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Sounds a lot like the premeds at my college.

But seriously folks, if we want a REAL profile of "J. Random Hacker" (Programmer), we should look at the Jargon file, Appendix B. It's got about the best description there is.

-Chris

Perutz's conclusion is that many people previously involved in bio-warfare projects are now sowing FUD to enhance their own prestige and to generate opportunities in spurious counterterrorism (as Henry Sokolski notes below, fears of terrorism have generated $10 billion annually in spending by the U.S. government alone).

Perutz quotes an article by Henry Sokolski, the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, saying:

Last year President Clinton announced the US would spend $10 billion on countering terrorism, including biological and chemical threats, for fiscal year 2000. Would there be better things to spend such large sums of money on? As for biological attacks worldwide, seventy have occurred in the last century causing nine deaths, but only eighteen of these seventy attacks were made by terrorists. There are risks not only in underestimating the chemical and biological domestic terrorist threat, but in overestimating it as well.

Look who slipped through the moderation net.

Since you obviously feel there are fallacies in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, why don't you post the article? I was actually referring to The Magic Cauldron, which you'd have known had you followed the link.

Not that there aren't flaws in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I just didn't think they were relevant to this discussion.

Look who slipped through the moderation net.

Since you obviously feel there are fallacies in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, why don't you post the article? I was actually referring to The Magic Cauldron, which you'd have known had you followed the link.

Not that there aren't flaws in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I just didn't think they were relevant to this discussion.

Look who slipped through the moderation net.

Since you obviously feel there are fallacies in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, why don't you post the article? I was actually referring to The Magic Cauldron, which you'd have known had you followed the link.

Not that there aren't flaws in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I just didn't think they were relevant to this discussion.

I actually like this trend of freeing old software. While it would undoubtedly make us all feel better if all software was free, there are good reasons to keep a program closed-source. If the environment changes (and it does) then the advantages of closed-source can evaporate, leaving it in the best interests of everyone to open-source it. If it works, or contains worthwhile code, people will use it. If not, it will die. Either way, it's all upside.

I think one of the best points in this model is that you no longer have to support clients that are ridiculously back-level. Publish the source code and have them fix it themselves or pay some random hacker to do so.

ESR wrote an interesting essay on this subject.

Then you have the "year" releases of other products, and then you see the "clearer" year versioning scheme fail as you see people talking about "windows 97" (since a big "97" pops up when they run Word or Excel from Office97) or Windows 2000 (same thing, except they bought Office 2000). It makes knowing *what* version people have a nightmare.

I think this is more of a PEBKAC issue than a versioning issue, but what you say is true. Perhaps it would be best if Operating Systems (defined as complete working kernel, and associated software) would be year versioned, with individual parts of it independanly versioned.

IE:
"To upgrade from GNU/Linux Slackware 98 to GNU/Linux Slackware 99 you need to get X version kernel, X version this, " etc..

However, for multiple updates it becomes bad.
Slackware 31/11/1999 anyone? It still is not a good solution. Numeric versioning provides too much independance from dates (and knowning if it is updated), and date versioning provides too close a tie to the date (and makes frequent updates problematic).
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This thread is officially over.

(If you don't know what Godwin's Law is, look it up in the Jargon File.

Ha, ha, only serious. Yes, I was saying that in a tong-in-cheek way.

For example: the basic problem is that people are dishonest. The Wrong solution is to use passwords and such; the Right Thing would be to make everyone perfect. But I am not Richard Stallman to continue using 'rms' or the empty string as a password because that is the Right Thing. I use passwords even though they are the Wrong Thing. So, obviously, I can only be joking when I make this claim.

Still, it should at least make yourself wonder if there isn't a better way to deter people from cheating, like, try to persuade them that it isn't fun and that it spoils others' pleasure, or ban them if they are caught at it. Or some such thing. I'm not saying it will work, but I think it should at least be considered before jumping to solutions like are being proposed.

