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5:13pm: i'm committing suicide tonight.. do not intervene as i have many stories to tell and do not want them to die with me #debian #runnerkristy67
5:14pm: watch my blog later http://ianmurdock.com/
5:17pm: https://t.co/I1CSCJErWf
5:20pm: I'll write more on my blog later. But the police here beat me up for knowing on my neighbor's door.. they sent me to the hospital.
5:20pm: Then beat me up some more.
5:21pm: My bail for "assault against a police officer" are all that: $25,000.
5:22pm: I'll write more much later. They still don't have cameras on all police so I'm going to use my somewhat celebrity to hopefully stop this.
5:23pm: Quote: "We're the police, we always win."
5:25pm: My career is over now, so I'll be gone soon.
5:27pm: Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.
5:30pm: I'm not committing suicide today. I'll write this all up first, so the police brutality ENDEMIC in this so call free country will be known.
5:34pm: if anyone wants to come over and see what the police did to me i would be more than happy for that
5:35pm: they beat the shit out of me twice, then charged me $25,000 to get out of jail for battery against THEM
5:36pm: i had to go to the hospital
5:36pm: they followed me home
5:36pm: then they pulled me out of my house and did it again
5:37pm: i had to have swtitches
5:37pm: then followed my home from there
5:38pm: i asked if they had cameras
5:38pm: they said no
5:45pm: shall i post pictures for all my bruises from my against the police officers?
5:45pm: where they put you in a cell with absolutely no instructions whatever aside from the spell on the floor in piss?
5:48pm: Writing up my experience for others to hopefully prevent others from police abuse then you won't hear from me again
6:00pm: @jacksormwriter wants me dead
6:06pm: i'm going to post my case on my blog.. if anyone can post it on hacker news or wherever i would apprieciate it
6:07pm: i'm hoping coming from a successful white guy it will help everyone
6:31pm: (1/2) The rest of my life will be devoted to fighting against police abuse.. I'm white, I made $1.4 million last year,
6:33pm: (2/2) They are uneducated, bitter, and and only interested in power for its own sake. Contact me imurdock@imurdock.com if you can help. -ian
6:41pm: The police are uneducated, evil, and sadistic. Do not trust them.
6:42pm: The rest of my life is to fight against the police.. they are NOT friends, so don't ever ever believe otherwise.
6:49pm: What does one have to get education wise to become a police officer.. asking for a friend.
7:03pm: "We're the police, we can do whatever the fuck we want.."
7:08pm: This was right after the female officer ripped off my underwear.. I guess that's not considered rape if you're not a woman being raped.
7:12pm: I am a white male, make a lot money, pay a lot of money in taxes, and yet their abuse is equally doned out. DO NOT CROSS THEM!

People deciding on suicide for real rarely make future plans, but his last tweets were full of them. I wonder about head trauma, mostly because of the extreme confusion here. Note his first line. He didn't want anyone to stop him from killing himself, because he had stories that he wanted to tell.

Why wouldn't they just change whatever internal version number is being improperly queried to 10, have the correct API call return 9, and market it as 9?

There is over a dozen different ways to get Windows version that I can think of. One of them is the official API, and others are hacks. but that doesn't stop people from using them, for the same reason why you see checks like b.toString().length==5 to check whether a Boolean value is true.

The correct approach would be to issue an advisory for all these shitty programmers to update their applications or they may not work on Windows 9. Fix your shit, or GTFO, basically.

One of the reasons why Windows remains popular in the enterprise is that shit doesn't just break like it would under your proposed model. Even if that means that there have to be lots of hacks in the OS itself to basically work around bugs in applications. As an engineer, you can rightfully cringe at it, but people pay for it, so...

Please actually read the GPL. Specifically the section which include the following statements:

"b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. "

"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. "

Android is a whole. That's why it has a name. That's why different companies can ship "Android" phones.

Or do you think every Linux distribution is violating the GPL too?

Probably, if they are still shipping discs. I think the FSF selectively enforces the GPL to the most egregious cases.

Linus originally chose a GPL license to play nice with the GNU toolset, so that a whole "Linux" distribution would be GPL. It didn't take long for companies like Red Hat to start throwing on proprietary bits to make their distributions commercially valuable. I believe they have since changed from that model to some mix of trademark (can't copy our distributions verbatim, you have to "clean" them of trademarks) and a licensing model.

Yes, it should be, and you shouldn't have to look for DEB packages if you're on a Linux distro using a deb-only package manager or a RPM if you're on one using a RPM-only manager. All package managers should be made compatible with at least one format(preferably more) so Linux software installation is simple, instead of Linux users having to hit website after website of software where the developers never bothered to release some kind of binary because of this mess, or they release a binary which isn't a normal package, and even if it does it doesn't contain the information inside it for a URL for automatic updates. Instead us Linux users often have to deal with out-of-date software because we're stuck waiting on our distro maintainer to specially package everything under the sun we could ever want, which is impossible, and which gives certain larger distros an unfair advantage. Or, we have to compile it, which limits the numbers of Linux users greatly because obviously normal users don't know how and most users don't want to bother with doing it even if they do know. So, yeah, I'd say it was a big problem.

