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Overall, this is a great new window manager, that will perform well on lower end machines.

If you want GNU-Darwin background and a balanced view, ignore Pudge's "FUD" and try the following links.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2003/ 1/20/191655/929
http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-25.en.htm l
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/12/01/2 028254&mode=thread

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Here's a quote from the an article previously referenced on SlashDot:

IDC warns that Bangalore, India's primary IT hub, may no longer offer the world's best IT outsourcing value; that the infrastructure there is saturated; and wages for skilled workers are being bid up, with many new grads demanding annual salaries of $4,000 (USD) or more -- not only in Bangalore but all over India.

Oh my God. The nerve of those Indian developers demanding more than $4k/year. No wonder companies are turning to Romania and China. They're obviously less greedy in those countries.

Can you cut your salary demands from $75k to $4k, probably with no health, pension/401k benefits? If you can't, then the argument for telecommuting is moot because someone else will do your job for a hell of a lot less than you will.

I know a lot of Slashdot readers are in favor of globalism, but I don't think they're prepared for the effects of it. Unless you're a plumber or electrician, you better get used to a wildly lower salary and standard of living, because if your job can be sent overseas, it will be, due to this type of astromonical savings.

Not just IT -- engineers, benefits administrators, architects, analysts, animators, call centers, they're even shipping radiologist work overseas because someone in India can read X-rays just as well as someone in NYC.

We won't see the alleged benefits of globalism for decades, so there is probably a long stretch of very rough waters in our future, where entire industries will be eliminated almost overnight by offshoring, and the economic balance of many regions of the US will be ripped to shreds.

The problem is that the change is just too fast to react to. IT is still a relatively new field; when I attended RPI 10-12 years ago there were really no IT courses being taught, it was all CompSci -- data structures, etc. The IT industry as a career has ramped up and burned out in a span of about 10-15 years. That's about 1/5 the length of a person's working years.

How can someone completely retrain themselves every 10 years, when retraining means starting from the ground floor both salarywise and knowledgewise? I'm not talking about evolving, like moving from mainframes to PC's. I'm talking about moving from being a programmer to being a lawyer or an accountant.

How can anyone prepare for a career when there's a significant chance that the career could be totally obliterated in as short a period as 5 years.

Ralph

You misunderstand the point of that statement. The person I was replying to was complaining how you had to buy a liscense (for commercial software) for each computer you put software on, and how much better it was to have a single computer with a bunch of terminals.

I didn't misunderstand your point at all, it simply is no longer valid. It certainly was at one time, but once you take per seat licensing out of the equation, which Linux does, it really is much cheaper and easier to go thin-client.

But you aren't just maintaining one machine, you're maintaining N+1 machines -- the monitor doesn't just plug into the ethernet port.

Actually, some of them do. And no, you aren't really just administering N+1 machines, because only 1 of the machines has anything on it that actually matters, or any parts that can't simply be swapped out in a few minutes (keyboard, mouse, monitor, and whatever they use for network connection and what little local processing is required, eg 486, NCD terminal, etc), sending the user back on their merry way. This Newsforge article covers the benefits nicely, I think. (It's wrotten by Roblimo, so there's some MS bashing, but there's also some good info if you can get past that)

Some key points: The terminals they're using cost about $700 new, but can be had on ebay for under $5 each, and they have a 10 year life expectancy. The 2 terminal servers, as I mentioned before, are dual P3s and they serve over 450 terminals. When an employee needs to change terminals for whatever reason (terminal needs to be replaced, policeman going from his car to his desk, etc), there's no need to worry about saving or transporting their work since their session is maintained on the server; they simply log in at the new terminal and pick up exactly where they left off.

See http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/07/07/1516238.sh tml:
"For example, the latest patch that I worked on myself (as opposed to working on merging other people's stuff) was to get X11 and Mozilla to load faster by improving the read-ahead heuristics for page faulting in the executable images"
I hope this could also improve OO startup perf.

I searched the web and found elsewhere allegations that he was probably fired for incompetency.

Microsoft has been convicted of piracy...

One might wonder if these companies contributing code to a version of the Linux kernel would mean other intellectual property debacles a la SCO. But, according to an article written by Slashdot's Roblimo on Newsforge, there is legal stuff you must sign before your code is allowed into the tree:

"...as long as you include a paragraph's worth of non-onerous disclaimer (basically an agreement to release your code under the GPL or LGPL) with each submission, along with disclosure of any patents, patents pending or other claims you know about that might encumber the submitted code."

