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Linus, Transmeta, Proprietary Code and Metcalfe
smeng58 writes "InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe asks why, if Linus Torvalds is truly a believer in Open Source, Transmeta Corp. has seen fit to make Crusoe, or at least its VLIW "code morphing", proprietary. The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux. Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is. "
jiggy jiggy jiggy smalls is da illest
!
woo hoo! finally last post!
Your brain is in the cupboard above my kitc-ch-ch-en shelf so you don't have to think
April 1st is not here yet!
'nuff said.
I'm not sure what he means bu x86 software, but windows is certainly not the only OS which is designed for the i386 architecture.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 2/12/108l-021200-idx.html
Do not make illegal copies of this troll For distribution with a new kitty 1-2 Pussy processor edition Contains code to run on linus' kitty's pen0r
Here's the large vat of molten metal you ordered Sir.
Can I get you an eye-patch for that ugly looking wound?
Wingnut
Bob Metcalfe makes the mistake that I care what Linus Torvalds says any more than I care what he writes in his articles - or anyone else for that matter. If there is one thing to be learned from this article, it is that past accomplishments should not grant you authority over future events, and this includs Torvalds, RMS, and Metcalfe.
Just another columnist. I am getting tired of
Well if you read their press release or saw when they introduced it, yes, it is optimized to run windows. It's also optimized to run mobile Linux. That's because there are two chips, each with x86 compatibility but different VLIW instruction sets.
Transmeta is set to fail. My regards.
Mm. PalmOS isn't an instruction set.... And Palm is based on Motorla chips... The Dragonball, to be more precise, which is a member of the M68k series of CPU's, as found in the original Macs, Amigas and Ataria STs, to mention some.
> what precident is there for Open Source firmware? It is called Alpha Software Development Kit.
A number of you have thrown out the "just an employee" defense -- that Torvalds writes code for someone else, making him free and clear of resonsibility. Wrong. I'm not saying for good or bad, but Linus *IS* inherently backing Transmeta's policy by simply being an employee. If Transmeta doesn't make the software open source, and Linus stays on board, he obviously agrees with that. Actions speak louder than words. As an employee of a company, you carry the reputation and ideals of that company around with you like a parrot on your shoulder. Working for the mafia and claiming you're an honest non-gangster is absurd.
METCALFE IS RIGHT. LYNUX SUCKS NUTS. MICROSOFT RULES ALL. YOU WILL BOW DOWN TO BILL GATES WHEN HE SAYS SO. YOU WILL BE KRUSHED LIKE A BUG.
Simple: if software is not proprietary, someone with an existing compiler will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (more features) for less and put you out of business; software and true physical-domain engineering (CE, CS, IT, NET) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work. The overhead on creating from scratch software does not lend itself to the open source model.
Please, please, lets have more 'news for nerds' and 'stuff that matters'. Hating Microsoft is old. The arguments are old. AND YOU ARE BECOMING BORING
MS will continue to trash NT because W2K is just plain more reliable. Do I hear the pathetic cry of Troll coming from some Open Sorse religious fanatic? Yeah, too bad....
What you post doesn't have to make sense. It just has to maximize the number of banner-ad impressions. Patent nonsense is actually better than serious journalism. Sensible, well-reasoned articles are not going to bump the hit count, but articles that are inflammatory or just plain stupid will.
Metcalfe knows very well that what he wrote is only part of the story. Torvalds is no different from any other open-source programmer who has a day job that pays real money. We all work with this contradiction. Open-source advocates are not pie-in-the-sky idealists. We have to eat, too. GPL is nice, but no one is required to give their stuff away. Keeping software proprietary is not evil.
Metcalfe knows this just as well as anyone else.
But hey! Let's ignore this, and accuse Torvalds of hypocrisy! The more people we piss off, the more Web traffic we'll generate!
OK, Slash-dotters! At the count of three, become furious! Ready? One, two, three!
If you did the code morphing software, you would want it to be proprietary. We're not talking about GNU gizmo alpha 0.1 here man. This stuff must have been really hard to costly to create. You don't want to release this stuff to everyone. this OSS crap does not always work you know.
IMHO Metcalf writes like shit. The whole tone of his prose feels arrogant, and hollow. I don't care what Bob "ETHERNET-IS-MY-ONE-HIT-WONDER" Metcalf is ranting about this time. He needs to amp up his trite style!
Hey Bob! We know you _were_ fucking brilliant back in your PARC days! Note the emphasis on "were." Now get over it, or get the fuck out.
And one more fucking thing. 3Com NICs fucking suck. They barely perform better than the rubbish that gets peddled at your local crappy computer store. The one run by the foreigner who tries to sell you a notebook from a company you've never heard of. So you ask if it runs a useful OS (Linux or NT), and he assures you that "a guy he knows" had much success in that area. That being said, why do they cost more than the $20 SuperStormer 2000 10/100 NICs that are pretty much equivilant in performance? One thing about us Linux geeks is we actually get to write out own drivers. So it's hard to sell us crap as easily.
Linux = OpenSource
Linux = Linus
Transmeta = Linus
===================
=> Transmeta = Linux = OpenSource ?
which is a bit of a shortway
I love to see you hypocritical zealot slashdot bitches backpedaling about opensource because your fearless leader works for a company that doesn't give a fuck about it.
I normally like Bob, after all he invented ethernet but this time he is way off.
If you ask me Intel paid him to say all that rubbish.
Hey BOB! - Why doesn't intel give their stuff away? What is that you say, they'd be out of business next year? Oh.
pundit = a person who once had ONE good idea, and hasn't bothered thinking since.
self-proclaimed pundits like Metcalf (or Dvorak) reached notoriety and recognition once (usually, at some time during the 70s) and have demonstrated an almost amusing lack of knowledge, or general awareness of contemporary technology, or even contemporary news.
By far the most amusing statement was probably:
> So what I want to know is, if open-source
> software is so cool, and if Torvalds "gets it,"
> why isn't Crusoe open source? For a start, why
> aren't the Crusoe chip's mask sources published
> for modification and manufacture by anyone?
By which Metcalf demonstrates that he obviously doesn't even get a simple concept like 'capitalism', or 'economics'.
a) Linus is am EMPLOYEE of Transmeta, and thus, as a programmer, responsible for working on some pretty neat code. As highly visible as he is, I'm sure he has little influence, and little interest, in the business model.
b) A manufacturer, even one making a cool processor, and even one believing in Open Source, would not just give away the results of years of development work, like their processor. Calling that questionable is just plain stupid.
c) Since the Transmeta business model is not yet know, and it is not known what Transmeta plans to do, it is way too early to tell what they plan to do - and thus making accusations based on non-facts, albeit very typical for Metcalf, only further illustrates his stupidity.
The best way to deal with Metcalf's columns is to either not read them, or regard as amusing demonstrations of what happens to you if you get out of touch. If you REALLY have time to spare, feel free to write his editor (and get lots of other people involved) about how incompetent he is, and how they ought to replace his column with a random feed from Slashdot.
Face it, Metcalf does this just to get Slashdotted, so he can claim high traffic rates.
Harry
Items are costly to manufacture because
They use expensive materials
The manufacturing process is expensive
The design process is expensive
Chip manufacturing actually falls into the same category as Audio CD's and software. The primary cost is outside of the reproduction area. If I can "beg, borrow, or steal" the instructions for a chip mask, I can hire a "fab" to turn out hundreds of thousands of chips for very little cost per chip. The expensive part of the process is getting the design right. The same is true of Audio CD's. The cost is in the "design" of the original master. The copies are very low cost. Software used to fall into the second category when the computers cost much more than the programmers that supported them. However, today, that same computer costs less than a week of one programmer's time. But without good programs, the computer cannot do anything of value. So where is the difference. It's all in design . What to build, and how to build it greatly overshadow the cost of actually building an extra copy.
I guess Metcalf wouldn't mind it if, every month, *ONE* person downloaded his column, and then posted it, verbatim, all over the place for the benefit of the open source community to read - right. Heck, place them on a good mirror, and have Slashdot link to *THAT* version of the article (minus all the ads and Infoworld masthead).
After all, information ought to be free, right - I just can't shake the feeling that Metcalf's lawyers, and Inforworld's would run rampant then.
Seriously, anyone want to do that? I'd even shoulder the risk and host the articles, just to see how quickly Metcalf's lawyers will rise to the occasion.
Harry
harry@fizbin.com
Excuse me Sir, but the vet is here to lance that nasty belief in your own self importance you're currently suffering from.
Wingnut
Just keep making excuses for your friends, while flaming your enemies.
Besides, you have already sold out the Free Software community anyway, so no one cares what you say.
Ruben loves you, remeber come into the welcoming arms of Ruben Lopez!!!
Or does Bob just sound bitter. It's actually kind of sad.
Spot on old chap!
Care for a Brandy?
Wingnut
It's also completely silly to suggest that should be done just because one Linus Torvalds is currently employed there.
What if there were 3 Linus Torvalds employed there? =P
If that table had been open-sourced, could Intel have avoided a $500 million charge to earnings?
Part of the value of open source is the recognition that your customers have an interest in helping you find and fix your bugs. (And of course, part of the cost is that your competitors have an interest in copying your good ideas).
here is the only way I can see open source in the future:
a gnu license where royalities are paid to the original owner, every time the code is used!
free speech, not free beer
With OSX soon to be released.
Get it? X is the roman numeral for 10.
Check your sources please.
That would be a grey area, now if there were four they would pretty much have to open source it.
...little Linus Torvalds with his old car and rented home...
Oh dear! The poor little mite! Slaving away at Transmeta and the mean old company isn't paying him a month what I get in year - how nasty of them!
Praying in the Churches of Torvalds and Free Software if affecting your thinking - want me to book into a clinic?
Wingnut
Let's see:
The GNU Freaks complain that metcalfe is an old fart who did something productive a long time ago, but now just spews crap.
Let's see: Who else used to produce useful software and now just spouts all sorts of useless and cultlike crap?
Oh yeah, Richard Stallman.
Where does the article say that "since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux"?
Why are you claiming this is a double standard? It has nothing to do with Linus, and everything to do with Metcalfe being full of shit.
His claims
* Linux, Linus, and Linux users used to be virulently anti-commercial, until we got stock
If you've been around, you know that's nonsense. The original license for Linux (back in the good ol' 0.x days) was strictly non-commercial. You couldn't make money off of it, period. Linus changed that because he wanted it to be commercially feasible.
Similarly, Linus and most Linux users have never been opposed to commercial software per se. Would I like an Open Source office suite on a par with Office 2k? Well, yeah, sure. If there were a commercial one out on that level at that price range, would I buy it? You betcha.
* the Crusoe should be open-sourced
This reflects a lack of understanding of how the Crusoe works. The whole point of it is that you can't write native code directly to it, but instead write to the API provided by the software. Releasing the software would kill that.
* Linus and Linuxers have something against x86
Yeah, right. Metcalfe's head is pretty far up his ass. Is x86 a pretty shitty chip? Yeah. Is it good for the price range? Yeah.
Interesting, that my previous comment got marked down, while NO other one this late had. A little Slashdot sensitivity going on Kurt. Well, here it is again, so moderate it down again. I guess freedom is relative huh? Try marking down some other "flamebaits"
Jeez, could you be a bigger prick?
You sound like some witchunting SOB. It is just an article, and you know what, Kurt, he raises a good point. The Open Source community is like Animal Farm. It seems that some open source coders are more equal than others. Linus gets away with it because everyone here makes him out to be a God.
Everytime, a product is released, everyone here screams that is HAS TO BE OPEN SOURCE, except if it involves one of their heros.
Besides, how long did it take you fuckers to release the Slash code. You are as guilty as anyone of being a phony.
The answer is hypocrites.
They are cult members and followers.
open source IS communism. Why do you think we have such a powerful "community". It's ideal communism (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) and only works because scarcity doesn't exist in cyberspace.
Because this wasn't meant to be an informative part of the discussion. They just wanted to get first post.
It's good to be able to see the difference. That first post was totally redundant. And the "BTW...fp? Nah...." is just DRIPPING with maturity.
Around here it is because it is not MS. Pathetic.
He is an old windbag as well? What has he produced lately, besides hot air?
If this is a blatant troll, then why do you post the article?
Are you that stupid?
Ahh - I wondered when you were going to correct your sig.
Have a lollipop.
Wingnut
"Technology pundit Bob Metcalf walks in the valley of death, Open Sourcers to his left and Microsofties to his right" Oh, Bob Metcalf, you are the divine holy martyr. Muahahahahaa.
First you made him out to be someone who just got out of a homeless shelter. Now he does reasonably well.
Man, you are the king of rewording and double talk. You should start a site with Katz.
Tim, do you have a family? I want to know if I will be creating orphans when I bludgeon you and kill you.
thank you.
Within a couple of months of the chips being produced the VLIW core will have been hacked to death, so I wouldn't worry.
Have a carrot.
Wingnut
I can't really take this guy seriously.
Just remember, this is the guy that said everybody in the "open source community" was a communist. (theres a difference between communism and open source, open source actually works. And actually, the windows world is very marxist if you think about it.. everybodys going against eachother, its a fight to the finish kind-of thing.)
Programmers from that era didn't really love their code like we do, and are generally (from personal experience) very closed minded people. Most of the people that used to be programmers got sick of it and now do side things (like write blatantly closed minded articles, and manage software companies). I've talked with a few microsoft engineers that are now salesmen because they were sick of programming. Most programmers will agree that programming for windows is very boring (not a lot of code around, everybody's got this marxism thing going for them) And it just gets boring to them (and some of them get this family-man thing going for them, i'm sure that can change your perspective.)
Another thing.. somebody would have eventually developed something ethernet-like, it was only a matter of time really.. I'm not going to give him god-like praise for creating something that was deemed to be invented eventually.
Are you really sure the SPARC came out of academia? I know for a fact that the MIPS chip was created by students, but then they created MIPS, Inc to sell it. I don't know all the history behind the SPARC. I do know that Sun did have a hand in it's creation, especially the 64-bit SPARC CPUs.
This guy is just begging for attention. I think if he posted that to Slashdot even the cluless moderators who can't differentiate between an opinion and a troll would see that this is nothing but flamebait.
I predict that he will write an article in a couple weeks about all of the angry email he's gotten from the open-sores community.
Get a life Bob.
Hell Kurt, no wonder you are spouting the Slashdot, sorry, Andover, sorry, VA line.
SO MUCH FOR UNBIASES SLASHDOT.
THIS FUCKING SUCKS DONKY DICK
--snip-- He knows as well as you and I that Linus does not own or control Transmeta, the very suggestion that a commercial company should give away it's prized possession for free goes against every principle of the free market. --snip-- Hmm... a commercial company giving away its prized possession ... seems like exactly what RedHat is doing. You can still download RH Linux for free last time I checked, and all their major support is available for free on their website. :) -Face it, Torvalds is sellin' out :) They can open source the code and still sell the chips, if they really are as unique and neat and far ahead in development as they claim. They can patent the hardware and open source the code. silly slashdotter.
Source:TransmetaDK
Thank you.
A) open source lifestyle:
/.ers in, are either 1) script kiddie 2) warez monkeys, or 3) less than 14 years old. This has been apparent in many of the "intelligent" posts of the slashdot community. I guess having everything in life for free would be a good thing, but that's not what it's all about. slashdotters also probably believe in the following: affirmative action, government healthcare, and welfare. Why should I bust my ass to create something just so you can use it for free. The only way im going to even consider doing something like that is if I had over a billion dollars and I was bored with life. I would love to program for free, but I need something called money. It let's me get really neat things like: food, a place to live, and more importantly the computer im using to create the software in the first place.
1) no money is made on software
2) you still have to have a day job, because there are such expenses as a house, food, things to live.
3)life sucks because you don't get to do what you love doing, most of your time is spent at a 9-5 job.
