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Although the source is freely available, I have to agree will Richard Stallman's assessment, that the APSL is not as open as the GPL.
The point I think is the most important (in regards to this topic) is the "Possibility of revocation at any time". Which means that even if HFS+ is developed to perfection by the community, Apple can make it proprietary again and start charging fees?

As they say, "The Devil is in the details", which is why it's good that XFS is under the GNU General Public License.

A lot of free *nix-like OSses are doing name resolution quite well without glibc, thank you very much...
Actually, I'm quite certain that the glibc folks borrowed quite a few ideas from 4.3BSD or thereabouts. See also the resolv.conf man page.

Let's give props to all the altruists out there.

Stallman, Torvalds, all those guys from the CSRG, and everyone else who's ever made an effort to see their work and sources distributed 'free.'

The licenses are well and good; they ensure other people stick to the intentions of the authors. But what we need to honor is the initiative these guys took, and the sacrifices they made, to ensure their code would be out there for all. Those sacrifices might be 'small' -- arguments and lawsuits, not shed blood -- but they were still made in the spirit of altruism, so we ourselves wouldn't have to.

Today is GNU's special day. Stallman's breakthrough was in codifying a system -- indeed, an economy -- that ensures only altruists can benefit. That's some brilliant logic; he puzzled it out and wrote it up so that we wouldn't have to. The GPL is 'code' of its own sort, and GNU was the project that produced it, coordinating attention and 'patches' from many lawyerly eyes even before its first 'run' in the courts.

Let's say thanks for all that work -- be it coding or convincing -- that we didn't have to do ourselves.

Thanks.

Let's agree to stand behind anyone and everyone who gets up and does something for the benefit of humanity.

Props.

Several of the BSDs (though I'm not sure which, FreeBSD and NetBSD maybe) have ancestries which can be traced back to real unix.

However, officially no contemporary BSD contains a single line of original Unix code - at least that's the official outcome of a former lawsuit rather similar to todays SCO issue. Incidentally, this lawsuite happened in the early days of the FreeBSD project, which also lost its prime developer some time earlier. It took about a year for them to get back to a usable system with all offending code removed. It was also in the time of the beginning of the rise of Linux (early to mid nineties) - some BSD old-timers still like to muse about whether BSD would be dominant today rather than Linux if this legal battle hadn't happened.

Helevius

So either everyone else is lying to themselves, or just you. Micro vs. monolithic kernels is a trade off (simplicity vs. speed), but with a good design, monolithic kernels are just as stable and modular. Linus won the flamewar, and Linux is winning in the real world.

It seems that open source community's stance on this is "either it's fully open or we don't support it". Sorry, but in the world where companies have to make money they have to hide some of their IP in closed source code.

Actually, I think hardware companies could probably find a better revenue source. Like, oh, I don't know, selling hardware? It's so crazy it just might work!

The University's suit claimed that USL had failed in their obligation to provide due credit to the University for the use of BSD code in System V as required by the license that they had signed with the University.

...

The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.

Now, all legal issues are solved and there is nothing the BSD's can be sued about :)

The fact is, there is nothing in the System V codebase worth adding to Linux. I don't know if System V has even been actively worked on in the last couple of decades.

If you read the last bit of the article, the dude is claiming that SCO has the right to demand royalties on all distributions of Linux, and implies that they would be demanding licensing fees if any of the distros were making money.

Finally, he claims that System V is the basis of all the OS'es not developed by Microsoft. This is patently false. BSD was already sued for IP infringements on System V code, and when all was said and done, BSD had to re-implement three or four source files. That was back in 1992. More

The vast majority of OSS developers who do not "code OSS professionally" participate in a gift economy, a system where people compete for ethereal quantities like reputation.

It works in OSS because reputation gives people jobs, money for speeches, and fame. And we know geeks like fame.

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. Monolithic versus micro kernels have nothing to do with how things are linked, static or dynamic. It has everything to do with whether you call subroutines directly (in the case of monolithic) versus message passing to separate processes (in the case of microkernels). Whether things are linked at compile time or run-time is totally irrelevent.

