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The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC.

I was running 386BSD on x86 PCs in 1992-93. While all UNIX wasn't proprietary at that point, this was a time of great changes in that realm. ATT UNIX was in the process of getting re-written as BSD. There was also much legal wrangling going on around the re-write, slowing down the process. According to Linus, "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

"Why contribute to a project that may well be successfully sued by one of the largest corporations in the world?"

Because, at any rate, Linus didn't want to contribute to anyone's code base but to tinker with his shinny new 80386 on the knowledge he gathered from Tanenbaum's MINIX.

I'm not referring to just Linus, I'm referring to the general developer community that wanted *nix on the PC.

And then again, he started tinkering with his new toy in 1991 while the USL v. BSDi lawsuit didn't started till 1992 and even then, Linus was 23 y.o. living in Finland and so, didn't give a damn about USA politics or laws. I challenge you to find *any* first hand reference from Torvalds saying he was worried by license/patent's problems from BSD -or that he even knew about them.

"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
http://gondwanaland.com/meta/h...

Do you think it was per chance that Linus announced his new project on comp.os.minix and said it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" and even went so far as to add "PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" but still didn't referenced BSD -at all?

It was also not released under the GPL license. He used his own license. It gathered attention and support without the GPL initially. The GPL did not make Linux, Linux made the GPL. The community wanted *nix on their PCs so badly they would have supported any viable project, regardless of license.

This sort of logic was present and functioning on the first steam-engines! You have such a system in your toilet — it closes the water-valve, when the "sensor" detects, the tank is full...

I think you're greatly overstating the importance of Linux there. Not to take away from the great work Linus did and continues to do, but he himself said: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

Source: http://gondwanaland.com/meta/h...

With all due respect to your unixbeardedness, your statement has very little to do with the point I was making. We are comparing open source UNIX to open source UNIX, and what factors influenced the relative success of one OS over an other. The roots of the early success of Linux were the i386 "home users" with some blank floppies, who were far more numerous than people with access to corporate mainframes or university labs. I am explaining why those early adopters of Linux didn't go for BSD instead - BSD simply wasn't on their radar. Linux got there first, and when you've got one kernel you don't need another. (GNU's favoritism of Linux over BSD due to licensing bias is a separate issue.)

GNU was open-source (though restrictively-licensed) since its inception in 1983/4, and Linux from 1991. BSD was entangled in legal FUD until January 1994 , by which time we had not only Linux but also Slackware, Debian, etc. (To some people BSD's "obnoxious advertising clause" was even more of a turn-off than Linux's copyLEFT, and BSD didn't become fully compliant with copyFREE standards until 1999, but that's a side-issue.) So it was in January of 1994 when BSD became a contender, while Linux "went viral" among the home geek crowd in 1993.

Linus himself had said that if 386BSD had been available (i.e. free of AT&T legal uncertainty) at the time, he probably would not have created Linux. (And it didn't become fully free of legal FUD until a few months after that interview was published.) In that same interview, Linus also mentions other reasons that worked against BSD: higher hardware requirements, "lack of co-ordination", bad approach to release engineering, etc.

Switching kernels (which also meant switching file-systems, kernel-dependent system components, etc) has always been very difficult. Switching Web browsers is much easier, and its (mostly) BSD license didn't keep Chromium from leapfrogging over Firefox. Apache httpd wasn't the least bit handicapped by its non-copyLEFT (though not entirely copyFREE) license (in fact the "got there first" advantage of Apache has kept out decent GPL'ed Web servers like Cherokee), and it's now gradually yielding ground to the fully-copyFREE nginx. Among scripting languages, lisp (the most popular scripting language of the 80s, also Stallman's favorite) was overshadowed by weaker-copyLEFT perl, which in turn was leapfrogged by even-less-uncopyFREE python / php, and which are now being leapfrogged by fully-copyFREE node.js / ruby / etc. Apple's recent choices leave no doubt that GPL has handicapped the popularity of mysql and gcc.

