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You know, back in the day, when I first came to Slashdot, Open Source was all about the free, wild and woolly creation of software, about freedom from The Man, and doing stuff because it was a Nerd Mountain and by goddamn we were going to climb it.

Open Source was never about freedom, it was and is about pitching the Open Source development methodology primarily to businesses: when businesses share source code they ostensibly get better programs developed with less expense because they can tap a large community of programmers who are willing to work on their project for no fee. Open Source talks about the practical outcome of sharing source code, not the freedoms that make those practical ends possible.

Freedom to share and modify programs was and is the message from the Free Software movement which started over a decade before the Open Source movement began. I recommend this essay for an instructive look at the differences between the two movements. It was the Free Software Foundation that brought us the GNU General Public License which secures the freedoms to share and modify and the community the Open Source movement has leveraged to spread their message. The FSF did these things well before the Open Source movement got started. I'm grateful the Open Source Movement is bringing users to Free Software and encouraging use of the GNU GPL (one of many Free Software licenses), but let's not overstate what the Open Source Initiative did--adding a license to a list of approved licenses cannot compare with writing and defending the license (links to parts one and two of Eben Moglen's essay).

I'm never sure if I should be happy or sad that companies such as Red Hat and Oracle are essentially hijacking the popularity of Linux.

SCO FUD aside, is Oracle interested in what's in the Linux kernel, or were you referring to the GNU/Linux operating system? I don't understand what you mean by "hijacking" here either--Red Hat has contributed a great deal to Linux and (as far as I know) all in accordance with the GPL. Everyone is free to study, share, and modify their contributions as well as the rest of the kernel.

You know, back in the day, when I first came to Slashdot, Open Source was all about the free, wild and woolly creation of software, about freedom from The Man, and doing stuff because it was a Nerd Mountain and by goddamn we were going to climb it.

Open Source was never about freedom, it was and is about pitching the Open Source development methodology primarily to businesses: when businesses share source code they ostensibly get better programs developed with less expense because they can tap a large community of programmers who are willing to work on their project for no fee. Open Source talks about the practical outcome of sharing source code, not the freedoms that make those practical ends possible.

Freedom to share and modify programs was and is the message from the Free Software movement which started over a decade before the Open Source movement began. I recommend this essay for an instructive look at the differences between the two movements. It was the Free Software Foundation that brought us the GNU General Public License which secures the freedoms to share and modify and the community the Open Source movement has leveraged to spread their message. The FSF did these things well before the Open Source movement got started. I'm grateful the Open Source Movement is bringing users to Free Software and encouraging use of the GNU GPL (one of many Free Software licenses), but let's not overstate what the Open Source Initiative did--adding a license to a list of approved licenses cannot compare with writing and defending the license (links to parts one and two of Eben Moglen's essay).

I'm never sure if I should be happy or sad that companies such as Red Hat and Oracle are essentially hijacking the popularity of Linux.

SCO FUD aside, is Oracle interested in what's in the Linux kernel, or were you referring to the GNU/Linux operating system? I don't understand what you mean by "hijacking" here either--Red Hat has contributed a great deal to Linux and (as far as I know) all in accordance with the GPL. Everyone is free to study, share, and modify their contributions as well as the rest of the kernel.

Sigh... a completely different issue.

Did he have Automatic Updates enabled? Did he allow the updates to install or did he ignore them as I've seen so many people do?

Consider: If (and it's a big IF) most of the world were running various distributions of Linux, and users were faced with a remote exploit, Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, et al would have to quickly develop, test and distribute patches. Would the uptake of these patches be better than Windows Update? I doubt it. Note that even the FSF was not able to patch in time to avoid an exploit -- and it took them over 4 months to discover they had been compromised: http://ftp.gnu.org/MISSING-FILES.README

Is that clear enough for YOU ;-)

Backups don't help if you don't know when you were cracked, and they don't help replace files which only exist after the crack if you can't verify that they weren't cracked. A comprehensive backup is not a magical wand that you can just wave to get back everything that could've been damaged by a crack or other catastrophic event. Backups are there to minimize losses. The FSF is doing what is right in this situation; they're not blindly trusting their backups. It's sad to see the ignorance in this thread where people assume that because they're asking for help that they don't even have any backups.

