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Not that it'll convince any industry titans, but this is due to the fact that we've (mistakenly IMHO) focused as a community on the business and engineering benefits of open source software rather than the precepts behind free software. Maybe open sourcing Java won't accomplish anything -- but freeing it will.

...no Open-Source SUN Java.

People being impatient have already generated GCJ and Kaffe working on open-source implementations of Java. Neither are yet as complete as the 'full' Java, but are in progress.

Is there a 'standard' for the Java language itself, in the same way that there is for "C#"? If not, could it be because Sun doesn't want to make it easier for Open-Source folks to create a complete implementation?...

It's also not a very glamourous project to work on when there's already an implementation which works that you are trying to match.

I still feel they are important however. GCJ looks very promicing.

Will.

The other thing is that you don't have to be Sun to open source java! Anyone can do it.

In fact - several people are.

Leave Sun alone. If you want it open source then go code it your self or join the people who are.

Will.

You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

GNU Arch can already do this.

Guile ?

Tell that to the people who invested in RedHat's desktop products.

Open standards apps are inherently safer, due to open discussion in specification phase.

Apparently not. Hence this article's topic. Or, for example this or this or this or this or this or this or... well, you get the idea. What does "inherent" mean again? Last I looked there were several MB worth of RH advisories in my inbox, and hitting linuxsecurity.com really doesn't make me any happier than hearing about the latest IE exploit. So I suggest you think twice next time you use the word "inherent".

Where a market does exist

You accuse me of using a "phenomenon" (which is indeed a proven fact of how markets work, regardless of what you consider a market to be) to make a point and then you turn around and regale me with an account of some vaporous scheme to wire the third world. That's fantastic

It is free software and open standards that enable alternative platforms to the consumer market

Mmmkay, that was weird. Let me know when you transition 120 million consumer PCs to dumb terminals running "GNU/Linux" and controlled from their ISPs central Brainiac super mainframe.

aptitude covers all apps, and draws from a fundamentally saner development and deployment process to boot.

But of course it does.

And anyway, why would anyone use anything other than emacs...

Who needs to unify them?
Emacs can pretend to be vi (M-x viper-mode) and vi can pretend to be emacs (vimacs.)

(And anyway, why would anyone use anything other than emacs - yeah, trying to remember all the keystrokes will drive you insane, but M-x doctor is there to help ;-) )

...[Many books fall into a nether region. These are works that are not commercially viable and therefore not widely available to the public, but are nevertheless subject to continuing copyright protection. The Internet Archive wants to include many of these books, which we refer to as ?orphan works,? in the Million Book Project, but current law makes that very difficult.

Requiring even renewal would eliminate this problem; the more-than-generous term of 28 years (the original term of a copyright?) was mentioned also on the CIS site. If someone doesn't want to copyright a work, there are a wealth of public licences out there (I certainly don't need to mention the most famous) to let them give their work to the public, but freeing a work requires positive action.

For authors (etc.) who have abandoned their work, though, it should be freed by default: requiring renewal of copyright would let Disney keep their mouse, but would also free lots of IP that has been long abandoned by their authors (70 years of protection is a long time!). It seems to be a darn good compromise, if nothing else.

For apple it was Visicalc, for DOS it was Lotus

So for Linux, it must be GNUMeric, no?

But seriously, I'm not sure if the killer app theory still applies, just about every conceivable niche is filled by some slick commercial product. Even if something really progressive came out for Linux alone, being open sources makes it even easier for Msft to come up with a version tied to their os (can you say 'Netscape'?).

and there really isn't a simple console (text-mode) editor geared for DOS/Windows users available on Linux.

I assume you are looking for an interface with the basic CUA (Windows) keybindings? Unfortunately, AFAIK, full support for CUA seems to be virtually impossible in the generic case of remote terminals (due to ESCaping keycodes and the ancient keyboard limitations kept alive by terminal emulators -- e.g. this is the reason you have to hit ESC twice in mc to register a single ESC), but in the specific case of the Linux Console (which has direct access to hardware), this is possible.

Many editors have CUA bindings, though to varying degrees of success. e.g. Emacs or Jed. Unfortunately, some of the time it feels like a hack and a few might even require manually modifying Linux's keymappings.

