Slashdot Mirror

I haven't forgotten them, but I'm not willing to accept that they should cloud the argument most proprietary software users face today, particularly on trackers (cell phones, mobiles) where nonfreedom is rampant and for which Apple takes full responsibility.

I enjoy CUPS, for instance, now just as I enjoyed it before Apple bought the software and thus took over the copyright from EasySW. But CUPS isn't commonly found on trackers as far as I know. It'll be interesting to note if the contribution to Clang you point out continues when Clang gets to a point where Apple is satisfied with its utility. Brad Kuhn has said he expects that contribution to end once the software is good enough to let Apple remove the GNU Compiler Collection ("GCC", Apple's long-time multi-language compiler) entirely (probably due to Apple's perverse anti-GPL zealotry which is rooted in not getting away with copyright infringement against the Free Software Foundation back when Steve Jobs ran NeXT). We've already entered a time when Apple's compiler basically can't be used in freedom. This is hardly the testament to Apple's contribution to software freedom you tried to make it out to be.

And I know that proprietors and their sycophants in the open source movement are keen to cite marketshare/popularity as an important topic (mainly because they're both eager to distract people away from talking about software freedom where they know they have nothing to offer). So it's ironic to note how unpopular LaunchD, Bonjour, GrandCentralDispatch, and Swift are. LaunchD & Bonjour aren't needed on free systems due to free reimplementations of their functionality elsewhere. Bonjour doesn't even wholly qualify as free software; only some of it is licensed under an Apache license. Your namecalling and bullying attempt at distracting people away from talking about the lack of software freedom for iThing users is falling apart.

Slashdot seems to me to be a proponent of the open source movement, the software development methodology that Bradley Kuhn rightly called "greenwashing" (another copy) the free software movement by talking about much the same software and licenses but without the freedom talk in order to placate business interests seeking to proprietarize software. Consider the case in this thread—defending copyleft—this clearly shows the difference between the two movements. The older free software movement wants to preserve software freedom while the younger open source movement was built to not discuss software freedom at all. Kuhn's personal blog post on this topic describes the situation very well and with no punches pulled.

When you come across someone who talks and works to defend software freedom, such as Richard Stallman, in a forum whose participants are (be they a proprietor's shill or genuinely describing their own view) devoted to supporting the kind of power over the user that strongly copylefted licenses, such as the GNU GPLs, were built to withstand you're going to find people using whatever namecalling and misrepresentative tactics they can come up with to try and malign Stallman (as if that would somehow reflect badly on software freedom). The complaints get weaker over time (remember when people used to complain that the GPL wasn't defensible in court?) so the objectors have to find other avenues to try and distract people into not thinking in terms of software freedom. It wouldn't matter if software freedom were proposed and initially championed by someone wholly objectionable; that wouldn't make software freedom a bad thing. Talking about Stallman instead of talking about software freedom is doing that distractionary work because the facts on the ground fail to back the case that we're better off without software freedom.

See Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft (mirror) for the cure to non-copylefted free software—to keep software freedom in derivative works, license with strongly copylefted free software licenses (the AGPL version 3 or later being the best choice now) and then enforce the license.

Quite right, in fact most of what gets posted to /. including this story could be responded to with a phrase Eben Moglen has been saying for years in his talks: "RMS was right". Richard Stallman had it right years ago and, equally importantly, for the right reasons. Not "Open Source" (the younger movement Brad Kuhn rightly points out is built to greenwash proprietary-supporting non-copylefted Free Software (copy 1, copy 2) but strongly copylefted Free Software released and developed for freedom.

The Affero GPL version 3 or later will keep software Free as in freedom and meet the needs of the future. Users will undoubtedly want to know how things work and benefit from software written by programmers allowed to understand how things work. This will help us avoid the very trap the grandparent post referred to (and you wisely advised against).

I think you're evaluating RMS' argument according to priorities you're imposing on him (such as talking about offering "choice" as if that's always a good thing) rather than trying to understand what software freedom is, how freedom and power differ, and why copyleft is something worth fighting for. That you would actually use the term "IP" as you do (meaning the phantom "intellectual property") suggests you haven't considered that concept very deeply either.