Conclusion: The conjecture that FreeBSD was hurt by its license is baseless, buried under a mountain of more plausible handicaps in the history of FreeBSD's development, and is utterly contradicted in most other software categories!

--libman

It was not because of the legal issues. FreeBSD 4 [released March 2000] was widely considered as the pinnacle of FreeBSD's technial advantage over Linux, for example. BSDs were run on some of the busiest websites on the internet for years. Hotmail, Yahoo, cdrom.

Linux blew past it, and picked up the new wave of internet companies like google and facebook significantly because of technical contributions from companies around the mid 2.4 to 2.5 timeframe. They did not start contributing to it *after* it surpassed BSDs.

You've completely lost the context of the conversation.

This conversation is about me debunking what daboochmeister had said on Oct 16th: "...the GPL 2.0 license is a big part of WHY Linux has kicked *BSD's butt ...". (He didn't make any further GPL v2 vs v3 points, so I'll assume the GPL version differences weren't a major part of his argument.)

If copyleft licenses constitute a competitive advantage over copyfree ones, then we should see the pattern of copyleft projects succeeding over copyfree ones in many different segments of the FLOSS market. Copyleft licenses do have the historical momentum (GNU started in 1984), and their gains should be more difficult to reverse (GPL is viral). As I've pointed out in my previous posts, we are seeing the opposite trend.

We are not debating the technical merits of Linux vs FreeBSD. I've acknowledged that in the 1990s Linux quickly surpassed BSD's in popularity and most measures of quality. Linux's multi-year head start before BSD freed itself of legal FUD problems (and the ad clause) is one of the reasons for its success, and there are others - no fragmentation of kernel development, several distros (of the same kernel) to propagate marketing and support, Linus's magic touch, etc. Once Linux became #1, that's what everyone focused on. BSD's do have a few technical virtues, and of course the license and the philosophical differences, so reasonable people may disagree on which is best.

My thesis is that after a certain honeymoon period, when people didn't give much thought to downsides of copyleft licensing and just went with the flow, copyleft slowly started to lose momentum and decline. Let's use year 2000 (nice round number) as the baseline. (Actually BSD itself only really became copyfree in 1999, when the obnoxious advertising clause was finally removed.) In the year 2000, pretty much all major software that one would use (except X, Apache, and some scripting languages) was copyleft. There were no alternatives in the FLOSS world to GCC and the GNU toolchain, to GTK/Qt GUI apps, etc. PostgreSQL was largely forgotten, and MySQL was all the rage. There were no copyfree Web browsers, media codecs, P2P clients, etc, etc, etc. Today there are more copyfree alternatives, and they are gradually gaining market share. This disproves daboochmeister's claim.

No amount of your "Linus said this" handwaving alters what actually happened.

Specifically, I was talking about Linus's 1993 interview with Meta Magazine, and his answer to the "What is your opinion of 386BSD?" question. Linus's answer lists many reasons other than licensing for why BSD was in trouble. That's also where he delivers his famous line: "386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened".

BSDs had large uptake among many companies at the forefront of tech well after the lawsuits were over.

Web server hits don't contribute code, developers do. From what I remember of the i386 hacker culture of mid-1990s, Linux was seen as the definite way to go. (Back then I myself was a Microsoft kid, but I've spent a lot o

Meta: What is your opinion of 386BSD?

Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available .. and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. link

"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

Read the current article, then the one linked to another interview with Linus. It will become clear.

filesharing has done nothing to break the hold of the major labels on the promotion and marketing of musical acts. As long as they can hold on to those, they will survive, and eventually they will figure out how to take advantage of the internet to make loads of money.

Indeed. Filesharing isn't going to break major label hold on our minds any more than sharing copies of Microsoft software was going to break that company's hold on our computers.

In the end, we'll have advertisements embedded into the hit singles, as part of the music and lyrics.