Can read why Linux software installation sucks part one and two, and read about two projects hoping to make it better in the future.

Yes, it should be, and you shouldn't have to look for DEB packages if you're on a Linux distro using a deb-only package manager or a RPM if you're on one using a RPM-only manager. All package managers should be made compatible with at least one format(preferably more) so Linux software installation is simple, instead of Linux users having to hit website after website of software where the developers never bothered to release some kind of binary because of this mess, or they release a binary which isn't a normal package, and even if it does it doesn't contain the information inside it for a URL for automatic updates. Instead us Linux users often have to deal with out-of-date software because we're stuck waiting on our distro maintainer to specially package everything under the sun we could ever want, which is impossible, and which gives certain larger distros an unfair advantage. Or, we have to compile it, which limits the numbers of Linux users greatly because obviously normal users don't know how and most users don't want to bother with doing it even if they do know. So, yeah, I'd say it was a big problem.

Can read why Linux software installation sucks part one and two, and read about two projects hoping to make it better in the future.

Giving a binary base for privative software vendors throwing their software wherever they like to, with half-assed start/stop scripts and without integration with the native package management tools of my distribution of choice?

Uh that's exactly what the LSB is trying to put a stop to. Currently, software installation sucks because it doesn't have integration with the native package manager. One of the reasons for forming a cohesive, extensible packaging API is so that any package can communicate with the package manager about it's existence. Normally, this isn't done unless you use packages for your specific version of your specific distro. This is beyond retarded, and will keep Linux fragmented and away from ordinary users who don't know what the fuck configure make make install means, not to mention have no clue how to solve problems in doing that when they arise.

Currently the Burgdorf API is the incarnation of the LSB Packaging API and it would be nice to receive more help on such a critical issue. The article was spot on in saying that this will also lead to increased stability in other APIs as it's silly to install ten different versions of one library just because it's API isn't stable. Updating the library, that's mostly OK, but the rigidity of library APIs will become more apparent/annoying once Linux programs are actually portable (yes, I know binaries exist, I'm talking about packages for automatic updates, package manager awareness, etc).

Everyone should support good standardized APIs for Linux to help make this happen. While some users will be OK with never installing any software outside their own little world except for what their distro maintainers bundle up for them, many users are interested in having direct access to so-called "third-party" programs, not only for their binaries but for automatic updates among other things. Who's not satisfied with being stuck with version X just because they're using distro X of a program they love? I don't think most users are, and they shouldn't have to wait for the distro gift if they don't know how to compile, or the annoyances of running a "disconnected" binary in which they have to create manual menu items for and manually update.

If Linux is to ever be actually available to the masses, for it to gain momentum through the easy sharing of software outside the box which is the immediate software repository, and make it actually easy for Linux software developers to write software for any and all Linux distros without their blessed consent, this project is critical. Any user that wants free, unfettered, easy access to software has every interest in installing the LSB packaging API or using a distro with it already installed.

P.S. Yeah, there are other answers like Klik, Autopackage, Zero Install, and others, but an API to allow any package to be installed so that it will provide immediate integration with the package manager is much more helpful. Until the packaging API is finished though these solutions will help.

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons.

The most impressive things to read on Raymond's weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: "Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, 'Don't upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it's not compatible with program Z.' Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn't work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You're going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)"

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1...

A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work...

To contrast, I've got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

Google Calendar has been able to do this for a year now. http://ianmurdock.com/?p=419

Forking is not a problem when code is free as you can tell by looking at the hundreds of "forks" in the Debian repository, or if you look at the thousands of distributions that all get along famously.

Yeah, cos Ian Murdock didn't say that he wished Ubuntu hadn't forked so far from Debian as to be entirely incompatible.

Oh, wait. He did.

*complete shite about Java*

What? What are you talking about?

The problem came when they were unable to verify that all of their code was free.

Bollocks, frankly. XEmacs has always been GPL. The problem came because the FSF wanted copyright assigned to them for XEmacs. So yes, complete horseshit, Twitterris.

The "Linux Desktop" is far more unified than non free equivalents from M$ and others where you can't be sure the clipboard is going to work across applications or the network.

I haven't had a single problem copying and pasting between any application in Windows. Or for that matter, Mac OS X and Linux. Care to explain more about this mythical uncertainty? And no, the *NIX desktop isn't more unified than Windows or the non-free equivalent. Windows and OSX have visual styles which export the global style to all applications that are coded to use it. The *nix world has 2 major APIs and numerous other smaller ones. Slightly different, no?