The FSF's admin is just savvy enough to realize what the limits of backups are. They are hoping that other people who may have downloaded these packages before the crack will have what the valid MD5s for them are. On the other hand, this isn't going to be a reliable answer for them either. People who have cracked binaries will report back the cracked sum. They have to look for files for which they get contradictory responses on. This isn't foolproof either thanks to malicious trolls who post false info and potentially cracked files for which no one responds with the correct MD5 to. I wish them good luck, but they are going to be carrying suspect data for a long time.

Read the link off of the Alpha site for more information on what they're doing and why. (Yes, Virginia, they did have backups.)

Check it out


It explains that the system was compromised back in March by a vulnerability that had not yet been patched at the time. The cracker left a behind a trojan to keep getting in, even after the software was patched. Unfortunately, the FSF people didn't realize it had been compromised until recently, so all the backups for the past few months can't be trusted, hence the verification.

Looks like March 2003.

You mean, an accounting like this? Seems pretty detailed to me...

They have all the source code, they are just trying to verify that none of them have been altered by the hacker.

Did anyone read the statement on the ftp server? They are simply trying to verify the authenticity of the code that they STILL have before putting up links to it. There is no need to get the files elsewhere, they don't need any backup, they still have it all, the just want to make sure no trojans, virii, etc have been added.

Bradley Kuhn says it was ptrace.

That's not what Bradley Kuhn says. He says ptrace, and it was actually done between the time the exploit was made and the time Linux was patched.

Perhaps my favorite link to checkout new releases from the FSF hasn't been working the past week or so.

I'll bet that 90% (or more) of all break-ins are the result of problems that could have been patched. Yeah, it sucks that this happened to GNU, but they're only human. Last I heard, they only have one system administrator to handle all of their machines, including Savannah. I can understand that this happens from time to time. GNU has to be a relatively high profile target (such as for disgruntled BSD h4x0rs and so on) so cut them some slack. If you patch 40 machines 99.9% of the time, nobody remembers that, what they remember is that you got cracked on one tiny detail you missed.

At least they yanked the programs until they could verify that they were correct. That really was the only thing they could do. The lesson to take from this is that with computer security and auditing, nothing less than absolute perfection is necessary. And so long as human beings are doing the admin work, absolute perfection just isn't realistic. :)

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fastest of them all?

Actually, what I was implying, is that companies ought to go after the criminals - but not group everyone as criminals for doing something legal.

In other words, I frankly don't believe that VHS tapes should be recorded with macrovision. I don't believe DVDs should be recorded with macrovision, CSS, and region protected. I don't believe it's necessary to scramble satellite signals.

Why? Because most people are still honest. The video industry didn't kill the movie industry, they helped it. Cassette tapes didn't kill the music industry, they helped it. MP3s would help the music industry if given a chance.

Why? Because while a lot of people go off the deep end into "copyright infringement" (let's agree "piracy" is a bad term), a lot of people embrace new technology that makes their lives easier. And if it's cheap, more the better.

Even wireless communications - you know, while it bothers me that someone might be listening to one of my conversations, the truth is they'd be bored to tears by it. How many 10s of thousands (if not millions) of conversations are going on right now? How many people use cordless phones at home that have NO encryption? I can sometimes pick up neighbors phone conversations on my baby monitor!

If you need privacy, though, you should be able to pay extra for a secure line.

Now, like I said, I don't agree with what DirecTV is doing (and I was considering becomming a customer, but it's now just a passing thought). They should use those resources on creating added value for customers.

I guess what I'm saying is it would probably be more worthwhile to ignore casual pirates than to go after them - and that's in just about every industry I mentioned, and they should embrace new technology and just go with the flow instead of figuring out how to restrict it. I think we are almost on the same boat here.

The scary part is when I reread Stallman's tale of the future, The Right to Read. That's one of the reasons I don't necessarily advocate technical solutions as a means to control content. When he wrote it (in 97), you could have called him an unstable conspiracy theorist. Well, he probably is, but with the new world of DRM, this look at the future is pretty scary.

Don't fool yourself.