In any case, the essential point is that a binary loader just makes it slightly more difficult to cheat. I'm sure someone can easily come up with an (open source?) program that will spoof the loader in a systematic way. (As I pointed out, all it takes is a ptrace().)

``Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.'' -- Salvor Hardin

On point (d), we will have to agree to disagree. Situations in which small-group peer review of closed source works are so rare that they make a perversely bad guide to development practice.

I think I'm a moderator now. If I have the capability when I finish this reply, I'm going to moderate you up.

September was the month when all the computer newbies would appear. Look it up in the Jargon File - Septem ber That Never Ended
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I doubt that most open source programmers do it for the money, at least not initially. There's the canonical motivation of
scratching the developer's personal itch. There are others. Eric Raymond has rightly called open source a gift culture. That is not the only facit of open source economics, but it is an important one. There are some of us, myself included, who want to be heard. That is, to help shape the future directions of software in general. Open source is the single biggest lever out there. If you can offer enough help to see your own good ideas get into a project, there are plenty of open source projects that will gladly have you. And there is glory. I don't mind finding my name on a project web site.

I wouldn't turn down an offer of shares in a new open source company, and I certainly wouldn't mind if it made me independently wealthy. But I don't expect it. Smaller amounts of money from open source companies can still do a lot to motivate me. They can host project web sites, mailing lists and CVS servers. They can give credit to contributers on web sites and in manuals. They can send CD ROMS, t-shirts and bumper stickers. Or even, as the above mentioned article says about VA Linux and Eric Raymond, they can provide a location for open source developers to use to stay in touch and maybe occasionally provide a necessary piece of hardware to keep some person or project going. The bottom line is that I am unlikely to get a big pile of cash for anything I do. So what? Host my project and send me a copy of your distribution. It costs less and funds the goals we share.

Actually, this would sound like a really good open source project to do "bazaar" style. After all, more eyes make all bugs shallow.

Anyone with any thoughts on this?

Oh ye of little faith! I see that Tower has truly cast his pearls before swine. Fundamental principles are laid before you and identified as such, and you accuse the moderator of an input error!!! When will the world finally accept the truth???

On a more serious note, I believe that informative is a wonderful moderator adjective for that post; if nothing else it exposes those who are unaware to the "darktron" theory of light bulb functionality. I should add that one of the proofs of this theory is the black residue in burnt out light bulbs - the bulb is saturated with darktrons and cannot absorb any more!

And while this rates right up there with the "magic smoke" theory of computers, it is part of our geek culture. A part that we should cherish. Informative, indeed.

"The scientific mind is open, if not fully ventilated."
-Martin Gardner, from Scientific American

And on nerd vs. geek, since I'm not a native English speaker, I'm not that good at those fine differences - sorry.

One way to look at it is that a nerd is someone who thinks he's cool or wants to be cool, but most definitely is not cool, while a geek is someone who really doesn't give a damn one way or the other.

The Geek Code website (no link because I don't remember where it is/was) had another "nerd vs. geek" definition. The Jargon File should also have some useful info regarding nerds and geeks.

My Ghod! They must be writing the microcode in Intercal!!!

Donald Knuth has also had a profound impact on spiritual side of computing and programming. Programming wouldn't be what it is today without him, and he has always kept the ``Art'' of programming foremost in his mind, in front of the ``technique''.

He gave a lecture series entitled God and Computers at MIT from 6/10/99 to 17/11/99. Dr. Dobbs is carrying the Real Audio version of it on their technetcast site. Definitely worth a listen!

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Donald Knuth has also had a profound impact on spiritual side of computing and programming. Programming wouldn't be what it is today without him, and he has always kept the ``Art'' of programming foremost in his mind, in front of the ``technique''.

He gave a lecture series entitled God and Computers at MIT from 6/10/99 to 17/11/99. Dr. Dobbs is carrying the Real Audio version of it on their technetcast site. Definitely worth a listen!

