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(can you tell me about a US computer mag, which actually features news?)

Linux Journal and Linux Maganize come to my mind. Even though their news lag several months behind, they're still a treat to read. I go online for my news, magazines for insight and articles.

Let me try to put things simply.

X is the name of the windowing-system project invented at MIT in the 1980's. It was the successor to 'W' (stood for 'Window').

X.org, formerly the X Consortium, a bunch of industry-types (HP, Dell, DEC, IBM), tasked with developing X.

XFree86.org started as a port of the X code to PCs, and for much of the late 1990's and early 2000's, was the standard-bearer of X development.

Freedesktop.org is an umbrella project for *NIX GUI development.

At MIT, X went through several incompatible protocol versions, culminating at X11. Version 11 of the X protocol is what most servers speak today. MIT then formed the X consortium, which continued to develop X.

At some point in the early 1990s, what would become XFree86 forked from the X Consortium code, and was intended as a distribution for PCs.

The X Consortium and XFree86 continued make releases, and merged code between them periodically. At some point, the X Consortium was renamed X.org. X.org releases went up to X11R6.6. XFree86 releases, which maintained their own version number, went up to XFree86 4.4 (4.3 corresponded roughly to the X11R6.6 code). During this time, XFree86 was the primary developer of X11.

After a license change at XFree86, and concerns about it's slow pace of development, X.org and freedesktop.org forked the XFree86 4.4 code (just prior to the license change), and released X11R6.7. X11R6.8 is the latest release from X.org/freedesktop.org

There is a great, detailed history here.

You're talking about this one perhaps?

http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-04/gear_01.html

Still sticking with just HTTP and RSS as it is now, some kind of if-modified-since HTTP request would greatly reduce the load. That or a checksum. Or a date-time stamp.

It would also be possible and more complex to make a TCP or UDP based RSS designed to be robust and minimize effects of heavy use. A lot of information can be crammed into a single UDP packet, or it could just be a checksum or even just a date-time stamp.

Okay, I know, I'm getting off topic. But here's a link telling us how RMS views other FOSS advocates anyway.

Um, no, actually. It started off as a joke at the time, but since then Parrot has actually turned into a a real project which will run Perl 6 and, eventually, Python and other interpreted languages. (The Perl folks are in much more of a hurry to ditch their spaghetti Perl 5 VM, so that's priority #1. :-P) But there's some strong rumblings in the Python community about the Python port in progress, there are quite a few references to JVM bytecode translation and a Scheme port, and I've seen unsubstantiated rumors of Ruby and PHP ports. True, the core Python community isn't planning a switch yet, but if someday down the road the standard Parrot distribution comes with a Python frontend, people might start flocking to it for the one-stop convenience.

of middle eastern *nix users.

The camel book

People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.

Ai! Too late. He already knows it.

<lurk>

"The protocol is so incredibly convoluted and bloated and badly designed -- there are ten ways of doing everything. You end up with these massive exchanges going on the wire between Windows 95 and NT, just because they are trying to work out exactly which sets of bugs the other guy has so they can figure out how to actually stat a file or find its size or date or something. And we've found from talking to people who work at Microsoft how much of a headache it is to maintain the damned thing and keep it secure."

This, my friend, is a Microsoft "standard".

Well, there you go. That's more than a silver lining: it's the groundwork for a new project. (Assuming that a popular web site is what's you're aiming for.)

If what you're after is to showcase your work and get the word out there about your project, then why not try something like Linux Magazine's Project of the Month? They've had articles by the guys that did Gallery, TightVNC, etc, so you'd be in good company. It'd be a good way to get your project in front of people.

-B

At least SysAdmin (even if pretty clueless sometimes as an entity) and Linux magazine are still worth reading. Both contain enough code to keep the old brain cells churning.

And it was so sad that Web Techniques turned into a load of old wank aimed at PHBs - that, and TJP were the only ones I happily paid for.

Anyone else got any (reasonably priced) recommendations for geek mags that still keep the ol' brain cells working?

.02

cLive ;-)

Linux Magazine reviews the IBM p615

Not that I'm complaining, but wasn't 2003 supposed to be the year of desktop linux?

Or, how about EiC, now hosted at Sourceforge. "EiC is pointer safe."

checking if image is initramfs...
I couldn't google much info on it. Anybody know more about it?

