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Thanks for the link and your research.

You're welcome.

You have, however, misrepresented the statement Bruce Perens made. This unfortunate fact turns your work from useful to bullshit.

No, no it does not. Frankly, it wasn't clear at the time what Bruce was talking about. Lots of people were making lots of claims at the time — remember, this was a dozen years ago, before Christine Peterson claimed to have coined the term. But even if it was, that doesn't change the content or quality of the citations I and others located even slightly.

Neither Perens, nor ESR, not Stallman, nor any other person claims to have originated the term,

Christine Peterson outright claims to have "coined" the phrase. My recollection is that before that, ESR claimed to have done so, but he has since supported her story. I agree with you that Perens didn't claim to have coined the term; what he did do was claim to have established its meaning authoritatively by writing a document — which sought to retcon history by redefining a term already in common use before the OSI was even imagined.

Trying to portray it as an argument between the people who were present is disingenuous.

I portrayed it as a series of mutually contradictory claims, but I never asserted that they "argued" about it, at least not that I can recall. If you can find a place where I made such a claim, I'll happily retract it.

It would also be more interesting had they used the combined term "open source" as a noun. They used the noun phrase "source code" with the adjective "open", which may seem like a subtle difference.

That is an outright falsehood. Surely, you can do better. The Caldera press release for OpenDOS authored by Lyle Ball clearly puts all three words together, in the order which you expect, right in the headline: "CALDERA® ANNOUNCES OPEN SOURCE CODE MODEL FOR DOS". If you had actually read my citations, instead of only looking for arguments against them, you'd have known that. This post to comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32 from 1993 also uses the phrase in the sense in which you describe. (To be fair, that citation was linked from my later article on this same subject, which I didn't link in the subthread to which you're replying; however, I did link it in a sibling subthread in this same conversation before you wrote the above comment — you might have taken the time to read the rest of the discussion before writing such an emphatic reply.) However, the Caldera press release was linked from my original article, which you really should have read before leaving your highly inaccurate comment here.

What a waste of your time and ours.

You can make excuses all day, or mischaracterise my efforts repeatedly, but it doesn't change the facts at all — And the most basic fact is that the phrase was being used by the community at least five years before Christine Peterson claims to have "coined" it (her word, not mine), and was used by at least one corporation two years earlier.

Further, because I was there, I personally remember the term being in broad use in conversation around the Santa Cruz geek community in the early nineties, in its current sense. That's what set me off in the first place when I read

Stupid bleeping...I'm not sure how I wrote "probably". A specific person, ESR, definitely used it first.

First, ESR doesn't actually claim (any more) to have invented it, he claims Christine Petersen invented it. He changed his story.

Second:
1993: Jerome Schneider
1996: Caldera (Written by Lyle Ball, whom I queried on the subject)
1998: Christine Peterson (Writing in 2006, mind, and providing zero citations)

So you tell me, who you gonna believe? The citations which prove that its use predates OSI claims by five years, provided by a person (me) who has nothing to gain by continuing this argument except the credibility which naturally comes from supporting the facts, or someone with something to gain economically from making such claims, like Christine Peterson or Bruce Perens? The only dog I've got in this fight is the truth.

Sustaining this argument over the years (literally over more than a decade) has cost me substantial credibility, but only among people who value prejudice over fact. I'm okay with that. Better to suffer for the truth than promote a pack of lies. Buying into bullshit is why we can't have nice things.

Nonetheless, interesting little post. I do feel like it confirms the original authorship of the term as ESR. It's claimed that Perens claims ESR invented it, regardless of the disagreement on timing.

You think he invented it in 1997, my citation clearly shows that it was used in 1996, and I contacted the person who wrote that press release and he confirmed "my" version of events. (I also included two additional citations at the bottom of that second story).

The evidence proves conclusively that nobody at the OSI invented the term. I probably should have linked that second blog post first, or instead, but my first post was frankly sufficient proof. In fact, I only ever wrote the second one because of the obstinate Open Source cheerleaders who first demanded proof of the claim that nobody at the OSI invented the term (I and others were actually using it regularly in conversation before the OSI ever existed, as well as before that meeting took place) and who refused to accept my clear citation as evidence.