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The truth of it all is that IBM's present business practices and policies do not lend themselves very well for being a company that interacts with an open source community. IBM has a harden protocol that is very Cathedral in nature. Even for source code they have released it has been a very Cathedral model in which it is presented.

Take install packages for instance, I can take RedHat's RPM application and modify it and contribute it back and RedHat takes my modifications seriously for being part of their offical package (and RedHat takes the time to honor the licensing for it as well). If IBM released the AIX installp today, I strongly believe that it would be in similar nature to their other source code releases. Unlike RedHat which releases code for peer review and seems interested in getting code back, IBM seems to publish the word of IBM (which just happens to be in source code form for that occation). IBM, as a matter of company protocol, is not prepair to actual interact with an open source community.

With the ADSM LGPL violation, IBM didn't take my feedback seriously. One of the offical maintainers for one of the most used kernel drivers took my patches seriously and so did Linus, but IBM is no Linus in software maintance philosphy. Instead, under the normal IBM business model, the already reported ADSM LGPL violation would continue unless in a satistfaction survey a signifcate number or key customers reported that the ADSM LGPL violation effected their view of IBM. Since the satistfaction surveys are written targetting management and not developers, it is highly unlike that the violation would be brought up in enough surveys for IBM to ever take notice. This is not a model of "interaction" that I think is approbate for a company claiming now to be embrassing Linux and open source. Without a shift in the IBM prospective to the greater community also being key developers towards IBM achieving it's goals and IBM treating those external people as such then I believe IBM will continue to do more harm than good. Don't get me wrong, IBM is good at what it does but right now it's attempt at being a good member of an open source community is like an large triangle peg being pushed into a circular hole.

Sun might not being playing well with the greater open source community either. However, I think Sun Microsystems is more likely to attempt to take the open source community seriously as a matter of company protocol than IBM is. Sun, like Netscape, may one day be walking among us in the Bazaar on a regular basis. But can IBM afford the chance of tarnishing it's image by coming out of the "true blue" ivory castle to walk among the common developers? At what point can I call IBM and tell them that they are violating the copyright held by me and other open source developers by violating the license and be taken seriously instead of being told "but your not using the client we provide for AIX or NT or Solaris or the other platforms we support" like Derik was so kind to point out? IBM will never treat an external developer as an equal and in that way they will never truely act as part of the community.

Yer a Wiccan, yippy, just say it, no need to beat around the bush and pretend your ashamed of it...

Me, I'm a Zen-Pagan-Taoist-Athiest-Discordian. I'll be visiting my parental units for "Christmas" on the 25th and have my friends from the Circle of Laughing Thunder over for a Yule celebration on the 26th. (That turned out to be the most convenient day for everyone, even though the Solstice and a full moon fall on the 22nd.)

We're completely off-topic, so if anyone want to discuss further e-mail me. (Remove "spambefuddler-" from the address above.) Happy (insert-holiday-here)!

The MBAs out there probably read that and said, "there, but for the grace of Cobol, go I"

:-)
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For those of you who would like some history, check out this story. It's one of hackerdom's great stories about the last Real Programmers who hacked in assembly using vi and a toothpick....

C++

1.Not quite as good as getting a B-
2.Control language for submarines

C++ /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n.

Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to know what is and what is not legal-- the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" --ESR]
(Internal links omited. The complete entry is here.)

C++

1.Not quite as good as getting a B-
2.Control language for submarines

C++ /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n.

Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to know what is and what is not legal-- the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" --ESR]
(Internal links omited. The complete entry is here.)

Ah yes, the UNIX and "Open Source"(TM) misinformation campaign rolls forward.

... Whereas the predecessor to UNIX, Multics, a large project with heaps of developers failed miserably and never produced a working system. ...

From http://www.multicians.org/history.html
"6. Commercial announcement (1/73)"
It must not of been a working system.

You probably also think that UNIX was the first OS not written in assembler.

From http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/j argon/html/entry/Unix.html
... The turning point in Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974, making it the first source-portable OS. ...

