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Real Bourne Shell will be released as source code sooner or later by Caldera. Here is the press release:

http://news.linuxprogramming.com/news_story.php3?l tsn=2001-08-20-003-06-CD

http://ir.caldera.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID= 57417

And here are some quotes:

"The Regular Expression library and tools will be made publicly available on SourceForge this week at http://unixtools.sourceforge.net. In coming months, Caldera will Open Source other UNIX tools and utilities, including pkgmk, pkgadd, pkgrm, pkginfo, pkgproto and more, as well as the Bourne shell, lex, yacc, sed, m4 and make. The licenses under which these technologies will be Open Sourced will be decided based on community and business needs."

So, you must keep you eyes on this:

http://unixtools.sourceforge.net/

Meanwhile you can do portable shell-scripting with help from these WWW-pages:

http://www.raycosoft.com/rayco/support/porting.htm l

http://www.raycosoft.com/rayco/support/SANS_2001_f iles/v3_document.htm

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobo ok_208.html

Ash is really good Bourne Shell clone and POSIX-shell implementation. I really like to use it for my shell-scripting, because it prevents me from using bashisms. In my Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 Potato /bin/sh is actually a symlink to ash that I compiled from sources I took from unstable Debian and it works.

But if /bin/sh is symlink to bash and you have some bashisms in you script that starts "#!/bin/sh", it seems, that even in that case bash won't complain about those bashisms.

But you must check out, which version of ash you are running. Debian has always used the latest version of ash. I think it is downloaded from this place:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src /bin/sh/

Red Hat Linux had ash version 0.2 and it really sucks. Then I made bugreports and latest versions of Red Hat have fresher version of ash.

But it seems, that Slackware still has that ash version 0.2:

ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash > pwd
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/mirrors/slackware/slac kware-8.0/source/ap/ash/
ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash > ls
ash-linux-0.2.diff.gz _ash.tar.gz
ash-linux-0.2.tar.gz SlackBuild
ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash >

BTW I really don't understand, why somebody would want to create installer scripts, when this kind of tool exists: http://www.easysw.com/epm/

EPM Is:

A free UNIX software/file packaging program that generates distribution archives from a list of files. EPM Can:

Generate portable script-based distribution packages complete with installation and removal scripts. Generate vendor distributions in AIX, BSD, Compaq Tru64, Debian, HP-UX, IRIX, Red Hat, and Solaris formats. Provide a complete, cross-platform software distribution solution for your applications.

So much for making informed decisions, lets just be morally superior and force our views on others.

Yeargh..... You probably haven't really read the GPL or LGPL have you? ;-)

These licenses do not force you to use them when starting your own projects or applications.... they only stipulate that if you want to use code from an existing GPL/LGPL project, you must retain the software license. You are free to choose whatever license you want for your own projects.

This is socialism, no matter how you wrap it up in pretty rhetoric.

Double yeargh.... It is not socialism... You can take the GPL or LGPL, retain the copyright of your code/project in your own name, change the copyright at a later date (just not on already published/released code), and even modify the GPL or LGPL to ensure you retain in control (just remove the "or any
later version" from them, and viola!).

While RMS is extreme, and many times arogant and hard to deal with, the one thing you have to realize is that the FSF is not RMS and RMS is not the FSF! There have been many many examples of desent inside the FSF (just take a look at the glibc maintainer's issues with RMS).

The GPL is about power, not freedom; buy into the GPL myth, and you're just exchanging one master (Mr. Gates) for another (Mr. Stallman).

That's not really true. You can retain the copyright in your name (or your company's name, or your group's name). By using the GPL/LGPL you are not inherently giving over control to RMS (or even the FSF)... plus, as was mentionned elsewhere, by removing the words ""any
later version" from the GPL on your code, you can further ensure that changes to the GPL/LGPL in the future do not affect your software (unless you want them to).

But what it really comes down to when choosing a license (and this was the thrust of your post) is your own personal definitions of "freedom" and what you want allowed (or disallowed) with respect to your code.

Many people who use the GPL, and may or may not agree with RMS (such as myself), do not want derivative works to be placed under licenses which cause the work to become property of another entity. People using other licenses, may or may not have strong convictions about this.

For example, one thing that many people don't realize is that the networking code in Windows (I think it was just NT at one point, but now may be in all Windows variants) is actually based upon BSD networking code. The BSD licenses in place allowed Microsoft to legally do this. Some people may not have much of a problem with something like this, but those that typically use the GPL do so to prevent this sort of thing.

Personally, while I use the GPL/LGPL for all my projects, I am not about to try and force others to do the same. Part of my definition of freedom is "freedom of choice". And for any project you personally start or are responsable for, you are (and should be) free to choose whatever license you like.

I think it's actually important to realize here that the FSF is not RMS and that RMS is not the FSF...

Many times people hear RMS's (sometimes ;-) flippant or (occassionally ;-) arogant remarks, and assume that everyone inside the FSF must feel the same way (or be as arogant or whatever...) There are many people inside the FSF movement (and this really includes anyone who publishes GPL/LGPL code) who patently disagree with many of his statements. So we need to be very careful not to judge the FSF just on RMS alone.