B) closed source lifestyle
1) you make money off your programs, and life is great!
2) from the beginning of the day to the end, you are the head of your new software company, set for life with your 1.2mil a year income.
3) source is released, but money is gained for compensation
hmm..I forgot..slashdotters arent either A or B, they are in a new catagory C. They are sheep that only follow what their masta's tell them. THey don;t know how to program, and they think C++ is the name of their favorite male star in the transexual porno "chix with dix". working a 9-5 job at MCdonalds is normal, and "head fryer" is a step up in their career. The only other catagories I can see
and such a firm believer in free speech has got some problems. Anyone who defies the opinion of slashdot(even if it might be the truth) is moderated down as either flamebait or troll.
I hate Microsoft products, they are sluggish, take up tons of resources, and have numerous bugs(IIS is the worst!, I usually end up having to reformat my system if I want to get everything back to a functional state). I don't think Linux is any better. apache may be stable, but the time it takes to fully set up a linux system, and keep it running, isn't worth the effort. I think the general public is going to go toward another OS(probably BEOS or something else).
NOT FLAIMBAIT!! PLEASE DOn't mark as troll or flaimbait, just my opinion
If RMS was working for Transmeta, Metcalfe would have a point. But it just doesn't wash with Linus.
...but it's worse on days when school is out.
hahaha...very funny! and very true!
I have a suppurating boil on my left buttock called Bill Gates, but today I'm going to rename it Bob Metcalf.
I apologize. I was a litte over the top on that comment. I do not wish for Bob Metcalfe's demise, nor that of his family.
You talk about cynicism, but Transmeta didn't "use" Linus torvalds for the hype factor. It is your OWN cynicism that makes you stretch so far to make him look bad using an argument built with air. He was hired YEARS before Linux was ever heard of by the likes of Bob Metcalfe and the rest of the clueless, hypocritical media. But anyway I shouldn't get so worked up, this is all just part of the inevitable cycle of good=underdog, bad=popularity which runs through all of western civilization.
the above comment was mine and was intended as a joke...a poor joke, but a joke none the less. I apologize if I offended anyone.
Why does everyone keep saying Open Source means free?
The code morphing software is PART OF THE PROCESSOR design. Stop thinking of it as SOFTWARE.
You people keep harping on " I want to write in native crusoe...." get a clue. NATIVE "CRUSOE" includes the MORPHING CODE. The processor was designed to use it.
Intel AMD or any other chip maker never DISECTED their chip and handed you over the schematics, CRUSOE'S code morphing software being open source would do that!
"CRUSOE PROCESSOR"=(tramsmeta chip)+(morphing software)
it is programmed in X86 like any other x86 processor.
THIS IS THE PRODUCT, they havent released a MULTIPURPOSE product yet, as it is, its X86.
Noone shits on intel for not cutting away all non-X86 parts of the P3 so it can be programmed in RISC natively, why?
These people havent made a DIME from anyone for five years! Now people start speaking up thinking transmeta OWES them access to something in active developement before its even had 1 freaking buyer. Thats blatantly unfair that because Linus works there that this company is held to unreasonably high standards and is expected to be non profit.
Once you evolve past the protozoa stage, you might one day realize that what is happening in the software world is exactly the opposite of what your spanked little mind is conceiving.
SPARC almost came out academia. It was based on the Berkeley RISC project's processor. SPARC follows Patterson's (professor at Cal) concepts more so than Hennessy's (professor at Stanford, designer of the MIPS architecture, and founder of the MIPS). So SPARC pretty much did come from UC Berkeley. MIPS came directly from Stanford. Sun developed SPARC, and set it up as an open standard of sorts. A few other companies have made SPARC chips, like Fujitsu. But Sun's always been the chief designer.
Yes, someone asked a question like "Will Windows be more stable on a TM processor?", and he said that it will run exactly the same. They will emulate the BSOD perfectly. It was in the webcast. Of course, the same would go for a kernel panic in Linux (or any other OS), although I've never actually seen one.
They should open source the processor's design, so that I can make a few changes and send tape off to get it fabricated. Transmeta should allow the hacker community to create thousands of slightly different versions to compete with them and trash their brand name. It's just good business.
This is B.S. There are significant costs involved in manufacturing large ICs like microprocessors. The mask set alone for manufacturing a processor on a particular .18u process can cost in the range of a million dollars. Then you have the costs for producing the wafer with x chips on it, and packaging and testing the individual chips. Producing a small run of chips will likely cost you over $1000 per chip.
well YOU sure missed the point. Making stuff open source is not just so you can run in on linux & bsd. It's an ideological thing (that I don't necessarily agree with).
Or the third option: everyone here actually understands that software is NOT the same as hardware. Certainly it may be possible for them to open up their designs, but since the implementation is "just another x86" there really is no need for it. On top of that, very few basement hackers have access to chip factories from which to mass produce their designs.
Great comment...Try adding some content next time.
If Kurt is a man of his principles he would apply pressure to release the source (sooner). That is the StallFreak way.
You are just an Slashdot, Perens ass sucker anyway. I guess that explains the mocha part of your name. Go for the brown buttboy.
plonk!
When software is open-sourced, the motivation is not necessarily purely altruistic. I dare say that both Linux and Linus Torvalds would be unknown today if he had decided to keep the Linux source proprietary and sell it for profit.
The producer decides how to license software, and the consumer decides whether to use the software. The consumer has the right to refuse to use proprietary software, but he does not have the right to dictate to others how to license their software.
Personally, I think it is perfectly reasonable to keep custom, low volume software proprietary, but users would be foolish to continue to use proprietary mass-volume software (standard OSs, compilers, etc.).
You forgot Eric Raymond, the self proclaimed official open source "evangelist/interface to the corporate world". And what did he do? He wrote fetchmail. Oh, and he rubber stamps non-open-source licenses like the APL and QPL. Somehow that gives him the right to claim all the success of open source and blame RMS for it taking so long. And what did RMS do? Emacs, GCC, the GNU Project, GPL, open source as we know it...
So what I want to know is, if open-source software is so cool, and if Torvalds "gets it," why isn't Crusoe open source? For a start, why aren't the Crusoe chip's mask sources published for modification and manufacture by anyone?
... patented.
And yes, Mobile Linux is open source, but not the "code morphing" software Torvalds helped write. Transmeta has taken the phrase Code Morphing as its proprietary trademark. And what the code does, according to Transmeta, has been
Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt?
Torvalds showed up at LinuxWorld Expo touting open source, of course, but then went on to revise two of its bedrock principles.
Torvalds talked at LinuxWorld about fragmentation -- the emergence of too many Linux versions. Being old enough to have watched Unix fragment during the 1980s, I worry.
But instead of holding to the party line that Linux will not fragment, Torvalds now says there is bad fragmentation and good. One can assume, because he's in charge of both, Transmeta's Mobile Linux will fragment Linux 2.4, but in a good way.
Then Torvalds talked about commercial companies, which aren't so bad after all: Take for example Transmeta. His audience, packed with employees, friends, and family of newly public Linux companies, did not boo him back out into the barnyard.
Where is the outrage?
So just to keep Torvalds honest, I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free. Chips have to be manufactured -- with white coats, ovens, and stuff -- so maybe it should be OK to sell open-source Crusoe for the cost of its silicon, trace metals, media, and manuals.
And how about this? To keep pigs out of the farmhouse, how about bundling Crusoe chips with Transmeta shares? This would cement commitment to Transmeta products and its inevitable IPO.
Until the Internet stock bubble bursts, this would provide Transmeta with funds to pay to make the chips and to pay for Super Bowl ads. This would be breaking new ground in The New Economy.
"Thankyou for letting the flamebaiters know about where the source is"
God... you really are an easily led little sheep aren't you.
Did you even LOOK at the URL?
&sign($AC[0]);
StallFreak done lately but try to tell everyone what software they should run?
You mean Richard Stallman, that washed up coder who can't do anything but claim credit for Linux, and harass everyone.
"Thats blatantly unfair that because Linus works there that this company is held to unreasonably high standards and is expected to be non profit."
...
The Linus should
1) quit
2) start badmouthign his own employer...
or
3) Shut the hell up about how the world is only good if all information is "free" and "open".
Windows doesn't open their source, just an API, becuase if they opened the source it would ruin the point. You are such a closed minded individual it isn't even funny.
The only reasonable complaint people can have with the original post is that he synonimizes x86 and windows. But taking him to task on this point is about as fruitful as correcting spelling in someone's post, and thinking you destroyed their argument.
HURD barely works now after 100 years of coding.
"Hey, he's clueless but did something cool so many years ago, and still expects to be worshipped for it"
Isn't that ESR? Or would that be RMS?
"For the simple reason that if they released that, people would write "to the hardware" and they would be stuck in the same old backwards hardware compatability morass that caused the x86 mess in the first place is enough to leave the code-morphing proprietary."
/. the place that had a cow because of undocumented windows API calls?
So your justification is that they stand to have more flexability in their business if they keep some stuff secret - and this is good.
Funny.... isn't
Transmeta - business security through obscurity.
The man invented Ethernet - something most all of us are using today! I think he has a pretty good understanding what x86 microprocessor instructions are. And its not like he's some kind of Windows advocate - he's been screwed over by Microsoft in the past just like everyone else in the computer industry.
He may be stretching it a little in saying that that Transmeta should open source everything, including the VHDL models and chip masks for their VLIW processor, but I think he does have a valid point.
One argument commonly heard from "open source advocates" is that at least the core components (such as the OS) should be open source. The rational being, if the OS is open source than everyone building applications on top of that OS are fighting the good fight. By design, there are no hidden APIs that privileged individuals may exploit. I think this is a valid argument. The second, equally valid argument for this model is that when building an application, if you find a bug in an OS API or you need a new API, you can resolve this issue directly! You don't need to wait for someone else to uncover and remedy this same issue.
If you have a system built on a Transmeta CPU, I think the "code morphing" software inherent in such a system fits into this category of "core components" and should be open source. If there is a bug in the x86 instruction translation, it will be "easy" for any developer to spot. Also, developers would be free to suggest optimizations, etc. Transmeta could release the code under an alternate "proprietary" license - much as Apple or Sun has done - if they feel that GNU would be giving up too much control. In fact, they could even release the silicon level designs under such a license. I seem to remember Sun doing the same thing with (some?) of their Sparc processors - they just included a clause in the license stating that if you used the design in a commercial application, you had to pay a royalty to Sun.
If you ask me, this whole "code morphing" thing is a joke. Its not any different than running Virtual PC on a Mac or FX!32 on an Alpha. The way to go is to compile apps into native code for the CPU in question - efficiency is king, especially in the portable device world Transmeta is targeting. Some day, x86 will die - really, it will.
"I really cant stand it when people writing for an industry based magazine or journal start to stray from the truth and facts toward tabloid style headline grabbers "
So what the heck are you doing reading slashdot?
&sign($AC[0]);
Metcalfs logic has always been of doubios value. But this artical takes his twisted thinking to a new level. I am suprised that InfoWorld even published such insane ramblings. Even a person ignorant of computor technology should be able to see the incredibly disjointed rehtoric. I am reminded of the speaches of the Cesars during the later days of the Roman Empire. I wonder if lead poisoning is the cause. B.B.Wolf - Just moved, can't find my passwords and just deleated cookies.
Well,
If he has to go, he has to go.
"Good journalists check their facts."
/. out.
Well, that leaves
Seriously, the Transmeta peopel had no problem sticking Lunis face in a camera every time they wanted a investor dollar - so now they are pretty stupid to be upset that we actually think he has some power there.
Standard FUD - the linux companies are learning fast.
&sign($AC[0]);
Student Project
By Orestes
orestes007@hotmail.com
***
This work is copyright (c) by the author. You may download and keep
copies for your personal use as long as the author's byline and e-mail
address and this paragraph remain on the copies. Posting an unaltered
copy of this story to newsgroups or on websites is permitted as long
as no money is charged for access and as long as the author's byline
and e-mail address and this paragraph remain on the story. No
alteration of the contents is permitted. ***
My roommate, Tracy, couldn't believe that I had signed up for the
research project.
" Behaviour modification through WHAT? " she asked, with more than
a little disbelief in her voice.
" Through intense hypno-therapy, " I answered. " It's right in my
field of study. I've read a lot about it. "
" How the heck does that work?"
" I've agreed to participate in the project for six weeks during
our summer break By reviewing my initial psychological profile,
Dr. Porter will target some aspects of my personality and attempt to
override the traits under hypnotic suggestion. The sessions will begin
in the afternoon, and testing will continue through the evening
hours."
" Doesn't it scare the hell out of you?"
" Nope, " I replied nonchalantly, " I've read a lot of Dr. Porter's
work. She's a real professional. Following each testing session, the
hypnotic suggestion is removed. Don't worry, I'm in good hands. "
Tracy shook her head in disbelief.
" I don't know, Natalie. Do you really want someone going into your
head and mucking around with your personality?"
I had already thought this through. In truth, I hoped that my
participation would land me a position with Dr. Porter for my post-
graduate work. Tracy's concern was a little irrational, but well
intended.
" We'll talk tomorrow, after my first session, " I ended the
conversation.
I had already completed the initial psychological testing, and had
been among the 30 subjects selected from a screening of 150
applicants. There was no way I was backing out now.
True to my word, I didn't feel any anxiety when I arrived at the
research site, in an old ivy covered section of the university. What I
did feel was excitement about my one-on-one meeting with Dr. Beth
Porter. Up until now, I had been dealing with her research assistants.
I was led to a small office, and was told to expect Dr. Porter
shortly.
I had barely sat down when she came in.
" You are... Natalie Foulds, " she read from the clip-board. I
stood to shake her hand. It was strange, meeting someone I'd read so
much about. I suppose I expected her to be a larger, more physical
presence. In fact, she was a shade less than 5 feet tall, with a
slight build. The way she wore her black hair so shortly cropped made
her look like a tom-boy, and made her appear much younger than her 45
years.
" I've reviewed your testing, Natalie, and I'm excited about the
opportunity to work with you, " my heart swelled, she was taking a
special interest in me. " Your results indicate, among other things,
that you are an extremely dominant personality, very dominant indeed.
This is the trait we'd like to override for our testing sessions. "
She handed me a form.
" This is your consent form. As you've been told, we will place you
under hypnotic suggestion each day, and then conduct some tests. We
will only proceed with the tests if you sign the consent. Otherwise,
you will be removed from the study."
I nodded. I read the consent form carefully and then signed.
" When do we start? " I asked.
" I appreciate your enthusiasm, " Dr. Porter said. " We'll start
right away. "
I can't say I remember a lot about the hypnosis session. We began
with some visualization and breathing exercises, but I don't remember
much more. The next thing I remember is being in a small conference
room with Dr. Porter and one of her assistants.
" The session went extremely well, " explained Dr. Porter. " It
took me several hours to lay the groundwork in your subconscious, but
future sessions will take very little time. I'll leave you with my
assistant, Alec, to begin testing. At the end of the evening, I'll
come back, and remove the hypnotic suggestions. "
Well, I didn't feel any different. I was a bit disappointed that
Dr. Porter wouldn't stay around for the testing, but I suppose she
had other test subjects to attend to. I turned my attention to
Alec. He was a thin black guy around my own age. I have to say that I
envied him for working on Dr. Porter's project.
" Stand up, " he said.
I did, almost automatically. He stood, and walked around me. I
turned to look at him.
" Stand still, " he commanded.
I faced forward. This wasn't like me at all. Normally, I'd bite the
head off of anyone who used that tone of voice with me. Instead, I
just froze, and waited for him to circle me.
" On your knees," was his next command.
My pause was only momentary before I found myself obeying. What was
he going to tell me to do next?
Alec, who now towered over me, made some notes on his clipboard.