From http://www.oreilly.com /catalog/opensources/book/raymond.html
... Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1974 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types. This had never been done before, and the implications were enormous. ...

From http://www.multicians.org/general.html #tag13
...
1.3.3. High-level language implementation

Multics was implemented in the PL/I language, which was then a new proposal by IBM. Only a small part of the operating system was implemented in assembly language. This was a radical idea at the time. ...

Linux as an OS certainly won't last forever, but in the long run Linus just might be remembered not for writing an OS but for creating a whole new kind of development process, one that isn't going away.

The whole idea of 'release early, release often', invite patches from everybody, and huge-team development was actually pretty different from the way even gnu worked at the time.

This is essentially a myth. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, ESR argues the merits of a "bazaar" model by contrasting it with a "cathedral" model of closed software development. The examples of "bazaar" development he presents are Linux and fetchmail to represent the "bazaar," and his example of a "cathedral" project is.... Emacs.

How's that again? Emacs is not an open source project? It does not invite patches from everybody? It does not incorporate contributions from an army of individual hackers? It has not made all its bugs shallow by offering its source code to millions of eyeballs?

The plain weirdness of this comparison still leaves me puzzled. What is it supposed to mean, in a paper whose thesis is the fundamental superiority of open source over closed source? That Emacs is essentially a closed-source project? That it has more in common with NT than it does with vi? These notions are absurd, but it is hard to draw a different conclusion.

The truth is that these development models are quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different. While Linux development is more frenetic than that of FSF mainstays like Emacs or GCC, nightly snapshots and frequent releases are only modest differences in style. They are essentially personality differences; even GNU and BSD projects include nightly snapshots, after all. They don't constitute a sea change in software design.

While no one invented the open source software ethic, it appears likely that Richard Stallman will get more credit than any other individual, which is IMHO as it should be. Many, many people created projects, but Stallman created the movement. More people became conscious of free software and open source as a philosophy through Project GNU than through any other source, Linux included. Linus didn't create the development process; Stallman did.

Linux as an OS certainly won't last forever, but in the long run Linus just might be remembered not for writing an OS but for creating a whole new kind of development process, one that isn't going away.

The whole idea of 'release early, release often', invite patches from everybody, and huge-team development was actually pretty different from the way even gnu worked at the time.

This is essentially a myth. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, ESR argues the merits of a "bazaar" model by contrasting it with a "cathedral" model of closed software development. The examples of "bazaar" development he presents are Linux and fetchmail to represent the "bazaar," and his example of a "cathedral" project is.... Emacs.

How's that again? Emacs is not an open source project? It does not invite patches from everybody? It does not incorporate contributions from an army of individual hackers? It has not made all its bugs shallow by offering its source code to millions of eyeballs?

The plain weirdness of this comparison still leaves me puzzled. What is it supposed to mean, in a paper whose thesis is the fundamental superiority of open source over closed source? That Emacs is essentially a closed-source project? That it has more in common with NT than it does with vi? These notions are absurd, but it is hard to draw a different conclusion.

The truth is that these development models are quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different. While Linux development is more frenetic than that of FSF mainstays like Emacs or GCC, nightly snapshots and frequent releases are only modest differences in style. They are essentially personality differences; even GNU and BSD projects include nightly snapshots, after all. They don't constitute a sea change in software design.

While no one invented the open source software ethic, it appears likely that Richard Stallman will get more credit than any other individual, which is IMHO as it should be. Many, many people created projects, but Stallman created the movement. More people became conscious of free software and open source as a philosophy through Project GNU than through any other source, Linux included. Linus didn't create the development process; Stallman did.

Madeleine Kahn, to my mind, was a "nerd actress" in that she usually played quirky people with above average intelligence, who saw things from an unusual angle. From what I saw of her "real self" on talk shows etc. she seemed to be the same in real life.

I expect that Madeleine Kahn will have been a favorite of J. Random Hacker as a recognized kindred spirit.