RMS is not alone in his views on working to marginalize GCC in favor of something that can be made into proprietary software, Brad Kuhn talks about copyleft licensing and around 21m44s in the linked linux.conf.au talk he points out that proprietors (he notes Apple by name) contribute enough upstream to non-copyleft Free Software projects to keep those projects useful to the proprietor. It's hardly a stretch to see Apple doing the same for LLVM "because [Apple and Qualcomm] want GCC to die" as Kuhn points out in his talk. Steve Jobs and NeXT's history of copyright infringement with GCC is very much a part of this story. Being caught infringing the GPL on GCC is something I doubt Jobs or Apple ever forgot and is a big part of the reason why he, like so many open source enthusiasts, think non-copylefted licenses such as the MIT X11 and new BSD license are better than than an enforced GNU GPL.

Eben Moglen is quick to point out in his consistently wise speeches that "RMS was right" (as he did in his linux.conf.au 2015 keynote speech). /. should learn to do the same. If you want to get comments like "RMS is pretty incendiary, eccentric, and often does or says crazy shit but... in this case it sounds like he said something alarmist to get attention and try to get some discussion" you should back it up with specific examples of what you mean. His flavor of "eccentricity" led us to recognize software freedom as an ethical human need well after RMS saw this; another clear example of how RMS was right. When what RMS says looks to you as "crazy shit" you should make it clear to others that you understand his long history of being right on these issues.

RMS is not alone in his views on working to marginalize GCC in favor of something that can be made into proprietary software, Brad Kuhn talks about copyleft licensing and around 21m44s in the linked linux.conf.au talk he points out that proprietors (he notes Apple by name) contribute enough upstream to non-copyleft Free Software projects to keep those projects useful to the proprietor. It's hardly a stretch to see Apple doing the same for LLVM "because [Apple and Qualcomm] want GCC to die" as Kuhn points out in his talk. Steve Jobs and NeXT's history of copyright infringement with GCC is very much a part of this story. Being caught infringing the GPL on GCC is something I doubt Jobs or Apple ever forgot and is a big part of the reason why he, like so many open source enthusiasts, think non-copylefted licenses such as the MIT X11 and new BSD license are better than than an enforced GNU GPL.

Eben Moglen is quick to point out in his consistently wise speeches that "RMS was right" (as he did in his linux.conf.au 2015 keynote speech). /. should learn to do the same. If you want to get comments like "RMS is pretty incendiary, eccentric, and often does or says crazy shit but... in this case it sounds like he said something alarmist to get attention and try to get some discussion" you should back it up with specific examples of what you mean. His flavor of "eccentricity" led us to recognize software freedom as an ethical human need well after RMS saw this; another clear example of how RMS was right. When what RMS says looks to you as "crazy shit" you should make it clear to others that you understand his long history of being right on these issues.

The first link in the article is for The Linux Foundation, who have been publishing the same report since at least 2008, when a minimum of 70% of the contributors (including people who submitted one-line fixes) had corporate sponsorship. Even before then it is easy to see who the top contributors to Linux were -- Kernel maintainer Alan Cox was employed by Red Hat from 1999 to 2009. Ted Ts'o worked with MIT, VA Linux and IBM while he developed /dev/random and the ext2 file system. John "Mad Dog" Hall was the man responsible for making Alpha the second architecture Linux ran on while he worked with Digital. Prior to his employment with Transmeta and the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds was paid $20,000,000 in stock options by Red Hat and VA Linux.

Even before the majority of kernel development was done with corporate sponsorship, it was done to further academic goals. While not every one of these people is a dot com millionaire for their work with Linux, calling it a product of slave labour is disingenuous at best.

It's not about feature, it's about X being unmaintanable, huge, and impossible to understand.
This video is extremely insightful, and quite worth watching.

This video seems to provide a good explanation of the motivation for Wayland.

Daniel Stone made a great presentation explaining various problems with X11 that Wayland tries to fix:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv

The same presentation is also on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

I'd suggest watching the talk from LCA 2013. Video here. I went along and found it quite interesting. Puts Orbital science experimentation into the hands of people that would have never been able to afford it previously.

But I'm seaminly responding to another trollish post with a +4 Insightful. Imagine a class room full of students excited about science because their teacher organised for a bunch of their projects to go up into space, and that drives them to further that knowledge and go on to become successful scientists. No, there is no useful purpose for this project at all

I'd say there's a non-zero risk of an IPv6 connection failing. When something breaks in IPv4, everyone notices and fixes it. But for IPv6, since hardly anyone is using it and applications should fail over, there's a good chance that a failure will go unnoticed.

This recent(ish) talk (video) has some interesting statistics on IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 take up.