If OS/X changed Mach to be link-based rather than message-based, then it's no longer a microkernel. It doesn't matter what it originally was.

If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Linus himself.

It's being done by IBM, anyone would think it's biased? :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of IBM, and IBM has really, really made a JDK multi-times out-performing SUN's JDK.

However, I'd believe the selection of 'opponents' are simily..unfair. :)

Kaffe is surely an easy-pick. Yes it's the only GPL JDK out there but many people(at least Java developers here) would avoid kaffe as it has a fatal security flaws that kaffe team doesn't seem to want to solve it. :/ (We call Kaffe 'MS' JDK'2, not just for humor, but it's really the case. ^_^)

Even the GNU people know gcj is slow, even GNU guys know it; but speed is not a real issue for gcj, it's basically a starting point for all implementation - or reference implementation as we like to call it. We would pick a commercial java compiler if we need it.

SUN's JDK, well...you know what I think it just what you think - IT'S SLOW! Yes, we all know that. :D

Nevertheless I think developer's work is doing a great job here, it confirms something everybody know - that IBM's JDK is fast, and that's it. I don't see it could conclude the performance of native compiled java programs. Unless they include all other commercial java compilers into testing, I wouldn't think we have reached a conclusion yet. :)

On June 29th, FreeBSD Services Ltd. announced release of a bootable DVD containing FreeBSD. You can buy the 9GB DVD at http://www.freebsd-services.com/. There has also been some discussion of selling a FreeBSD DVD at FreeBSD Mall. A Japan retailer is offering NetBSD on DVD. When will OpenBSD follow? I expect there will be difficulties, as Theo copyrighted the CD layout - that's why you won't find it on Linuxiso.org. That's too bad, as an OpenBSD DVD would be quite convenient.

We relate that to an analysis of the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away.

Everything created by the Feds exists in the public domain, yes; but public domain works can be used in GPLed programs.

But the reverse is not true; a GPL'd program is not in the public domain. Placing something in the public domain means that it's there for people to use as they see fit, including modifying it and charging for the copyrighted, modified version -- the original is still in the public domain, of course.

The GPL explicitly prevents this. The viral nature of the GPL means that modifications to GPL'd programs as also GPL'd. (The intentions of the GPLs creators seem to be that this even applies to linkable modules. Although Linux has a permission, courtesy of LT, for things like device drivers. See here for comments on this.)

So, if the government wants to create a modified version of a GPLd program, for the public good, there's a potential conflict.

This is a good example of where the use of free in the FSF's definition of free software becomes rather questionable; it's not so free as ye olde traditional public domain. The GPL provides a benefit in terms of preventing incompatibilities, drift and hidden extensions. Something which is a good thing. It also prevents free use of publicly available information, which is not so good and something public institutions need to keep a wary eye on.

Good news for you: there is now a very pretty GUI version of Nethack called GnomeHack. If you love Nethack, you will want this!

This has been folded into the official Nethack distribution, so it no longer exists as a separate project.

If you use RPMs, do a Google search for "GnomeHack" and you will find lots of sites that have them. If you are a Debian user, you can get this with apt-get.

Here's a review of GnomeHack.

steveha

Here.

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1. It lacks the BSoD (even given the attempt to indicate compatibility with BSoD-enabled systems through a misleading name).
   
2. Its mascot is a cute, little devil. That's DEVIL, folks. Just ask Phil Foglio! It's SATAN! Prince of lies! (Hmmm... I feel a filk coming on: "BSD Went Down to Georgia", based on the old urban legend about the woman who walked into a diner in texas wearing the Daemon on a shirt)
   
3. It's too fast to promote conventional chip design bloat.
   
4. GNOME doesn't run as stably on BSD as it does on Linux, and we can't figure out how to load background images if we don't have GNOME! (xload...WHAT?)
   
5. Two words: Splash Screen. Where's the cute flying widgets in space while my diagnostics are being packaged up and thrown into /dev/null? Or, at least the smiling computer icon.