The whole reason that Free Software was created was to differentiate from Open Source, because Open Source only means source code access, and source code access is not sufficient. What is needed is the freedom to actually use the code, and especially for users to be able to use the code in place of the original code. That's why the GPLv3 includes the anti-tivoisation clause. Claiming that Open Source provides these protections for users is a direct attack upon the concept of Free Software, on behalf of corporations with a vested interest in confusing the issue — because it does nothing of the sort.

Nonetheless, interesting little post. I do feel like it confirms the original authorship of the term as ESR. It's claimed that Perens claims ESR invented it, regardless of the disagreement on timing.

You think he invented it in 1997, my citation clearly shows that it was used in 1996, and I contacted the person who wrote that press release and he confirmed "my" version of events. (I also included two additional citations at the bottom of that second story).

The evidence proves conclusively that nobody at the OSI invented the term. I probably should have linked that second blog post first, or instead, but my first post was frankly sufficient proof. In fact, I only ever wrote the second one because of the obstinate Open Source cheerleaders who first demanded proof of the claim that nobody at the OSI invented the term (I and others were actually using it regularly in conversation before the OSI ever existed, as well as before that meeting took place) and who refused to accept my clear citation as evidence.

The whole reason that Free Software was created was to differentiate from Open Source, because Open Source only means source code access, and source code access is not sufficient. What is needed is the freedom to actually use the code, and especially for users to be able to use the code in place of the original code. That's why the GPLv3 includes the anti-tivoisation clause. Claiming that Open Source provides these protections for users is a direct attack upon the concept of Free Software, on behalf of corporations with a vested interest in confusing the issue — because it does nothing of the sort.

Do you have any shred of evidence whatsoever that the term was in use prior to the February 1998 meeting, or are you talking out of your butt?

Solid Evidence is located here.

BTW OSI has trademarks for various "Open Source *", terms so they *do* get to define it, legally.

No, no they do NOT. They have trademark on "Open Source Initiative" but they declined to attempt to register "Open Source" when they registered "Open Source Initiative" on the advice of their legal counsel. We don't know on what grounds their legal counsel told them not to do it, and they don't actually believe in Openness so they haven't told us. We only know that their counsel told them not to, because they told us THAT much.

A specific person probably used the term "Open Source" first,

They probably did, but we (around UCSC, MIT, etc) were already using it before it appeared in the first commercial source, a press release for Caldera OpenDOS. Background and Citations are found here.

and that person has given a definition and description of intent, and control has been placed in the hands of the OSI.

Well, no. Absolutely not. We don't actually know who first coined the term relating to software, but they were probably in or near the intelligence community, which was using the term to mean something else. What we do know is that the people in the OSI who claim to have been involved with its invention did not invent it.

You're lying. You've never proven this statement -- but you repeat it over and over because you want it to be true. And when pushed you pull out [one] press release from 1996 about proprietary software where the code was made viewable-but-not-usable.

I've provided literally exactly as much proof for this statement as Christine Peterson has provided for her claims that she coined the phrase. Besides Lyle Ball (CEO of Netendeavor, formerly of Caldera) who was willing to publicly support my claim, others here on Slashdot have come forward to support me. We were using the phrase "Open Source" to describe software whose source you could get at and compile for yourself by the mid nineties.

Great! So then we agree that Caldera's code was proprietary/non-modifiable/no distribution allowed. But Martin prefers hiding behind weasly phrases like "clearly used...in the sense which I describe." (That "sense" being proprietary/non-modifiable/no distribution code.) Whoopee. It's not something to be proud of.

This is not about pride, for me at least. This is about facts, which are something I thought geeks cared about. Silly me.

Right, because you were "chumming" with your friends at SCO. We all get that you want to hurt the Open Source Initiative -- but to do it, you're making shit up.