I'd say there's a non-zero risk of an IPv6 connection failing. When something breaks in IPv4, everyone notices and fixes it. But for IPv6, since hardly anyone is using it and applications should fail over, there's a good chance that a failure will go unnoticed.

This recent(ish) talk (video) has some interesting statistics on IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 take up.

One of the most interesting talks at linux.conf.au this year was by Geoff Huston of APNIC (and with a long history of involvement in the internet in Australia), talking about IPv4 address exhaustion and IPv6 and Carrier Grade NAT (and why CGNAT sucks).

tl;d[wr] version: two of the main reasons why it sucks are a) it results in double-NAT when users have their own LANs and NAT devices behind a CGNAT connection and b) it's effectively a ways for a handful of major telcos around the world to gain control of the internet on their terms, just like in their Good Old Day (which is why they have little or no interest in IPv6).

CGNAT means getting the same kind of crappy barely-functional internet service on your landline (or wifi or satellite etc) broadband service as you get on a mobile phone.

Video here:

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_IPocalypse_20_months_later.ogv

LWN article about Geoff's talk here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/424696/

Is Daniel Stone enough of "qualification" for you?

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv

For those interested in knowing what Codec2 is, there's a video from Linux Conference Australia 2012 which gives a pretty good (and gentle) overview.
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2012/Codec_2_Open_Source_Speech_Coding_at_2400_bits_and_Below.ogv

There is a video lecture I watched recently called "What does Linux prove" from an old linux.conf.au event. In this lecture, the speaker shows how to use lamda calculus to implement the C language from scratch - including implementing the "if (boolean)" functionality using only pure functions with parameters and return values.

It's not something immediately obvious to every high school kid, but conditionals apparently are available in pure mathematics.

Link to lecture: http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/215.html

Everybody here should listen (or watch) at least once Andrew Tridgell's presentation about how to read a software patent. He's a good and entertaining speaker, and what he has to say is highly relevant.

Everybody here should listen (or watch) at least once Andrew Tridgell's presentation about how to read a software patent. He's a good and entertaining speaker, and what he has to say is highly relevant.

link here

Since when has windows followed specs? Lets see here, linux follows the spec and works most of the time, Microsoft embraces and extends and magically works when other things don't.

Anyways, it seems that the problem is actually due to AMI and not Foxconn itself. It appears the same problems are happening with some Asus and MSI boards too. All of which are using AMI BIOSes.

Now, if you were to read Matthew Garrett's Journal, you can see the OS checks in question. Garrett is someone of knowledge to the situation and has been attempting to help with it.

But if you look at the first link, you can see the OS check and what the options are. If the NT or Unknown or even the ME or older linux return is somehow passed back, it could be possible that there is simply no support for it or the support wasn't optimized the the board because the OSes aren't in service anymore. But you will alsoo see from that site that

To summarise:

        * There is no code in this DSDT that could determine that the system is running any Linux kernel of 2.6.9 or later. This may even be true of earlier versions - I'm not sure when _OSI support was added
        * Even if the code did manage to determine that the system was running Linux, there are no codepaths that are Linux specific. Every piece of code is run on at least one version of Windows

It can be worse when you consider the OEMB tables error. The OEMB is defined according to this VMware thread as

AMI OEMB table [Enabled]
(Set this value to allow the ACPI
BIOS to add a pointer to an
OEMB table in the Root System
Description Table (RSDT) table.
Note: OEMB table is used to pass
POST data to the AMI code
during ACPI O/S operations.)

Now, if you ask me, and I'm mostly using the power of deduction from actually paying attention to what's going on, the DSDT overrides parts of the RSdT which is modified by the OEMB. The OEMB in these AMI BIOSes maintain something that isn't compatible with any return other then the windows 2000/XP/vista return and somehow, the AMI bios is setting the linux Identity to something other then 0 which would be the Windows 2000/XP/Vista return. This is probably the root of the problem and most likely what AMI fixed to allow Foxconn to get thing going on a new bios. You have to remember that windows can also use PNP as a fall back to the OEMB information and just set the hardware setting to a sane default value based on similar chipsets and such.

But, this part is speculation on my part. What isn't speculation is that Malice on Foxconns part isn't at play.

Depends where you are. Here in Melbourne there's plenty going, a lot of stuff is advertised on the major job sites (JobNet, Seek, MyCareer), and as for the rest you have to build up contacts. User groups are a quick way to do that (For the major lugs see http://linux.org.au/usergroups).

And what you do. If you are willing to be a PHP programmer and have a decent resume you could have half a dozen (good!) offers within two days, the combination of Cisco and Windows seems to be the big one for sysadmin type stuff at the moment.