The short answer is that the purpose of this message is to help people familiar with the kernel diagnose problems which prevent completion of bootup. Your system works, so ignore it. Preventing the message is more trouble than it's worth.

If you are interested, there is a little more info here.

You can always resubscribe.

Or, better, you can *not* resubscribe. Linux Magazine and Linux Format (in the UK, but relevant anywhere) are both better publications.

And if I had to choose just one Linux information source, it'd have to be Linux Weekly News -- high quality journalism and analysis in a very timely fashion, written by people who know what they're talking about.

KDE on the other hand gives the administrator the Kiosk mode. You can simply lock down any user setting. Thus removing administration hassles by user changes, while at the same time keeping all the great flexibilty differnt user (groups) nees. If Sun had been smart, they would have offered a KDE desktop with a locked down default user profile.

For an explanation and tutorial of Kiosk look here.

No, SMB is and always has been a very published spec.

Are you intentionally lying? Or just ignorant?

SMB is not an officially published spec. Notice how that informative page you linked is not provided by Microsoft, and in fact describes the fruits of external reverse-engineering efforts.

(In recent years, pressure from successful reverse engineering projects has pushed Microsoft to reveal partial protocol details. But they're not complete, and it wasn't "always" published as you claimed)

By claiming that SMB is a published spec, you denigrate the enormous effort put in by Trigdell, Allison & cohorts to puzzle out how it works, often dropping down to the level of sniffing ethernet packets.

For further verification that "reverse engineering" is a COMPLETELY VALID description of Samba's development history, see any article, interview with one of the authors, including one conducted on Slashdot. Or just read their own mailing list even.

A 2.5 x speed advantage can only mean one thing: misconfigured Windows machines.

I'll focus on the network cache consistancy problem since that's the one I've had problems with. I don't know about the general speed issue (what speed are you referring to? throughput? Resource availablility? Master Browser updates? connection speed and concurrency under a heavy user load? ) I have experienced all kinds of problems with a highly volitile network, with programmers running multiple OS's inside of virtual machines. These virtual OS's need to be frequently restarted, meaning the network is constantly gaining and droping objects.

A prime example of Microsoft's bad cache coherency problem is that if an object is deleted or removed from the network, the information can take over an hour to propogate through the entire network. The worst case isn't nearly as bad in the pure-Samba implementation, but the difficulty remains. This failure means that newly added resources aren't immediately visible on the network, or recently removed resources take a long time to be removed, and show up as errors when you try to access them. Or the object can be visible on some machines, but not available on others.

When there is a high level of volitility on the network (machines being frequently rebooted or shut down, network re-wiring, etc.) this can really plague any SMB or CIFS network, but is especially hard on Windows boxes, and more so the older your Windows implementation. Problems are exacerbated if either the LMB or LMB-backup system is the one going back up and down, because the Windows boxes will respond less-quickly to the problem; this results in further instability for the SMB network, since critical nodes are not available, propogate incorrect data, and take longer to reconfigure.

As you mentioned, the Samba boxes are faster than the Windows boxes, but not as big of a difference as you experience. You said you have "a LAN full of Win2000/XP boxes", which probably means they are on most or all of the time. Is it unreasonable to assume that the author has a more volitle network, or is otherwise more prone to speed impairment issues?

frob

This article from Oct 2002 talks about Reiserfs, and claims that "... ReiserFS is about eight to fifteen times faster than Ext2 at handling files smaller than 1K. "

Does Linux offer something similar [to chroot jails]?

Linux has a chroot jail.

SCO has the other kind of jail too, unless you pay $699 to Darl McBribe [sic].

IIRC, the 169.254.xx.yy address range is also used for Zeroconf / Rendezvous networking, being plugged by Apple, as well as an implementation on Mandrake. The August issue of Linux Magazine just did a write-up on it.

Got a URL? I think you might be thinking of X386.

That this isn't the first test of the GPL!!!!! Mysql recently won their suite concerning illegal usage of Mysql code in a competitors non GPL'd product. It took nearly 2 years but they won hands down. THAT was the first test. That is the case that made the GPL viable. Take a look here.