Perhaps the closest I've found is SetEdit, which is based on a port of the TurboVision text-mode windowing library, which is very comfortable for me since I used to use the old DOS Borland IDE, which also happens to have an OSS Linux version called Rhide.

I love text-mode and I think a lot could be done to improve it in Linux; particularly, "fixing" the ancient terminal system and providing for modular non-linear behavior. Sometimes I don't want to deal with the 100MB+ required for X (not to mention GNOME & KDE for apps that are dependent upon them), but I'd like a non-linear interface.

Screen is a step in the right direction, though it is not (initially) very user-friendly (not using Windows/CUA keybindings ;)). I've also found the simpler dtach to be useful at times.

I don't know why more non-linear text mode applications aren't created. I've found a few that are made as independent ncurses apps, but, ideally, I think they should all use some standard text windowing environment. Recently, I noticed Twin which looks familiar (tvision?), but doesn't seem to be very actively used... and I don't know if it supports CUA keybindings.

Hope this helps.

So RMS actually thinks he could live off his open source activities if he had to?

No, absolutely not. As he has said many times now, RMS doesn't have anything to do with the open source movement. He even said as much in the transcript I pointed you to before ("I do free software. Open source is a different movement."), he was correcting an introduction that included the same error you made.

But he has already shown that he can and does live off his free software developments. Perhaps you didn't know that the free software community--which RMS founded over a decade before the open source movement began--started with his work on a number of still-popular free software programs including Emacs and GCC.

Of course, they would have been in a pretty pickle if we'd all followed their advice, since they were dependent on us for things like access to a telephone and the occasional hot shower.

I fail to see how this applies to free software (which seems eminently practical) or RMS (who seems incredibly wise, looking back at his fight for software freedom over the past 20 years). I also think there's a serious imbalance of credit being taken for all the problems brought on by large-scale modernization you refer to. Finally, can you point to any evidence where RMS rejects modernization simply because it is available? Even RMS' post about the security system at his old building had to do with being unnecessarily (and, I'm guessing he would argue unethically) pushed into exclusion.

He has all these social theories that he's never had to test in the real world, because he's spent his entire professional career subsisting on grant money.

Actually, RMS said that at one time he made enough money from distributing free software for a fee that he could live on it. He also mentions that he lives inexpensively. So, not only did he test these theories in the real world, he lived on them.

I've never had a job since quitting MIT in January 1984. So, [in 1985] I was looking for some way I could make money through my work on free software, and therefore I started a free software business. I announced, "Send me $150 dollars, and I'll mail you a tape of Emacs." And the orders began dribbling in. By the middle of the year they were trickling in.

I was getting 8 to 10 orders a month. And, if necessary, I could have lived on just that, because I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.

He also earned awards which paid well and allowed him to do interesting things with the money. This is a far cry from the description you offer which tries to make it sound like he has no idea what he's talking about.

To this day other organizations have tested these theories in the real world, and now there is an operating system one can run that proves his theories do work in the real world.

I just get very tired of the way the "Free Software" folk insist that they've transcended the evils of software "ownership". Which they've never actually done. Their bills are paid for by revenues from the very businesses they are too pure to work for.

Do you mean businesses like IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell? I think many people work for those businesses. In what way was has free software not "transcended the evils of software ''ownership''"? The most popular free software license (the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL) grants us all the freedom to do virtually anything we want to do with the software, certainly the majority of things most hackers want to do most of the time, even though these hackers don't hold the copyright to the program they are improving or sharing.

"Open source benefits from anti-X sentiment" is only true for values of X in which X is a country which produces the majority of proprietary software on the international market.

I suggested India before, so let's run with that value of X.

Feelings against outsourcing to India are running high in America. While there are certain financial benefits to be gained by outsourcing, there is also an increasing backlash. Sending jobs to India may alienate potential customers. Open source solutions enable companies to become more competitive without outsourcing.

An example might be a company which wants to expand while keeping helpdesk costs down. Instead of completely outsourcing helpdesk jobs to India, they might use Bayonne, an open source IVR telephony app, to create an automated helpdesk service which can answer more questions without human intervention, bumping only the unique support questions to the live representatives. The company can then trumpet that it has grown without sacrificing American jobs.