I suspect RIM is falling into the trap of believing that they can reduce winCE to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers". However, others have tried that path and failed.

For gods sake RIM, don't do a palm/netscape

What I also found interesting is that Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, has a screenshot in his blog whith ubuntu in it: http://ianmurdock.com/2007/02/26/google-calendar-a dds-freebusy-scheduling/

Yes.

-ian
--
Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com/

What the hell? How does this guy get off calling himself Ian! I'm the real Ian Murdock. And I can prove it too!

Ubuntu are a bunch of shitheads, and that Mark fellow deserves to be shot. Imagine coming and stealing Debian and throwing lots of money at it. That is all Mark did. Anyway, fuck that fool, and fuck this fake Ian too.
Later,

-ian
--
Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com/ [ianmurdock.com]

Hi all,

It's being announced today that I'm joining Sun as chief operating
platforms officer, which basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's
operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux. I just posted the
announcement on my blog (http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/),
and it'll likely be making the rounds soon. Just wanted to
make sure you heard the news directly from me and to introduce myself.

First things first: I'm a long time Linux user, developer, and advocate.
I founded Debian in 1993, co-founded a Linux distribution company called
Progeny in 1999, and most recently served as CTO of the new Linux
Foundation, where I was (and still am) chair of the LSB, the Linux
platform interoperability standard. I'm also a long time Sun fan.

As for what I'll be doing: While I'm coming in with some fairly formed
opinions about what Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris ought to do (peruse my
blog a bit to learn more), I'm also a big believer in listening
before talking, and I have a lot of listening to do in the weeks
to come. So, please, feel free to drop me a line if you have
anything to tell me. And, please, be gentle while I get settled. :-)

Gotta get on a call in a few minutes. In the meantime, I just wanted
to say hello, and to make sure you heard the news directly from me.

Later,

-ian
--
Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com/

Ubuntu is still its own OS (as are the other distros): See Ian Murdoch essay.

As such, no platform exists for PC software vendors to target.

Interesting to hear about Ubuntu on the server, I'll have to give that a try. However, my experience with Ubuntu on the desktop matches that of dazed1: it seems like it might be a great distro for grannies, but I know it's not for me. I run a Debian desktop myself, and I'm very happy with it. I'm not sure why you'd say "it can be done, but it's not fun", unless you're thinking in terms of running Debian stable on every desktop in an organization, in which case I might agree. But for my own use, on my current machine, I installed Debian's AMD 64-bit version over a year ago, and the only config issue I had was installing the nVidia drivers for a GeForce card.

I still admire the Debian team for what they've accomplished, and I know that Ubuntu was built upon the strong foundations created by Debian, but the child is quickly outdoing the parent.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ubuntu still relies on Debian for most of its packages, i.e. if (unimaginably) Debian went away, Ubuntu would be scrambling to replace what Debian does for them. Hardly a "child outdoing the parent" situation: rather, Ubuntu is doing with Debian exactly what Debian is designed to support. I'm glad Debian doesn't focus on making the base distro more granny-friendly, because that would likely cut into its flexibility and usability for non-granny-running purposes.

Also, read this piece for reasons why Ubuntu shouldn't even want to "go it alone" and cut its dependency on Debian.

Early on in Ubuntu's beginings, I ran it as my primary desktop mainly because it was described as a better Debian than Debian. So I ran it, and was genuinely impressed, but not overly thrilled. Yes, it has many of the pluses that Debian has namely in APT, and embraces Debian social contract, and then some. But I still don't get why people are losing their minds over this. After about seven or eight months, I tried it again. Better, but still not amazing. In the meantime, I had used Xandros, and eventually moved (and settled on) PCLinuxOS. Wireless worked, the browser had every plug-in I needed, Java was pre-installed, etc. In my opinion, it's clearly a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu. What permanently turned me off, is when Ubuntu refused to include KDE based apps with their distro (this is prior to Kubuntu and Breezy Badger), and when problems started cropping up regarding Ubuntu seemingly splitting off with Debian. Regardless of what Mark Shuttleworth has to say, I agree with Ian's comments that they are not respecting the fact they are riding on the backs of Debian's work. Just my .02.

Not only do they make royalty for your car's head unit w/ iPod integration, they insure that one in every three will most certainly get an iPod if they dont already have one.

Its just an enormous network externality.

But really, if we're talking about network externalities... why not just add the network? There seems to have been a certain je ne sais pas ce qui when we introduced intercommunication to the pc. Would I be a total heretic to suggest we try exposing network interfaces to our mp3 players?
Ian Murdock (debian creator) was lamenting the lack of good remoting interfaces. Well, he was wrong. The problem is just that no one's implemented it.