My friends from SCO predate the SCO v. Linux SNAFU by many years. In fact, they predate Linux. I know quite a number of them, few of whom I will name here because I have not discussed that with them. I will stick only to public information. I knew these people because we moved in the same social circles — namely, the scruz geek community which grew up around UCSC. I came into it through BBSing; local BBS lists included two public-access SCO systems run by some of these employees, ex-employees, and friends. One of them was gorn (the planet gorn) which was a 386 running SCO Xenix. Another was deeptht (deep thought) which ran SCO Unix. Through these connections I got my hands on a trial copy of Xenix 286, which I ran on my own computer (inkpot) which was a 286@6MHz with 1MB RAM and a 40MB RLL disk. inkpot ran as a UUCP node hung off of deeptht for some years. Consequently, I can thank SCO (and friends at SCO) for introducing me to the world of UNIX and Unixlikes.

Try to understand that's not "The SCO Group", but the real Santa Cruz Operation. Though amusingly, while I was acting as the admin at circus.com (formerly the Marshmallow Peanut Circus) we ran Caldera Network Desktop on IIRC a Compaq 486 with 16MB RAM. One of my housemates brought both the hardware and the software home one day from work, and I installed it. Circus.com had formerly been running on one of the other local geeks' '040 NeXT Turbo slab. We had an entire class C (165.227.17) connected through scruznet on a dedicated 28.8k SLIP using Hayes Accura modems. (28.8kbps was the last symmetric modem speed...)

Please tell me which parts of this you believe I am making up. Be specific. Follow this up with an explanation as to why I'm not entitled to the opinion that Open Source and Free Software are not the same thing. The user must be entitled to the source code, and must be protected from workarounds which prevent them from using the source code.

I have proven conclusively that you did not coin the term "Open Source" as pertains to software; not even the term Open Source Software is your creation. Ransom Love's corporation Caldera (which was later taken over by others, becoming The SCO Group) was actually using the phrase in press releases in 1995, but I (and others) who were in the scene at the time remember well using the phrase before Caldera did so. So why do you continue making these false claims? Is it simply for your own self-aggrandizement, or are you warming up for the OSI to make a run at copyrighting the phrase?

Open source was developed in direct opposition to the types of traditional licenses and restrictions placed on code and programs from Microsoft and other companies like them.

You misspelled "Free Software" there. Open Source just means that you can get the sources, and the concept (if not the name) actually predates Microsoft. People were giving away source code to CP/M programs before Microsoft knocked it off as DOS.

The fact is Linux never needed windows support, and no one has explained the net-gain from supporting the execution of free software that has run stand-alone for decades other than the potential to sell more licenses for the proprietary OS under which it is being made to run.

Support for one or two Windows applications has roped many people into Linux, because it made it possible for them to ditch Windows. How many? Who knows? But it was useful.

in other words, given the chance, no one is going to intentionally shell out cash to run GCC on a copy of windows.

Which is not even vaguely close to what is happening, or what is suggested to be happening.

I was once an open source nut during my college years, but attempting to coerce someone to give away the changes they make to an openly available source code base is nuts.

That's Free Software, not Open Source. Open Source only means that you can get the source code, it means nothing whatsoever about distribution rights. The OSI likes to claim that they invented the term in 1998, but I have diehard proof that the phrase was already in use in the sense in which I have described by 1995. I knew this of course, because I was one of the persons so using it, but the leading lights of the OSI would like us to believe differently because the lie makes them more influential.

Also, the word "proprietary" in this context is referring to licenses that do not give the rights required in Open Source licenses.

Ahh, the OSI. Still trying to claim ownership of the term "Open Source" even though it becomes more and more clear that you have no right to do so.

Re: SJWs are the Worst (Score:2)
by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on 03-16-18 14:48 (#56272251) Homepage Journal
[...]
You're too much of a snowflake to even log into Slashdot,

Drinkypoo? You might as well have not logged in. I lmao at dumbshits who have essentially anonymous logins who criticize others for real anonymous logins.

I lmao at dumbshits who can't read. Your parents must be real proud of you.