So I think they've got that base covered. Good Thing(tm). :-)

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/03/06/24/1542 207.shtml (Can someone show me how to turn that into a link?)

<a href="http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/03/06/2 4/1542207.shtml"> NewsForge article </a>

gets rendered as

NewsForge article

What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO utterly from quietly selling all of their SCO stock sometime between now and the point SCO goes into court

You mean, like if their VP of Engineering sold every bit of stock he had? Ha ha, yeah... wouldn't that be.... hmmm...

Newsforge: SCO VP Opinder Bawa cashes out

Quote:

June 16, 2003, Armonk, NY.... Since filing a lawsuit against IBM, SCO has made public statements and accusations about IBM's Unix license and about Linux in an apparent attempt to create fear uncertainty and doubt among IBM's customers and the open source community. IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated. This matter will eventually be resolved in the normal legal process. IBM will continue to ship, support and develop AIX which represents years of IBM innovation, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many patents. As always, IBM will stand behind our products and our customers. # # # Trink Guarino Director, IBM Media Relations

The parallels continue. Upper management is starting to cash out. Perhaps the entire campaign is a final hurrah so that insiders can cash in on stock inflation before the whole company crashes.

-j

A Continental jet cockpit? How ironically funny if he could make it Linux-powered...

SCO VP cacheing out? I'm starting to change my mind about their motives... I used to think it was to get bought out to benefit their sharedholders. Now I'm beginning to think it was to artificially inflate their stock price so the insiders can cash out, before they reveal their non-existent legal case and the company crashes permanently. Good 'ol fashioned screw-the-shareholders maneuver... and after all their talk about "doing what's right for the shareholders"?

-j

...and gals he's previously worked with. Go and read some of the AC posts from employees of the companies that D'ohl has previously tra^H^H^Hmanaged. Sobering stuff.

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.

His opponents appear to be Free Software proponents opposing his ties with Microsoft, including making sure that Microsoft is represented at Open Source Conferences and RMS is NOT. I don't know much about this guy, but the referenced article makes him look pretty mean evil and nasty. I'm not sure I 100% agree with RMS on everything, but I think if he is sounding a call to warning it makes sense to wonder why. RMS a Microsoftie? Chyaahh.. Monkeys.. etc... :P

Perhaps Mr. Stinko should give Microsoft a page or two, linked from his announcement, to explain how great Microsoft's shared source and government source initiatives are, and how Microsoft is really embracing open sourcing, without the troubles of uncontrolled changes to code, and how much better this is for the military.

One great quote:

It's like Exxon assisting to a Green Peace conference...

btw, since your first failures (see first link, and google it, I think Roblimo had more on this) in trying to set something up to profit off of open source as an attorney, how goes your latest effort Mr. Stinko?

Perhaps Mr. Stinko should give Microsoft a page or two, linked from his announcement, to explain how great Microsoft's shared source and government source initiatives are, and how Microsoft is really embracing open sourcing, without the troubles of uncontrolled changes to code, and how much better this is for the military.

One great quote:

It's like Exxon assisting to a Green Peace conference...

btw, since your first failures (see first link, and google it, I think Roblimo had more on this) in trying to set something up to profit off of open source as an attorney, how goes your latest effort Mr. Stinko?

You're are probably right about the IP space being fine for the number of actual computers, but I wanted to respond to this point:

I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China

The CIA says 48.5 million users. I see no reason why they'd lie. The figure may be inflated a little, but it's probably ballpark accurate.

Your own link (first one) states 1% of China has a computer. That's ~10 million computers. But Hong Kong alone (technically part of China, listed separately in the stats on that link) has 7 million people - and 29% have computers in their household.

The abundance of (literally thousands) of internet cafes probably helps as well. People over there will certainly share access (ie: one PC per household of six / one PC at a cafe may have 8 different users a day) - but each person still counts towards being a user of the internet.

45.8 million internet users in China is not an unrealistic figure.

Also, note that China has an official Linux distribution: Red Flag Linux (english website | review). They also make their own CPU, the Dragon, a MIPS clone originally designed for the Chinese military.

and in other news... every other city on the planet is using Microsoft.