As such, her untimely passing is News for Nerds.

Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

the thing is so resource-hungry, you'll need access to mains power to run it for more than three minutes!

Wouldn't it just guarantee victory for our side if Symbian went open source? How come the hardware manufacturers don't realise this is in their interests? "The Magic Cauldron" makes it all fairly clear...
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According to the local Seattle news, the police have admitted to using tear gas on protesters. Some protesters have created human chains to block I-5 freeway entrances. The 20,000 person AFL-CIO march has been very peaceful, but a group of self-proclaimed anarachists are vandalizing downtown. There are about 30 "anarchists", dressed in black hooded sweatshirts and hiding behind gasmasks, smashing store windows (such as GAP and Starbacks) and spraypainting police cars and news cameras! They don't seem to have a cause or message; they just wanna have fun. One "anarachist" spoke with a news reporter and rambled about the Bush family being Nazis. Do we get to invoke Godwin's Law on these wanna-be anarchists? :-)

(Says www.tuxedo.org/~esr/guns/ipscc1.html :)

One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.

As you indicated, that is the classical man-month tenet, more formally known as Brooks Law. As ESR pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this doesn't hold true when people are working on a problem that they find interesting with a communications medium at least as good as the Internet. In the world of closed source, Brooks Law holds true, because when you throw money at a project, and hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project. You're getting developers who are interested in making a living. However,

isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?

For the most part, yes, but how much are they able to work on it? Most developers have to work on problems they are not interested in in order to make a living, and work on their interests in their own time. By adding funding to Mozilla, Red Hat presumably intends for Mozilla to do what Red Hat has done with Linux - find people who already find the problem interesting and are working on it, and pay them to work on problems they find interesting. Yes, they may work on things other than what you're hoping to get, but if done properly, they will still find the problems you want solved interesting and will continue working on them as well.

But just because it's the most obviously revolutionary thing happening doesn't make it the most revolutionary. What CmdrTaco and the boys are doing is pretty revolutionary too - to take another of today's stories, for example, it's the Slashdot effect which surges huge flows of traffic around the Web. It isn't the Times effect, the CNN effect or the BBC effect, and it isn't because these bodies, skilled and resourced at newsgathering as they are, have not managed to exploit this new medium in the way that Slashdot has.

What I'm suggesting is that Slashdot may be to Berners-Lee as The Times was to Caxton, or CNN has been to Logie Baird: the body which has most effectively discovered the formula to harness the new technology to journalism, and which will in the long run influence the way in which journalism on the medium is presented.

Of course I may be wrong here; I may be simply absurdly overestimating Slashdot's importance. But at the same time I can't help betting that there are executives in half the media coroprations in the world lying awake at night wondering how they let Andover get away with such a bargain, and executives at Andover lying awake at nights wondering what to do with it.

We all (I assume) believe this medium is powerful, and yet we're all continually being surprised by how powerful it is. And so, from time to time, we get surprised when stories like this blow up out of nowhere. This is another sort of Slashdot effect , a consequence of using a powerful technology when you don't have enough experience with it to know instinctively the potential consequences of your actions.

What I liked about this story is that it is Slashdot introspecting about Slashdot. Introspection is something which, as Eric Raymond has often pointed out, we in the open source movement don't do enough of. When what you're doing is revolutionary, when the waters which you are navigating are uncharted, if you don't think carefully about what you're doing you are likely to do much less well than you otherwise might.

So Rob (and everyone else who has contributed), don't be upset by accusations of self indulgence. Sometimes looking at what we're doing, trying to understand what we're doing, and, most importantly, trying to understand the consequences of what we're doing, are as important as doing it.

Viva la revoluçion!

Too late; it's already here. Ia ia Shub-Internet fhtagn!

Shub-Internet:

* Forces people to consume HARD-CORE PORN!
* Lures YOUNG KIDS to COMPLETE STRANGERS!
* CONS people out of their MONEY on E-BAY!
* Lets those evil CRYPTO-FREAKS conspire secretly!
* Forces your EMPLOYEES to do ZERO work in a day!

