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Is that really the case? Do you have anything to back up this claim?

As someone pointed out, LinuxWorld had an interview in February 2000 (I believe), where Jon was quoted as saying:

"the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member"

Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten also reports that:

"In hacker circles Johansen has come under criticism for taking the credit for the codebreaking, but Johansen himself says he has been misquoted by the media."

I personally find it easy to believe that the media would misquote him, as they misquote everyone else. When they can write big headlines, they don't worry about twisting facts, and a Norwegian kid doing something like this - now that was something they couldn't resist!

I personally will refrain from judging anyone (heh). If you can give me conclusive evidence that Jon did in fact have the nerve to take all the credit himself, I'll be happy to concede defeat.

http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-01/lw -01-dvd-interview.html

Jon Johansen: I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part.

LinuxWorld: The other two people that you had worked with to make the player are remaining anonymous -- is that right?

Jon Johansen: Yes, that is correct.

...

LinuxWorld: Do you know why they want to remain anonymous?

Jon Johansen: They are both a lot older than me, and they are employed. So I guess they just didn't want the publicity, and they were perhaps afraid of getting fired.

He's a wonderfully plain-spoken person. My other favorite Jon Johansen quote is from when he was responding to reporter Declan McCullagh, and Declan was arrogantly giving Jon a hard time for not immediate returning Declan's request for comment:

Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 21:26:23 +0100
From: Jon Johansen (Micro Media ADB)
Subject: [Livid-dev] Wired article on legal threats

I assume you've read a great deal of articles on the subject? If you have, you might have noticed that I'm only 15 years old; which means I go to school. Norway is GMT+01. You should be able to figure out the time difference, and when I would be available for comment :)

Joe Barr did a similar article for 2001. Here's how he did:

1. Linux Kernel 2.4 will be released, and will trounce Windows in the benchmarks
Half right. 2.4.0 was released, performance was good, but not as good as it could have been. It's gotten better since. Nobody that I know of has done comprehensive benchmarking. I'll give this one a half point.

2. MS Findings of Law overturned, Findings of Fact stand. Ordered back to lower court. DOJ loses zeal for case
Almost perfect. The Conclusions of Law stood, but the Final Judgement was overturned. Everything else was on the nose. I'll give this one a full point.

3. Consolidation and attrition of Linux companies. Fewer distributions. RedHat & VA merge. SuSE & Atipa merge.
Didn't happen. There were some mergers, but no big ones. There was much attrition, but primarily on the fringes of the Linux world, the rest of the computer industry was much harder hit attrition-wise. There are more distributions than ever. There are no superdistributions, in fact, I'd say more people realize today that RedHat != Linux than a year ago. No points.

4. KDE and GNOME continue as separate projects.
Easy point.

5. Linus stops heavy kernel hacking, focuses on community leadership.
You've got to be joking. No points.

6. One of the big five computer retailers offers a Linux boot (or dual boot) for a retail desktop machine.
Nope, didn't happen.

7. Widespread government desktop adoption of Linux
Nope, didn't happen. More servers tho.

8. Bruce Perens shakes up HP.
If it happened, it was completely behind the scenes. From out here, it looks like Compaq's pleading to be eaten had much more effect on HP's management than Bruce did. He has had some effect, and he's still there, so there's always next year. No point.

9. Linux stocks will thrive.
Ha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Seriously, they didn't do badly compared to the rest of the tech stocks, but I would hardly call it "thriving". No point.

10. Another great year for Linux
Easy point.

So, last year, he got three and a half out of ten. One was a complete giveaway (#10), and most people would say #4 was a giveaway too. Not the most impressive set of predictions.

The short version:"They're a bunch of arrogant elitist bastards". (The article's opinion, I've never tried to install mplayer).

The premise of the author is that "HP refused to market OpenMail energetically as an Exchange replacement because it was more interested in protecting its relationship with Microsoft"

If only OpenMail were opened: the last best hope Exchange replacement is explained in this article on linuxworld.com. That hope was OpenMail by HP.

Rumours abound that it was a Microsoft idea, in the first place. While we can't be sure if Microsoft thought up the idea before anyone else - I believe EasyJet tried a similar thing in Belfast, Northern Ireland with chalk drawings on the pavement, and were sued accordingly - it's been rumoured that Microsoft was forced to get their checkbook out after hiring spraypaint artists to advertise the X-Box in a number of cities.