No, that's not true. A couple of other cities running Linux:

• Turku, Finland (Linux continues onward march in land of its birth)
• Largo, Florida, US (Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions)

By the way, a lot is happening in developing countries. On May 22nd, I had the opportunity to attend the publication seminar of the interesting Free as in Education research report by Niranjan Rajani, sponsored by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Other writers published in the study are Cesar Brod (Brazil), Frederick Noronha (India) and Nico Coetzee (South Africa). Also attending the seminar, among many others, was Edgar Villanueva (Congressman, Peru), who sent the famous response letter to Microsoft, giving a talk on "Legal and Other Experiences in Promoting FLOSS in Peru".

But cities are not the only ones interested in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), of course. For example, what do you like the government of South Africa open source software web site at http://www.oss.gov.za/? Their Government OSS Strategy Document (in PDF format) could be interesting reading.

As a famous cybersecurity researcher, I have access to news articles that are impeccably fresh.

Understanding the Micro$haft-SCO connection
SCO Group drops old Caldera name - .com.com: isn't that a funny domain name?
German Linux association may drop SCO as member
Thousands say 'SCO Sue Me'

As a famous cybersecurity researcher, you should believe what I tell you.

Yeah, the ASP loophole that was noticed a few years ago. Last I heard, RMS was working on the next version of the GPL (v3) that would close this loophole.

Sometime. Eventually.

GPLv3 may take even longer than Hurd. :)

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/02/10/23/1247 236.shtml?tid=4

Zdnet
NewsForge

Here's my comments on the Largo story, latest post on Newsforge, which is actually a side story on Mandrake's version of ltsp, but which references the Largo story.

My comments are repeated below, since no one answered on Newsforge. I, and I'm sure others would like to see answers to these questions from people with experience on this part of it. Especially since I know companies that would move sooner if they can avoid any licensing fees, like the citrix licensing, which Largo does use:

The article is over a week old. Other sites already linked it as news a week ago.

As for the scaling question, some of the posters at the story site are talking about maxing out at about 20-25 users or so, depending on hardware. Yet this is similar at what Largo Florida is doing, though I believe they are using citrix. So can someone explain how the dudes at Largo are putting 150-200 users, and can handle about 400 users on one server if the second one goes down? That's what the article states. I checked the specs on the hardware they're using for that performance. The servers are basically PII-400 dualies with a lot of ram. But the other examples of the ltsp project and the other story are using newer hardware, with GB ram specs, and much lower user numbers. What's up?

Can someone supply some real world numbers for the following setups? Assume a gigabyte ethernet card for the server, fast ethernet for the terminals, and a switch capable of feeding the gigabyte ethernet server card in all the examples and no citrix:

1. A server equipped with an AMD XP-3000 cpu, and 2 GB DDR Ram?

2. Same as 1, with 3 GB Ram?

3. Same as 1, with 4 GB Ram?

4 A server equipped with dual AMD MP-2800 cpus, and 2 GB DDR Ram?

5. Same as 4, with 3 GB Ram?

6. Same as 4 with 4 GB Ram?

7. If the dual boards can handle 4 GB per cpu, same as 4, with 8 GB Ram?

Let's leave the opteron's, the jokingly inferior, overpriced pentiums, the jokingly expensive xeons, and other (sledgehammer, air hammers, hammer's hammers) pipe dreams out for now. Let's also assume a raid disk setup that is not the bottleneck in this setup.

So how many terminals are we talking about? Using a free software solution? Without citrix? Is citrix mandatory? Any way around it? What difference would citrix make in the above examples, and can someone throw in ballpark licensing costs for 5 users, 10 users, 25 users, 50 users, 100 users, 500 users or similar breakdowns within these points?

I can convert a small business right away if I can avoid citrix and other recurring licensing costs. My relative can start talking to the non-profit where he works in the it department, with the 400 or so seats they have. They are already trying red hat in a few of their small satellite offices for file serving/print serving /connectivity to the main office, and for voicemail and a few other apps. But they are heavily dependent on citrix for their windows based dumb terminals at their central office.

If they can be shown a solution with linux and without citrix, and without the recurring licensing costs and audit preparedness costs/risks, I'm sure they'll jump on it.

Here's my comments on the Largo story, latest post on Newsforge, which is actually a side story on Mandrake's version of ltsp, but which references the Largo story.

My comments are repeated below, since no one answered on Newsforge. I, and I'm sure others would like to see answers to these questions from people with experience on this part of it. Especially since I know companies that would move sooner if they can avoid any licensing fees, like the citrix licensing, which Largo does use:

The article is over a week old. Other sites already linked it as news a week ago.