" Crawl to the corner of the room, " he said. I now realized that
he was running through a set of instructions on his clipboard. He
watched as I, despite the humiliation of the position, crawled on my
hands and knees to the corner of the room. It was like I wasn't
totally in control of my own actions. That is, I knew that it was my
decision to obey, but I knew that my normal reaction would be much
different.
There was something else that came along with the humiliation;
arousal. As I crawled the distance, I could feel myself getting wet.
When I reached the corner, I stopped. With no further command, I
lowered my arms to the floor, leaving my ass sticking up lewdly.
'Why did I do that?' I asked myself silently. My god, Alec must
think I'm a real slut. Nonetheless, my arousal increased.
We continued to go through the list: stand in the corner, sit, lay
down, crawl over here, stand on the table. The tasks went on and on,
and throughout it all, my pussy was telling me that I was enjoying it.
At the end of the night, when Dr. Porter rejoined us, I was sure that
she would be able to see the excited state I was in. My face went red
in humiliation.
" It's time to remove the hypnotic suggestions, " she told me. Alec
left, and under Dr. Porter's command, I was soon falling back into a
trance. When I awoke, she was no longer in the room. I gathered up my
things, and left.
When I got back to my apartment, I went straight to my room. I was
having second thoughts. The feelings I had experienced under hypnosis
were unexpected, a bit scary, but also exciting. I fell into a fitful
sleep.
The ring of the phone awoke me in the morning.
" Nat, it's for you, " called Tracy from her room.
I groped for the phone beside my bed.
" Hello."
" Hello, Natalie, it's Beth Porter. "
I sat up in my bed.
" Yes "
" I think we need to have a meeting about the project. Can you come
down to the office?"
" Of course. I can be there in, " I scanned for my watch on the
night stand, " in about a half hour. "
" That'll be fine. See you then. "
I couldn't believe it. Beth Porter was definitely taking an
interest in me. I was elated. I left without breakfast, and got to her
office as quickly as I could.
My elation didn't last long.
" I think we have to consider removing you from the program. "
Her words twisted into me like a knife.
" Why?"
" This is a delicate subject, Natalie. Alec's observations indicate
that the hypnotherapy had an unexpected effect on you. He told me that
you seemed sexually aroused. "
My embarrassment must have been apparent.
" Don't worry, Natalie. This isn't your fault. It's actually quite
interesting, from a clinical point of view. As a matter of research, I
truly wish that we could continue with the testing and see where this
leads. However, my money comes from the university, and I have to
steer away from anything the university would consider
inappropriate. "
" Please, " I begged, " I want to continue. "
" I'm sorry, but I can't jeopardize my research. "
" Then let me do it alone, " I blurted out. Their psychological
testing sure had me pegged. When I set my mind on something, I was
aggressive as hell.
" I don't see how I could..." the professor started, before I cut
her off.
" I just graduated with a degree in psychology. I've read all of
your work. I'm sure I could conduct the study. I would, of course,
give you full access to my notes. "
She smiled at me from across the desk, and shook her head.
" I can see that you are determined, and I have no real desire to
stop you. What I need you to do, though, is sign an acknowledgement
stating that you are no longer a part of my research. If you want to
continue on your own, I won't stand in your way, but my own
participation would have to be minimal."
" Just plant the suggestions, and I'll do the rest. In six weeks,
I'll come back and have the suggestions removed. I'll give you a piece
of research you can be proud of. "
This was just the chance I needed. Maybe I let my enthusiasm get
the best of me, but if I could impress Beth Porter with my research
skills, she would HAVE to accept me into her post-graduate studies
program.
I gladly signed the acknowledgement form, my head filled with plans
on how to document my time under hypnosis.
" I hope you know what you're doing, " she warned me, one last
time.
" I do."
The next thing I knew, I was on my way out of her office. I didn't
feel any different, but that was true of the previous night's session
as well. Tracy was waiting for me when I got home.
" How did it go?"
I didn't know where to start. Tracy was a good friend, and always
looked out for me. She was sort of the big sister type, from an
Italian family where she took care of several younger siblings. I
could trust her. I told her the whole story.
" What have you got yourself into?" She scolded me.
" I want to make this work."
" You've made yourself really vulnerable, " she said. " You're
placing yourself in danger if you go out there trying to find someone
to 'test your submissive side'. People will take advantage."
" I guess you're right, " I admitted. I hadn't thought this through
fully. In Dr. Porter's lab, there had been controls in place. Out here
I was on my own. " Tracy, you've got to help me. "
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. " Not me. I don't know
anything about psychology."
" Please," I begged.. I gave my best attempt at puppy dog eyes.
" Maybe, " she relented, " what do you need me to do?"
I explained my goals to her. I needed to document the changes in my
personality through daily notes. I needed to be exposed to situations
which would, in my regular personality, have made me defiant, even
angry, and see if I now reacted with submission.
" In short, " I explained, "I need to see exactly how far this can
go."
" Let me think about it, " said Tracy. " I have to go out."
I was left there, wondering if I'd done the right thing. I trusted
Tracy. She would make sure I was safe. Besides, it would only be six
weeks. And I really wanted to make an impression on Dr. Porter.
I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, and waiting for Tracy to
return. Around six, I decided to have the shower I'd skipped in the
morning. My shower was interrupted by the sound of Tracy returning to
the apartment.
" Natalie, get out here, " she called. My body reacted before my
mind, and I was out of the shower, heading to the bathroom door.
Tracy was standing by the kitchen table when I emerged, naked and
dripping, from the shower. She had obviously spent some time preparing
herself to be as forceful with me as possible. She stood with her arms
crossed, and barely batted an eye at my state of undress.
" Why isn't dinner ready? " Her voice was harsh.
" I... uh, didn't know..."
There was no sympathy. Marvellous. She was playing the part
perfectly.
" Get to work on it, now!"
A rush of sexual excitement came over me as I began to cook up a
pasta dinner for Tracy. I must have made quite a sight, chopping red
peppers, naked and wet, with my blonde hair sticking to the sides of
my head. Tracy went to watch television as I finished dinner. When I
was done, I set the table.
That's the way it went the whole evening. I did the dishes, the
vacuuming, and the dusting before Tracy told me to go to my room and
fill out my research notes.
I sat at my desk with the note pad. I still hadn't put any clothes
on. I didn't want to do anything to lose the feeling of the evening. I
started the notes three or four times, in different ways, trying to be
as clinical as possible. Each time, my description seemed inadequate.
How could I describe the rush of sexual excitement I felt each time
Tracy commanded me to do something? I was embarrassed even thinking
about it. My left hand wandered down towards my pussy, and as soon as
my fingers found their mark, the notes came much more easily.
The next morning, I woke up early and began breakfast. This was
actually nothing unusual for us. Tracy wasn't a morning person, and it
took her a while to fully awaken, so I had always taken care of
breakfast. I set the plates on the table, and served up the french
toast. I was about to sit down, when Tracy spoke up.
" No, " she said, in a tone usually reserved for pets or small
children. She removed my plate from the table, and placed it on the
floor, near her feet. " You'll eat from the floor from now on."
I knelt down to the floor. Tracy was good at this. My pride was
telling me not to accept situation, but I couldn't muster the will to
resist. Tracy didn't give me any utensils, so I ate as best I could
with my hands.
After breakfast we went on a shopping trip, on my money, of course.
We stopped in a couple of upscale stores, where Tracy tried on quite a
few outfits. I had always admired Tracy's figure. She wasn't really
overweight, but she did fill out her clothing well. I, on the other
hand, had always been a bit on the flat side. Not to say I didn't have
a body I was proud of, but I certainly didn't have Tracy's curves.
Tracy finally decided on a couple of nice blouses, and a new pair of
shoes.
Then it was my turn. She brought me two stores, the first of which
was the kind of teeny-bopper trendy clothes store that I usually
avoided like the plague. Tracy picked out a cute, but rather short,
skirt for me, and a thin cotton sweater that I couldn't get to cover
my belly button. She had me wear them out of the store.
The second store was a pet store. I was confused.
" Go pick yourself out a leash and collar, " Tracy told me. My eyes
went wide in disbelief.
"Now!" Her voice was so commanding. Blood rushed to my face in
embarrassment, not only because of her command, but because my pussy
throbbed in excitement.
I went to the dog section of the store, and began to look for a
collar that would fit. Tracy followed along beside me.
" Can I help you?"
It figured. The only time I didn't want service in a store, and up
comes this barely-out-of-highschool store clerk, all eager to help.
" Yes, " replied Tracy, before I could protest. " My friend is
looking for a collar and leash. "
His attention turned to me. " Okay, for what breed of dog?"
My face must have been a brilliant red by this point. My body was
quivering in sexual excitement. I couldn't help myself.
" It's for me, " I said quietly. Another surge of sexual energy
came over me. I couldn't believe that I was humiliating myself in
front of this teenage store clerk.
The clerk didn't know what to say. Tracy stepped in.
" I think this one will be okay, " she said, selecting a black
leather collar with little metal studs. " Thanks for your help. "
We drove home in silence. I really needed an orgasm, and I was sure
that Tracy could tell.
When we stepped in the door, Tracy ordered me onto my knees. She
produced the collar and leash, and snapped the collar around my neck.
She attached the leash to the collar. I was breathing heavily.
" Come on, " she slapped her thigh, and began to walk the
circumference of the living room. I crawled beside her, on hands and
knees. My physical reaction was uncontrollable. I needed an orgasm so
badly.
" Please, " I said to Tracy, quietly. It was the first thing I had
said since the pet store.
She stopped the pacing.
" Please what?"
" I, um, " I paused. Could I really humiliate myself this way? " I
need to masturbate."
I couldn't look at her.
" Okay, " was her response, after a minute.
I began to rise, to go to my room, when Tracy stopped me.
" You'll do it right here, " she told me. How could she do this? I
was mortified.
Tracy sat down on the couch, leaving me on my hands and knees in
the middle of the floor. She still held the end of the leash. My body
was on fire. Despite my utter embarrassment, my right hand went
quickly towards my pussy. I reached under the hem of my short skirt,
and slid my hand beneath the elastic of my panties.
She was watching me, I knew without looking. I could feel her eyes
on me. The sensations were unbelievable. I bit my lower lip as my
fingers stroked my clit with a desperation I had never known. My ass
pushed wildly back and forth as I ground my pussy harder into my hand.
I was alternately moaning and grunting as my fingers reached a
feverish pace. It was coming on so fast. When my orgasm came, I
screamed out loud. My body gave out, and I writhed helplessly on the
floor as it consumed me. When it finally subsided, I just lay there at
Tracy's feet, my hand still pushed down the front of my panties, which
were now quite wet from my orgasm. I was so ashamed.
" Come here, " Tracy pulled on my leash. I looked up.
Tracy was pulling me to my knees again. She sat on the sofa with
her jeans and panties bunched down to her ankles. Apparently, my
little performance had some effect on her. She was slowly stroking her
pussy as she pulled my leash towards her.
There was no mistaking what she wanted me to do. She was pulling my
face in towards her crotch. Tracy had always enjoyed having her
boyfriends go down on her. Her most recent boyfriend had been
reluctant, and Tracy had confided in me that it was one of the main
reasons she had broken up with him. Now it was me between her legs,
with her hand on the back of my head, and the smell of arousal in my
nose.
I gingerly extended my tongue towards her. This would change
everything, I reminded myself. Tracy and I would never be the same. I
wanted to please her so badly. How could I be horny again so quickly?
The hand on the back of my head pushed me directly into Tracy's
pussy. The aroma of her sex was stronger than I would have imagined.
The dark hair around her pussy was untrimmed, and surrounded the lips
of her pussy. This was one thing I never thought I'd learn first-hand
about my roommate.
My tongue found flesh, and Tracy reacted with a moan. She pushed
her crotch into my face as her wetness covered my cheeks and chin. I
explored the folds of her pussy, and my mouth filled with her taste. I
went slowly at first, but when my tongue found her engorged clit, I
instinctively began to flick my tongue rapidly against it.
" Oh, god, Natalie. Oh Natalie, " she repeated my name over and
over between her moaning, as if reminding herself that it was me
between her legs.
Her second hand reached for the back of my head, and her thighs
clamped down on my cheeks as her body began to shake in lust. Tracy's
crotch jerked up and down against my face as her orgasm hit. She may
have been screaming, but I couldn't tell, as her thighs were clamped
against my ears. I got a mouth full of her juices instantly, and had a
hard time breathing with the way she was grinding her pussy into my
mouth. Nonetheless, I continued to work her clit until her body began
to relax again.
" My lovely, lovely Natalie, " she said to me quietly, as she
loosened her grip on the back my head, and stroked my hair tenderly. "
You'll get used to doing that for me. "
She was right, I did become accustomed to performing orally for her
on command. I couldn't have guessed that Tracy had such a sex drive.
She had certainly hidden it well for the couple of years we'd lived
together. I slept on the floor at the foot of her bed from then on,
just in case she wanted any attention during the night.
In the morning, I would make breakfast, and while she ate, I would
lick her pussy from under the table, whether she wanted an orgasm or
not. She told me it helped her to wake up. Those parts of my service
became a routine.
Another thing I couldn't have guessed about Tracy is how much she
really got into the role of dominating me. She seemed determined to
find a limit to my submissive behaviour. When I didn't bristle at my
domestic duties, or at paying for everything, or at being treated like
a dog, Tracy just went on to find other ways to push the envelope. It
was at the end of the first week that she took to punishing me with
pain.
" Come here, Natalie, " she called from her room, in a tone which
I now recognized as preceding some new form of humiliation. I put down
my notebook (which she still allowed me to maintain) and followed her
voice.
She was sitting at the edge of her bed, with a belt in her hand. I
looked at the belt apprehensively, and waited for Tracy's command.
" Lower your jeans, " she told me, " and get over my lap."
I felt like I was a little girl again, like when my mother gave me
the same sort of punishment. I dropped my jeans and did what she said.
She caressed my ass through my panties for a few minutes before she
landed the first blow. I yelped. She had really hit me hard. Another
one came, on the same spot. Tears welled up in my eyes. Tracy paused
to pull my panties down my thighs before starting again.
The blows came, one after another, as I helplessly squirmed in her
lap. I didn't dare try to cover my ass with my hands. My submissive
side was loving this. Each blow brought a new wave of sexual pleasure.
" That's what I like to see, " she told me, when she was done. "
Stand up and have a look at your ass in the mirror."
I turned myself in front of the large mirror atop her dresser. My
rear end was striped with painful red streaks, some dark, some
light. I felt so alive, and full of sexual energy. Tracy smiled in
delight, and a real glint in her eyes. It was the first of many times
I saw that look.
When she was done with my ass, I licked her to orgasm.
Our sessions became more extreme from there. A trip to a local sex
shop racked up my credit card, and provided Tracy with many new ways
to inflict punishment. She would cuff my hands to the foot of her bed
each night, and take her sweet time inflicting various sorts pain on
my body. Vicious little nipple clamps became a favourite for her, as
did a nasty little wooden cane she used on all parts of my body. Just
when I thought that I couldn't take any more, she found a way to make
it hurt even worse.
She knew how to play me. By the time she was done, I was begging
for more punishment. I wanted her to hurt me just a little bit
more. She would then lay me on my back, and straddle my face. While I
desperately licked her pussy, she would 'play' with my nipple clamps,
until she flooded my mouth with her juices.
At the beginning of the third week, Tracy gave me a day off. She
was going out to see some friends for the day and told me to go
shopping.
" Is there anything you need ?" I asked.
" Nope, this is your day, Natalie. " She was putting her shoes on.
She stopped to give me a kiss before leaving, and as she did, she
pressed something into my hand.
" Surprise me, " she whispered in my ear, then she was out the
door.
I looked at what she had given me. It was a business card.
' The Body Art Gallery ' it read, and gave an address.
Did she want me to go there? Of course she did.