So, if it makes you feel any better... it's not just the Penguins who are causing all that pollution. :)

Michael Tiemann: Well, as a matter of fact, we were profitable, increasingly profitable, every single year until we attracted so much attention that people wanted to invest money in Cygnus. That happened in 1997.

Red Hat S-1A Filing, January 28, 2000 (search under "3. BUSINESS COMBINATION (CONTINUED)") says that Red Hat lost $1.5M in fiscal 1996, $2.9M in fiscal 1997, $5.7M in fiscal 1998, and $6.4M in the nine months before it was acquired.

Sleepycat employs under twenty people, as does ACT. Peter Deutsch is one person, and may well be discussing a modest retirement in Wisconsin, which is dirt cheap.

So that's less than forty people, none of whom have had the payoff of a second-tier engineer in a moderately successful IPO.

Tim

Has any open source company ever turned an actuall profit?

Sleepycat Software (makes of Berkeley DB) has maintained a profitable business based on open source since 1996. Cygnus Support (gcc, gdb) was profitable from its founding in 1989 through being purchased by Red Hat. Aladdin Systems (Ghostscript) made enough money for the author to retire.

Sleepcat Software's open source Berkeley DB has "been profitable since inception" in 1996

Using multiple licensing models L. Peter Deutsch is able to provide Ghostscript under the GPL and make enough money to retire.

Cygnus Support (now part of Red Hat), was founded in 1989 and was "profitable, increasingly profitable, every single year" before the Red Hat buyout.

It's very unconvential, O'Reilly must be happy enough with sales of books to pay Larry Wall to keep developing Perl.

Open Source works. Maybe not as well as VA Linu... erm... Systems wants it to, but it does.

Also, he has all kinds of technical stuff going for him. He was one of the original authors behind X, for example.

He also has a lot of (IMHO) good opinions on design. A short piece on that.

I believe he can (continue to) do a lot of good for Gnome.

/August.

IDE's can help find and resolve some problems a hell of a lot quicker than CLI tools. It can also generate quality code or program templates.

Before trolling again in such a cute manner, why don't you check out this and this.

Quick summary of the 2nd link:

How do some of the integrated development environments (IDEs) for Linux rate, especially when compared with old favorites like Emacs? And does Linux need IDEs at all? Sam Mikes dons his flameproof suit as he investigates this controversial topic, comparing Metrowerks's CodeWarrior, Cygnus's GNUPro Toolkit, and John Lindal's Code Crusader with XEmacs and Microsoft Visual Studio. (6,000 words)

rgds,
Al.

Both of your comments can easily be solved by converting from pc desktops to X terminals. Number 1 is just obvious. Number two was addressed here last week. Your whole mode of thinking is way too windows-centric. You can't see that other ways of doing things even exist.

502 Proxy Error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /site-stories/2001/1025.errorhandling.html.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

IRC has proven to be a fairly good source for news coverage the past few days. Volunteers on the #wtc-confirmed and #worldtradecenter channels on irc.openprojects.net have been watching various news channels and sites, posting the latest news regarding Tuesday's attacks and the aftermath.

There's even an article on LinuxWorld.com about these channels.

I'm one of the volunteers in that channel. News has been fairly slow lately, but we do welcome people to sit in and listen or participate.

In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".

Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.

To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.

I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.

I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?

I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.

But why should't we spend some time having fun with other languages? We shouldn't because time is the most precious resource. Ignorance of how the small things add up to big things is how people who used to earn good money can have no savings and how people become obese. Two weeks spent on Ruby is two weeks you didn't spend on something else. If we followed Dalroth's advice, we would repeatedly waste weeks at a time on other fringe languages as well. Sure it MIGHT pay off but this is the same logic people are criticized for when they spend money on lottery tickets.

I think that learning to live in a budget is simply part of growing up. There is not infinite money to spend, most cannot eat an unlimited amount of junk food without getting fat, and one doesn't have unlimited time. One has to make hard choices. Why is it so hard to accept that people need to make time budgets, especially in light of research that it is essential to get proper amounts of sleep in order to learn.

Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman response is here

A complete and usable desktop like we've grown acustom to since Macos/Windooz should be the priority.

Actually this is the problem. Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about thowing out all the past good ideas, and using something that doesn't work, simply because it's new. But one shouldn't blindly reimplement old ideas, including implementing their short comings simply because, that's what people expect.