As for the scaling question, some of the posters at the story site are talking about maxing out at about 20-25 users or so, depending on hardware. Yet this is similar at what Largo Florida is doing, though I believe they are using citrix. So can someone explain how the dudes at Largo are putting 150-200 users, and can handle about 400 users on one server if the second one goes down? That's what the article states. I checked the specs on the hardware they're using for that performance. The servers are basically PII-400 dualies with a lot of ram. But the other examples of the ltsp project and the other story are using newer hardware, with GB ram specs, and much lower user numbers. What's up?

Can someone supply some real world numbers for the following setups? Assume a gigabyte ethernet card for the server, fast ethernet for the terminals, and a switch capable of feeding the gigabyte ethernet server card in all the examples and no citrix:

1. A server equipped with an AMD XP-3000 cpu, and 2 GB DDR Ram?

2. Same as 1, with 3 GB Ram?

3. Same as 1, with 4 GB Ram?

4 A server equipped with dual AMD MP-2800 cpus, and 2 GB DDR Ram?

5. Same as 4, with 3 GB Ram?

6. Same as 4 with 4 GB Ram?

7. If the dual boards can handle 4 GB per cpu, same as 4, with 8 GB Ram?

Let's leave the opteron's, the jokingly inferior, overpriced pentiums, the jokingly expensive xeons, and other (sledgehammer, air hammers, hammer's hammers) pipe dreams out for now. Let's also assume a raid disk setup that is not the bottleneck in this setup.

So how many terminals are we talking about? Using a free software solution? Without citrix? Is citrix mandatory? Any way around it? What difference would citrix make in the above examples, and can someone throw in ballpark licensing costs for 5 users, 10 users, 25 users, 50 users, 100 users, 500 users or similar breakdowns within these points?

I can convert a small business right away if I can avoid citrix and other recurring licensing costs. My relative can start talking to the non-profit where he works in the it department, with the 400 or so seats they have. They are already trying red hat in a few of their small satellite offices for file serving/print serving /connectivity to the main office, and for voicemail and a few other apps. But they are heavily dependent on citrix for their windows based dumb terminals at their central office.

If they can be shown a solution with linux and without citrix, and without the recurring licensing costs and audit preparedness costs/risks, I'm sure they'll jump on it.

hmm, yes I understand the irony of you plagiarizing my comment, when I was arguing against credit being visible in software.. But you could have at least provided source code or documentation countaining the credits. Of course, I didn't license my comment and just put it in the public domain, so I guess I was asking for it.

In any case, MY comment got modded up to 5, even though you posted it. Which does in fact boost my ego. Not what I was aiming for in writing it on Newsforge as an AC, but I'll accept it. More proof that you don't need credit for something you did in order for it to boost your ego, you just need to see it used and have people approve of it.

Speaking of giving credit, this comment was copied and pasted from MY comment on Newsforge. Are you that pathetic that you can't come up with your own ideas?

If you use the cheapest configuration, maybe, but data is BETTER protected when it's on a central location that can be easily backed up. Also, certain RAID levels as well as totally mirrored data storage is quite viable (look at sgi's failsafe configurations - hot swappable components, redundant servers that talk to each other so that when the main one goes down, the second one takes over, etc.).

Is it expensive? Sure it is, but it's no more expensive, hardware wise (a GOOD diskless system can be $1000 or more, although you can get significantly cheaper), than desktops all around. But it can also be a lot cheaper, depending on the configuration, and it's a lot cheaper and easier to maintain - there's only one "main" system - or two, or four - in a client/server environment there's X workstations (one for everybody) + Y servers.

Moreover, with Unix, you have the option of client/server and thin clients - and you can even intermix the two, without any extra hardware or software costs.

It really depends on what you're doing, but for office administration (email, memos, some reports and spreadsheets) the thin client model is hard to beat, IMO.

Now, in your post, where I work we all share huge arrays anyway - so we are still stuck if one goes down. We might be able to run our software (which had to be installed on each workstation separately - another big cost, both installing and upgrading), but we can't access our projects, so it's a moot point. To date, this has happened once (several years ago, and we learned from our mistake), we have redundant systems and haven't lost a byte in years. On the upside, the projects are backed up several times a week, and then permanently when they are finished. Then we also have the flexibility of being able to move around to other workstations to access our data. Using windows, with all local storage, you'd have to map 50 drives to access each individual machine.

Bottom line is the needs dictate which model is better, and thin client would work in a lot of places where people are throwing money away on client/server approaches.