SCO is not just attacking IBM, but the GPL as well. They're going after the whole idea of open source, trying to convince IBM to step back from the GPL, etc.

This is an attack on the open source way of life and an attack on the friends of GCC. This is an attack on a community.

Not only that, who do you think makes GCC? This whole FUD and anti-GPL campaign strikes directly at the ideals of the FSF.

This is more than just a strike at IBM. Don't you read Slashdot? :)

Linux and Stallman are staunch representatives of the freedom to code and share your code and have show[n] this during many years with deeds, not words.

One clarification: Linux is a program--a kernel commonly used with the GNU operating system. Did you mean Linus Torvalds here? Either way, that is quite incorrect. Linus Torvalds does not champion the freedom to share programs, he is a pragmatist who chooses whatever program he feels suits his immediate needs (for example, Torvalds' continued use of the non-free Bitkeeper program to manage his fork of the Linux kernel). Long-term considerations of software freedom seem relatively unimportant.

Richard Stallman (RMS), by contrast, founded the GNU project in 1984, years before Torvalds began working on Linux. RMS is the founder of the Free Software movement, and one of the authors of the GNU GPL, the most widely used license in free software. RMS wrote an informative essay about Linux, GNU, and freedom which explains his take on the matter.

Recent GCC versions do have (limited) support for precompiled headers. Shouldn't that speed up Qt app builds quite a bit, or does it not work for some reason?

Well maybe join the


GNU Enterprice

then and hack away on python code. This is an enterprise level ERP systen for accounting/ personel/ inventory/ purchasing and so on.

And even more here. They are pretty long, but quite informative. Take a break from the dreamworld and listen to some reality.

It does not spread anything except information. The announcement states that
a) SCO has attacked Free Software b) Many people have asked that the FSF remove SCO support c) The FSF has not chosen to do so yet, out of respect for GCC's users.
That's not FUD.

We will have a further announcement concerning continuing support of SCO Unix by GCC before our next release.

That is, most assuredly, FUD. I'm not saying it is necessarily wrong, I'm just calling it what it is.

You should look at this bug which was filed, PR11842.
People calm down, this is not really big news as FSF has done this before with Apple and other people so this should have not come as a big surprise.

There is plenty the free software community can do to protect themselves. All they have to do is publish their work before any of the "megacoporations" go out and file their patents.

This only describes part of the process (and thus only part of the problem with software patents). The other part is raising this prior art in court as a defense to patent infringement or to get a patent overturned. Either is very expensive, in fact it is so expensive I wouldn't be surprised if there were organizations who would rather simply not engage in the patented process than pay for a lengthy and possibly fruitless patent defense or overturning lawsuit.

At its heart, this is a part of the problem with software patents--people say software patents are okay because the court can resolve any problems in the system without acknowledging the adverse impact on those who can't afford lawyers. Court action generally discriminates against the poor (which can include the people who are ostensibly supposed to be so well-served by the patent system by allowing them to monopolize their "inventions"). The rich can afford to buy patents by acquiring organizations that have them. Large corporations probably have a lot of patents and can afford to cross-license (a practice which exposes an interesting fatal flaw with software patents).

RMS' talk on the dangers of software patents is most enlightening, I highly recommend listening to it or reading the transcript.

However the business logic and reporting is written in Guile. This in turn is based directly on Scheme, to quote the home page:

a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language

The thing is that when you work with this kind of program, you need to implement the objects in something that is fast, however the upper layers need to be at a higher level so this approach works well.

There isn't anything "nebulous" about the GPL, despite Blake Stowell's FUD. And it's not a social contract; it's a contract, pure, and simple, and legally enforcable. [...]
Now, in the case of the GPL, instead of paying with cash or a portion of the profits from distribution, you pay by agreeing to certain terms and taking certain actions.

Eben Moglen would disagree with you in that the GNU GPL is a contract--it's a license. The licensee is given permission to copy, modify, and make derivative works and otherwise you have whatever copyright law allows for by default.

There is not necessarily payment being made by the licensee, there need not be agreement with the terms of the license (you might find the terms attached to distributing derivative works to be too onerous, for instance). The licensee either behaves according to the terms of the GPL or they only get what copyright law allows for.