Take for instance the start menu. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the user shouldn't be able to edit the root menu. Sure, you a limited ability to add new items, and then remove your items, but you you're stuck with what Microsoft decided would be "useful". (Run, Shutdown, Programs, Favorites, et cetra.) Don't use Favorites? Don't want it cluttering up your menu? Tough.

So GNOME and KDE (they both suffer from the same debilitating disease last time I checked) said, "Hey we need a start menu. Afterall Microsoft has one and when the Great Flood comes and Redmond is washed into the sea, those that the Great Penguin deamed worthy will go forth and claim the land and the people left will be expecting a start menu. Those that don't want a start menu, can remove it. So everyone is happy.

Not quite. For the would-be deliverers have decided that everyone should have "Programs", "Favorites", "Run", "Applets", "Logout", and "Lock Screen". You mean you would like to edit this? You can't under windows. What do you mean that's not acceptable? That's how Microsoft does it.

For all the talk about how Microsoft doesn't innovate, there sure is lack of innovation in the opensource world. I've yet to see it. In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.

Sure someone will bring up something like Gimp, but let's face it. It's Photoshop, only more confusing and without nearly as many useful plugins.

Looks like all those warnings have proven true. They obviously have cut back like the rest of the Linux vendors. Looks like they can only afford an email account now ;-)

Bjarne Stroustrup recently had an interview with LinuxWorld where he outlined his plans for the future of C++. Here's an in article that analyzes and contemplates the ramifications of these changes.

Don't expect these changes anytime soon though. From recent ACCU meetings it seems that most of the C++ standard from 1997 still hasn't been implemented now let alone new libraries that are yet to be designed. The soonest I see any of Bjarne's ideas being usable by developers and standardized is 2005 if the rate of compiler and library development continues at the current rate.

--

Actually, that's why Linus released the kernel under the GPL in the first place: to thank RMS for gcc. Just for gcc, actually.

Before that, Linux was under a much more restrictive license. Therefore, either RMS hasn't done his research, or he's an ungrateful bastard, or still just pissed that HURD wasn't finished sooner.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Can be organized into a hierarchy

Is small in size

Is read much more than it is written consider using a LDAP data store. There are excellent open source and commercial options available for Linux.

Get started by reading this nice series of tutorials from LinuxWorld.
After that, help yourself to some of the free schemas here.

I believe that on First Amendment grounds the Supreme Court will eventually rule to lift the injunction against 2600 for linking, but that the DeCSS code will be ruled to infringe the Constitutional DMCA. After all I believe in the Betamax case the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had to specify explicitly what were the limits of fair use. Congress has done so. So we'll get 2600 scoring a media victory while a Supreme Court case will set a long term precedent against fair use, one whose significence will be equal to Betamax. This I feel is madness for the EFF to pursue if it had the best interests of the community at heart. Find a better case.

Linuxworld invites you to design the LSB logo. "The winner will be announced on LinuxWorld.com and will become eligible for an award given at the August LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. Best of all, this logo will appear on every Linux product box that conforms to the LSB standard." Not too much extra info there though :-(

...can be found at LinuxWorld.

For his review, Joe Barr actually paid attention during the movie and asked maddog, Linus and Michael about their participation. His comments are more to the point as well.

Hah! Tee hee! Hoo! Okay. I was buying into this post at first. Then, I got to this part:

Look at the succesful companies in the industry. Microsoft, Compaq, IBM et al are not control freaks,

Hee! Right. Microsoft, which pressures OEM's not to change the bitmap displayed on boot, and not to load competitors' software at the factory, isn't a control freak. Bill Gates, as notorious a micromanager as ever has worked in tech, isn't a control freak. IBM, I'm suspicious of. Compaq, couldn't tell you. But Microsoft?

[Apple needs] to adopt the more socialist methods... of MS, IBM and so forth, who are unafraid to compete in an open market, with open standards.

Hee hee! Hee. Hoo. Microsoft, the company that broke Kerberos? The same company that threatened to sue a competitor for benchmarking them? Okay. With my Rod of Lordly Moderation, I dub this post -1 Troll, +4 Funny. Take the net gain to your Karma and go back under your bridge.

I'm sure Linus Torvalds probably heard some comments like this when he was originally working on building the first Linux kernel.