I drove down to the place. It wasn't in the best part of the city,
but it was on a main street, and seemed legitimate.
The store, on the inside, was a bit hard to absorb. The merchandise
was mainly fetish clothing and jewellery. Along one side was a hair
salon, and the back wall was covered with tattoo art. There was a
doorway which led to the tattoo studio, and a stairway which led to
the upper level.
I was so out of place. I had dressed conservatively, as is my usual
style, my hair straight and shoulder length. I really stuck out in
this crowd. What did Tracy want me to get?
A young store clerk approached. She was decked out in leather, and
had an impossible looking hair style.
" Hi, " she said. " What do you need ?"
I couldn't control my arousal as I responded.
" I need something to show my obedience. "
" Cool, " she said casually. "I'll show you some things."
Once I began, I had a hard time stopping. My body kept telling me
to continue, even though my mind was telling me to stop. As I waited
for Tracy at home that night, I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror
and reviewed the changes.
My hair and eyebrows had gone from a soft blonde to a fiery red.
They had trimmed the sides fairly short to give a good view of my new
piercings. The piercings were many. My ears seemed to be on
fire. There were three new rings in each ear, one in my right eyebrow,
one on the top of my lip, and one in the nose. I had talked myself out
of the tongue ring, at the last minute, because I knew that Tracy
would want to use my tongue tonight.
As for my body, I only went with the nipple ring. That hurt like
hell now too. A bandage covered the tattoos on my upper arms and on my
left ankle. The tattoos were a simple design of interlocking thorns,
encircling my arms and leg at almost an inch in width. The pain had
been exquisite. A tight leather bra now pushed up my smallish breasts.
My new panties were black lace, and didn't cover much.
One of the girls had convinced me to shave my pussy.
" Nothing says 'I'm yours' like a cleanly shaved pussy, " she told
me, as casually as if she were selling me a box of candies.
I couldn't wait for Tracy to get home.
The next two weeks, Tracy was sexually ravenous. She liked the body
piercings so much that she even had me go back to get my other nipple
and my belly button done. She had me buy a short chain to connect my
lip ring to one of the rings in my right ear. I maintained a shaved
pussy for her, and would go most days without wearing anything but my
dog collar and leash.
In addition to giving her oral sex in the morning, and our night
time punishment sessions, Tracy had taken to fucking me with a
brutally large strap-on dildo during the day sometimes. It amused her,
she said, to hear me squeal like a pig while she fucked me from behind
with the massive thing. This would be my only sexual release during
the day.
Throughout it all, Tracy made sure that I had time in the evenings
to fill out my project notes, although, I'll admit, I had a hard time
remaining focused on them at this point.
It was at the end of the fourth week that Tracy told me about one
final surprise.
" We're going to be done in less than a two weeks, " she brought it
up during dinner. "Before I send you back to Dr. Porter, we're going
to have a little party. I've invited some guests over for next
weekend, and we're going to show them our hospitality. "
This I could not believe. It was one thing for Tracy to take
advantage of my situation, but she couldn't expect me to humiliate
myself, sexually, for other people. Who would she invite? Would they
be people I knew? I couldn't stand it.
Tracy shushed me before I could protest.
" I don't want to hear anything more from you. This IS going to
happen, and I'm going to prepare you for our guests."
For the next week, I lived in a state of sexual anticipation. My
horror at having other people abuse my body seemed to only increase my
excitement. Tracy intensified our punishment sessions to the point
where I actually passed out from the pain a couple of times. Her other
preparations for the party consisted of making me wear a ball gag in
my mouth for extended periods, and fitting me with a butt-plug which I
wore almost all of the time.
When the evening finally came, Tracy left me chained to the bed
while she greeted her guests. I could hear the voices of at least four
people conversing in the other room when Tracy came back to retrieve
me.
I was wearing my leather bra, but no panties. My butt-plug as in,
as well as my ball gag. Tracy put on my collar and leash, and released
me from the hand-cuffs. A quick tug on the leash told me to crawl at
her side into the other room.
She led me to the centre of the living room, where she had cleared
an area. The guests were seated around me. Conversation had stopped as
everyone got their first look at me.
Only now did Tracy release my leash, and allow me to see who she
had invited.
My humiliation was complete. Tracy must have given a lot of thought
to her guest list. The first was Josh Tremblay, my most recent
boyfriend. I had dumped him at the end of the semester because he was
having financial problems, and I didn't need that distraction in my
life. He had put on some weight since our break-up.
"Pointless semantics and hairsplitting. It is software. End of story."
.. aside from the fact that this is domstrably untrue.
Absolutely.
What about all the OSS silliness that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
It would seem that the code morphine software should be OSS to check it for security holes and bugs.
You know... like all the Linux zealots always whine about.
&sign($AC[0]);
I thought IP was just plain evil (after reading /. for months.)
Metcalf is a big shit, bigger than a big shit. In fact Metcalf is an example of the generation of sick so-called journalists, who wrote before doing any research, and with a very bad writing skill.
"I really loved his pun though, I mean how many people would have thought to call Open Source "Open Sores"? That adds some real credibility to the article!"
You mean like all the Linux advocates who say...
MicroSloth
Micro$oft
Internet Exploder
and any nomber of other stupidities?
&sign($AC[0]);
It seems that Mr. Metcalf has gone from accusing OSS advocates of being communists, to accusing them of not rigidly adhering to the party line. Free software has nothing to do with communism!
Metcalf has been SO WRONG about so many other things before, that I think he just writes his dribble without thinking much about it. I agree with and earlier poster...i need a kill file for his really lame articles
Even though it is probably a waste of time, I went ahead and sent a couple of letters to the editor to make myself feel better.
--Keith
Mr. Metcalfe has missed the point of Open Source software even though he is swinging with a very large bat. Firms patent hardware and firmware (even extensible firmware like Transmeta's code morphing) for the same reason that drug companies patent a new drug. They need the headstart in order to recoup the cost of development. There is no incentive for a company to invest in product development without the ability to make money. Like Intel, Transmeta is a hardware company and needs to keep its hardware proprietary so that they can pay back their investers.
Open Source advocates are happy with Transmeta for two reasons: They hired Linus Torvalds, and the changes they have made to Open Source software they are giving back to the community.
--Keith Stark
The UNIX fragmentation in the 1980s almost caused UNIX to self destruct. However, UNIX fragmentation was done so that each respective company could get an edge over another and sell their hardware. There was no incentive to bring these various versions back together.
However, Open Source code fragmentation is not as large a threat. Very few projects have fragmented and most that have were resolved over time. The GCC/EGCC code fork is the most notable one that has recently been resolved by the replacement of the weaker variant. If two versions of the same software are available under the same conditions and cost, the stronger one will win over time. Also, a fork in the code will often allow a stronger version to thrive which will, over time, replace the weaker version.
--Keith Stark
NEXTSTEP/Intel already exists, though you can't buy it any more. Betas of Rhapsody/Intel also ran on Intel, and Apple promised it'd ship, but that was a lie. They think they're better off not supporting Intel, because that preserves the Mac's role as a giant dongle you have to buy if you want to run MacOS.
Since when does he say that? This is the same Linus who thinks nobody should complain about an author's license, and gave express permission to link proprietary modules into an otherwise GPL'd system. He's just in Open Source for pragmatic reasons, not to advance the profession.
Do it.
That "washed up coder" dedicated his career and wore down his hands writing the tools that make GNU and other free systems feasible, starting back when hardly anyone else cared about the idea. He's practically a martyr, we're still finishing the project he started, and it doesn't deserve to be written out of history the way it has.
I'm sure I'll be moderated down by the zealots here who are too young to understand things like car payments and morgages.
You need to understand that debt is evil and you will never be sucessful if you owe other people huge sums of money.
But there's no good reason for Transmeta not to publish the software their hardware is using, unless their hardware is so pedestrian they need to keep the software proprietary to temporarily inhibit competition.
It is fair to ask why Linus is working for a company that makes proprietary software. Doesn't make much sense to ask, though, since he's long since made clear he thinks Open Source is convenient at times but optional.
You are close.. The Code Morphing is not a part of the native design. Crusoe DOES have native code, but it doesn't make sense to release the instructions because they want the full ability to change it without having to worry about being backward-compatible.
The chip's sole purpose is to translate another instruction set. They are not held back by typical processor concerns.. They have complete freedom.
We don't have to read the original article to get furious, and this is especially true for lame stories like this anyway.
Not being familiar with him (I stopped reading Infojunk years ago, even when it can be had for 'free', it's not worth the price.) I'm not sure if it's his arrogance+attitude, lack of any journalistic vocabulary (even for a so-called editorial, his belongs in the street, just short of the gutter, had there been a few 4 letter words included), or he's a lucky fool that got a job with a combined 200 SAT. Any case, he's troll, and certainly not capable of any logical discussion from reading the article. Enough of my wasted time, I need to work and get paid... so I can freely contribute to Linux in the interim.
Well I can believe either:
1) Bob Metcalfe (who founded 3com and created ethernet) who belives that Linus is a hypocrite...
2) You, a slashdot kiddie.
Hmmmmmmm.
We want real news dammit !
Linus permitted proprietary kernel modules. His stance can be paraphrased as "who writes the code can pick the license, and nobody else should bitch about it." He only advocates Free Software in certain obviously-useful cases.
I think you miss the point in that the cost of getting involved in software producting is effectively nil, whereas the cost of getting involved in hardware production is enormous.
...)
Wrong. I'm a software engineer and I worked for a fabless semiconductor company for a couple years. You have no idea how similar the disciplines of SW and silicon engineering are. And, yes, if you have the talent, you can design chips at home for "effectively nil." Just like for SW, all you need is GCC and Make, with all the free stuff available for silicon dev, the same is true. Ya, you can spend millions on QuickTurn boxes and proprietairy development tools, but you don't have to.
I can't download the hardware specs for a chip, tweak it to MY liking on my home computer, and burn a new chip.
Wrong again. Have you ever heard of FPGA's? (Field Programmable Gate Arrays like Xilinx, Altera,
While there are circuit and CPU emulators that help work with chip design that's pretty useless to the end-user/programmer.
Wrong yet again. Do you really have no clue on how chips are designed? SW Emulators/Simulators are exactly the tools that would allow the guy at home to design, test, and debug his own chip.
So chip development can be done on the cheap. The outsourcing of the fabbing is the only expensive part but there are ways around this. Some schools have small volume educational fabbing deals with some universities, and going to a venture capitalist with a finished proven design is more likely to equal investment than a slick sales pitch by itself.
So you see, hardware and software are COMPLETELY different from the perspective of the kid in college or the computer professional who likes to dab in a bit of programming while at home, even if that isn't his or her primary job.
Nope, hardware and software design are exactly the same, you just don't have the background/experience to realize this. Now the talent required to do this is another thing altogether. But this isn't all that different from open source software, you just think since you can write a program that compiles and runs, that this is the same as developing a quality piece of software. Just look at Freshmeat, 95% of what is posted is utter rubish. How many MP3 ripper/encoders and SETI front ends are needed?
Nice try at karma whoring, but falling to a troll who wants to generate web traffic is laughable.
We want real news dammit !
Well crap, if I had known that I wouldn't have borrowed 60k for school
But those fit- Microsoft products really are expensive, slow, and unreliable. "Open Sores" isn't a relevant criticism of Open Source; in fact it's about half a step above booger jokes.
He convinced Netscape to go opensource
all the Linux companies that don't make a profit.
Keep speaking the past tense. Martyr, please!!!
Pass the kool-aid.
You are right about one thing, he is history.
Judging by your web page, you have contributed nothing to society either, so your collective worth is far less than his.
This type of rant is not new for our beloved Boob. He's gone on incoherent rants about Linux and the 'open sores' movement before.
Just forget about Boob. He had his day in the sun, and it's long past...why do you think he's writing now instead of actually coming up with something new?
Mr. Metcalf views himself as a heckler of the Open Source movement..he just wants attention, he isn't interested in making a coherent point.
Do us all a favour Boob..give up writing. There are idiots out there that do a much better job at it. You're a rank amateur compared to Jesse Berst and John 'See?' Dvorak. All you have is your name, living off a very old accomplishment. What have you done lately, Boob?
You dare make sense. You will be moderated down for sure for that mistake.
Isn't Ethernet (Metcalfe's big claim to fame) 30 year old technology also? Why are we moving to gigabit Ether rather than ATM?
and RMS claim to fame is the worst fucking piece of bloatware ever.
Ok, Transmeta can't really take chances at this moment. Remember all the buildup and secrecy they've done. Now they have to bring something out. Yeah, suddenly they're just going to release all the specs to their processor because their employee thinks its cool? Also Transmeta does have a responsibility to its investors. It can't risk some new company taking its design and making copies.
I wouldn't really care if Linus worked there or not, its a cool "new"(at least to the PC world) way of designing processors, only thing we have to do is see how well it works.
There is a big difference between hardware and software. Plus, making their code-morphing software propreitary does not have the implications that basing a lot of free software on a proprietary(at the time) library does. All it does is translate x86 code.
Plus, it would not really benefit anyone to release the code because seemingly it would only run on crusoe processors, and that Transmeta will supposedly release completely different processors as it goes along, which is one of the points of the code morphing software, that they don't have to really deal with backwards compatibility in hardware.
When something makes sense to open-source, then you get more debate. In this case, its not that Linus works there, its just that there is little reason to open source the hardware or the code morphing software.
It also preserves Apple's good relationship with their #1 third party developers. You know, the one that ships the two most important pieces of software for the MacOS: the working web browser and the office suite.
He's not, and any halfway competent pundit doing even cursory research would have figured that out. Linus is a pragmatist; he doesn't see programmers producing proprietary software as unethical.
You claim he is quoting canned speeches and all you can provide is a link to a canned GNU speech?
Think about it.
Name one company that develops only free software from start to finish and makes money. Not redistributes (redHat), but produces.
I thought so.
right. Because, you, one of his sheep agree with him. Stallman has not produced jack in years, except stealing other's work, and making a general foll outo of himself. I find him to be quite pathetic and entertaining all at the same time. I love the people who kiss his feet all the more fascinating. They remind of the people who think BillG is a visionary.
Software shouldn't be silently misrendering ill-formed documents anyway. Wouldn't it make more sense to put those glyphs at their correct Unicode codepoints, than to borrow some undefined codepoints and hope all software maps appropriately from Unicode to your new proprietary encoding?
Is one very painful, unpleasant assfucking. With something sharp.
Between that and the way they backstabbed the cloners they courted, I'm amazed anyone is still willing to do business with those slime.
Our ideals, not his. He doesn't seem to see any need to fix our profession, so why wouldn't he cash in?
The inventor should be rewarded for doing the work (and the entrepreneuer if he actually helped), but should not have the power to say who may use the invention or how. We've been granting the latter just so we don't have to think of the right way to do the former.
I just would like to point out how your sig interacts with what you said in an interesting way, specially given the context of the article in question.
The Transmeta chip has been specifically tuned to run Windows software. These enhancements do not increase or help Linux (or NT (or Solaris (or NextStep))) at all. But is designed to speed up execution of legacy (windows95/98/3.1) code. So mrMetcalfs statement does not really show his ignorance, but the person who posted this story, and added his own extreme prejudice to it, certainly displayed his ignorance.
IMHO it's much clearer to call it CP-1252 (for "Microsoft code page 1252") than "extended Latin-1" or "Windows ANSI" or any of the other misleading labels that have been applied.
> Most of the slasdot lemmings would be all
> over Transmeta if it wasn't for the fact that
> Linus works there
Most of us wouldn't have *heard* of Transmeta if it weren't for the fact that Linus works there.
I don't think that Metcalf makes a fair point at all. Linus isn't particularly an open source evangelist (as far as I know), he's the main author of Linux (which should be enough for anyone) and he leaves the proselytising to others. If he wants to work for one of the zillions of companies out there whose product (which isn't particularly well suited for OS in the first place) isn't open source.... well, good for him. Now, if Richard Stallman were working for the same company, I think that there would be justification in getting irate.