Linux Magazine and search for the section, "Jurist Judges GPL as Just"

The point here is that in his opinion the judge establish legal precident for the GPL and it's validity as a "contract". I'm no lawyer but I do know that the SCO bulldink might be the most current test... but it's not the first.

2002, great, too bad it wasn't available in 1991.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question
Message-ID:
Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
Hello netlanders,

Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.

A month later, Linus posted:

As to POSIX, I'd be delighted to have it, but POSIX wants money for their papers, so that's not currently an option.

This June 1999 article is good: The Past and Future of Linux Standards

Also, this Dec 2000 interview with Linus touches on Linux and POSIX/LSB standards.

To sum it all up: POSIX is good, LSB is good, let's work together towards world peace.

I figure that if you're going to develop a commercial product and work it into a development environment for free software, you can expect a little heat. His attitude rubs me the wrong way, although I understand much of it is probably in reaction to off-list discussion.

So why would they set the feature freeze for Halloween if new features wont be allowed in after mid July?? Or does the feature freeze have nothing to do with features being added? I'm highly confused.

Ideally, one would never want 100 PCs to deal with. I've worked in such environments before, and there are constantly parts breaking, etc, - its just a major headache. Thin clients with no moving parts are a much better solution. Check out this article on Largo, Florida, and the link to the original article:

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/12/04/234 62 15

However, suppose you already made the mistake of buying a big pile of PCs, so you want to make use of them until you migrate to something that makes more sense. Rolling out Linux on them all would be relatively painless, and there are numerous ways of doing this. One method would be to go with the Linux Terminal Server project:

http://www.ltsp.org/

Supposing you want to keep the "PC" model, because, say, you don't have the network or server resources for a central login server setup, then there are many ways of rolling out a group of linux PC installs as well. Here's an article that discusses some of them:


http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-12/cloning_01.html


In UNIX/Linux, by default, normal users do not have the ability to modify the system. They have authority only over their own home directories. There is a great deal of security measures that one could take to "lock down" the system to a far greater degree than the average defaults, but the default configuration for most distributions likely offers more protection to the systems integrity than a professionally locked down Windows box.

You can set up Linux in several ways for centralized system accounts and authentication, to achieve, in effect, the type of "domain-like" logins that you are used to in Windows. LDAP servers are a great mechanism to do this (LDAP is actually the protocol on which MS DS is based).

There are numerous ways to centrally manage all of the software installs, configuration files (which determine all system settings), etc., on a network of Linux machines. Linux/UNIX philosophy is that tools are made to be simple and flexible, and to work easily with other tools. This gives the administrator the freedom to set things up the way s/he sees fit for his/her specific environment. Rsync is a good example of a tool with remarkable flexibility for keeping files in sync: http://rsync.samba.org/index.html

Perl has infinite potential and flexibility in systems management. http://www.perl.org

Cfengine is a powerful distributed configuration system: http://www.cfengine.org/

So basically you can patch together a system that works best for you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tools that you can use. Many of them are built in, others you might have to download and install.

If you want a commercial "out-of-the-box" management solution, those are available too. Ximian's Red Carpet product is an example of centralized package management. I think I read that Novell was working on some type of management software... I've never looked into commercial solutions, since the free & roll-your-own ones are more than sufficient for me.

As for your quip about no support and problems with drivers - that just shows your lack of experience with the platform. Support is generally a lot better with open source software than it is for commercial software, and its usually free. As for drivers, wouldn't you check to make sure they exist before buying the hardware? Chances are extremely high that any hardware you have in the enterprise today is fully supported in Linux. Its the bleeding edge, just released this month gaming hardware that isn't.

Check here for a good background on DFS. It also has a quick table comparison of the popular programs, and a walkthrough to set up Intermezzo.

kermit ran on it (search for "Dell").

And in a not-so-stunning coincidence it appears that Tom Roell was actually on the Dell Unix team at one point.

> However, looking at my shiny new gnome-2.2
> installation, I must say that perhaps that is slowly
> changing. This looks MUCH more like an interface
> for the ordinary people who want to actually USE
> the applications, not hack them

ever heard about KDE in KIOSK mode?
It does just the same, only much better.
And it doesn"t enforce this simplistic Joe User
mindset on the whole user base, regardless of
their needs or tastes.
*shrug*

Development on the XWindow system at MIT started in 1984. This was during the conflict between Borland and Microsoft over the "windows" name. However, both Xerox PARC and Apple were using the generic term "window" long before that time.