Anyway, there's a big fallacy in this whole discussion. Everybody seems to think that LT woke up one day and said "Eureka! (My kernel work) + (GNU Project) = A NEW OS !" That's not what happened. For one thing, GNU always had their own kernel (althougth they've taken their sweet time finishing it!). For another thing, LT was never a big fan of most of the GNU software (in this article he expresses admiration for GCC, but attitudes ranging from indifference to absolute disgust with everything else).

The simple fact is that LT wrote a simple POSIX-compliant kernel for his own private purposes -- mainly self-education. It was the viral marketing that he unintentionally started by giving the source to his friends that established Linux+GNU as a new OS. I once heard him say he was more shocked by the 100th copy of Linux than the 1 millionth!

That being said, it might well be interesting and useful to create a new "OS" based on the Linux kernel. "Completely complying with free software's philosophy" strikes me as a rather silly motivation, but Tonneau does seem to have done some interesting work that bears further discussion. Is anyone going to comment on FullPliant's unique features, or is everybody stuck on Religious Flamewar mode?

__________________

LinuxONE lite, at least in theory, does this. I haven't been able to connect to their webserver lately, though, so I couldn't tell you what the status of that is, nor can I download and test it.

You mean these guys ? Bwahahahaha! They've been exposed as a stock-IPO scam with only the barest attempt at a product. How could anyone read Slashdot and miss all the articles about LinuxOne?
--

LinuxWorld does a profile and interview with BP: "Filmmaker, Linux hacker, and ham radio geek, Bruce Perens is one of the quirkiest figures in the open source and free software communities. He's as famous for resigning from high-profile projects in high dudgeon as he is for founding them. He helped to set up Software in the Public Interest, the Linux Standard Base, and the Open Source Initiative -- and he has left them all. This is his side of those stories -- and a few more." A rather good interview in that they get ESR and RMS to clarify some points made and some titbits about the OSI debacle etc are thrown up in the air.

The Original Upstart is a great piece, highly recommended reading.

Penguins need lovin too. The Linux Pimp

From this LinuxWorld article: (in relation to track editing for Tux Racer)

There are three layers that are used for elevation, terrain, and trees. The rules for each of those individual layers are as follows:

Elevation is measured by colors. White is high, and black is low.

...

It sounds to me like the whole dammed track is one huge bump map. Not really a bump map in the current normal usage but more like a heightfield from POVRay and similar.

Quite a clever, and very cheap (Gimp) way of coming up with a map editor.

I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?..And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta ) web-browser in such a short time! ..How did the KDE developers manage this?

I think these are important questions to ask. Whenever anyone here tries to raise the issue of "What went wrong with Mozilla?" it's always met with angry accusations of trolling and claims that the project is doing great, just great! especially if you've tried the last couple of nightly builds which are much better than those of a few days ago.

Mozilla is the flagship project of the "Open Source Movement" (not to be confused with the "Free Software Movement") and when it was launched, Eric Raymond and CmdrTaco were featured prominently in everything from C|Net to Cat Fancier preemptively declaring victory in the browser war. Three years later, Mozilla isn't close to their first release and has been crushed by Microsoft in both market share and quality. At the same time, the Konqueror team has come up with a 90% usable browser from scratch in half the time, with a tiny fraction of the developers and bug testers and without the resources and experience of Netscape behind it.

It seems to me that the sensible course would be to make an honest effort to figure out where Mozilla went wrong instead of keeping up the pretense that everything is going perfectly. I mean, when Eric Raymond goes into CEOs' offices doing what he's not embarassed to call his Prince From Another Country act, don't they ask him what happened to Mozilla? Wouldn't there be practical and rhetorical advantages to having an answer to that question?

---------

A couple years ago, Bruce Perens penned Preparing for the Intellectual-property Offensive for LinuxWorld. It's an interesting perspective on the potential for the subversion of the patent system by unscrupulous (is there any other kind?) proprietary software vendors.

Some noteworthy ideas, including that of "open patent" development, which keeps resurfacing whenever patents are discussed, but doesn't really seem to have taken hold yet.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown

A longer version of this essay can be found at http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-09/lw -09-penguin_1.html.

Hence my question: Is there a website which provides comparative reviews of open source software or more simply put, which says which freely distributed software, not necessarily open source, is the crème de la crème for the Linux/FreeBSD platforms?
Before one could find such reviews on the LinuxWorld website. Right now there is a terribly expensive and I do not know whether very objective, monthly publication called Linux Format (its website just contains Slashdot-like news).

Singing Skunk, singing false, so lonely!