Quick! Ban the Internet!

When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.

Question: Does this mean that projects going open-source should be Alpha stage before recruitment begins? If not, then what stage would you call it when your project is ready for open-source?

Disclaimer: I am a /. newbie, so point me in the right direction if this question has already been asked...

paxx

There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't -- or don't -- inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any trap doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.

the third story on this page, to be precise. The page also details the MIT football-game hack described above.

You'd be meaning The Story of Mel then...

See the jargon file entry

Nikolai Bezroukov's article in First Monday, unfortunately, adds almost nothing useful to the debate. Instead, Mr. Bezroukov has constructed a straw man he calls "vulgar Raymondism" which bears so little resemblance to the actual content of my writings and talks that I have to question whether he has actually studied the work he is attacking. If "vulgar Raymondism" existed, I would be its harshest critic

One of the few references that I can find on the web is here in a 1990 paper.

Basically, this handwriting has been on the wall for well over a decade, and one can only hope that SGI recouped their investment in the first few years after purchasing Cray.

You should check out Fetchmail. Although I've never used it with an Exchange server myself, the FAQ says that it supports Exchange servers. The beauty of Fetchmail is that it lets you use practically any mail client with practically any mail server. I started using fetchmail because MIT's mail servers use KPOP which very few mail clients support, and fetchmail supported it beautifully. I use Netscape Messanger to read and write my email, but practicaly any other mail client that runs on Linux will also work with Fetchmail (as it uses the standard mail spool).

As a nice added bonus, Fetchmail can transparently check multiple mail accounts at different intermittent intervals. So now I can check my ISP mail account, my main mail account, and my work mail account on a regular basis without having to think about it. When I used to live in the world of Windows I only checked my ISP account about once a month because nobody ever sent me mail there because I never gave out the address. Well, one day my ISP sent mail there because the credit card they had on file for me had stopped working (my bank had issued me a new card for some reason and cancelled my old card before its expiration date). Anyway, I didn't get this email in time because I checked my account there so infrequently and so one day my dialup account with that ISP just stopped working. The moral of the story is that if I had been checking that account regularly I could have prevented the problem. Now that I use fetchmail this problem will never happen again because I've set up fetchmail to regularly check all of my accounts and it takes zero time on my part.

That was just a fringe benefit, though, and it would probably be a fringe benefit to you as well. The main point is, Fetchmail can be used with Exchange servers.

You should check out Fetchmail. Although I've never used it with an Exchange server myself, the FAQ says that it supports Exchange servers. The beauty of Fetchmail is that it lets you use practically any mail client with practically any mail server. I started using fetchmail because MIT's mail servers use KPOP which very few mail clients support, and fetchmail supported it beautifully. I use Netscape Messanger to read and write my email, but practicaly any other mail client that runs on Linux will also work with Fetchmail (as it uses the standard mail spool).

As a nice added bonus, Fetchmail can transparently check multiple mail accounts at different intermittent intervals. So now I can check my ISP mail account, my main mail account, and my work mail account on a regular basis without having to think about it. When I used to live in the world of Windows I only checked my ISP account about once a month because nobody ever sent me mail there because I never gave out the address. Well, one day my ISP sent mail there because the credit card they had on file for me had stopped working (my bank had issued me a new card for some reason and cancelled my old card before its expiration date). Anyway, I didn't get this email in time because I checked my account there so infrequently and so one day my dialup account with that ISP just stopped working. The moral of the story is that if I had been checking that account regularly I could have prevented the problem. Now that I use fetchmail this problem will never happen again because I've set up fetchmail to regularly check all of my accounts and it takes zero time on my part.

That was just a fringe benefit, though, and it would probably be a fringe benefit to you as well. The main point is, Fetchmail can be used with Exchange servers.