The Internet Principle ("be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate") breaks down when too many broken generators are tolerated. If conflicting forms of nonconforming data are silently accepted, eventually a working implementation will be impossible to write. Market pressure will select one of several broken implementations, and we'll be stuck with the format it seems to understand (which by definition was not well thought out by anyone)... forever.
Please, please, lets have more 'news for nerds' and 'stuff that matters'
that line, my trolling friend, has been used more times than I care to remember. Trolls are bad, but there's nothing worse than a "boring" troll.
It's true that closed source is currently legal, but we only have to put up with it so long as all their competitors do the same.
"Sharing" is inaccurate; there are other words for giving value to people who refuse to return it. "Charity." "Subsidy." "Exploitation."
"Unselfishness."
So I guess that must make him smart too.
about 95% of the posts here just mock him without actually addressing anything he's saying.
No, I would say 95% of the posts directly address Bob's column, and even address such ridiculous statements like this one you made:
the fact is that if he's against closed-source in principle, he shouldn't work for them
Many of the posts have correctly stated that Linus has at NO TIME ever said he is against closed source. Your drivel is hardly worth responding to, so I'll stop here.
Surely the most useful thing about "sex chat rooms" and text-based porn is to watch a bunch of sexually frustrated kids who have never had sex rant about what they think it might be like. Then they eventually have their first sexual experience (probably with a Poodle) and discover their incredible lack of self control while their girlfriends discover why their friends suggested that they bring a vibrator to the event.
Leaving the content of Bob's article aside, I guess a few folk took the flamebait in the story as gospel without reading the actual article.
Bob actually said: Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows.
To me, that's factually correct - the press releases I've seen have pushed the x86 compatability, and the fact that it can therefore run Windows. Keeps all the corporate types happy. (We get to be happy with Linus playing Quake3)
Sure, Bob had a go at open-source, but who expected anything else? Let's just try to be more accurate than the mainstream when flaming.
Stripping Bob's vitriol away, a serious point was made too. With the proprietary nature of the morpher, we're at the mercy of Transmeta to roll out morph layers for other architectures, timely bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. I'm not personally worried - a portable with 12hrs of battery lifetime will be a godsend.
Still, there are fewer folks eyeballing the code - though with Linus working his magic, I'm not sure more eyeballs would help. I believe the 'all problems are shallow given enough eyeballs' really depends on the quality of the eyeballs, as well as the quantity!
Just some ramblings to mull over...
Mark
Does your company user ethernet?
Do they use any of Stallman's bloatware?
We would be swapping floppies without Metcalfe. Stallman on the other hand, produces nothing of any use to most anyone involved in real development.
deep down, the underbelly of the city, the dark unwanted corners of mass culture, influenced by overeducation in university as well as hip hop and punk rock, are these mighty few trolls, unafraid of attachement to any specific dogma or ideology. rhetoric shatters before the cold hard truth of absurdity. hypocrisy is rendered impotent to inflame or incite. nothing means a new paradigm or insight. the blind hatred of a mob infested with group think and 'more equal than others' lays flailing like a dying fish out of the water of narrow minded logic for the troll has no world of static putrid shit-stables of the mind but rather walks the earth as a giant, no idea sacred or profane. simply untouchable by anything other than self destruction, independence a tight line between insanity and salvation. the world crushes down upon us but we happy few are free to tell our children and their children where we were on slashdot day. we trolled and trolled again, we stopped only at death or extreme embarassment, but even then within us and within our haunting spirits echoing in the shadows of every bit is our voice, strong, proud, defiant, and free still.. though our bodies and minds may have succumb. long live trolls! dreamers of dreams! builders of the world!
By his own admission you are supposed to give software away, so at least get your propganda straight.
Has he produced anything recently, like the last 5 or 6 years? Don't bitch about Metcalfe being washed up when the StallFreak is washed up and more annoying.
1. get Crusoe internal instruction set "opened" up
2. release a flood of Metcalfe sponsored "native" apps, games etc (binary only, not "open sore" -- come on, it's because as he said he doesnt' belive in it! not because you'd try to compile it yourself!!! don't you guys ever get it ?)
3. Now Transmeta is in a fix, they can't change the native instruction set any more.
4. Thus nip-in-the-bud the challenger-to-the- established-order.
5. Status Quo, and QED.
This isn't funny!!! Cowards are never funny !!!
Disclaimer:Okay, this is meant to be just thought provoking... I fully disclaim responsibility for the effect of this statement on anybody's wellbeing (which includes stock prices of all corporations; now that corporations have more equal rights than people)).
they can live off of selling service on the crops. Companies like RedWheat and Corndera will go public and make millions.
--- ALL INFORMATION SHALL BE FREE ---
Yeah. If there is that GNU 64-bit microprocessor project, why can't they GPL Crusoe?
It is all about capitalism. They don't work for pleasure or for helping. They work for money. Pigs.
I propose a boycott to Transmeta, DDoS attacks to Transmeta sites and cracking their web-pages! And dismiss that betrayor called Linus Torvalds... Let Richard Stallman and Alan Cox control GNU and the new Free Transmeta!
Today the software, then the internet and tomorrow the World! Viva Anarchy!
--- ALL INFORMATION SHALL BE FREE ---
read what you wrote Mr. Cult Member. Another GNU serf comes in here and posts some link to the kool-aid website.
If he thinks you have to allow people to share, how can you keep it private? I know that won't register with you since you are brainwashed.
i have never seen so many tongues so covered in the feces of each other. do any of you twits have your own fucking opinions or do you just sit around all day masturbating to pictures of your leaders and blabbering about how you are always right and everyone who disagrees is a tabloid moron stupid journalist who cant spell etc how about some fucking debate of the issues instead of a bunch of whiny bullshit excuses for your idiotic anti-rational borscht-fest... god what a bunch of fucking idiots.
the Quake engine is 4 years old. The Q3 engine is not open sourced, nor should it be.
Companies open the code up when there is little or no more money to be made from it. Please get a clue.
you are a brainless ass licker.
you are a brainless asslicker
in the wilderness of StallMinions.
You make far too much sense to be wasting your time with the left wing loonies on this site.
THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION CANNOT BRING ABOUT MONEY AND OPEN SOURCE NATALIE PORTMAN WITH COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES LIKE YOU MAKING SPURIOUS COMPARISONS TO ORWELLIANISM OR LENINIST-MARXISM BOTH OF WHICH ARE TRAVESTIES OF HISTORY AND THEREFORE BY DEFAULT NOTHING LIKE THE OPEN SOURCE ANTI BOB MELTCALFE MOVEMENT. YOU SHOULD BE EXECUTED AND ALL YOUR CHILDREN BURNT SO THAT WE CAN HAVE BETTER HARD DRIVE STORAGE CAPACITY AND DVD-AIBO WITH BREASTS LIKE A WOMAN
Read it again...
Following #2, then you cannot control it. Duh!!!
Pass the kool-aid, FSF serf.
how much did you Mr. GPL make from all the Linux IPOs. You have been hoodwinked. Congrats.
that he is not all that wrong. The OSS community is full of "exceptions." It all depends on your profile. The level of BS that is thrown around is quite deep.
Torvalds has stated this explicitly: "he who writes the code chooses the license."
I went to church last weekend and dropped a $5 in the collection plate. It was my $5 and I chose to do it. Is that a communist act? A capitalist act? Whatever it was, it was a voluntary act.
Yes the adventures of DiveC, the Contradiction Boy take us to the world of GNU where you are free to do whatever Richard Stallman says you are. you can copy a few things a few times, but if he finds them of use (like computer books because he doesn't care about certain books, like ones on grooming) then you must give them away.
Did you comb out his beard tonight?
are you saying that there might some "bending" of the dogma of the FSF? Hmmm...wait, they are pure, and we are the great unwashed. Maybe that Animal Farm reference gets more and more significant.
It is not ok for the government, but you seem to think that letting StallFreak dictate it is ok.
expects it. If you read the links which you provide, you would see that. Another StallLackey.
tell everyone in your office tommorrow all of your secrets. His position on either is unacceptable.
Anything that commie bastard says has some sort of ulterior motive anyway to advance his cause and spread the Virus known as the GPL everywhere.
BSD is true open source he had a problem with it because of the advertising clause. That restriction was nothing compared to the viral nature of the GPL. Give away all your changes. Duh. The road to the poorhouse.
according to Stallman, that info must be free. So fork it over pal. Can't have it both ways.
I don't advocate a ban on anything like that. I am for freedom. You can release code under the GPL if you wish. I think it is a very deceptive license, and advances a political agenda. It has a twised view of freedom. But if you wish to screw yourself with it, I am not going to stand in your way. But I will laugh later when you get screwed by it.
is freedom. He never seems to distinguish unless it suits him.
please. Stop seeing what you want to see. He has never accepted the privatization of information. Following that line, everything should be open including that. Of course, if everything was GPLed, we would have no money anyway, so bank info would be useless.
A link to the Nation on your site. That sums it up. They are the most anti-capitalist magazine around today.
nice job comrade.
See how Stallman changes his tune?
Name ONE company that writes only GPL code and has released a product that they created.
RedHat and VA did not spend the millions it takes to create an operating system. They got it AFTER it was useable.
BTW, comrade, Linus is not writing GPL code at Transmeta. That was Metcalfe's point.
Stalin
But the GPL tries to force it on you
He says:
"I hate the Open Sores Movement, because open source doesn't work."
"Open source isn't playing fair according to the rules that I prerceive they have set for themselves".
Think about it.
95% of programmers have jobs writing custom shit that only their employer has a use for. They write the generic stuff and share it with their fellow programmers. It gets peer review and everyone benefits. Except for the 5% who write proprietary shit. 5 Percenters. In the ghetto or the closed source world. 5 Percenters are the ones making life hard for everyone else.
Most Free Software is written and distributed at no cost. This indicates a massive failure of the market- most commercial offerings are thoroughly proprietary, interoperate badly, and meet users' needs so poorly that umpteen thousand programmers are donating valuable labor to work around the problem.
it is a kernel problem?
Remember, RedHat did not develop Linux, they just package and sell it. Who gets held responsible? This is the biggest flaw in OSS
The license doesn't require the copyright on derived works to be assigned to them (in fact adding this restriction would violate the GPL!) The FSF merely declines to publish any substantial contributions whose copyright hasn't been assigned to them and disclaimed by the author's employer, probably because they don't want to risk getting sued over publishing work the "contributor" didn't have the right to license to them (ISTR this almost happened several years ago). In return they sign a contract agreeing to preserve the work as Free Software and defend it from proprietary abusers.
I didn't emphasize strongly enough- you can derive from a FSF project, abide by the GPL, and nobody will get angry and nothing bad will happen. The FSF just isn't assuming the risk of helping you distribute your derived work (unless you assign the copyright on it to them).
"Precisely why my company has never released anything under the General Public Virus. You communists can go to hell."
Or so Mr. Gates would say, if he were a /. poster.
troll.
Metcalfe is a FUCKING idoit, he is the same one that said he would eat his article if the stock market doesn't crash by... last october...well his fat ass better getting eating so he can choke on his bullshit. The dude is so out of touch with everything called tech. He is bitter because he got ran out of 3com, because he is an ASS. IMHO :-)
here is the only way I can see open source in the future:
a gnu license where royalities are paid to the original owner, every time the code is used!
free speech, not free beer
Oh yeah! That got me hot!
Both of them haven't produced anything substantial in a long time. RMS spends most of his time fixing bugs in Emacs, and adding features mostly submitted by others to Emacs.
just make up shit. bill gates went on to say that linux sucks his big hairy cock. who cares if some fucktard anonymous coward says 'but thats not true' you have 400 other comments by raving lunatic slashdotters and rob malda and his priesthood of logical and smarter-than-everyone-else crew saying that he did say it and that he is wrong for doing it and should apologize. facts are for powerless losers who dont know how the game is played.
you're misinterpreting.
/.
this is a quote about the division of labor and distrubution of goods.
"From each according to his ability"
If you Can you Do, and thus provide the labor necessary for the raw materials a community needs to run.
"To each according to his need"
If you need something you take it from the public coffers in this case the Internet. There is no personal property, the community owns all, although this breaks down in that the GPL only requires source with distrubution. You can only take whats there and have no direct say in what is there outside of providing it yourself (see above)
The infinite quality of software makes the effort of a small group of people transferable to any who asks. This is why communism works in software and not in real-world goverment. One man programming a word proc/device driver/kernal can supply enough for everyone. One man farming can't.
AC because Communism is a dirty word in the U.S. and I've already been quoted on
No great surprise; at the time commercial developers were all selling proprietary software and thus undermining the entire profession of software engineering.
How can I "sabotage" an organization simply by not allowing them to do what they openly refuse to allow anyone else to do? How could they deserve better if the rest of the world didn't?
(and neither does Linus Torvalds)
Being old enough to have watched Unix fragment during the 1980s, I worry.
Why? Does fragmentation lead to more bugs? I can understand that perhaps it causes a problem with standards (glibc and libc for example, but even these are now merged into glibc2, I think). There are downsides to fragmentation, yes, but there are also benefits. Why do we have more than one OS? Because not everyone's happy with say just MacOS or Windows, and different needs require different tools.
Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt?
The open-source community does not equal Transmeta (and Torvalds is only an employee). What Transmeta does w/ Crusoe is not an open-source community decision.
Then Torvalds talked about commercial companies, which aren't so bad after all
They were bad to begin with? To keep w/ the open-source theme here, how many of these open-source programmers do you think work for free and live off of email thank-you's ? I would think it's safe to say they work for these commercial companies you mention. If you mean to say 'it's ok to hate Microsoft but leave the Linux people alone' then perhaps it might be wise to look at what it is exactly that people don't like and do. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the negative sentiments towards say Microsoft are because of its not-so-liked business practices which, quite frankly, I have yet to see with the Linux companies you refer to. (Maybe w/ time they might turn out to be the same, but now is a bit to early to say for sure, don't you think?)
"So just to keep Torvalds honest, I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software should be open source and basically free. Chips have to be manufactured -- with white coats, ovens, and stuff -- so maybe it should be OK to sell open-source Crusoe for the cost of its silicon, trace metals, media, and manuals."
"And how about this? To keep pigs out of the farmhouse, how about bundling Crusoe chips with Transmeta shares? This would cement commitment to Transmeta products and its inevitable IPO."
Did Torvalds build this chip himself? Did the open-source community iniate Crusoe? If so I must be reading the wrong web articles. Crusoe is the result of a few individuals who came up with an idea and brought it to fruition... Torvalds just happened to be a member of this group. As for Transmeta's commitment, I highly doubt that after all this secrecy, then publicity, that they would decide to just mass produce their product and go underground with their profits so as to avoid giving support. Even Microsoft doesn't practice this business tactict (I hope)--let's just make Windows 2000, take our money, and then run. As for bundling the chips with shares, you might as well say "hey, don't buy our products, we'll give it to you for free; and better yet, here's some money in the form of shares so you will believe our product works".
In case you're wondering, I use Linux, but use Windows NT just as often. Each has its good and bad. No I'm not an open-source programmer. Just next time give your thoughts a little more thought if you know what I mean.
VA bought slashdot? Yes.. and taco & hemos made *SURE* that they had *complete* editorial control over slashdot. THEY decide what happens to it, not VA, VA just gets to say that they own it.
Look at the obvious irony of these two statements. I bet the opposite is true and Linus is more important to Transmeta than Slashdot boys to VA Linux. If you asked people that own Transmeta, I bet they know the importance of Linus, but I don't think than more than a small percentage of VA Linux's shareholders know or care about taco and hemos.