And what of it? When did Microsoft trademark Windows as a term by itself? Is this the extent of the trademark, or is it only when used in reference to software (any software?) or operating system? What do I call these things that pop up on my screen when I doubleclick on icon, if not windows?? I seriously hope they go to court and lose - then they will have to think up better named for their product like Intel did when it found out trademarking a number wasn't such a good idea.

g4dget wrote: "The open source community should not touch either of them.".
Opens source development often follows the very successful strategy of finding a standard that works and re-implementing it and building upon it. It is possible to reimplement standards based on proprietary products but due care should still take place

GNU/Linux is a implementation based on Unix and the Posix standards. Unix was proprietary licensed by AT&T, and early open source BSD386 (what became FreeBSD and NetBSD ) development, which replaced the remaining proprietary AT&T code in BSD, was greatly hampered by threats and lawsuits from AT&T. Early Linux development escaped legal entanglement precisely because the developers took steps to insure no such code mixing with AT&T's source took place. However, this took place before software patents were in widespread use, in fact it was not until 1991 that most software companies took any interest in software patents at all.To quote Bill Gates May 16, 1991 email "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Does this mean that the open source development community should avoid any and all frameworks and patented methords? NO - There is a better way.

The solution is to start a negotiation "dialog" with all the parties involved, getting them to actually support open source implementations and licensing based on their proprietary products. How? It's not easy but it is possible.
1) Win-Win: demonstrate how it is in there best interest to work with the open source community - using open source developed code to ad value to there own products
2) Reward : Any relatively good behavour, incomparison to other players, reward - say thank you and promote them.
3) Converted partners : When you have made a "convert" to open source, such as IBM and SAP, them to badger other partners into also adopting open source friendly licenses.
4) Comparison : play one against the other, Get Microsoft to open it's .NET spec and patent licensing by continualy comparing them to Sun's terms.

5) Badger, Badger, Badger them with the truth : Long conversations and confontations are tiring but it forces the other side to truly consider the issues.

In the long term, does it work? Yes. With the X Window System, in 1998 the Open Group releases X11R6.4 under restrictive licensing, after months of haggling and bitter arguing, The Open Group rescinded the restrictive licensing. On November 14th of this year, again after months of similar haggling and bitter arguing, the Patent Policy Working Group of the W3C announced the Royalty-Free Patent Policy.

It's ironic, but the open source friendly licensing model actualy bring about a solution to the software patient problem proposed by Bill Gates himself in the same email, patent exchanges - "The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can". Since no company can aparently truly trust the competition in long term relationships, open source friendly licensing provides a methord where competing parties can build upon each others patents.

g4dget wrote: "You think everybody who isn't enamored with Sun must be a Microsoft shill?"
Well, the tactics you employ under the shear weight of contradictory linked evidence is a tactic I find often applied by members of the Microsoft Shill persuasion. No, I don't work for Sun, IBM or any other vendor in the IT industry, but I do admire and promote postive behavour when I see it.

at least debian is easy to figure out how to pronounce:)

before you call me stupid, read this
to quote:
"...as Purdue undergraduate Ian Murdock flipped through a Unix magazine...[stuff]...fusing his first name with that of his girlfriend Debra, Murdock founded what would become Linux's most popular non-commercial distribution -- Debian GNU/Linux."

so that's deb[ra]Ian...
not Deebian..

(and for the record, I do use debian as a desktop os for my desktop, my laptop, and my girlfriend's desktop)

Because until the late 90's desktop UNIX renaissance

The late 90's means 1997 or so. It's 2003 now, that's 6 years. And it'll surely be at least another year before RnR becomes broadly available. That's a long time. (Especially when you consider that the RnR guys only needed a few months, once they started. This suggests that writing extensions is so hard that only a select few can do it. Not encouraging)

Apple and Microsoft have both improved their GUIs enormously since 1997. X (and the other Unix graphics system, OpenGl) don't seem to have gotten much better during that time.

Since the founding of the XFree86 foundation, X has been improving at a faster rate than it has in fifteen years

XFree86 was founded in 1994. I guess I don't remember how well X worked in 1979, so I can't comment on how fast it's progressed.