City buses are the form of mass transit that people find most irksome because of their slowness and frequent stops. Now that Uber is subjecting them to competition, perhaps bus service will finally improve. I can see bus systems meeting the challenge by using smaller, demand-activated vehicles that pick up and drop in response to apps.

I agree, and I've written about such repeatedly. But there will be lag time, because autonomous systems are currently expensive. This will lead at least some transit lines to employ full-size autonomous buses instead of shifting immediately to more van- or shuttle-sized vehicles which pose less obstacle to traffic.

Absent explanation, the term "open" in computing means interoperable. Since the eighties, Unix systems have been described as "open" due to their conformance to published standards.

Few think that "open" means "open standard". Proprietary software that's interoperable because one can interface with a published API certainly isn't called "open".

The term "open source" on face value only implies "source available".

Yep. And that's all it means.

Uncapitalized and on face value yes. But the OSI definition includes the full libre criteria, and most developers now associate the uncapitalized term with this definition (even in this article).

But I believe the most important feature of open software is that it allows people to create and distribute modified versions.

Nope. All it means is source code access. It doesn't imply the freedom to redistribute changed binaries, only patches.

I'm not talking about terms and definitions here, but calling out what I see as the most important aspect of Free Software.

"Open Source", as defined by OSI, should be capitalized, which it isn't in this summary.

The OSI does not get to define the phrase Open Source, because they did not invent it (not even, as they claim, pertaining solely to software!)

OSI did invent the term "open source" as a more descriptive term than "free software" for MIT- and GPL-type licences. The article to which you linked found an earlier use of "open source" that only meant "source available". As I said above, "open source" now means more than this in most people's minds.

Yes, the term "Free Software" on face value only implies that one can use it without payment,

That's only if you hear "free" and automatically think "I don't have to pay". Some people hear "free" and think "not in bondage". In some countries, Free Software is called Software Libre, which suggests freedom. But "Open Source" is, frankly, an even worse term. You can construe that to mean basically anything — and the OSI is trying.

The ambiguity of "free" in English was a major reason for the introduction of the "Open Source" term by the OSI.

I prefer the term "open software".

Absent explanation, the term "open" in computing means interoperable. Since the eighties, Unix systems have been described as "open" due to their conformance to published standards.

The term "open source" on face value only implies "source available".

Yep. And that's all it means.

But I believe the most important feature of open software is that it allows people to create and distribute modified versions.

Nope. All it means is source code access. It doesn't imply the freedom to redistribute changed binaries, only patches.

"Open Source", as defined by OSI, should be capitalized, which it isn't in this summary.

The OSI does not get to define the phrase Open Source, because they did not invent it (not even, as they claim, pertaining solely to software!)

Yes, the term "Free Software" on face value only implies that one can use it without payment,

That's only if you hear "free" and automatically think "I don't have to pay". Some people hear "free" and think "not in bondage". In some countries, Free Software is called Software Libre, which suggests freedom. But "Open Source" is, frankly, an even worse term. You can construe that to mean basically anything — and the OSI is trying.

There are ways to licence software that, while its source can be viewed, modified, and re-published, requires payment for production use. I'd still call such packages "open software",

You can call them whatever you want, but if the users can get the sources, then they're Open Source by definition. Whose definition? The people who were using it as such before the OSI even existed. In fact, the people that the leading lights of the OSI certainly heard the phrase from, before they claim to have invented it.

Are they arguing over who should get marketing props?

They are, and it's pathetic, because they are ignorant at best. My particular dog in this fight is not wanting the OSI to be in charge of what you can call Open Source. They wanted to be in charge of it before, their legal counsel advised them against it, and they decided against attempting to establish such a trademark. Hopefully that bird has already flown the coop, but self-aggrandizement like this could lead to actual attempts. I'm not trying to make myself look great, I'm trying to prevent a hijacking.