First he writes obviously provocative material of a dubious standard, then publishes it. Shortly afterward the site is slashdotted, validating him as an important figure.
These hits are then translated into statistics for the purpose of selling advertising on the web site. The marketing people are happy, the advertisers are happy and more money is made.
Whether you agree with his views or not is hardly relevent, by visiting the site you do him a favour.
One fault wiht OSS is that a PRODUCT NEVER STOPS BEING DEVELOPED!! (which sucks and leads to bloat)
What if the frigging Morping software in the crusoe is OPTIMAL, ie, it does what it's supposed to and nothing more with the absolutely mimimum requiered code.
You OSS advocates would prolly develop "Hello World" into a 20Mb program by adding useless features if you could... it's sad
why would stallman have 'sheep'?
wha the fuck are you talking about?
You really are clueless
you dont find many people out here in reader land caring too much for the bloated ramblings of jon katz.
All in the past, and the long past on top of that. And let's see the FSF and GNU, two of the most divisive organizations in all of software, full of dogma and politics. Yeah, good thing he invented those. Get a grip.
A Dog. Wonder how did he invent Ethernet within his sick head.
Jealous guy
Kind of like any other company releasing the source code under GPL?
Software costs money to write, you know.
Posted anon since going against the /. mindset is a good way to get marked as flamebait.
What the hell is with all the replies here? Well over half of them call Bob an idiot because Transmeta spent a lot of money on R&D and has to recoup it. Well DUH!!! That's exactly Bob's point. As far as the cost of manufacturing... He mentions that. Charge for the cost of the silicon and fabrication. But if Linus, ESR, RMS, et al are correct and Open Sores is the way to go for the future. Then Transmeta should publish the internals of their chip, including the source to all the software to let others review it, improve it, and build their own chips. I can't believe you people are so stupid as to not get the point of the article. Are you so caught up in blind following?
A giant dongle? I've never looked at it that way, but that's a damned interesting take on the setup. On the other hand, PPC beats hell out of Intel on execution, power consumption and heat production, so I'll vote Motorola on that one. Then there's Apple industrial design. Design is important to me-many people put their computers on the floor and/or under a desk and you don't need to see too many Wintel boxes to see that's where they belong, no matter how well they work. But a giant dongle; that's a good take. I doubt you'll ever see Apple split into hardware and software divisions even though Jobs himself has called the MacOS the company's crown jewel. It would be worth it just to see the MS-Win defections after people had run MacOS for a few weeks.
CRAP!! Open Source SOFTWARE! It is software that is open sourced...not hardware! Man where did this guy come from?? Hardware will NEVER be able to be properly open sourced in this society, because it will always be able to me made ONLY by corporations. Software on the other hand is made by the people for the people. Hardware, ANY hardware(and the software is INTEGRATED into the hardware), is MADE, physically, in a plant, that could NEVER be afforded by a common person. Open sourced software is so successfull because it has be come a world villiage initiative; when the brain power of a whole villiage or community is put into a project, the ending product is usually astounding(look at the aztecs, egyptians, etc.) It's myopic people like the guy that wrote that article that really burns my buttocks!:> I laughed so hard when I read the little bit at the end of the article:
"Technology pundit walks in the valley of death, Open Sourcerers to his left, and Mircrosofties to his right. He needs all the encouragment he can get at "
Brackets all mine.
Yeah, ENCOURAGE this guy to get a clue!!! OY!
Linus may not own the company, but he has basically accepted and used his position within the open source community to evangalize Transmeta. I think his behavior has been a little more that opportunistic in this regard. I suppose the true test of his convictions will be when Transmeta's modifications to Linux clash with the popular direction, which will make the offical kernel... I have no problem with any one capitalizing on Linux and/or opensource, what gets me is the hipocritical stance Linus appears to be taking here.
Mr Metcalfe,
Your article needs a little work, here's why:
The "software" is written for THIS chip, the technology and know-how to do what they've done...been around for about 5-10 years; they just figured out how to do it correctly. As far as the Open Source Movement, it's a SOFTWARE movement, and this software must be able to run on the hardware it's written for. The Crusoe chip, and yes, even the software ON the chip, really it all counts as hardware. Why? Open source software, such as Linux, can be re-compiled to fit the individual users needs, or to address new support for features, etc. But it's just software, and if any fundamental change were made to the HARDWARE in the system, then the Linux OS and any other software would have to be re-written. Think of the chaos of multiple chip vendors bringing out their own versions of the crusoe software...Disastrous. Hardware is global, Software is personal:). Until that changes, which someday it may, Hardware could never successfully be made Open Source.
Also, you mentioned how that they made the chip to be "windows compatible"...it's not "windows compatible", it's called x86 architecture. That architecture is what most Windows, Linux, BEos, etc. Operating systems are based on. If they made the chip so that it'd run ONLY Linux, they'd just be making another Macintosh.
I do not think that Linus has used his position to "evangalize" Transmeta. He's been very neutral in my opinion. I went to the first Linux World Expo in San Jose, heard him talk, and even got to talk to him personally. When he was on stage, he was constantly being asked about Transmeta, and its very coprporate-non-open-source-ishness (at the time, the project they were working on was still a mystery). He had to remind everyone that he DOES have a family, car, and a house, and that open source does not pay for those things, working for a company does. Linus is just like any other guy, he just happends to be smart enough to write his own little monolithic unixesque OS. He's indirectly responsible for this whole open-source movement, that doesn't mean he necessarily should be held accountable for it, or that he has to abide by weird net-morals that don't apply to making a living.
The cost of R&D *pales* compared to the maunacturing costs, e.g.:
100 engineers @ 100k/yr = 10M
50 support @ 50k/yr = 2.5M
facilities,labs, etc... = 10M?
--------
total 22.5M/yr
times 5 years = 112.5 Million dollars
Now for manufacturing, consider the
cost of a Fab plant (1-3 billion?),
parts (say it costs $15 in parts *
1 million items produced), tons of
employees to do production, infrastructure
to support those employees. Perhaps
you outsource the fab, still, thats gonna
run you maybe 2x cost of the chips
themnselves ($30/per). So need to make
1 million of them? Its still $30M, then
you have the marketing, sales, and
everything else associated with promoting
your product. Fact it folks, R&D costs
are only a minor clink in the bank.
The cost of R&D *pales* compared to the maunacturing costs, e.g.:
100 engineers @ 100k/yr = 10M
50 support @ 50k/yr = 2.5M
facilities,labs, etc... = 10M?
--------
total 22.5M/yr
times 5 years = 112.5 Million dollars
Now for manufacturing, consider the
cost of a Fab plant (1-3 billion?),
parts (say it costs $15 in parts *
1 million items produced), tons of
employees to do production, infrastructure
to support those employees. Perhaps
you outsource the fab, still, thats gonna
run you maybe 2x cost of the chips
themnselves ($30/per). So need to make
1 million of them? Its still $30M, then
you have the marketing, sales, and
everything else associated with promoting
your product. Fact it folks, R&D costs
are only a minor clink in the bank.
This applies to almost all other industries.
Only in the software Biz is the cost of
R&D a signifigant portion of the whole chunk.
A chip with code-morphing doesn't need to release bare-hardware API information for the same exact reason that Microsoft doesn't have to release the 'undocumented windows API calls.'
There's no magical difference. People who try to pry in a little wiggle-room so they can hate Microsoft but praise Transmeta are playing little games.
Just look at Freshmeat, 95% of what is posted is utter rubish. How many MP3 ripper/encoders and SETI front ends are needed?
Obviously, all the software posted to Freshmeat, and even more, is needed, to bring in that all-important banner ad revenue. Just the same as heated discussions are needed here on Slashdot for the same reason.
You forgot to mention the burning need for 'skins, yet more graphical front-ends for administration scripts, log parsers, and desktop themes.'
It's an amazing thing that all those programmers have generously given their work away for free.
Actual;ly, you'd be amazed at how much many of those programmers' bosses were paying them when they were writing the open source code. Of course, the boss was never told.
In many cases, we're talking about people who work in government (NASA staffers, people on University campuses, in government labs, etc.), so we all paid them to develop that code.
I suspect a small percentage of the actual code in Linux is "donated" in the sense that nobody was paying the grocery bill for the developer who wrote it.
Not that it was all coded with time stolen from other projects. Just a percentage of it.
Yes.
Richard Stallman is such a fscking great hero.
We should worship the ground he walks on.
And he should move off campus and find a real job.
Oh, wait! He doesn't have to work for a lving, he's an endowed academic! Oh wait! I forgot, he's not an academic, he's just one of those guys who never moved off campus when he graduated! There are bottlewashers like him all over the country. Entrenched work-study losers from the 60's and 70's. I know a guy like that at the U of MN.
I wonder why slashdotters think that transmeta should be open sourced. I mean...if you shelled out > 1 million dollars on programmers and engineers to create a revolutionary idea, I don't think you would want some other company to just start producing it..
me thinks the slashdot community has a mental problem
Doesn't Metcalfe own the Infoworld publication? That was the impression that I had.
By definition anything that is libbertardian is only a 'concept' and never becomes reality.
"Open Source" has become reality.
It therefore can't be libbertardian.
Just try to find something you can sell that is not competed with by GPL software, it is getting harder and harder. Pretty soon only Microsoft will be able to compete, small programmers will not... It's time to fight the GPL
> One fault wiht OSS is that a PRODUCT NEVER
> STOPS BEING DEVELOPED!! (which sucks and
> leads to bloat)
As opposed to all other forms of software which achieve perfection after a short time and remain unaltered forever? I'm sure there are thousands of examples, I just can't think of one.
Code changes and programs bloat because everyone wants new features. It has very little to do with it being open source.
As an aside: I find it difficult to decide if the greatest threat to open source is people who deride it or people who support it. There are certainly intelligent people on both sides of the argument, but the unwashed masses seem incapable of anything but vitriol and abuse. Way to go guys....
Actually, I surrounded my post with sarcasm in HTML begin and end marks, which /. seems to treat as real html.
Companies and individuals donate software at no cost for all sorts of sound economic reasons. Microsoft donates hundres of millions of dollars worth of software to black colleges, presumably to increase the pool of available NT-savvy graduates. O'Reilly donates software development to sell books. Some companies create free software because it decreases their risk for their primary business.
Giving something away for "free" does not indicate market failure, it usually simply indicates that the giver expects other, non-monetary economic gains, like risk reduction, publicity, collateral sales, or market share. That's true for open source software as much as it is for Microsoft. It's good, sound capitalism, and it indicates an efficient market at work.
The above post should be ingored. It was not written by Bob Metcalf while he was in a normal state of mind. You see, as he was typing this letter I poured hot grits down his pants. He got so excited he posted this rambling troll.
I think he really enjoyed it, but next time he wants to try out copyrighted undistributable grits instead.
Thank You
Your sig is false. Bill Gates never said any such thing; further, he was not responsible for the design of the Intel 8086 (which had only 1MB of addressing space) or the IBM PC (which used 640k of that for RAM and 384k for devices, which was very reasonable).
Gates _is_ a clueless genius, but this particular urban legend has no basis in fact.
Not true. RedHat has been profitable at certain points in its history. The reason they show a loss recently is simple: they're expanding at a tremendous rate to handle all the new business.
I've been watching this thread and I have to say, I think it's obvious who has the wool over their eyes.
Shut the fuck up already.
What you fail to realize is that the "traditional" programming-for-sale model is only the most visible aspect of the software industry: in reality, it only hires about 10% of the programmers.
The other 90% are working on in-house or contract projects that are never released to the general public; and the effect open-source has upon them is _wonderful_.
Any closed source is bad, oops, except if it St. Linus. He works for a company that does not open source its code, and everyone looks the other way. It is sad.
I also love the rationale of the GNU weenies that hardware does not have to be open sourced, because it costs money for physical production. Hmmm, last time I checked most software is written by people who need to be paid. They are a physical resource as well.
RedHat and Caldera, and others can make loads on Linux simply for the reason they did not spend the millions needed to produce an operating system. It is easy to give away a product that you did not have to pay to produce charge service for it.
Unfortunately, the real world does not work that way. Once you cheapskate college losers get out in the real world, you might actually want to get paid for your work. Let's see how strong your "ideals" are then.
End of Line.
Everytime there is a BSD article here on /., there is a predictable group of /.ers who thump their chests about how the GPL model is better than any model that allows for IP to be controlled, or money to be made.
/. SHOULD be doing the same attacks on Transmeta and Linus. Yet they do not. So, either they don't belive in the GPL or they are hyprocrites.
Yet, where is the outrage about how one of the poster childern who is held up to defend how well the GPL works (Linus) is NOT working to get the Transmeta code GPLed.
Or, given possible GPL contamination of what Transmeta has done, where are lawsuit calls to defend the GPL?
The people who attack the BSD licence here on
Web columnists get paid for bringing readers, and Mr. Metcalfe has succeeded with aplumb in doing that with this latest irrational comparison. Yes, Mr. Metcalfe, I swear that all Open Source software users are exactly like the unfortunately typical flaming slashdroids that sometimes show their face here. Really. I swear that I'm not being sarcastic.
Mr. Metcalfe just got a whole lot of hits from us, therefore proving to his employers his competance as a desirable writer. Odd, isn't it, that one can do that today solely by writing bizarre gibberish and merging it with an seventh grade paper on animal farm?
Mr. Metcalfe, you're a real nowhere man.
----------------------------
Then I think that he'd be writing a column on the evils of genetic engineering and cloning =P
Nick
Nick
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
s/what/if/
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Personally, I don't see why Metcalf even gets the time of day from anyone. Where does his credibility hail from? Coming up with a bit of tech, even one which sees so wide a deployment, does not necessarily mean that the developer is qualified to make comments on other areas. It doesn't even mean that they're a big thinker -- Bob Metcalf is obviously no RMS. Technical ability does not mean you are immune from being an idiot.
In any event, Metcalf hasn't earned any sort of consideration or credibility in my mind. On the other hand, Linus has built up a fair amount of credibility thanks to his general ability to stay "above" the petty arguements in OSS land and to almost always make a great deal of sense. So, in a Bob Metcalf v. Linus Torvolds arguement, who gets the benefit of the doubt?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
So what I want to know is, if open-source is so cool, and if Torvalds "gets it," which isn't Crusoe open source? For a start, why aren't the Crusoe chip's mask sources published for modification and manufacture by anyone?
Just because Linus is an employee, doesn't mean he has any say whatsoever on the intellectual property policy of Transmeta. Have Intel, AMD, and IBM released mask sources for their products?
Worce, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath comtempt?
Sorry, there Bobby, I didn't know the 'open-source community' had that policy set. Dammit Linus, Alan, Bruce, RMS, why didn't any of you guys tell me that I must fanatically froth at the mount when the mere name Windows is uttered...
[...muttering about code fragmentation...]
As has been discussed in this forum before, the GPL is designed to allow, if not encourage fragmentation. Since all derivative works (such as Mobile Linux) are under GPL, the 'good' modifications will end up across all of the fragments, which may share so much that the fragments merge. Open source software is a living, breathing thing. Darwinian even: bad fragments will quickly wither and die. Good traits will be rewarded by being passwd down generation to generation.
> Long term, I see 'code morphing' as a basic part of software development,
/. for evidence of this phenomenon. Or, how about, RedHat, Suse, etc. The difference there, is that they have been released under the GPL. Why couldn't the GPL also be applied to the microcode in the processor? Transmetta could still make a profit off of the packaging and distribution of this microcode in their Crusoe chip.
> but it would be insane for Transmeta to dump that much cash into a
> development project and then just 'give' it to Intel.
Isn't this the founding theory behind Open Source? Write software and release it without any cost to the consumer in the hope that they will
A) Use it
B) Take the source and improve upon it
The amount of time and development that goes into some open source projects has been staggering. It has been proved that a company can survive, not off of the revenues of its software sales, but off of other services such as support or advertising.