A lot of people in this thread are suggesting that Sun offer prettified servers to impress clients. I'll only make an observation that a company has tried selling servers before that had a major selling point of "cool blue light." That company no longer sells servers.

If I may throw my $0.02 into the mix...

Linux Magazine has a "LAMP Post" section in their magazine. It is usually well written and older months are available here.

Moreover, I read Linux Magazine cover to cover (multiple times usually) faithfully every month. There is information in there for everyone.

Linux Magazine has an article on why Debian would fill in a good role as 'arbitrator' amongst the distributions and why HP chose to use Debian as their standard distro.

A distro free from vendor squabbling and influence, that's exactly what the Linux 'standard' should be. Now all we need to do is get some LSB action going.

Why are they bothering to come up with a single uber-distro when Debian provides a solid foundation for this kind of work? If I were a Linux distributor, and was starting to realize that I can make money selling services and a name, why would I waste all this money making up yet another installer - hell, I'd hire 10 guys, slap a commercial release on top of Debian every 6 months, and let the community do the heavy lifting - all the while earning open source karma for supporting Debian.

Based on the reports coming out of Philadelphia schools if you are considering moving from Microsoft to Linux they may think it's time to do an internal audit of your machines to make sure that you have a license for every box.

I don't get the same impressions from Daniel Robbins of Gentoo, who wrote Advanced filesystem implementor's guide for IBM's developerWorks.

The short answer to your question: while yes, you can probably get your 1.3 config to work without *too* many changes, you should spend a bit more time exploring Apache 2.0, or you'll miss out on a lot of the benefits.

The configuration is totally different; it uses GNU autoconf now instead of the home-grown APACI system. The two have many similarities, but you should peruse all of the

./configure --help

The perchild MPM (which provides the configurable userid per Apache child process that you mention) is possibly not yet working; it's still classified as experimental. But we'll probably be getting that cleaned up within another release or two.

"Seasoned"? Heh. Read this article

I actually read it in Linux Journal. (Or maybe Linux Magazine) about... 18 months or more ago. Okay. I found it...

The article is here and the quote is about 5-6 paragraphs in. He did in fact apply at MS.

If the article is taken at face value, it seems that Miguel wanted to be a Bruce Perens type advocate. But... I don't know. I just don't think Miguel is the OSS/Free poster boy that some wish he was. I've got no problem with that viewpoint (much:). I would like to know the 'truth'. Perhaps it is in the article I quote. But the references are such throw aways that not much can be read into it. Or, perhaps, too much, in both directions, can be read into it.

Anyway, there's the quote. Not just a fiction. This appeared in print.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

There's is absolutely NOTHING wrong with charging for software.

That depends on what ethical and moral framework you are evaluating RIGHT/WRONG within. From some points of view withholding ideas that have zero cost for reproduction is an immoral attempt to exert power over others by software hoarding. They would further argue that this proprietary framework retards development and stifles innovation.

If you do nothing but write software for work, you have a reasonable expectation to make a living off it.

Most of the "Free" and "Open" software world has been arguing about this precise point since the success of Free Software in the form of GNU and Linux. The mantra used to be that one could make a living off service/support. That is what RH etc. are trying to do. There's a big difference between that and hoarding the actual product and charging per-seat licenses for each new version. Bitkeeper tried to find a middle way with allowing a dual-license: free,non-Free for those that surrender privacy, non-free,non-Free for commercial users that want to cloak their activities. This license is discussed here. This is an interesting idea and it is good software, but it is not Free.

The world doesn't run off charity man, nothing is free.

On the contrary, most of human activity is free. However, in this whole discussion you are missing the contentious part. Most GNU users are concerned about Freedom, not cost. This is an OLD argument!

WireX (my company) has been selling this kind of product for a long time now. The WireX web-based management interface (as provisioned on Dell PowerApp servers) even won an "Emperor Class" award from Linux Magazine. And the WireX servers have the additional benefit of being protected with Immunix security, something which is especially needed by the kinds of users who choose "easy to use" server appliances.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase

Linux Magazine's Gearheads Only is a great column to read for this, especially the mouse driver and Alan Cox's articles.

Their web site should have archives.

Sumner