For anyone who has any doubt about this claim:
Here's the truth:

Caldera Announces Open Source for DOS, Sept. 10, 1996. There, FTFY. I know people have become a bit tired of me harping on about this, but the fact is that the phrase "Open Source" was in well-established usage years before any of these people claim to have invented it. And what's more, all of them should know it. Caldera didn't invent the term either! It was already in common use among internet-savvy programmer types when Caldera used it! "Open" has been used to describe the interoperability of Unix systems since at least the 1980s, and the phrase "Open Source" was already being used around communities like Santa Cruz (where SCO was, hence the name) which were heavy on software developers to describe software whose source code you could get your hands on for free. If only Google hadn't completely neutered the search interface on Groups, I'm sure I could find more citations...

Open Source means that you can download the source code for your own use, it does not mean that it conforms to the OSI's vision of what Open Source should mean if they were allowed to trademark it — which they aren't, because it already had a meaning when the OSI became a thing, and it already had a meaning when Bruce &co claim to have invented it.

Not this again. If you can download the sources, then it's Open Source. Stop saying "Open Source" when what you mean is "OSI Approved".

Yes, I agree. Coworkers who ban strong perfumes are indeed assholes.

Assholes are like perfumes, they both stink. (Feel free to ignore my old blog post — just download the brochure PDF from Mendocino County Working on Wellness.)

It really depends on the person. Although It would be rude, I would prefer if people on the train would smoke rather than wear some of the perfumes I have had the displeasure to know.

BOTH should be banned. Period. If I can smell you from a distance, you've got too much stink on. Most of that shit is toxic and much of the stuff we permit here in the USA is actually banned in the EU because it's probably toxic and untested, or actually has been proven to be toxic but we permit it anyway. Then they mix the toxic chemicals with musk, whose job is to carry compounds through cell walls.

I don't think we should ban tobacco. I think we should ban smoking anything where someone else has to breathe it. While we're at it, let's ban chemicals that anyone else can smell. Why is it acceptable to make chemical attacks on people you walk past on the street? No one else should be able to smell you unless they are right up in your business.

Well you still haven't realized how fooled you were by Obama.

Hey, why don't you try telling me what I think and see how that goes! I bet it'll be amazing! To watch.

The âoeopen sourceâ label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code.

No, that is a lie, and you should not repeat it.

Golly, how did you know I was looking for advice from a guy who posts "drinking games" alongside his online resume?

I don't know if you were alive these last 8 years, but anyone who mocked or belittled the President was immediately shouted down as racist.

I disagree. I shared that image on social media, sadly it failed to take, probably because I didn't add any snappy text caption. I thought the bottles did the job, but I guess not. I got zero accusations of racism. Absolutely zero, and I have some pretty PC types in my feed. I come from Santa Cruz, see? Only the racism was necessarily called racism.

Given the number of positive things I've heard about his donations, I figure that this is one of his rare screwups. Or, more accurately, it's a screwup by one of the charities that Bill Gates decided to give money and a positive statement to.

Not everybody would agree on that:

- The flip side to Bill Gates’ charity billions

- Why the Gates Foundation is Evil

Meanwhile, god only knows what's in an air freshener, even the ones that are misted into the air.

If the FDA actually wants to increase my air quality, they should crack down on perfumes. Perfumes contain toxics and musk in the same package. Just about anyone wearing perfume which you can smell is subjecting you to a chemical attack, since the genuinely harmless kind (made solely out of essential oils... and not even all of those are harmless!) is the rarest kind.

Wasting their time dicking around with vapes while they could have been working on perfumes and body sprays for years (I'm looking at you, Axe) proves conclusively that they don't give a fuck about this issue.

I think you define "open source software" as "the source code is visible". I think open source is not quite that. Open source implies the public development of software.

Nope. Though Wikipedia credits the OSI for inventing the term, its use in computer software predates the supposed event by years. Guess which camp controls that Wikipedia article?

Open Source means that if you get the binary, you get the source code. That's it, period, end of story. It had that meaning before the OSI was even dreamt of. There are specific licenses which have specific language which grants you, the licensor, certain rights. Some of these are OSI-approved licenses, but they are not the only open source licenses. Thankfully, OSI's counsel advised them not to attempt to trademark the generic term "Open Source" way back in the way-back when they might have successfully achieved such a thing, and we are all still free to believe whatever we want to believe.