But this country-by-country analysis is pointless. If Andreessen had said "Open source benefits from anti-Indian sentiment", I'd have called him on a biased specificity there, too.

Again, the real benefit of open source is that it enables companies and nations to become more independent. That's true whether you're in Brazil or America or India or Germany. It's stupid and divisive to try to tie this benefit only to anti-Americanism.

I wonder if they will feature this wond'rous piece of melody and rhyme.

Let me guess: Your text editor of choice is ed, isn't it?

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Screen is a terminal which can survive connection problems. You can start your script, detach terminal, and then came back 10 minutes later and watch what its doing. I know, that's not "fault tolerant", but, most of the times, its enaugh.

Screen is a terminal which can survive connection problems. You can start your script, detach terminal, and then came back 10 minutes later and watch what its doing. I know, that's not "fault tolerant", but, most of the times, its enaugh.

Strictly speaking, ``selling'' means trading goods for money. Selling a copy of a free program is legitimate, and we encourage it.

However, when people think of ``selling software'', they usually imagine doing it the way most companies do it: making the software proprietary rather than free.

So unless you're going to draw distinctions carefully, the way this article does, we suggest it is better to avoid using the term ``selling software'' and choose some other wording instead. For example, you could say ``distributing free software for a fee''--that is unambiguous.

More to the point, Company X can sell as many copies of GPLed software as it wants, but it's still not "first sale" because Company X is not the copyright holder.

i agree. just hope that DDD will have homepage at http://www.ddd.xxx/
that will be fun.

i Screen [gnu.org] is a terminal which can survive connection problems. You can start your script, detach terminal, and then came back 10 minutes later and watch what its doing. I know, that's not "fault tolerant", but, most of the times, its enaugh.


dkc

Government agencies looking to use the repository must sign a contract with the collaborative. This grants an agency a license to any open-source and proprietary software it finds in the repository and prohibits that software from being used to make a profit. This is a crucial component, since Massachusetts law prohibits commercial entities from making money off products developed by the commonwealth using taxpayer money.

The key words in the above are "prohibits that software from being used to make a profit". This means that any software they develop will either have to be done from scratch or from a very permissive license such as BSD, which allows the modification of the license of the code.

Furthermore, this license does not fall under The Open Source Definition or The Free Software Definition for this same reason.

After a bit more thinking, maybe the demand for freeware has dropped due to fear of viruses and an increase in technophobic users. The latter is inevitable and isn't meant in a bad way. The former is a problem that is solved by source code liberation - when software has assistants or gaurdians rather than owners.

When I need software? in kinda this order:
$ grep keyword /var/lib/apt/lists/*
(that's for Debian, but I'm sure there are similar package lists with descriptions on the other distros)

If that doesn't work, I try the free software directory, and then freshmeat.

I never understood this issue. What's the big deal about it? You can do a ftp install where only the packages you need get downloaded. Lot less traffic for the providers.

You will not get the programs where SUSE has no rights for redistribution, but you would not get them on ISO's either. Remember there's software with commercial licenses included (like officebib).

SUSE tries to make money from boxed versions, and I think they deserve it. You can still get it for free (as in beer).

While we are on it: yes, the YaST license is not free. I do in most cases support the standpoint of the FSF, but since the license only prohibits commercial redistribution and not redistribution per se, I can even live with that.

I agree in general with the GNU manifesto, and I think RMS says in there somewhere that the problem is not capitalism itself but the way it is currently implemented.

I agree in general with the GNU manifesto, and I think RMS says in there somewhere that the problem is not capitalism itself but the way it is currently implemented.

>Because the transfer of money is explicitly limited by the GPL, it does not meet these criteria. Nothing in the GPL allows Company X (or anyone other than the original copyright holder) to sell the software! In fact, it states explicitly that one may only charge for the actual cost of copying and distribution of the media containing the software (Section 1).

Say what?

• Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
  Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

I have no idea where you got that idea from.

I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.

I use vim and RCS for this purpose.

RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.