I'll leave you with this article the Roblimo himself wrote. It's almost two years old, I'd love to see a followup.

Here's an interesting article from 2000 written by someone who actually had a dialogue with RMS about the subject.

It actually links to an even older Slashdot article about the same subject.

The basic story was a developer wanted to release his product as open source but didn't want to see someone grab it, set up a competing site and not have to share code.

That story links to a SourceForge.net forum thread which is now offline, or at least "restricted to members of this group" (?). I believe they had similar issues back when they published their code.

In the end, looks like nothing was ever resolved...

Maybe he meant Forged News.

Well then, just fire up your Beowulf cluster, render the pixels, and view the movie when it arrives much later. Wait, that's been done.

Does anyone know where to get the transcripts of the rest of the meetting. If this was a public meetting, then there should be transcripts of the entire meetting, not just the "...lightly edited..." version posted on newsforge. If people are to be properly informed to make good decisions, then we should have all of the facts (Not just what newsforge puts up). I would like to know what questions were asked at the end of his "testimony", and how they were answered. Plus what the hell does lightly edited mean. What was left out, or even better what was added to the "transcripts". IMHO, the topic and susbsequent newsforge article seems kind of ironic.

I know how many posts I've read about people bashing the intelegence level of Floridians, so I'm figuring that if they can do it, New Yorkers should be able to figure it out too!

By our own Roblimo, no less: Replacing Microsoft Exchange with a Linux-based solution.

not ready

Apache has always been the leading web server - IIS was released by MS as a knee jerk reaction to it's dominance (which is probably why it's like Swiss cheese).

Perhaps he really meant PHP Overtaking ASP which is the first Open Source project I know of to come from behind.

Also interesting to watch is whether Eclipse eclipse Visual Studi...

Come on, it's obviously an april fools joke. I can't believe you all fell for it. "Red Hat Linux"? It's obviusly just a piss take of Yellow Hat Linux. They even ripped off the logo.

And according to
this article, Yellow Hat from the Dalai Lama.

I agree that this is a good way to go -- using a update tool that can use mirrors, it's what YellowDog does, for the new version they have apt and yum.

Personally I use apt with RedHat and YellowDog, but I might try yum some time.

One of the best reasons for a distrubted, free, updates system is that it aviods the potential problems of people not updating.

In the medium term using P2P for ISO's and updates might make most sense, though I also think it's cool that people do want to pay for Linux :-)

Between this article, and this article; I expect to wake up monday and find out this weekend never happened!

Let's try...(Note to moderators: this is a joke!)

RMS was asked to speak at the conference but refused. Newsforge just published a statement from him explaining why. You can read it here.

This way of doing things will lose one of the benefits of going GPL from day one. Since the code will be closed source for a period you can't build on top of already open software (unless lgpl), this means having to reinvent the wheel, which means higher cost.

On the other hand if the software is open source from day one customers will be less inclined to pay, profit suffers and the software won't be made.

Would you like some egg with your chicken?

So suppose we make a more company friendly GPL? (FSF probably won't like it so a lot will have to be created from scratch, but less that for the proposed scheme), Requiering that source be disclosed after a profit threshold is reached won't work since a company could cheat by setting the threshold redicoulously high. What might work is some kind of time-delayed GPL e.g "If you modify this source and make binaries the source must be provided no later that three months later". That way the a free softwrae author can be sure that nothing based on his code will stay closed forever, and companies could benefit from already developed code. Still it would probably depend a lot on the free software community and their willingness to change their lisences, and you can bet you'll see different time limits depending on what the authour of a piece of code thinks is acceptable. But if something like this is implemented I believe both business and the community could benefit. (except for evil monopolies ;) )

This sounds so much like the argument that once a software company has made enough money on a version of software that they should/could give it away or open source it so that people who would have never bought it can benefit from it.

The part that gets me is that there has to be a "trusted entity" that ensures that the release occurs once this mysterious threshold is reached.

I think there is a great parallel here in the pharmaceutical industry. After all, we all know that drug companies don't fight for extended patent rights to drugs that improve peoples lives. They are always real nice about making their "threshold" amount then releasing their drug(s) to generic and whole-saler manufacturers so that the majority of the people can benefit.

It is not ALWAYS about money.