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/v ertes.html
http://www.linu xworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-05/lw-05-ramparts_p. html
http://www.secu rityfocus.com/focus/linux/articles/linux-securing. html
http://www.isr.umd.edu/~dani elf/Linux/securinglinux.html
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~jjasen1/unix/ linux.html

--
Kiro

I must admit that my knowledge about LVS, or any clustering, is quite limited. But from what I just read on LinuxWorld , I ask: Do you think that a load-balancing system would be a factor in this case, given that Lynx was restarted for each connection? (Making persistant connections impossible.)

-Waldo
-------------------

First, there's "S/390: The Linux Dream Machine, the article referring to Linux on the s/390 as "a herd of forty thousand raptors"

Then we have The Iron Penguin, coverage at linuxworld

Finally, here's IBM Runs 41,000 Copies of Linux on Mainframe, the original slashdot article.

I'll agree on that.

Yet, as Alpha hardware aren't that cheap if you want to build a decent server, I could also suggest a parallel system of cheaper IA32/64 boxes.

A friend of mine was building something similar and since these people aren't going to be modelling fluid flows (which would more or less require a cluster of Alphas), a beowulf cluster of some Athlons should do the trick.(I don't know how much FPU-intensive are database applications. I guess they shouldn't be that much, so even Cyrix's should also work well).

The node machines don't have to contain much: 1-2 processors and 1/2 to 1GB of RAM (depending on number of machines) and some (preferrably) fast network card (Ethernet for cheap, Myrinet or similar if you're serious about it).

I have no experience with such database deployments, but a cluster after all might not be as bad an idea as some here have suggested.

I know the parent post is a troll, but just for the sake of clarity here are some urls, including the original /. story.

• Microsoft Clarifies Linux Myths
• Mandrake's Rant on the Subject
• More response to the myth
• Linuxworld's Take on the matter

Weblogs are a cool concept, but ultimately lead to fragmentation -- content, eyeballs, authors, and participants are spread among many distinct islands.

One of the more interesting ideas to emerge from the Advogato / Kuro5hin axis is the concept of syndication. This would cover content, already common -- Slashdot and LinuxToday are essentially content syndication sites, and The Register officially sanctions linking. But syndication could also include a distributed user directory, and potentially (flame on) attributes such as karma or other metrics of merit from various sites.

I see a mix of several models coallescing into the final "product":

• From Slashdot and Blockstackers -- Everything -- a hyperlinked, persistant, discussion/directory. Somewhat like Wiki.
• From Kuro5hin, a well-de signed collaborative moderating system
• From Advogato, the idea of a trust metric is useful, but not sufficient.
• From the IWETHEY EZBoard, active content promotion. Active topics float up in the discussion queue. It's a bit different from a typical weblog, but tends to promote issues of interest and bury (but not kill) those which aren't generating much traffic.
• From LinuxWorld, multiple forum interfaces -- forums can be web, Usenet, or e-mail based.

Still to be worked out are issues of story selection. Various models work -- Slashdot and IWETHEY fall at two extremes, with a dedicated editorial staff on the one hand, and a number of free-form "open forums" in which any topic may be posted and discussed. Kuro5hin's still working out the kinks, though a number of suggestions have been proposed.

The point is that high-quality (and low quality) content are created all over the Net. Mindless Link Propogation (TM) (MLP) is a useful way of aggregating it to key sites. Mindful link propogation might be even better.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Weblogs are a cool concept, but ultimately lead to fragmentation -- content, eyeballs, authors, and participants are spread among many distinct islands.

One of the more interesting ideas to emerge from the Advogato / Kuro5hin axis is the concept of syndication. This would cover content, already common -- Slashdot and LinuxToday are essentially content syndication sites, and The Register officially sanctions linking. But syndication could also include a distributed user directory, and potentially (flame on) attributes such as karma or other metrics of merit from various sites.

I see a mix of several models coallescing into the final "product":

• From Slashdot and Blockstackers -- Everything -- a hyperlinked, persistant, discussion/directory. Somewhat like Wiki.
• From Kuro5hin, a well-de signed collaborative moderating system
• From Advogato, the idea of a trust metric is useful, but not sufficient.
• From the IWETHEY EZBoard, active content promotion. Active topics float up in the discussion queue. It's a bit different from a typical weblog, but tends to promote issues of interest and bury (but not kill) those which aren't generating much traffic.
• From LinuxWorld, multiple forum interfaces -- forums can be web, Usenet, or e-mail based.