It's this careful crafting of the GPL, leveraging only the powers that are granted to copyright holders, that makes the GPL very likely to survive any court scrutiny. It's also what makes other licenses seem relatively poorly worded (like those licenses that try to place terms on running a program, a power not granted to copyright holders).

What doesn't help is that it's, "Oh, I'll buy when it has Ogg Vorbis." "Did I say 'Ogg Vorbis'? I meant Ogg Vorbis when it's not a proprietary implementation."

I don't owe them business. They have to come up with something I'll like before I'll buy it. I'm doing them a favor by telling them what I want rather than silently rejecting the product. Furthermore, what I'm asking for can be accomplished without altering the hardware they've already built.

They'll probably complain when they release new models of hardware that do more than the old models, especially if they won't give away the software to do the new stuff on the old models.

I never asked for anyone to give away software, perhaps you should reread what I am asking for. I want software freedom and I'm willing to pay for it. Free software, the kind I'm asking for, has to do with the freedom to share and modify the software, not price. If someone sells me a copy of the device software under a free software license, and/or distributes the specifications for the hardware (so I can make my own controlling software or hire someone to make it for me), I'm satisfied.

As I clearly stated before, the Rio device already has attractive hardware features. It would be more attractive with free software so I can study, change, share, and freely use the unit as I wish. I believe this poses no threat to any portable digital device business because they make their money from selling the units, not the software. To the contrary, I think this information is critical to developing a sustainable diverse userbase and a good relationship between the consumer and the businesses that deliver the goods.

I mean, why would anyone want to go for this market?

First, your critique has shifted off-topic from talking about digital music player hardware to talking about delivering audio tracks. Second, to answer your question directly: Because they have little choice but to go where the market leads. The alternative--using legalized bribery to buy new laws to protect old business models--is possible but doesn't pay off quickly or thoroughly enough for those businesses and commercial artists who don't innovate. People are discovering the weaknesses in the old distribution model; as more people become distributors, we have a decreasing need for the distribution aspect of recording studios. Studios need to change their business model to become less dependent on distribution. Ultimately, no laws will change the technology that lets people share.

And that is why so few companies support Ogg Vorbis. Not because it's hard to do, not because it's expensive, not even because it's for such a small market. They don't support Ogg Vorbis because it's for a group of people who, by and large, will never be happy when they're buying a product.

I doubt it. Do you have any evidence to support this?

Patents on the simple idea of plug-ins and applets? This seems almost as ridiculous as the amazon patent on one click purchasing.

You are under no duress that you must use the program, and you could not use it anyway if that clause were not in place.

The act of running the Program is not restricted.

Could you post a link to more info about that?

GNU GPL section 7: "if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." And IBM continues to distribute GNU/Linux.

Read. The official way on how to respond to a (possible) GPL violation.

There is a special case of the GPL to allow for US Government submissions. Check out these questions from the GPL FAQ for more information.

Or you can check out some of the improvements we've made to dd as part of dcfldd.

I followed the "not recommend" link, and what I saw was this:

"APSL version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license. Apple's lawyers worked with the FSF to produce a license that would qualify. The problems described in this page are still potential issues for other possible licenses, but they do not apply to version 2.0 of the APSL."

How is this a non-recommendation? What am I missing?

I'm writing a book for O'Reilly, to be released under the Gnu Free Documentation License. Will people copy the book instead of buying it? Oh, surely. But even more people will hear about it and eventually buy it.

For new authors, obscurity is a bigger enemy than "piracy".

-m

Disclaimer: Clicking on the above link will show your support for O'Reilly and Free Documentation, but also amazon.com. Moral dilemma, huh? If you just want to read it, use the free link in my sig. And stop calling me Shirley.

This is why the APSL is an Open Source license instead of a Free Software license.

Umm, APSL 2.0 is a "free software" license:

The Apple Public Source License (APSL) version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license.

And if you agree with copyright, that's exactly how you should call it.
Unless you want to be a dope promoting the big publisher's propaganda.

Once again, the FSF tells it as it is...