We need look no further than our own beloved and infalable (evidently based on the posts I've seen today)
I'm not saying that I agree with everything that Metcalf says, but lets not toss the whole article out the door just because some of it might (gasp) criticize Linux and Open Source.
something clever
I doubt that very much. I suspect that getting everything Intel has would be much like getting the source code to windows (or netscape???). Everybody would look at it briefly, express amazement that the thing works at all, and quickly return to their previous work.
There's just no reason to want anything more from something that's already so well-known, and, quite frankly, so archaic it isn't even useful any more. Intel isn't in business because they protect the ability to make chips that implement a particular instruction set. They are in business because they are the best-known maker of such chips. AMD has proven that anyone can make x86 chips. What nobody has yet demonstrated (to me anyway) is why anyone would want to use them.
Now, if I could have unfettered access to everything in Transmeta's safes, all I would take is the documentation for programming the chip itself. And port Linux to native Crusoe. I don't really care how (or even whether) their "code morphing" stuff works. If it's fast at emulating an x86, it'll be faster emulating itself. And there's zero incentive for me to want x86 emulation if it's faster without it. But then, that's because I don't use closed-source operating systems. Funny how that works. Transmeta derives value from people's foolish use of closed-source operating systems. If everyone used Free Software, any chip would be as good as any other and emulation would be irrelevant. Chips would be chosen for their real characteristics, not for compatibility with a 1971 ISA. What a world that would be, huh?
Well, let's remember that Ethernet isn't really a very good technology. :)
Now lets be facing it, Bob Metcalfe is not a stupid man.
An alternative way of putting all this into perspective is that Bob here has done a great service to Open Source and Linux by making its detractors look like a bunch of stark-raving lunatics, primarily because Bob writes like one.
Bob fails to see the point of course, obviated by his constant references to "Open Sores". The guy has gone down to being nothing more than the equivalent of a USENET troll. He still has a slightly better reputation than your average /. troll, but barely. I expect this to change soon, and not necessarily for the better.
Bob, if you're listening, give up the journalism gig. You're no good at it. Your ideas might be considered good points if you didn't write like such an idiot. However, you are a smart guy and all. There's gotta be something more worthwhile for you to do!
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
- Guilty of making unreasonable suggestions: Metcalfe says...how about bundling Crusoe chips with Transmeta shares? This the trademark of a real troll: trying to stir up the sentiment that any businesses remotely related to Open Source must give away their capital to the public or they are being dishonest to Open Source. Guilty!
- Guilty of making unreasonable assumptions about a person's role at the company they work for:
...if Torvalds "get's it" then why isn't Crusoe open source Another troll trademark: assuming every employee at company X sets the policy for every aspect of the company X's business. Guilty! - A bold-face confession that this article was engineered to stir up resentment from Slashdot:
...why is the sanctimonious open-source press still cheering him on? Are the likes of Slashdot.org, just gobbled up by VA Linux, also porking out in Orwell's farmhouse? This, I submit to you ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a plain confession that this article was meant to stir up the masses of Slashdot readership and cause unhappiness in these here web pages! The true goal of every professional troll! TROLL, I SAY! - Guilty of trying to insite a Slashdot riot: Metcalfe blatantly asks, Where is the outrage? Oh there is outrage, that you sir are a troll!
- Guilty of dragging Microsoft into the conversation:
...Crusoe is touted for running X86 Intel software, in particular Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt? Yet again, the true trademark of a troll: when all else fails, mention Microsoft.
So you see ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that Bob Metcalfe is a troll! He has engineered this article to flame Slashdot! What is his next article going to be about? Natalie Portman pouring hot grits down his pants?! I say to you, ignore him!! Let him feel your defeaning silence and disinterest! Please, as with all trolls, DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.Thank you ladies and gentelmen of the jury for your time. The prosecution rests.
Maybe this guy is wrong, maybe he's right, but about 95% of the posts here just mock him without actually addressing anything he's saying.
About the only good post at the top-level that I saw was the one by fwr. The issue here is whether Transmeta should release the source for the code-morphing software. The problem obviously is that the software is tied to a hardware product, but I didn't see you guys cutting Apple any slack on releasing the MacOS source, when clearly that software is what gets them the hardware revenues. This, it seems to me, is a very similar situation.
Also, you can make excuses about how Linus doesn't run the company, but the fact is that if he's against closed-source in principle, he shouldn't work for them. He may not have control over the company's actions, but he does over his own.
If I was a web designer, and the KKK or some Neo-Nazis or the Christian Coalition(they're all in the same category in my mind) came to me to ask me to design a site, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If Linus truly thinks all software should be open source("information wants to be free"), then he should not work for Transmeta.
Interesting, I have disabled Doubleclick on my machine by setting up fake zones in my DNS server. The page will not display. If I temporarily re-enable doubleclick, the page displays.
Final proof, re-disable doubleclick, restart netscape (to flush it's cache of lookups) and the article won't display again.
I guess that's the last article I read on their site.
As for the article itself, perhaps Mr. Metcalf is under the impression that Transmeta is a sole proprietorship owned by Linus?
As for the windows crack, it probably also runs CP/M 86, so what?
"Uh, excuse me, but there aren't many poor GPL Linux programmers these days. Is this a particular personal income
problem?"
Presumably one would think that based on the rhetoric on fsf.org that the end goal of all of this is to abolish intellectual property rights.
That may not be what YOU want, Bruce, but it's clearly what RMS wants.
It would be very interesting to see the economic consequences of this. (I don't think there's any accurate indicator as to what would happen, but there's reason to be concerned.)
-Stu
I'm almost serious, when I say that. Anyone who can't understand the difference between a CPU instruction set and an application is in serious trouble, and is in urgent need of help.
I'll accept, for the sake of argument, that newbies MIGHT get confused. But there are some important points in just that. First, is that word "might". Most newbies are smart. They may not know much, which is why they make so many errors, but that doesn't make them stupid. A newbie can figure out that if they can read English, they can read any book written in English. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that if the computer can read x86, then it can read anything written in x86.
Then there's the "confused" part. It's understandable if a newbie can't quite figure out exactly what part the OS plays and what part the processor plays. That takes at least a little experience, which (by definition) a newbie doesn't have. However, that doesn't mean they can't guess. Sometimes they'll guess right, sometimes they won't, and sometimes they'll look things up. And everything's fine with the world.
My point? Bob Metcalfe isn't a newbie. Not even close. And yet he's making errors that even a newbie would be hard pushed to make, even deliberately. Errors such as "it runs Windows, so there's a problem with Linux" are beyond ignorance and enter a realm of surrealism and unreality that I would consider a fairly good symptom of insanity.
In many ways, this is worse than the article trying to push the blame for the DDOS attacks onto Linux and Solaris. At least, in that, there was some attempt at reasoning, however distorted and delusionary. Here, there isn't.
Lastly, Linus and the virtual instruction sets. EXCUSE ME, MR METCALFE!! Linus doesn't run Transmeta. There's no evidence Linus even WORKED on the translation layers. For all Mr Metcalfe knows, Linus could have been working on Mobile Linux (which might be construed as a little irregular, given his promise). He could have been working on the intelligent caching. Or the instruction set itself. We Don't Know! To throw the blame at someone, for something you don't even know he did/didn't do, is childish, immature and pathetic.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is.
I think it's sad Hemos either has no idea how much more Bob Metcalfe has done for computing than almost anyone he's ever met or he's just an ass. My respect for Hemos and SlashDot has just dropped quite a bit. Metcalfe's point is one a lot of us have been trying to address for a long time - the distance between open source ideals and money, i.e. the "real" world.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Basically, the models show no way for Transmeta to profit. The models are:
Support Sellers: What support? Either it works, or it doesn't, in which case Transmeta should fix it for free.
Loss Leader: This would be fine if Transmeta had other products whose market Crusoe would promote and not cannibalize, but it hasn't.
Widget Frosting: This *is* the widget.
Accessorizing: Again, I don't see how Transmeta could turn enough profit to recoup their investment.
So, in this instance, opening all aspects of Crusoe doesn't make sound business sense, and while it would be nice of them to do this, I don't think we can cast aspersions on their refusal.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
People, I have this awful feeling.
;-)
Somehow, someday, I'm going to start slipping down that horrible slope that Metcalfe has.
If this ever happens, please. Inform me that I am Metcalfing. Bludgeon it into my skull if you have to.
That's not to say that every controversial opinion I'll ever hold is automatically suspect--not that my opinions are particularly huge deal by any measurement, but I actually believe *gasp* that Microsoft has made some rather valuable technical advances in their time. But if I <i>ever</i> come up with something as *brain dead, credibility destroying, and obviously flaccid flamebait* as "Open Sores", please!
Help me! Remind me of Mr. Metcalfe. If that fails, go grab something from ESR's stash
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
What would such a warranty say? Can you point me in the direction of a vendor who does provide a warranty on their software? Most of the ones I'm familiar with provide a warranty on the physical media, and that's it. You can buy a support contract from Red Hat if you like, which seems to be about the same level of satisfaction and support you can get from any other vendor.
Or am I mistaken?
It might be nice if software vendors offered warranties, or if the US commercial code provided some sort of obligation in that direction, except that in the year 2000 we're not writing software in such a fashion as to be reliable enough for a warranty to mean much. If people were that serious about reliability, I expect software would take 10 times as many resources to produce and cost 10 times as much as it does now.
The guarantee that the software I use is open to me for my examination and that I can turn to any competent developer on the planet to improve the software as needed is about as robust a warranty as can be had.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
It may be fair to ask this question to Transmeta, but it certainly isn't fair to ask Linus why the Company's property isn't released for free.
He's an employee and member of a pretty kick ass team IMHO (plenty of other good minds working at Transmeta). That puts him in a position where he shouldn't and won't talk publically about this issue. This is what it means to be part of a Company. If you want to disagree strongly, go ahead and resign and let the resignation speak for itself. Otherwise, you air your differences in private, work through them, and move forward. Since Linus could obviously work at his pick of Companies, you can assume that he's fine where he's at.
Metacalfe stock just went down a notch for picking an easy target who can't defend himself publicly.
There are times when Open Source makes a lot of sense or is practically essential. There are other cases where it is more incidental.
Some might argue that the Crusoe morphing software is analogous to the situation with device drivers. Given that the morphing software is linked to the CPU itself, and the software is devoted to emulating an instruction set, below the level of API compatibility that operating systems worry about, the device driver argument isn't really valid.
The only other strong cases for open source are for reliability and security. As long as the code works reliably, that isn't an issue. Security isn't an issue for CPU firmware. Perhaps performance might be improved, but there's no assurance from that and there are reasons that Transmeta is avoiding releasing the code.
The benefits from opening up the code morphing software are extremely limited and the potential disadvantages given that there is a lot of investment made in the intellectual property, are much greater. That is a case where close source software is quite valid in my opinion. People doing things like voice recognition with natural language parsing and other cutting edge technologies to me can justify releasing the core elements in a close source form.
Linus is not a hypocrite for working on a closed source project. He's merely more reasonable than some people who would insist on forcing round pegs into square holes.
"Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe walks in the valley of death, Open Sourcerers to his left and Microsofties to his right. He needs all the encouragement he can get at metcalfe@infoworld.com. "
I said this last time an article of his ramblings showed up on here, and its worth saying again. Just because he "invented" some technologies thirty years ago that made him marginally relavent in the industry back then doesn't mean he's at all relavent now. He's walking through a valley of his own ego, reality to his left and the world as he believes it is on his right.
i wonder if he's a drunk as well. i wouldn't doubt it. is he pissed because he isn't as recognized for creating ethernet as he thinks he should be? what has he done lately anyway??
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
There was no equation, just a series of definitions. r is definined in terms of P, p, and something else (don't feel like looking back to the original :). The post was perfectly clear to me, anyway.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Moderate above as "Troll", please. Way out of line.
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Be conscious that Linus has held himself aloof from Red Hat and other companies directly involved in Linux who would gladly have paid him movie-star salaries.
If I were to be a worshipper in the "church of Linus" :-), it would not be for what he's done with software, but for how nice he and Tove are and what beautiful children they are bringing up. Having a life is #1, free software comes in somewhere after that.
Linux jobs abound these days. Can you program? If so, maybe you won't be poor as a church mouse for long. Remember, free software does not require you to take an oath of poverty.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I want to the Open Source world to use this CPU to write microcode and implement new instruction sets. I actually have personal experience in writing microcode, by the way, so I know what I'm talking about.
I don't care if the chip changes. I will provide new microcode when that happens, and programs written in my instruction set will continue to run independent of which chip they are on - all chips have different microcode to implement the same instruction set.
Transmeta can accomodate this without giving away their prized advantages. Whatever patents they have are licensed for the chips they sell, thus there's a license wherever the microcode runs.
Proprietary vendors can even establish an aftermarket in microcode, selling optimized implementations of an instruction set that might even be available publicly in a sub-optimal form.
Transmeta makes money from sales of their hardware into this market, and protects those hardware sales with their patents. What software people do after the chip is sold isn't of concern to them.
So, does this make sense or am I missing something?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You got it backwards, Brett. Can you guess why I am working on the problem of modifying a license (not necessarily the GPL) for the situation of ASPs? Because some ASPs asked me to. Why did they ask me? To protect their work and their competetiveness. They want to put out Open Source software and benefit from the collaboration of other ASPs and the community. They want to create a commons in which no one party to has an unfair advantage over the other in this collaboration. So, they will put their own code behind whatever license I come up with. And you can bet that will be compliant with the OSD. It's part of their business strategy.
The GPL treats commercial software developers the same way as everyone else. In fact, only paragraph 3(c) of the GPL even has a reference to commercial vs. non-commercial distribution, and not in a way that would impair commercial distribution.
You can't understand this sharing thing, can you? Want to use my GPL code? Fine! Share it with this excellent set of sharing rules we've cooked up called the GPL. Return value equal to the value I put in, and treat me as I treat you. But you're saying no share! gimmie! I want to use the code any way I want, and not give a thing back if that's how I feel, and who cares how much work you put into it! My work is more important to me than your work, so give me your work on my terms! Go over to freshmeat.net and look at all the GPLs on new code. Every one is offering you partnership in that code, if you can just learn to share.
And it happens that yes, I am on some corporate boards. I'd rather have me there than someone who doesn't believe in Open Source, and I bet a lot of people out there feel the same way. Why am I there? I tell them how they can make money while being good citizens of the Open Source community. I do it for some of them for nothing, and others have kindly offered me some shares in compensation. No cash or sale of shares has happened to date, nor does one appear to be close.
And what's all of this stuff about depriving programmers of their livelyhoods? I've got several nice positions advertised on my company web site for people who want to code Free Software. And I'm hardly the only one with open positions. The only reason you don't have one of those jobs is your attitude - unless you can't do the work? I've never seen your resume.
If you've got a mission to carry out, Brett, it would work a lot better if you did it positively. Gee - people accuse the free software folks of whining!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You, Tom, and Bob Metcalfe.
Translation: They really don't want to be competitive. Rather, they want to force their competitors to reveal the technology which might keep them ahead of the game. This is anti-competitive, not competitive.
Wrong. Their competitors are not forced to do anything unless those competitors choose to be partners on the same piece of code. Don't use the code, you don't have to obey the license. Together, the collaborators on an open source project are a bigger and better competitor.
But then, the GPL is, too. The GPL is intended to undermine programmers and hurt their livelihoods by giving away equivalents of their products for free and denying them access to that code so they can't add value.
Actually, that's not true. You can add value to your own GPL code and put it out with a commercial license. It's only other people's code where you have to obey the sharing rules. Didn't I explain this one to you last time?
So, they will put their own code behind whatever license I come up with.
Hmmm. Since when did you become "King Bruce?" It seems that, by attempting to dictate terms and restrict access to code, you are in fact becoming the very thing that open source was originally designed to avoid.