Subversion, CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.

As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.

Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.

Just my $.02.

YMMV.

I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.

I use vim and RCS for this purpose.

RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.

Subversion, CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.

As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.

Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.

Just my $.02.

YMMV.

Incase somebody's planning to publish it, I would like to (as I have done earlier) point to the RMS's essay: The Right to Read cached on Google here (incase gnu.org is down -- they're moving their machines to another location).

Some of you might have seen the essay earlier, but I think it deserves a much wider audience.

I've seen better...

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD: it's (a)live!

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD is dying community when Slashdot confirmed that *BSD death trolls have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all troll posts. Coming on the heels of a recent troll survey which plainly states that trolls are running out of *BSD ammo, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot trolls are trolling with new and better methods because trolling about BSD's falsely prophetic death is as obsolete and useless as GNU HURD.

You don't need to be Jesus to predict the Slashdot troll phenomena's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD trolls because *BSD trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD trolls. As many of us are already aware, *BSD has recently acquired several Live CDs. Red devil Live CDs multiply like fucking rabbits.

The reasons for the death of the *BSD troll are obvious. The creators of the *BSD troll post have lost 93% of their core developers due to casulties from the sudden and unpleasant battles between Trollcore and GNAA. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD trolls are dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

GNAA leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 700 active trolls on Slashdot. How many BSD death trolls are there? Let's see. The number of troll posts vs BSD death troll posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700/5 = 140 BSD death trolls. But half of those are just cheezy karma-whore spinoffs of the original troll. Therefore there are about 70 users of the real BSD death troll. These statistics, of course, reflect Slashdot before the war between Trollcore and GNAA. So we must assume that there are less than 70 people who actually believe that *BSD is still dying!

All major surveys show that *BSD trolls have steadily declined in humor level. *BSD trolls are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD trolls are to survive at all, they will be nothing but workers toiling in Slashdot trolling phenomena obscurity. *BSD death trolls continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD death trolls are dead.

Fact: *BSD: it's (a)live!

Xouvert differs from the others in that it appears to be a dead project.

> Can you (or someone else more clueful than I) explain it again in a manner assuming less cluefulness on the part of the reader?

I really haven't the time. About data I'd point you to some reading materials: the books mentioned on The Third Manifesto, DBDebunk, some articles at DMoz and an implementation with documentation; about OSs, the GNU Hurd site seems to be unreachable now.

It's possible to obtain a *fast* java program by compiling directly to native machine code: http://gcc.gnu.org/java/

In addition to that, you could use a native GUI - like GTK - instead of Swing, which should speed things up considerably.

This is a must read for anybody worried about patent_laws/copyright_laws/DRM/DMCA/etc. It outlines a future scenario where a student can face imprisonment for sharing/borrowing books/software which she could not afford.

There was a time when one would've considered this scenario farfeteched. With the new draconian laws, unfortunately it doesn't seem so anymore. A *must read* for any concerned Slashdotter AND to these folks trying to paint a BRIGHT picture for the current legislative system.

Quotes:
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan. This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.

---snip--

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

At least when it comes to software patents.

The patents that giants like IBM, Intel and Microsoft have do not form a major part of their marketing. If they are not part of their marketing, then it is unlikely that they are recognizing a major sales benefit from them.

However what IBM does do (and says that it does) is a lot of cross-licensing. IBM's portfolio provides a huge incentive to get other major players to cross-license with IBM. (Oops, did we trample on your patent? Well how many of ours are you infringing on? Wanna talk this over before you do anything silly?) That way neither company has to risk taking their patents to court (where they might get thrown out).

Of course that is a scale defence. IBM is so big and has so many patents that virtually anyone can be found to be infringing on a few. So they are protected from virtually everyone. But your average small company cannot even dream of doing that. Hence a big competitive advantage goes to IBM.

The result is that for the expense of having everyone maintain a patent portfolio, established players can avoid most potential problems from other people's patents, and also limit the amount of new competition that they have to deal with.

If you google around, you will have no trouble documenting quotes from players like IBM on cross-licensing suggesting that they really think like this. You will also run across plenty of cross-licensing deals that they have done.