How did you manage to reference OSI and completely miss the part

How did you manage to reference OSI and completely miss the fact that nobody at the OSI invented the term "Open Source", even as relates to software, as it was used by Caldera to describe licensing for OpenDOS before they claim to have dreamt it up?

That message is at the top of their main web-page.

And they can blow it straight out their ass. They want to be important and in the process they've both overstated the meaning of open source and diminished the value of Free Software by helping to promote more permissive licenses which provide less protection to users.

The Gates Foundation uses their clout as the largest charity in the world to push for stronger IP laws. So Zuck is just trying to get in on some of that sweet, sweet charity power for his own interests.

http://hyperlogos.org/blog/drink/Why-Gates-Foundation-Evil

Well, this is one of those "Made in China" brand jobs. It's got all the right logos except a brand name. I think I may have bought it new though, so it's possible it's in my purchase history on DX or eBay, heh heh. But neither one of them makes it easy to find out.

Tell you what, I'll use my trusty cellphonecam to take a photo of each side of this wonder and see what we get. I'll use fake HDR because I'm too lazy to walk outside where the light is, so that you'll at least get a useful impression...

here ya go

I loaded geoworks from the pc connection kit floppies. I sure wish I still had images of those. I still have my 1910 running geos with graffiti. I don't actually use it, of course. I would happily unload it on someone. The battery packs need rebuilding, and there's a full-size XT keyboard jack hacked in where the modem used to be. I only had the 2400 bps modem anyway.

I also have a 2390 which should really go with it. It's a little flaky, never detecting full battery voltage. cap failure or somesuch?

I am a liberal both by definition and by my own words, and I have spoken out online (whee! where's my medal) repeatedly against this whole robotic assassination thing, as you put it. I have long been playing the harp that Obama is at most irrelevantly different.

Many people are willing to give Obama a pass on stuff just because he's their guy just because many people gave Bush a pass on stuff because he was their guy. There's stupid people on both sides. Don't pretend that this is a Liberal thing, because it isn't. There's very little that's liberal about Obama. But the average voter does very little critical thinking about politics, probably because it's complicated and depressing.

In case you're wondering, I also own firearms, and I have a murrican pickemuptruck and I love Jesus, but I'm also pro-choice and pro-gay-rights and I also have a German sedan, so maybe I fit half the stereotypes. Regardless, don't imagine that all Liberals are the same, or in fact that all the people that call themselves Liberal are that any more than all the people who refer to themselves as Conservative actually are that. Most of them are really some kind of fascist who want people to be forced to live the way they want them to live. Thankfully, there's so many differing opinions out there that only a subset of the bad ideas are actually forced upon us.

From what you've seen where?

In the Android source tree.

Stop letting people who didn't invent a term tell you what "Open Source" means.

Who's telling me what open source means?

It means access to the source code, period the end. It doesn't tell you anything about the terms.

I know. I also know open source doesn't mean OSI-approved, but that's irrelevant if the licenses are OSI-approved anyway, which AFAIK, they are.

From what i've seen it's Apache, GPL or LGPL, are there non-OSI approved ones in there too?

From what you've seen where? Stop letting people who didn't invent a term tell you what "Open Source" means. It means access to the source code, period the end. It doesn't tell you anything about the terms. This is why Free Software licenses are important. Open Source is an important component of Free Software, and valuable in its own right, but it is insufficient for protection of the rights of the user, which are protected by effectively using copyright to give the code itself rights.

They certainly do come off as authoritative, don't they? But that's only one side of the story. Much of the misunderstanding comes from people who don't own a dictionary. They are permitting the legal profession to redefine words in our language, and then crying about how they're suffering as a result of the redefinition of those words which they've caused.

I have used PS3MediaServer with the Xbox 360 and it's a champ. It's got config files for a lot of players that give it the supported containers, codecs, and resolutions, and it autodetects them. I used minidlna on a dockstar for streaming files directly without transcoding, which works fine for quite a bit of media these days. If you have mkvs or similar, though, that's another reason why you might need to transcode.

How much will the American people take before they rid themselves of BusHitler and his evil?