I actually blame Intel and the Set-Top-Box people for not pushing Universal Plug and Play. It should've been pushed into more embedded devices, just the control specs for it, skip the whole streaming media over IP till basic networked devices get off the ground. Instead we're back where we were 20 years ago, fucking Apple(iPod)Talk 2.0, only this ones' even stupider than the last. That and serial interfaces, la-di-friggin-da. How many USBSerial adapters do I need to run my home theater? Gimme a break.

Myren

Myren

Oh, OK, you got me dead to rights! I'm pulling the whole thing out of my ass! That's why:

http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=831 this unbiased review points out many of the same issues I had, and why:

http://eol.init1.nl/content/view/47/2/
this guy seemed to have an issue with it, and why: http://corelands.com/blog/?postid=4
this guy sees a problem, and why:

http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/wxinmfpl/debian. html
This guy hits it on the head with why the whole apt system is screwed, and why:

http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/platforms/branden
this page of politics points to strife and
http://ianmurdock.com/?p=153
YOUR OWN FOUNDER EVEN SAYS THERE'S PROBLEMS COMPARED TO UBUNTU.

I especially like how you keep harping on reporting bugs through the proper channels. What, like you think I haven't tried? Then on that last link, Ian Murdock's weblog, I see: "One major difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian users' imput is mostly ignored, whereas Ubuntu users are heard and respected." -quote, typos and all! So, tell me, "stevey", is that you deleting our input so that the PUBLIC NEVER SEES IT?

I'm hoping to God that this lying weasel I've been arguing with is somebody currently high up in the Debian chain of command. Because, to read Ian Murdock's weblog, this man [Ian] sounds like he originally founded a fantastic, kick-ass distro, which he then trusted to a pack of idiots who fouled it up, and he regrets it.

Until today, I thought somebody just must have been scarfing shrooms - how could a Linux Distro *possibly* be *this* *stinking* *bad*?!?!? But thank you, "stevey" for at last providing me with an explanation that approaches sense: Debian is deliberately being sabotaged from within. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that that sabotuer(s?) was paid by a commercial software company which views itself to be in competition. This isn't the only possible explanation, but by God it makes the most sense. And I was ready to let it go, before I met you. But I love a good mystery! So, yeah, I think I WILL dig deeper until I get to the bottom of this...lol...pile, whenever I get the free time.

People who really want to know every detail of what's going on when you stick Debian Sarge disk #1 in your machine and boot it can view all the complaints this guy claims I'm covering up, along with my aborted effort to write some kind of install guide for the home user (heck, I *did* get it installed, after all!), can find my report HERE:
http://aimlesslifehobbies.blogspot.com/

I had the same thought, and even more so after reading http://ianmurdock.com/archives/000299.html (which someone up above linked to).

At latest Novell seminar, the Novell reps discussed *why* Novell bought SuSE: Novell already has 90% of the NON-x86 server market. They see linux as a way to increase their marketshare in x86 servers.

For M$, it's could be something similar: they already have 90% or so of general business servers, but linux would be a good way to broaden their market in areas where so far they've not competed as strongly, such as internet servers and thin clients. RedHat is already geared toward servers in the enterprise, and enterprise is M$'s main *paying* client base. Buying RedHat would give M$ a very quick additional chunk of the *enterprise* server market, complete with its own existing support contracts and fee structure.

It might also be good for Win-Linux interoperability, even if M$ only *supported* interoperability with RedHat -- since under the GPL, source for said improved interoperability would have to be provided for anyone to use, other disties could quickly catch up.

A few anything-but-M$ bigots would jump ship, but the gains due to name recognition would likely offset that by several orders of magnitude -- after all, Big Business' major ideology is also money, and they don't care about OS religions.

So overall, it would probably first boost RedHat, and as other disties caught up, linux's enterprise marketshare regardless of brand name.

Interesting, although I read this blog entry earlier and it is good food for thought.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Debian.
Especially in germany are a lot of organizations which were dissatisfied with SUSE services and switched to Debian.
According to Noèl Köthe's employer credativ, a company with strong Debian background, has made a SUSE to Debian migration for 30-40 organizations in 2004.

That's not insightful.
Here's what Ian Murdock said in his blog: original here
"Here's a suggestion on how we can avert the crisis before it becomes one: Provide a Debian compatibility runtime and development environment for Ubuntu, and make the development environment the default environment. That way, when developers build packages on Ubuntu, they can be installed as-is on Debian as well. Provide a Ubuntu-specific development environment too, so developers can take advantage of Ubuntu-specific features that aren't in Debian yet, but only use those features when you absolutely must. Everyone wins."

No kidding, Ian would be pretty happy. Or maybe Ian should learn when is right to use something and when it isn't. He missed Public Relations 101, sadly.