Not just PDAs - I think typing everything does it too. Hackers are legendary for having awful handwriting. I know I do. I'm in the middle of reinstalling everything on my other box, a job I dropped last week. I made notes of all the settings on paper. Can't read a thing. I was amazed upon reinvestigation that a particular scrawl meant "Velocity". Shoulda've just used Notepad on the other box..

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I think the term Open Source (instead of Free Software) was a bad idea.

Yes, it is true, persons don't have to think about the freedom when talking about Open Source. But in practice, as is seen on this article, persons tend to forget that, according to the Open Source Initiative, Open Source and Free Software mean exactly the same thing.

I'd rather have persons confuse Free as in Freedom with Free as in $0 sometimes than have persons think something can be Open Source but not Free Software.

Don't forget it: If it is not Free Software, it can not be Open Source.

No, poster, it is not your fault, it is Eric Raymond's.

Alejo

My first job experience was to help port some old Fortran code, from a mainframe to a workstation, and from Fortran-77 to Fortran-90. There were revisions and comments dating back to 1983 (this was in 96-97)... (Aside: There's an age/revision level past which code should NOT be maintained, it should be rewritten)

All in all it was a great learning experience. I've developed an aversion to spaghetti since then.

Imagine if you will, a 2000+ line subroutine containing many a multi-level if-else/for-do construct, from the depths of which conditional computed GOTO statements jumped into the middle of another multi-level for-do/if-else loop. Intercal was never more fun.

The true kick of the experience was that it was to be a code port. Not a rewrite. Not even a little. A straight port, so the original developers wouldn't have to figure out any new logic. Feh!

For example, the article states that "Lucid Emacs" was proprietary, and implies that it predates the GPL.

The history of the gcc/egcs/pgcc is also very misleading.

Unfortunately, the facts are somewhat murky, and more than a little disputed. I notice that my brief account does, for whatever it's worth, match the one give at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-baza ar/cathedral-bazaar-15.html.

Finally, Stallman did not write glibc.

Not guilty. I made no such claim.

The mention of non-free BSD-based commercial Unixes implies that these implementation came after the release of the free BSDs and the AT&T lawsuit; they long pre-date both.

Ditto. I implied nothing of the kind.

There seems to be a bit of confusion about exactly what this software offers over the standard SSH. Hopefully I can help clear it up a bit.

• Licensing

  SSH1 comes with a license which is rather ambiguous about commercial use. The most common interpretation is that it's OK to use it commercially so long as one isn't making a profit directly off it. (e.g. charging people for the software.) SSH2 is much clearer-- in order to use SSH2 in a business you must use the closed-source, $400-a-server version from DataFellows.

  Here is the vague portion of the SSH1 license:

  Companies are permitted to use this program as long as it is not used for revenue-generating purposes. For example, an Internet service provider is allowed to install this program on their systems and permit clients to use SSH to connect; however, actively distributing SSH to clients for the purpose of providing added value requires separate licensing.

• Compatibility

  SSH2 clients cannot talk to SSH1 servers. This was by design in an attempt to drive people to upgrade to the new protocol. SSH1 clients are able to talk to SSH2 servers.

• Patents

  The IDEA (default) algorithm is patented and requires a license to use commercially. The RSA algorithm is also patented, but that patent has either expired or is about to expire. If one can find a copy of "rsaref", formerly offered freely from RSA's FTP site, then one can use it instead of the internal RSA algorithm to work around this little hurdle.

One reason there is demand for another implementation of the SSH protocol is so that people in small businesses can continue to use SSH while still maintaining access to the source code and also staying $400/server closer to being profitable.

Given the incompatibility of the clients, upgrading from SSH1 to SSH2 requires a flag day upon which day every client and server must be simultaneously upgraded to SSH2. Trying to upgrade in stages results in those with SSH2 unable to connect to SSH1 servers. It is possible to install both versions of the client, but the user will have to be the one "failing over" to the other version. Irritating at best, costly and time-consuming at worst.

For more information about SSH implementations, check out the Open Directory Project's SSH Category.