It's copyright infringement, not a bunch of people sailing around with their swords in the air looting the natives and stashing thier booty (ARRGH!)

Um, have you ever read the philosophy pages at gnu.org? Of course RMS won't be satisfied until all software is free. It's like expecting human rights organizations to stop complaining because only two political dissidents are executed per day, instead of ten. (For the logically challanged: no, I'm not comparing releasing proprietary software with killing dissidents).

Have you ever gone to the GPL FAQ? and found anything you think is vague not clarified there?

When you work on the core of X, on programs such as the X server, Xlib, and Xt, there is a practical reason not to use copyleft. The XFree86 group does an important job for the community in maintaining these programs, and the benefit of copylefting our changes would be less than the harm done by a fork in development. So it is better to work with the XFree86 group and not copyleft our changes on these programs. Likewise for utilities such as xset and xrdb, which are close to the core of X, and which do not need major improvements. At least we know that the XFree86 group has a firm commitment to developing these programs as free software.

Since when does the FSF recommend other software licenses then the GPL? Even the LGPL isn't recommended.

The LGPL is not always recommended, but it can be. I'm not sure if what you're saying is meant to suggest the FSF is blinded to anything but the GNU GPL (version 2 as I write this) or if you appreciate the obstacles involved and understand their goals and strategies.

The FSF has okayed use of non-copylefted free software licenses in some instances (I vaguely recall them saying Xiph's approach with their Ogg Vorbis library was appropriately licensed under a non-copyleft free software license resembling the new BSD license). They take a very fine-grained look at licensing. They consider long-term ramifications others sometimes dismiss (like the software freedom for users of derivative works of non-copylefted free software programs). The thought that went into the copyleft concept is something I haven't seen prior to the GNU project.

A lot of licenses work to benefit the corporation that wrote the license, not a public software commons (including consideration of how software patents can adversely impact the public). The GNU GPL is notable for this and has been for decades now.

Pseudo my ass -- on the page in question, they say it 'qualifies as a free software license.' They're not claiming it's fake, they're not telling you to avoid APSL projects -- they're recommending against using it for new projects. And what's wrong with profit?

It seems to me that the very idea of paying someone to write free software is the very antithesis of what free software is all about.

It seems to me that you've no idea what free software is about. Rerhaps reading this will help.

In the GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman long ago proposed the idea of a Software Tax to fund Free Software.

4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.

You could... or you could read this. For an explanation of the Amazon boycott.

To quote GNU's website:

Copyleft and the GNU GPL
The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. The method we use is called "copyleft".(1)

Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free.

The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.

Some links I found usefull:
A Software Copyright Primer
US Copyright Office Website

From the page:

The system uses UPX compression on the main EXEs and DLLs, btw, in case you were wondering how I got it down past redruM69's 5.35mb. I also removed some extra files, and restored functionality which the other micro 95 builds don't have. I'll try UPXing the entire system and windows folders later, see if I can get it down past 4 or 3mb ;)

UPX compresses most executables to 30% of their normal size. But it also makes the system slower (well its Win95 so thats not a big issue ;) ) as the executables/libraries get uncompressed to memory when they get loaded by the Windows PE loader.

I'd like to see how small you can get the smallest floppy Linux using UPX, `strip` and some size squeezing GCC and linker flags :)

If you check the UPX examples you'll see that you can even get Emacs to less than 1 MB 8)

But do you think they'll call RMS as an expert witness? Gawd, I hope he doesn't pull out a flute or start singing...

Just imagine, you're in court, and all of the sudden: free software song (shudder)

Am I the only one still boycotting Amazon?

(cue chirping crickets)

Compare the web sites of PETA and GNU. It's pretty obvious that PETA is about what you should do, while GNU is about what you should think. With that, combine the "true believer" items such as GNU's list of words you can and cannot say, and a strange focus on morality, and you have something that is practically indistinguishable from a cult, even if it is only a cult of personality.

Compare the web sites of PETA and GNU. It's pretty obvious that PETA is about what you should do, while GNU is about what you should think. With that, combine the "true believer" items such as GNU's list of words you can and cannot say, and a strange focus on morality, and you have something that is practically indistinguishable from a cult, even if it is only a cult of personality.