But you'll have trouble finding marketing material from the established players where the existence of the patent is a big sell.

Which leads me to accept the patent cross-licensing theory as a better description of probable motives.

Incidentally for a decent overview of the problems that patents introduce, read this talk by Stallman.

Patents on compression are good patents?

You mean like the LZW patent that Unisys has? Yes, I mean this one. See also here. You could have chosen a better type of patent to defend.

An interesting data point. Several years ago from a random sample it was estimated that about 70% of software patents would not actually hold up in court. (It would take me a while to track the quote down. Anyone who wants to troll through the fsb archives looking for it, can.) Some would, but most wouldn't. However portfolios of mostly invalid patents are a useful negotiating weapon since nobody wants to go through the court fees to prove patents invalid. And if you think that you'll get it granted, what incentive do you have to not seek a probably invalid patent? Of course economists are far from convinced that even legally valid patents are economically beneficial to grant.

As long as the system produces such a lopsided ratios of clearly bogus to legally tenable patents, the existence of occasional arguably reasonable patents does not justify the system as it stands.

Only on Macs?

What about POC? Plus, of course, every GNU GCC compiler has an Objective-C front end!

• DotGNU is part of GNU, Mono isn't. So, if you'd like to support the GNU project, that is a reason to contribute to DotGNU Portable.Net
• Learn from the better compiler architect. Rhys, the chief architect of DotGNU Portable.Net was an experienced compiler architect already before starting to work on Portable.Net; he's also the author of treecc, a great aspect-oriented tool for compiler construction.
• Choice of implementation language: Portable.Net's compilers are implemented in C, while Mono's C# compiler is implemented in C#. If you think that working on a compiler for a language is a good way to learn that language (that was Miguel's stated reason for implementing, in C#, the C# compiler project that eventually became Mono's C# compiler), maybe you should contribute to Mono.
• Do you believe in the power of large corporations? Mono is sponsored by Novell, Inc and has several people working on it full-time, and the Mono folks can afford to spend money on PR, too. That is clearly an advantage, at least for now. However, there are strong economic reasons why in the long run, platform projects that are controlled by a corporation should not be able to progress as quickly as true community projects like DotGNU or the Linux kernel. (Email me - nb AT pobox DOT com - for a draft of an economics paper on these matters.)
• The threat of patent-based attacks. There are several reasons why DotGNU is less vulnerable to patent-related threats than Mono is. First of all, the difference in licensing is relevant. Mono's libraries are licensed under an X11-style license while the DotGNU project uses GPL with a linking exception, just like Classpath. Both are Free Software, both libraries can be used from proprietary software, but Mono's licensing terms are compatible with third-party demands for patent royalties, while DotGNU's licensing terms are not compatible with that. This means that when you contribute to Mono and someone has a patent and says "pay royalties!", the result is that Mono suddenly stops being Free Software. With the kind of licensing used by the DotGNU project, patent holders cannot require the payment of royalties (because that would be incompatible with the GPL) and if they say "DotGNU must not implement that at all" that'd be an antitrust violation, rendering the patent unenforcable and hence invalid. The worst that can happen to DotGNU on the patent front is that MS might say "don't use our patented APIs", but even then MS can't stop me from still distributing the code on a public ftp server since I'm in Europe, and around here patent law isn't nearly as broken as in the US. Even in the US, if those API patents are granted and MS tries to enforce them against DotGNU, it should be only a question of time until those silly API patents of Microsoft's have been desclared invalid by a US court of law. On the other hand, Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza has stated that if MS says that a paid license from MS is required for distributing Mono code implementing those patented APIs, Novell would buy such a license. This would mean that the affected parts of Mono would stop being Free Software / open source, since it would no longer permitted to freely redistribute them without buying a license from Microsoft first. In other words, if you crontribute code to Mono's library and Microsoft says "we have a patent", Novell will give in immediately and not fight for the freedom of the code that you have contributed. DotGNU on the other hand is part of GNU, and the Free Software Foundation will fight very hard to make sure that code which you contribute remains Free Software.

Screen is a terminal which can survive connection problems. You can start your script, detach terminal, and then came back 10 minutes later and watch what its doing. I know, that's not "fault tolerant", but, most of the times, its enaugh.