On RMS- the simple fact of the matter (the one thing that everyone always fails to realize when criticizing RMS) is that he is undoubtedly a brilliant person. He is very bright. The trouble with people who are "very bright" is that they can have a hard time dealing with people. This can prove especially troublesome when they have strong personal convictions (such as RMS has ;-)

While he has done some things I personally feel are horrible (such as this and this exchange) and very detrimental(sp?) to the FSF... I have respect for him and the strength of his convictions. Unlike a lot of people (hrm... many /.'s [not necessarily the original poster] ;-) he does hold to his ideals in the face of wavering support and hostile opposition.

Readers of /. yesterday, will recall Caldera's announcement regarding releasing pieces of the Original UNUX codebase to OSS. That announcement along with today's announcement from HP that they're gettinng into the Linux distro business signals a major shift in the market perception of the value of Open Source.

--CTH

check it out: http://news.linuxprogramming.com/news_story.php3?l tsn=2001-08-16-002-06 (scroll down to "And now for some not so nice things..")

A few choice quotes:

"Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him. This attempt failed ... I hope he will now shut up forever. The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella ..."

This is ESR, not RMS.

The primary difference between the two is that RMS looks like a dirty old hippie, while ESR has the appearence of a child-molester/NAMBLA member.

RMS is also a raving control freak, while ESR is by all accounts just plain nuts.

Hope this clears things up!

stop this dumbshit

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page (or just search for the words "not so nice things") you'll see Ulrich Drepper, a Red Hat programmer, discussing his own personal involvement with Stallman.

I submitted this as an article and it got rejected, but I really think that it's a good glimpse into the behind-the-scenes power struggles that go on.

Thoughts?

what this means? Scroll to "And now for some not so nice things".

• A huge patch for mainframes (you can skip that on your laptop, I think)
• Support for a new arch I've never heard before
• Fixing of two critical, though rare, bugs which could skrew your filesystem (but only if it is your lucky day)
• Hopeful fix of a bug on ReiserFS.

You might be personally offended by XP's insistence you do actual tests of your code, and then fix the code when it breaks, but this requirement hardly qualifies XP as "fragile".

Sigh. More rudeness and condescension for its own sake. If you had looked at any of the other posts I linked to, or at my published writings elsewhere (clue: I wrote this) you would know that I am in fact a very strong advocate of testing at all levels, including but not limited to unit testing. I will not allow you to misrepresent my argument as being in any way opposed to unit testing. Someone said "you weren't doing XP" and I said "we don't know that" without any reference at any point to which part of XP was omitted. I wasn't referring at all to unit testing when I spoke of XP's fragility or inapplicability. I was thinking more of XP's admitted limitations as linked from one of my previous posts.

The XP books, incidentally, do not claim that you have to do all of XP for it to be useful

Indeed they do not, but several people here seem to be using just that argument as an excuse for a failure when XP was applied.

Let me know when you come up with a better methodology than XP.

Take your strawman and shove it. I don't need to come up with a better methodology. It's not necessary for anybody to come up with a better methodology before we can consider XP's limitations or slashdotters' attempts to ram it down people's throats, but in fact quite a few smart people have managed it (if we define better as "more robust and/or applicable") over the last few decades of software engineering study. Yes, Virginia, there was software engineering before XP. Most elements of XP predate XP itself by decades. Good programming methodologies vary quite a bit, but one thing they have in common is that their authors admit there's no magic bullet. If only people here would believe them.

As I pointed out in a previous post, which you should have read before responding, XP is great but it's no panacea. Great things can still be overhyped, and right now - for all its good points - XP is being overhyped. What I seek to do is not debunk XP entirely, but just to bring the expectations down to a realistic level.

__________________

This trend will only escalate with every major break-in or crack of some company like MS. Eventually someone will get the bright idea of trying to outlaw any online activity that isn't logged and traced to an individual. See this article for how the gov't might try to justify this.

Hmm...

A lot of comments about hardware and hosting here and almost none about design misstakes.

I'll tell you a story: for more than a year ago I started collecting links to different Linux programming resources. Is started out with some static pages and got my self a domain (linuxprogramming.com). After a while I needed a database to keep track of all the resources so started learning MySQL, because that was what my hoster provided. I didn't know any SQL nor any database theory. After many hours of work, I manage to get everything to work the way I wanted it to.

But then I got more and more ideas. I came across a big problem: because I didn't know what I was doing when I created my base, I made alot of misstakes (especially in the design of the database). Te result was that I could not implement all the new stuff. This summer I decided to redo all of it. That is more than 4 months ago, and I'm still not done! (School and work takes a lot of time)

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that if you have such a great idea, create a base that is easy to scale. In my opinon, it is easier (and a lot more fun) to upgrade hardware och bandwith than correcting stupid design misstakes you did for 6 months ago...

Good luck with that idea!!