Still to be worked out are issues of story selection. Various models work -- Slashdot and IWETHEY fall at two extremes, with a dedicated editorial staff on the one hand, and a number of free-form "open forums" in which any topic may be posted and discussed. Kuro5hin's still working out the kinks, though a number of suggestions have been proposed.

The point is that high-quality (and low quality) content are created all over the Net. Mindless Link Propogation (TM) (MLP) is a useful way of aggregating it to key sites. Mindful link propogation might be even better.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Windows95 used to include the Sun PC-NFS client that might do what you're asking, but I'm not sure (as the last time I used Windows95 was several months ago and I don't have a test system to mess with).

If you're just trying to get Windows (NT) to log into an NIS domain, you can have a look at NISGINA. There's a neat article at LinuxWorld here. I poked around with this before I discovered Samba, but never really tested is. NISGINA's hopme page is here. NISGINA (and it's subsidiary utilities) come with source, too (which is nice).

Sun (I think..) also makes an NIS/NFS client for Win32 -- there's a technical run-through here. It's called the Solstice NFS Client for Windows and it probably doesn't come cheap.

Now, if anywone knows where I can get a cheap/free Macintosh NIS/NFS client... (and yes, I know about Netatalk, but I'd like to try anyways)

From the article:

There are several different types of clustering:

• Parallel computing: Beowulf is one example of the parallel-computing cluster, executing parallel applications written for libraries like the Message Passing Interface (MPI). Used mostly in scientific computing.
• High availability: Dedicated to maintaining a high level of overall system availability, these clusters replace failing nodes with backup nodes as quickly as possible, so that in the worst case a node failure only creates a few seconds of downtime.
• Load balancing: To improve overall system performance, the load-balancing cluster shares the application workload of all system users across the nodes of the cluster.
• Resource sharing: This kind of cluster combines system resources into a central system or service so they can be accessed by all nodes of the cluster or by other computers.
• Single system image: Here, the operating systems of several nodes are combined in a single system, so that it appears that all the users are running on a single large machine. This can ease system management and make it simpler to run applications for load balancing.

Although it's theoretically possible to build all these aspects into a single operating system, the practical issues of doing so are incredibly complex. While few operating system vendors have attempted to cover all the bases described above, one shining example does stand out in Compaq Tru64 Unix.

End of article snip...

If Compaq would only make the "Open" in OpenVMS mean GPL, then there could be some more great code to borrow.

3. THE ECONOMICS OF FREE SOFTWARE
... In practice the only possible cases are the following:
- The software developer may have a personal fortune ...
- The software developer may have other sources of income, paid by an employer or client as compensation for services unrelated to the free software. ...
- Many public institutions such as universities will release for general use most of the software developed by their employees (although, as universities around the world are being pressed by the purse-string holders to enhance their economic value, and recognize the economic potential of the software they develop, this generous attitude is not as universal as it used to be).

Interesting mistake here - the economic potential of the software developed is usually _reduced_ if it is distributed in binary form, to only a small number of people. It would be more economically useful if everyone could use and improve it. There is the situation where a third party might have the money to improve the software and 'productize' it, but that does not require that the third party need be given a monopoly on the software. Economically, it would be more useful to release the software under a BSD-type licence and get some competition among the companies building on it.

I expect that rather than 'economic value of the software', Bertrand Mayer means 'monetary value to the university', which is not the same thing. Anyway, let's go on:

- Companies may find it beneficial to release some of their software products without asking for a fee. ...
The categories identified here -- donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored -- seem to exhaust the economic possibilities;

I think a category has been left out. This is the case where companies develop software and sell it for a fee, but decide to make it free software. There are plenty of people doing this - Red Hat is the most obvious example, they charge for their Linux distribution.

Then there are the cases where the company makes money from technical support, rather than selling copies. Cygnus was for many years the prime example of this, now they're owned by Red Hat. People like AbiSource or Helix Code intend to make money from custom enhancements to the software they write.

Many of the contributions of the free software community are admirable. Highly disturbing, however, is its widespread slander and hatred of the commercial software world.