I was just wondering where I could get a C compiler.

The GNU CPP has been hacked to add namespace support ... so that the following DotGNU.SSL.h can be used in C .

Read Pnet C ABI ... for the info on all the other questions

The GNU CPP has been hacked to add namespace support ... so that the following DotGNU.SSL.h can be used in C .

Read Pnet C ABI ... for the info on all the other questions

C# is nothing more that Java language and .net is nothingmore than Java platform. That's fact.

Did Java kill C since nearly a decade it is here ? No ! So there is no doubt that a windows only platform (.net) can kill a multiplatform language !

If there is a platform that has deprecate C/C++ in lots of enterprise developpment it is more Java itself. Ey guys, look at the realworld !

Java has replace lots C/C++ developement just because it is much easier to setup and to maintain with an "average" skill (you got plenty of free & free solutions as well as bullet proofed comercial solutions that fits every needs).

Java is also the key to open the server side OS. Because by choosing Java enterprise can shift to any supported OS they want depending on their TCO for instance. And there Linux win in most situations here !

So Java offer OS choice and Linux OS solution ;-)

Personally, i've worked with .net on projects and i am realy surprised by /. post that claim "portability" to other OS ! MS has clearly put this point in front of the world : .net will only be available on MS OSes. This means that the complete specifications will never be available. Hence you can never claim to be "compatible" with it as you can not raise your complience level to one that enterprise require for support reasons.

I do not realy understand people working on mono (which is a nonsense by the way), why don't they go and help FSF's classpath project instead if they want a realy free implementation of some advanced language & VM ? Ey, FSF ! Know those guy ;-)

So if you want to help Linux to get a truly independent, full GPLed & fully compatible solution : Go and help FSF's CLASSPATH PROJECT ! They do need your skills !

Just wanted to point out that I have produced the most bug reports for pnet at the time (currently 54 bug reports in the system).

One good thing I have to say about Rhsy is that he fixes bugs quickly!

My sometimes harsh and questioning nature that brought me to free software is sometimes too much for people to take.

I bitched and moaned alot about dotgnu implementing patent-endanged code instead of following thier original plan.

My complaining got me banned from the project.

Now instead of accepting reports about this buggy software that would warn people that it is not usable on really challenging code (like libx11 or the gcc) that I was compiling with it.

The author rhys tried to *gag* me.

I complained to savannah about this here :

In the end, he of course appreciated my valid bug report and fixed them like all the other ones.

The arguments that my bugs are not valid really dont hold water if all of them are fixed. The reality is that the software was lacking major testing, and that my reporting of all these bugs reflected that unstable state.

The funny thing it the backpedling you can find in the history here, the bug is turned from invalid to fixed!
"Mon 02/16/04 at 23:41 rweather resolution_id Invalid Fixed"

So, I would really think twice before spending your time working on pnet/c, because the developers are trying to hide bugs from you! (the ones that I reported (Real bugs))

mike

Just wanted to point out that I have produced the most bug reports for pnet at the time (currently 54 bug reports in the system).

One good thing I have to say about Rhsy is that he fixes bugs quickly!

My sometimes harsh and questioning nature that brought me to free software is sometimes too much for people to take.

I bitched and moaned alot about dotgnu implementing patent-endanged code instead of following thier original plan.

My complaining got me banned from the project.

Now instead of accepting reports about this buggy software that would warn people that it is not usable on really challenging code (like libx11 or the gcc) that I was compiling with it.

The author rhys tried to *gag* me.

I complained to savannah about this here :

In the end, he of course appreciated my valid bug report and fixed them like all the other ones.

The arguments that my bugs are not valid really dont hold water if all of them are fixed. The reality is that the software was lacking major testing, and that my reporting of all these bugs reflected that unstable state.

The funny thing it the backpedling you can find in the history here, the bug is turned from invalid to fixed!
"Mon 02/16/04 at 23:41 rweather resolution_id Invalid Fixed"

So, I would really think twice before spending your time working on pnet/c, because the developers are trying to hide bugs from you! (the ones that I reported (Real bugs))

mike