I've been shaking my head trying to figure-out how to accomplish something like this. O-STEP is a taking a well thought-out approach that just MIGHT work. The real problem is getting lobbying money from vendors like IBM to start pushing programs like this. We need an Open Source Lobbying Group (OSLG?). A group dedicated to raising money and pushing legitimate legislation toward balancing the playing field for companies providing Open Source products. In my eyes some of the possible legislation would include tax-exempt status for companies or portions of companies, or some of the non-profit's umbrella of protection. Grant programs are another necessary step, in my opinion. Governments needs to start paying some development costs for software its people or even companies need, and stop lining the pockets of a particular abusive monopoly power in the industry.
So, in short O-STEP is a GOOD-STEP; but more needs to be done in this arena.

People don't release code open source as some kind of embarrassing step-daughter of commercial business models. They release open source either because they need market share for some related idea/product/service, or they simply want community contributions. And why do other people start using and contributing to open source projects? Because of its longevity: it doesn't matter what Linus or Stallman or whoever does, I can be certain that the Linux kernel and the GNU C compiler will be around, and if there are eno

RMS was asked to speak at the conference but refused. Newsforge just published a statement from him explaining why. You can read it here.

Not that this is on topic by any means, but here is a response.

Of the established solutions for compiling Perl into executables, at the forefront are IndigoStar's Perl2EXE and ActiveState's PerlApp. Both are commercial products. I've not had a reasonable impetus to buy either, but programs like AmphetaDesk, an RSS aggregator written in Perl, make impressive use of Perl2EXE. There may be a point in the future at which I might happily buy it--it just depends on the end I'm trying to meet with a given project. Sometimes preaching the freedom-of-software concept makes us forget that things can be worth money...

There's also perlcc, which comes standard with Perl, but it's in a "very experimental" stage and not recommended for production code.

So, there are options.

Of course, you aren't being a zealot by mentioning the advantages of one language over another. I've enjoyed reading all of the (reasonable) point/counterpoint comparisons between Python and Perl. I personally don't do enough programming in any of the areas where Python surpasses Perl's usefulness to make a serious switch. Perhaps in the future, I will.

What doesn't make sense is one's assumption that because he writes code in one language instead of another he is somehow of a superior race of beings. If there's any measure of superiority to be had, it more appropriately belongs to those who are familiar with (or even those who are willing to learn) more languages and environments and all of the necessary tricks and idioms to write an intelligent solution within any one of them.

But even if this is something that properly defines one's superiority, making a nuisance of oneself screaming about said superiority does an incredible lot to negate it.

Generic segue, an article about the BOFH becoming passé caught my eye today...

The Case For OpenOffice

Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions (part 1 of 2)

Largo loves Linux more than ever (part 2 of 2)

How To Run a Microsoft-Free Shop

Reasons to Avoid Microsoft (summary and links)

Microsoft loses showdown in Houston

Making a Living Saving the Government Money

Those are just some of the articles I've saved. If you wade thru a /. search, you may find more. I found those particularly interesting because some of them give details of companies or goverment agencies who have moved to Linux (away from MS), and their difficulties and successes doing so.

The Case For OpenOffice

Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions (part 1 of 2)

Largo loves Linux more than ever (part 2 of 2)

How To Run a Microsoft-Free Shop

Reasons to Avoid Microsoft (summary and links)

Microsoft loses showdown in Houston

Making a Living Saving the Government Money

Those are just some of the articles I've saved. If you wade thru a /. search, you may find more. I found those particularly interesting because some of them give details of companies or goverment agencies who have moved to Linux (away from MS), and their difficulties and successes doing so.

The Case For OpenOffice

Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions (part 1 of 2)

Largo loves Linux more than ever (part 2 of 2)

How To Run a Microsoft-Free Shop

Reasons to Avoid Microsoft (summary and links)

Microsoft loses showdown in Houston

Making a Living Saving the Government Money

Those are just some of the articles I've saved. If you wade thru a /. search, you may find more. I found those particularly interesting because some of them give details of companies or goverment agencies who have moved to Linux (away from MS), and their difficulties and successes doing so.

I may read this, but I certainly get more of my information from elsewhere now. Ever used NewsForge? It's nice and quiet, and seems to actually care about delivering the news, while it can still be called 'new'.

I just came across this short article by ESR over at NewsForge.
From the article: ... But it's also deeply stupid to piss off that community like this, unless you think you're never going to have to hire programmers again. SCO is behaving as though it thinks its IP portfolio is the only asset it has left.

Sorry if this already has been posted. Havn't seen it here though.