One man, however high-profile, is not the same as 'widespread'. Most free software advocates do not agree with RMS, as far as I can tell. Indeed Eric Raymond, mentioned at length later on in the article, explicitly rejects Stallman's views on this. But anyway, RMS would reject your view that free software is anti-commercial per se, eg in this LinuxWorld interview:

When people said, "Don't pour poison in the river," they were called communists. But they didn't want to abolish business. They wanted to abolish pouring poison into the river. The free software movement is a lot like that. It's a lot like the environmental movement because the goal is not to abolish business, the goal is to end a certain kind of pollution. But in this case, it's not pollution of the air or the water, it's pollution of our social relationships.

Note again that when RMS says 'the free software movement', he doesn't refer to everyone who supports free software. Back to the article:

Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your livelihood and that of your family.

There are plenty of explanations of the FSF's view on this. For example, see Selling Free Software. The idea is that when selling cauliflowers, you don't impose restrictions on what the purchaser can do with those cauliflowers. You don't make them give up any freedom (in the GNU sense). If you buy potatoes, you can plant them and grow more potatoes. (The closest analogy to the way you're not allowed to copy proprietary software is a genetically modified crop where the farmer is forbidden from saving some and planting it next year.)

To take your professor analogy, it would be okay (in FSF terms) to charge money for a lecture. But it would not be acceptable to stop your students passing on the knowledge they had learnt. RMS has said as much:

We see programmers as providing a service, much as doctors and lawyers now do--both medical and legal knowledge are freely redistributable entities for which the practitioners charge a distribution and service fee.

So the objection is not to 'selling' but to stopping the purchaser from changing and sharing what he has bought. The question then becomes, what if copyright is the only way to ensure a reasonable selling price for the author? RMS would prefer that the software never be written at all (work as a waiter instead), but personally I cannot agree with that. More from the article...

The only stated justification for the indictment of commercial software [apart from nostalgia] - is that software is different from other wares since it can be reproduced so easily. But this does not stand a minute's scrutiny. The difference is a matter of degree, not nature; software reproduction always costs something, even if it is as little as a dollar for a CD, ten cents of network connection time for an Internet download, or the marginal cost of using up more memory. With a good scanner or photocopier, you can reproduce a book, too, for very little money these days.

As the FSF site says over and over again, price is not the issue. Of course zero marginal cost is not a good enough reason for zero price - not in a capitalist society anyway. Have you seen the prices that the FSF charges for its software? It's bloody expensive. The question is - does the extra benefit to users from copyright on software outweigh the disadvantages? Fifty years ago, copyright on books was not a major restriction on people's actions, since copying a book would be difficult anyway. But for something that is naturally easy to copy and change such as source code, the restrictions placed by copyright law are more onerous. I think the loss of freedom is worth it in order to get more software produced, but it's not an open and shut case.

The article then goes on to criticize RMS for a 'skewed moral perspective', use of extreme analogies, and accusing the free software movement of hijacking the word 'free'. But this is a little unfair. Since the FSF concerns itself only with software, it's not surprising that the word 'freedom' on their pages is used only as it relates to computers. RMS is the first to admit that proprietary software is not the only problem the world has, or even the most serious. If every FSF page were prefixed with a disclaimer saying 'this is less important than other moral issues in the world', that would avoid accusations of a 'skewed moral perspective', but what would be the point? It's a mistake to assume that somebody concerned about one issue is a single issue proponent. It might just be that they don't have time to deal with everything, and have decided to focus on one specific area. (I do agree about the analogies getting a bit out of hand sometimes, but most of them work quite well.)

And the use of Eric Raymond to try to criticize free software proponents as a whole is even sillier. He may be a bit of a nut, but remember that unlike RMS, ESR is _not_ in the business of making moral proclamations, at least not in the software area. He does his best to make a practical case for free software - or 'open source software' as he calls it to avoid frightening managers. Bertrand Meyer seems to be arguing:

• Eric Raymond supports free software
• Eric Raymond supports gun ownership
• Gun ownership is a bad idea
• Therefore, the whole free software movement is a bit wacky

The article asks:

Is it right, one might ask, to make a connection between Mr. Raymond, who is only one person, and the rest of the free software community? The answer is yes, for at least three reasons:
- His propaganda is prominent in his Web pages ...

And? That still doesn't mean that it represents the whole free software movement. ESR doesn't even claim that his 'Open Source' writings represent the whole free software movement, let alone his barrel-of-a-gun writings. Some free software advocates support gun ownership, some don't. (I don't.) The fact that one person has written a web page and managed to get a large number of hits on it is neither here nor there.

- Eric Raymond has been one of the most visible proponents of the Open Source movement ... his views, unless disavowed strongly and publicly, inevitably commit the rest of the movement.