One shot, two shots, white shot, black shot.

Did they? I still have a netbook I bought in 1999. 133 MHz Pentium, 96M RAM, 3.2G hard drive. Same physical size as an Asus EEE. Came with Windows 98. Can barely run Firefox 3.6.

Well, you're only a decade late. Or if you prefer, the GRiDPad 2390 (AKA "Zoomer") of 1993, which was basically a size-reduced version of the 1910, and which actually came with a GUI OS (PC-GEOS). It's also the original platform for the "Graffiti" handwriting recognition system that was later used with Palm OS, though that's not what shipped with the Zoomer. You can backload the 2390's OS on the 1910, you only have to change the video driver.

Not this again. "Bruce: My favorite hack is a social one. One day, right here on Slashdot, I announced âoeOpen Sourceâ to the world. We were standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman, but Richard was poorly suited to empathize with normal people - rather than us hackers â" and thus evangelize to them." You did no such thing, and you don't even claim to have invented the term as early as the first citation located so far. Your accomplishments are significant enough that you shouldn't have to lie to self-aggrandize.

I also don't want to adopt economically ruinous measures; on the possibility it is.

Economic ruin due to preventing AGW is a red herring. We are not dependent on fossil fuels, or at least we need not be. There is no need for us to be. We are told that there is in order to manipulate people into being parrots for what you are squawking. The idea that not poisoning the earth is somehow inherently tied to having a high-tech civilization is a laughable one at best, but as long as many people repeat the lie you're repeating, there's little room for laughter. Only tears now, as we poison the environment in which we live. One of the basic tenets of life is that you shouldn't shit where you eat.

The USDOE already proved at Sandia NREL both that special strains of algae are unnecessary and that you don't need a special bioreactor to make algae for biofuel economically viable. What is needed is cooperation from the government. Since I have essentially written this comment dozens of times, I finally broke down and made a referenceable explanation of why burning oil is stupid and unnecessary.

since when has toilet paper had source code?

The source code for commercially-produced toilet paper includes the instructions for how to use the machines, what feedstocks they require, and how to operate them. It is not referred to as such, but that's what it is.

I love open source software, and I've been a long time supporter of the movement, but I feel it weakens the open source software movement when you generalize it's meaning in such a way

Then you're going to hate knowing that the oldest reference for the use of "Open Source" in software is a press release by Caldera for OpenDOS, which considerably predates the "invention" of the term according to the OSI. Open Source doesn't mean what you think it means, it just means you can get enough of the source code to interoperate. Pre-Caldera SCO was already using the phrase in this sense, but it's hard to find good citations because these days if you search for SCO you don't get anything useful unless you like reading about lawsuits.

So watering crop circles then?

Yeah, crop circles in the sky. But if anyone tries to tell me that the purpose of chemtrails is to communicate with ancient aliens I will have to pee on their boots.

OpenDOS source code derivatives bay be redistributed only for "non-commerical purposes" [sic] and thus it is Open Source but not Free Software.

Umm... this is just wrong. Open Source is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative.

No, it isn't. The rest of your comment is invalid. When you know something you may come back and make another comment.

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

http://hyperlogos.org/blog/drink/feed

I'm sure there's some way to subscribe to me here on slashdot, too :)

You talk like it's easy to get a decent DLNA server.

Well, I found it pretty easy to get a decent DLNA server up and running, in fact I wrote TFA on it. That and how to get evince working with mozplugger are my most popular howtos :p But that's just a dumb server that shares media. If you want transcoding you have to look further. minidlna is ideal for embedded servers.

I can't fathom why this article appeared on this website.

Because Slashdot loves to pick up the ignorant and inflammatory articles produced by the assmonkeys over at Gawker Media, because the discussion will lead to page views, and the page views will lead to ad impressions.

Don't people have to RTFA for Gawker to get the page views?

I can't fathom why this article appeared on this website.

Because Slashdot loves to pick up the ignorant and inflammatory articles produced by the assmonkeys over at Gawker Media, because the discussion will lead to page views, and the page views will lead to ad impressions.