Yep, and if we're willing to look to other cultures, it's probably already happening, see http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2008/02/23/copypop/

There might be legally technical problems (but IANAL) but more significantly, 1) it isn't clear such would need to be built into the licenses 2) added complexity is inherently bad 3) take as a lesson the near total lack of such practice in free software -- the only significant instance I know of, Aladdin Ghostscript, ended the practice approaching 3 years ago, now going straight to GPL and 4) licensing work n years in the future just isn't that valuable (consider discounted present value) -- same analysis showing that even non-retroactive copyright extension doesn't increase incentive shows that timed-release doesn't increase value of the commons much.

They do (sortof).

See here for a bit of a discussion of the topic, including a link to mod_wxjs an whitebeam.

Ps. Indentation is your friend, even with scope indicators, you still want to code scope blocks with indentation, otherwise its a bitch to read. python just removed them as they should be redundant.

Thanks to the FSF for supporting the summit that eventually led to Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement, even if FSF isn't endorsing them yet. I'm really surprised at the near total lack of on topic comments on this post. Not even any generic anti-FSF flames or calling Autonomo.us luddite. So everyone agrees that this activity is a good thing? (I'm biased.)

I'll strongly consider System76 if they offer a laptop with better than 1280x800 resolution when I'm in the market again. I'm running Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with 1920x1200 resolution and could not tolerate the downgrade. But I'd love to buy a machine with Linux pre-installed and tuned.

I'll strongly consider System76 if they offer a laptop with better than 1280x800 resolution when I'm in the market again. I'm running Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with 1920x1200 resolution and could not tolerate the downgrade. But I'd love to buy a machine with Linux pre-installed and tuned.

Those who take a personal stand to advocate free software usually tend to be on the left.

True, which is disappointing because there's an excellent case for free software on economic grounds. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it destroys jobs and hurts commercial software companies, but that's just a variation of the broken window fallacy. Free software is good for the economy, just like a free nonpolluting energy source would be good for the economy even if it put the oil companies out of business.

While I think ads should be used throughout the site to "fully fund free knowledge" the foundation could easily fund itself simply by selling access to the search page, just like Mozilla does with Firefox's search box.

The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia's neutrality.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There's simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn't even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, "being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)", as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google's near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both -- and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser's donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia's philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia's principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community -- of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there's a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia's neutrality.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There's simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn't even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, "being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)", as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google's near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both -- and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser's donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia's philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia's principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community -- of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there's a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

Expanded version: defeatist dreaming

15.4" laptop screens that support 1920x1200 have been around for awhile too. I'm satisfied with mine.

U send me automated dorm room to hlp me do ur oursourced job plz.

U hlp ur old frnd 2 do ur job.

Thx.

ps. I enclose 4 u this letter 4 ur redding.

http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/04/27/open-h1b-g ates/

"Gates and others have warned that American companies need foreign engineering talent to stay competitive. I believe that is the case for most businesses, but if there was an exception it should be Microsoft. There should be no advantage to being close to the customer in developing shrink-wrap software, as the customer is everywhere. Why should a shrink-wrap developer care about where engineering talent is located? Why not, e.g., move all Microsoft Office development to Hyderabad? Inertia I suppose. It may be hard to relocate Office development anywhere outside the Seattle area. Surely any wholly new shrink-wrap development teams ought to be located outside the U.S, barring H-1B liberalization."

Would white miners in South Africa be better off without competition from black miners?

Why shouldn't engineers from around the world have an equal chance to compete?

I say let anyone live and work anywhere in the world, and most slashdot commenters should be ashamed.

I like it. Has potential as a seastead-based business.

LimeWire is open source and is safe. I did a quick check of several other open source P2P apps (BitTorrent, eMule, Phex, and Shareaza). None are bundled with malware and if they have a license agreement it is only the GPL. All of the proprietary apps checked are unsafe, and it is well known that others not checked (e.g., Grokster) are also not safe.

Really ugly Replica document I created in 1993.

Also at http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.zip. Unzip into your web directory, create another mirror, a la http://gondwanaland.com/ml/sdmi-attack/sdmi-attack .htm.