No, it is fundamentally broken in places. It's not a matter of library support. It's a matter of the compiler taking those libraries and totally fucking with their intended purpose because the language spec lets them and it can improve optimizations.

But I'm glad idiots have opinions. It gives people like this guy (video) something to do, by educating you. What ends up happening is that compilers end up presenting non-standard extensions. I've used an embedded language nesC that would provide atomic blocks and implement them by disabling interrupts (not a great idea when avoidable, but passable if you know the drawbacks).

The last i heard it was planned to be in the main xorg in a release or two. I was in the audience at linux.conf.au, Video and he also did a presentation at our lug
The pointer on the screen is separate from the mouse and keyboard, you can potentially have a many to many relationship between keyboards and mice so you could potentially have a single keyboard to multiple terminals. To get everything working you need to run a command to attach this keyboard to this mouse and generate a pointer. You can start writing applications that will take advantage of multiple pointers if you base your input on Ximput where events include what mouse the event came from.

If you look around there may be something that will repeat multiple key presses to multiple terminals already out there but i cannot remember the name at the moment.

Jon showed how you can interface second life with the real world at LCA 2008.

Videos here http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039a.ogg
and here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039b.ogg

Jon showed how you can interface second life with the real world at LCA 2008.

Videos here http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039a.ogg
and here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039b.ogg

The presentation mentioned in the article that he gave at linux.conf.au was "Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World". Part 1 Part 2 Slides

The presentation mentioned in the article that he gave at linux.conf.au was "Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World". Part 1 Part 2 Slides

The presentation mentioned in the article that he gave at linux.conf.au was "Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World". Part 1 Part 2 Slides

The talk is available for download from http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-305.ogg

Oddly enough, I just watched a presentation about this very topic, with an emphasis on Erlang's model for concurrency. The slides are available here:

http://www.algorithm.com.au/downloads/talks/Concurrency-and-Erlang-LCA2007-andrep.pdf

The presentation itself (OGG Theora video available here) included an interesting quote from Tim Sweeney, creator of the Unreal Engine: "Shared state concurrency is hopelessly intractable."

The point expounded upon in the presentation is that when you have thousands of mutable objects, say in a video game, that are updated many times per second, and each of which touches 5-10 other objects, manual synchronization is hopelessly useless. And if Tim Sweeney thinks it's an intractable problem, what hope is there for us mere mortals?

The rest of this presentation served as an introduction to the Erlang model of concurrency, wherein lightweight threads have no shared state between them. Rather, thread communication is performed by an asynchronous, nothing-shared message passing system. Erlang was created by Ericsson and has been used to create a variety of highly scalable industrial applications, as well as more familiar programs such as the ejabberd Jabber daemon.

This type of concurrency really looks to be the way forward to efficient utilization of multi-core systems, and I encourage everyone to at least play with Erlang a little to gain some perspective on this style of programming.

For a stylish introduction to the language from our Swedish friends, be sure to check out Erlang: The Movie.

Linux would be way better if somoene could fix this kind of issues showing "Why userspace sucks" : http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/ video/talks/38.pdf

http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2007/talk/55.html
Michael Carden explains it well

My suggestion would be to find someone who's pretty savvy in the area you're aimed at, and hire him or her (OK, let's face it, "him"...)

The gender ratio is pretty extreme, but it's not 100%--there *are* expert female kernel hackers.

I'm just guessing that finding a kernel guru willing to give up a month of Saturday afternoons at $300 a session will be easier than finding "Linux Kernel for Experts" at the downtown Learning Annex.

Personal tutoring is a pretty expensive way to get an education, especially if it's in a fast-moving field whose experts are in demand for other work.

Off the top of my head:

• Volunteer, and find a problem to work on.
• Find someone to hire you to do kernel work, or some other way to work with people doing what you want to do.
• Have you considered grad school? There's places where you could get a degree taking operating systems classes and hacking the kernel for your dissertation. And when you're done you'll probably have an easier time with the previous item.
• Local user groups and universities might be good places to meet up with people who share your interests. Maybe start a study group to learn some kernel subsystem together?
• Conferences: OLS and linux.conf.au are fun. The OLS papers at least are on line if you can't go.
• Mailing lists, irc channels--look at kernelnewbies, etc.
• Books: Linux Device Drivers, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Robert Love's book.
• Read the code!