That is a bizarre statement. This is not a political party where people are expected to follow the party line. It's not some corporation where any press release represents official company policy. The 'movement' is a lot looser and a lot harder to pin down that Mr Meyer seems to think. There is no requirement on somebody who supports free software to publicly disavow anything that ESR says. His gun ramblings should be treated as what they are, a quaint irrelevance.

Given the choice between
- a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist from buying a police gun ...
- a society where all software would be free and Mr. Raymond's views on gun "freedom" were fully realized,
any ethically-conscious person would choose the former.

I don't see how this has any relevance. Especially since ESR does not want to remove copyright on software, and since the free software movement has nothing to do with gun advocacy - a couple of oddly-placed links on one guy's Web page notwithstanding.

we have had to cancel one major project, and reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn't pay for the products, there is no one to blame.

But 'nobody in charge' and 'didn't pay' are not consequences of the software being free. There are companies more than willing to take your money in exchange for providing a guaranteed response to bug fixes. The difference is that with free software, you can shop around and get the best deal for such support, rather than being limited to the company which owns the copyright.

Even though the GNU products are often good, the licenses which accompany them are no better, in the warranties (or rather absence thereof) they offer to the user, than commercial software.

Of course not. Would you expect the FSF to become liable to warranty claims from someone who downloaded the software gratis from an FTP site? However, the GPL explicitly allows someone distributing the software to 'offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee'. It's up to the free market to provide this service for those who can pay for it.

Warranty provision has nothing to do with 'freedom' - unless you count as 'freedom' being able to drag a software author through the courts because you downloaded his software and it didn't work. Again, if you want to provide a warranty for GCC as a profitmaking business, go ahead and do so. But saying 'use this at your own risk' is very different to saying 'you may not change the software; you may not copy the software'. One restricts what the user can do; the other is just an arse-covering legal measure - unfortunately necessary in today's litigious world.

Product F is free software. It comes with the standard no-warranty warranty.
Product P is proprietary software. It costs $50 for the binary-only version. [and comes with a full and comprehensive warranty]
... I would consider the second solution more ethical

I don't see how the first is unethical, provided it is absolutely clear about there being no warranty. Making false claims would be unethical of course. I don't see how you can expect Product F to provide a warranty if you did not pay anything for it - the author could be bankrupted by lawsuits from users who downloaded a copy or got one from you. There is a third option of course, Product F for $50 _with_ a warranty provided by the author.

I think the point is that the GPL doesn't _automatically_ grant a warranty. But it does provide a base on which you can provide warranties to specific individuals, if they pay for it. That seems sensible to me.

The free software axioms hold, as we have seen, that although charging for software is wrong it is all right to charge for services associated with the software, such as maintenance and training. The risk here is that such an attitude may lead to products with known deficiencies, giving the provider a ready-made source of juicy service contracts.

I don't think that any company could get away with this - how would the product establish itself in the market if it were broken? Don't forget that this problem exists with proprietary software too, if it has a support contract. Do you think that Oracle insert bugs so that their customers will subscribe to the most expensive support contracts for guaranteed fixes? It's all rather far-fetched. If you have the source, you'd probably be able to spot if something fishy were going on.

The article continues by accusing free software advocates of character asassination towards proprietary software developers. Again it makes the mistake of equating RMS with 'the free software movement'. There is no collective view on such things, any more than on gun ownership.

Finally, I think that most free software projects do indeed acknowledge where they have used ideas from other programs, free or proprietary. The GIMP's credits section describes it as a 'Photoshop-like' program, and that's about as clear as you could be. Similarly it is obvious where GNUstep, bison, less and so on got their inspiration.

Here's a link to Colin Powell and Larry Ellison donating 1,100 of these machines to the Dallas Independent School District.

And it doesn't scare me at all that Linux apparantly has this goal, because it hasn't nor is it able to replace NT... The problem with you and your fellow advocates is: you don't understand the people you're talking to.

With all due respect, it seems to be you who doesn't understand. Check this out.

This attitude also says to me I never HOPE to be called a Linux User if the loud mouth zealots keep their attitude.

Well then you can make it your mission to do your part to correct this bad behavior and I'll do my part to clue you in on which way the wind is blowing.
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read it here.

Mostly based on interview with David Niemi (the protest's organizer) but also gets a comment from an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association (plaintiff California case).