And if people have told you that "the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself",... actually, in the end, it's probably the *only* way. There's a certain point in your study of any field where you just run out of "courses". That's good. It means you're ready to do real work, because you're at the point where people are still busy doing the work and figuring stuff out, and haven't yet figured out how to break it down into manageable chunks and explain it in a logical order, which is a great deal of work in and of itself.

Tom Leonard, a programmer from Valve, gave a fascinating talk about this

Game developers are getting excited about technology like Erlang. A link to Extreme Concurrency and Erlang, an entertaining presentation by André Pang, was posted to the erlang-questions list by Miguel Rodríguez Rubinos on 12 April.

That post looks a bit screwed up that I made, but he's a central member of Ubuntu, a member of the laptop, kernel, and acpi teams and one of 4 members of the technical board. I had hoped his insightful analysis would have been enough, but it seems I botched a link or two. To make up for it, here's a video of him detailing how hacking acpi is done.

Scott James Remnant gave an upstart talk at this year's linuxconf.au. There's mention of launchd, initng and other sysv init replacements along with a discussion to moving to event based launching.

There's excellent analysis of this incidents. Monocultures are bad.

There was work done on NetBSD to do what you're talking about the paper was presented at LCA2004 and is availible online http://lca2004.linux.org.au/eventrecord/LCA2004-cd /papers/18-brett-lymn-veriexec.html

I don't know where that work is at currently

Linux Australia is running a petition in australia to present on the issue of how we implement our FTA obligations at http://www.linux.org.au/law and also has the feeder sites http://www.iownmymusic.org/ and http://www.iownmydvds.org/

My mum knows, and she's now reading information feudalism.
Get it onto talkback radio and I reckon it'll start to kick.
I've been trying to get to JJJ but havent had any joy yet.

Sign the petition and tell them.
http://linux.org.au/law

Layperson speak about the issue:
http://www.lucychili.blogspot.com/

Hi folks

LinuxAU have a petition to sign to restrict the circumvention to nefarious acts directly tied to copyright infringement.
Contact your local lug to sign one, download one from the LinuxAU site below.
http://www.linux.org.au/law

I've been pulling together an info stash about the impact on AU of DMCA for layfolk.
http://www.lucychili.blogspot.com/

Kim Weatherall is a good place to start if you want to see the proposed DMCA law from the perspective of a lawyer.
http://weatherall.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_weathera ll_archive.html

EFF is a perennial source for DMCA debacle court cases
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/

You can checkout a Q and A he did here (slides used in the talk are here) and a two part interview he did for the Linux Australia Update podcast.

Also check out The petition

You can checkout a Q and A he did here (slides used in the talk are here) and a two part interview he did for the Linux Australia Update podcast.

Also check out The petition

You can checkout a Q and A he did here (slides used in the talk are here) and a two part interview he did for the Linux Australia Update podcast.

Also check out The petition

You can checkout a Q and A he did here (slides used in the talk are here) and a two part interview he did for the Linux Australia Update podcast.

Also check out The petition

You can then literally apply Linux's security modules to individual Win32 applications -- or to individual instances of the same Win32 application -- by running the Win32 app under WINE.

Or run WINE under a different OS (e.g. OpenBSD) or emulator if you want different security tools.

I've done this with/for a number of customers, & integrating the security manageability with a system which has no viruses or spyware to speak of has saved them each endless damage (and endless payments to recover from that damage).

I've also convinced other developers to make their applications portable -- which has instantly increased their productivity and their market, too, sloughing off obsolete dependencies -- and simply stopped running the users under Windows (or anything from MS). This particular tactic earns you much peace & security in one step.

It's Linux. There is nothing hot an spicy about that. Just take a look at this guy. I going to have to immerse myself in porn for a day to get that image out my head. Disturbing

Well Linux take up might be bad in Australia/New Zealand but I was under the impression that we hold one of the three premier linux conferences in the world. ( Blatent plug for LCA 2006 which starts next Monday in Dunedin, New Zealand. :-) ).
Enough of the plug.

In some respects the article is correct! Trying to convince people that Linux is a viable alternative is hard. Within an organisation someone in MIS/IT (whatever) department does need to be a champion. I'm currently working in an organisation where Linux was being pushed over Windows. The main IT guy left and now things have swung back the other way. Considering our products are based on Linux the lack of support is high.

It really is a matter of trying to find ways of bringing Linux to the attention of "just people". I'm currently trying to set up a course through our local community college. From their I'm going to work on the local secondary schools.

And then world!! Bwahhh haaa haaa haaa