Who said dictate? They asked me to make a license for them.
No, the GPL specifically targets commercial software developers by attempting to force them to give away the fruits of their labor. Uh, excuse me, but there aren't many poor GPL Linux programmers these days. Is this a particular personal income problem?
True sharing means sharing with everyone.
You've almost got that right. When I give you GPL code, you must share that with me and everyone else equally. When I give you code under the X11 license, for example, you need not share it equally with anyone. You are allowed by the X11 license to just take, take, take. That doesn't sound like sharing to me.
If you are ethical
Here you go accusing me of being unethical again, Brett. It doesn't shed a good light on you.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Agreed.
Bruce Perens.
What we want from Transmeta is a microinstruction set description. Period. We don't ask hardware manufacturers for their chip masks - what we ask them for is full documentation of how to use the hardware from our operating system. Frankly, we can do our own "code morphing" given an instruction set description and a patent license that goes with the chip. And it's not even clear that we'd need to do code morphing from something like the x86 - I think we'd be much more interested in designing our own instruction sets to work optimally for Linux.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.
Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.
The writer made some really silly points, like the Transmeta hardware being open-sourced and given away for free. It's silly because you can't replicate hardware for nothing, at least not until nanotech reaches maturity. But a few of his conclusions were sensible, despite poor reasoning in arriving at them.
The Code Morphing Software *can* be replicated at zero cost, so the argument then hinges on whether you understand the positive effects of open sourcing or are tied to the traditional views of proprietary developers.
I don't have any doubt that Linus believes in free software, and if he does then he will have fought long and hard to get Code Morphing source released. It is very likely that he simply failed to convince the suits.
That's tragic for Transmeta, in my view, because the reasons that they gave for keeping it closed seem totally flawed: they would not lose the ability to change the underlying hardware arbitrarily, because they would need to integrate only those changes they see fit into their internal version, and on releasing a new chip then the onus would be on everyone else to catch up. No, that's just an excuse put out by the suits.
Open sourcing the Code Morphing Software would be extremely good for Transmeta: the quality of their code would improve for the usual OSS reasons, it would have numerous new features added by the world's gurus, the external development would cost them nothing, it would get ported to dozens of non-x86 instruction sets very rapidly, and perhaps most importantly of all, thousands of developers would buy into the CMS idea straight away. That's a priceless package.
And of course, meanwhile the only people to supply the underlying hardware would be Transmeta. They would become collosal, the next Intel but bigger, since their hardware can in principle subsume that of all other computer manufacturers.
Instead they're going to die in a few years' time without trace, just because their suits don't understand OSS. A pity.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If we apply standard ESR meters for this situation, then closed-sourcing the morphing code doesn't make sense. It will only lead to a chip which
- does less and
- is less reliable
Yes, Transmeta gets to set their own license. No, Linus probably doesn't control that process. Metcalf's comments on the VLIW morphing code seem to be spot-on, if you take our history of hardware vendors with proprietary drivers into account. If it "makes sense" for Transmeta to keep the morphing code proprietary, then why not Creative and Nvdia as well?The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Pointless semantics and hairsplitting. It is software. End of story.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The authors own the code they created. You have rights and responsibilities under the GPL. This ain't Communism, ya know.
One quibble, your point about closed hardware being more secure is false. Security through obscurity is NO security at all. If there is a hole, someone will find it. Just ask Intel.
STFU about slashdot bias.
your last point is incorrect: intel did demo nt. not at linux world, but at their initial announcement.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
it's not well known, but bob metcalfe runs the mail server performance under load benchmarks in conjunction with slashdot. it's a simple formula:
/. story magnitude r, the mail server responds in d times the normal amount of time.
let p be the number of posts in 4 hours on this story
let P be the number of posts in 4 hours on all stories
let t be the average time for mail delivery during that period
let T be the average response time normally.
let r be p/P*10 - the rating of the story
let d be t/T - the amount of degredation
so for a
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Crusoe isn't revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. It isn't the first VLIW machine by a ways. Rather, it is their decendant. It DOES fix what has been the achilles heel of VLIW - that you had to recompile for every addition of a new functional unit. It recompiles the code - on-the-fly!
;-)
As for the article - he's right up there with Algore, i.e. the inventer of the internet as far as his current prognosications....at least Metcalfe can make SOME claim to being involved in networking
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Do you think his advertisers appreciated out visit?
....
His advertisers didn't know I was even there
(have you junkbusted lately? Damn it feels good...)
Your Working Boy,
He didn't say "MacOS" he said "MacOS 8". I think the current incarnation in 7.something, which would lead me to believe that the whole Darwin business is going to be MacOS 8. And that would make sense, since they'd be starting with a codebase that runs fine on x86 though.
:)
But if the original poster wasn't talking about Darwin, then I'm with you on this one. WTF?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Linus has said before that the author of the software is the only one who can make any decision on what license to use...nobody else has any right to bitch.
Now Linus is the author of Linux, it's GPL. Linus is not in charge of Transmeta, he's just an employee. When he writes code, it belongs to his employer who does not choose to use an open source model. I don't see what is so hard to understand about that.
The problem here is the misperception that Linux users are fanatical foaming-mouthed zealots who won't take anything but open-source for an answer.
Granted, there are a lot of people like that, but I think the vast majority of Linux users are more sensible.
Well maybe Terrorist should Open Source their AntiGravity machines! You don't weant to float slowly into space when they turn one on in your town, now do you? heck i want to be hurled into space at near light speeds! and i would like to hack at their machines and retun the specs back to them so that they can hook it up...
And if you say otherwise... where do you live again?
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
This is not about eliminating the software industry (as you claim), it is about transforming the software industry to produce better software more cost effectively. I am sure, the society as a whole will appreciate this.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
For those who don't recognize sarcasm when they see it, refer to the above.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Chips have to be manufactured -- with white coats, ovens, and stuff
I work for the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductor equipment. Bob's analysis of the semiconductor manufacturing process is laughable. "Ovens?!"
I guess that fits in pretty well with his overly simplistic view of source code, CPU architecture, and everything else he wrote about in this article...
----
Also, I really think comparing GPL with any of the political or economic -isms is kind of going astray--it's code, not a government or economic system.
This time, Bob Metcalfe does have a point. Why isn't Crusoe opening up the chip design and the code morphing software?
I'm not saying it's an important question, but at least it's not another blatant FUD storm, as the Slashdot title implies. It's a question that deserves to be answered.
For the most part, I don't care if TransMeta opens up the code morphing sources or not. Hardware benefits less from the open-source development cycle because most people don't have a chip foundry in their backyard, so I do not benefit strongly, nor will the design of the Crusoe chip benefit strongly, from the release of the 'source code' to Crusoe (the chip etching masks, I guess).
Sooner or later all chips are going to work this way. Maybe an 'open source code-morphing FPGA image' that you can load into an Altera gate array will develop, maybe not. But releasing the source for Crusoe's code morphing probably isn't going to make that happen faster.
And, of course, there is the Freedom CPU project.
It is not "self-optimizing". The code morpher translates x86 code to native code for execution and also stores that. When the code is executed again it optimizes that, true. But the code morpher itself obviously is already compiled to Crusoe code, so it doesn't translate and optimize itself.
So you'd like to see things like TM3120rev1 TM3120rev2 among the architectures supported by Linux? Of course you'd have to port GCC and the binutils over to this too. As I understand it, making a VLIW compiler is very hard, but since the Trillium guys seem to have gotten IA64 working I guess it can be done.
Well, I can't speak for Bruce, obviously. I personally don't see the benefit so much in changing the instruction set, but more so in which instructions are more efficient. I'm sure that the Transmeta "code morphing" software has methods of optimizing certain instructions more so than other instructions. Transmeta's choice of which to optimize at the expense of others was likely the result of research into those instructions which are the most common and performance-critical in the platform which the chip is likely to be used - namely Windows-based laptops (at least for the higher-end Crusoe that is targeted towards Windows). Now, Linux may not have the same distribution of instructions, so those optimizations made in the code morphing software may not be the best for Linux systems. It would be nice, if you're running Linux, to be able to have an OSS code morphing software that is optimized for Linux, and which you can download and/or hack away at.
Just my two cents.
-Stradivarius
When the second release of BO was GPLed, the Cult of the Dead Cow presentation involved someone running from the room yelling, "Open sores!"
So no, Bob didn't invent that phrase.
Cheers,
Ben
PS OTOH I expect in time to see tyop show up in a dictionary....
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Hypothetical situation: You discover a way to make a processor 1500x faster than existing processors, zero heat output, and runs in a few milliwatts. Do you:
A) go public and tell everyone else how to do it.
B) Sell it to Intel, who buries it in a landfill never to be seen again.
C) Patent it, then go public.
D) Don't tell anyone - Moore's Law Must Be Upheld. (Only Intel may circle this box).
You see, if Transmeta released it's internal chip specifications now they'd be hosed because other manufacturers would then be able to produce clones... given Intel's vast resources this was Transmeta's only option. It was either that, or put up with an Intel chip that did code morphing but got floating point wrong 99.999938471% of the time. This is also Transmeta's way of protecting revenue - software is run by a different set of rules... try to keep this in mind when judging them.
Has he even heard of Mobile Linux? Apparently so, because he mentions it in his column. What about the Quanta Web Pad? That doesn't run Windows. Wake up, Bob. This is an x86 processor. (Duh, what's that mean?) Meaning, you can run anything your spiffy Pentium processor runs, INCLUDING Linux, and INCLUDING (But not limited to) Windows, DOS, and every other x86 OS/Program out there.
For a start, why aren't the Crusoe chip's mask sources published for modification and manufacture by anyone?
Would you want everyone to have the code that runs the hardware of a ton of computers? How about crackers who would love to find a way to cripple your processor, all because they have the source code. It's not necessarily a matter of Open Source, it's a matter of security. You can draw the comparison by saying "Linux is open source, and Linux is secure." Sure, but Linux is software -- easily fixed. Are you going to get a new processor every time an issue comes up? Sure you can flash the ROM, but what if an issue comes up that makes your processor useless? How are you going to flash it THEN?
Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt?
Does that erase the fact that Windows is used by most end users who own a computer? Yes, Windows is a piece of crap but it's a POPULAR piece of crap. Does it make sense to build an x86 processor, and remove Windows compatibility because you think it's crappy? Sure, let's remove an entire market from our product because of personal opinion. Get real. Oh, and there is no "particular" about it. It's a processor for God's sake. It doesn't run one piece of software any more "particular" than any other software.
Where is the outrage?
I'm guessing this dude WANTS outrage, and if he doesn't see it where he wants it, he writes articles like this to generate it.
So just to keep Torvalds honest, I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free.
Since when is Linus in charge of Transmeta operations? He works there, and has a hand in development. He's not the company's marketing department, CEO, or anything else like that. He works there. So this affects his honesty how? (I'm thinking Mr. Metcalfe isn't too honest either, be it intentional or not I don't know.)
I must ask this guy to grab a clue. He shouldn't be writing articles... (But in this screwed up world of ours, he is. And in this screwed up world of ours, people listen to him.) It's a shame really. Maybe Bob should go to work for Microsoft. Their marketing department is expanding.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
When the rent from secret bits is higher than the return from open source, it makes economic sense to be closed-source. When the return from open source is higher than the rent from secret bits, it makes sense to go open source.
The code-morphing software is the key to the Transmeta chips' superior features, so I'd say the rent from keeping the bits secret is pretty high.
RMS would probably argue that Transmeta has a moral obligation to free its software, but the pragmatic net payoff of a lot of the open-sourcing we've seen just isn't there in this case, and it's not realistic to expect a company to do so without it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Metcalfe's argument is reminiscent of the bar-room bait - "Hey, you're a vegetarian, but plants feel pain too. You chould eat rocks!"
-- need more time?
They own it , but they can't exert much control over it unless they re-release it under a different license. In particular, while it's their intellectual asset, they cannot capitalise on it.
Linux embraces many parts of the Marxist ideology, but it's not really "communist". "Communism" is a word that has been tainted by abuses and wrongs committed in it's name.
At the same time, Linux offers the anarchic freedom one associates with Liberterianism, though Linux certainly isn't capitalist. In a way, Linux offers the best of both worlds.
Check out this excerpt from Homesteading the Noosphere: there definitely is a strong sense of ownership within the community.
Hate to say it but I don't buy this. Open source is inherently anti-property in that it weakens what one may do with their intellectual assets, and in particular, it makes it hard to manipulate those assets for profit. The "rogue patch" thing has no legal ground. There's no legal ground for one patch to be called "rogue" and another "official". A succesful fork will turn the tables here. Eric's just having a hard time explaining why Open Source is all about his own political beliefs when in fact it is not inherently rightist or leftist.
However, Linux offers something that sample implementations of communism have failed to do -- freedom. This is why Linux appeals to those with strong libertarian sentinments. My feeling is that Linux really brings in the best of both worlds.
Not everyone even accepts that there exists a valid form of property. Those who believe exclusively in weaker notions of "property" are still anti-property, but less so than those who don't acknowledge any concept of property.
Intellectual property is corollary of capitalism. Take away intellectual property and you remove financial incentive to produce intellectual works, including software. It is awfully hard to honestly say "I'm a capitalist", then say in the same breath "I don't believe in intellectual property".
The concept that OSS even apporximates Marxism is rediculous.
I didn't say that it did "approximate Marxism". You failed to understand my post. A better way of putting it ( as some other guy did ) is this -- "Open source is voluntary". It "approximates" volunteerism
Well IMO, capitalism really didn't "exist very well" prior to the 1800's. Most capitalist societies of those days were barbaric by todays standards. There was no notion of a "publically held" company ( they were just moving towards that around 1800 ).
Moreover, there were many differences between the 1800s and nowadays. Piracy is much easier now than it was then. It was much less of a problem in the 1800s, since duplicating media was not very easy until quite recently ( try burning an LP on your hi fi system some time ... )
tir-na-nogth% dict communism
2 definitions found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Communism \Com"mu*nism\ (?), n. [F. communisme, fr. commun
common.]
A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life;
specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of
inequalities in the possession of property, as by
distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all
wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Note: At different times, and in different countries, various
schemes pertaining to socialism in government and the
conditions of domestic life, as well as in the
distribution of wealth, have been called communism.
From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:
communism
n 1: a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership
2: a political theory favoring collectivism in a classless
society
By these definition, the method in which the Open Source movement handles its code could be considered a form of communism. Note, however, that Animal Farm was a possible example of how a specific form of communism (socialism) wouldn't work as a form of _government_, which has been corroborated by events in the past decade.
I would say that OS has been doing quite well in its sharing of information equally. The source code is as available as people can make it, and that availability is put to good use.
If Metcalfe is trying to compare the way we handle our own source code to communism, let him. If, however, he's comparing the way OS is run, he's dead wrong. Linus, RMS, and many others are wonderful spokespeople for OS, but they don't run it. No one actually runs it. We all do our part, but we're not nearly organised enough to call it communism.
And I'm not sure I want us to be that organised. We're large enough that if we _were_ that organised, we probably would have many of the same or similar problems to those of a government run under that system.
It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you?re going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences.
I'm of two minds about this article. First, I agree with its premise: that Transmeta should open-source its code morphing software. Not to the extent that competing companies would be able to use it for free, but to the extend that the worldwide hacker net can go to work on it. Second, I think it's a stupid article, and it's written in a pretty stupid way. Give away the processors for free. Yeah right.
All this has very little to do with beliefs. OK, the gnu organization started because of beliefs, but the open-source movement continues because it produces more and better software. That translates in $$$ by the simple rule that if you give customers what is best for them, i.e., cheap and good, they won't be slow to pay you for it.
Open sourcing the code morphing software is something that Transmeta should do because it makes business sense. Again, very little to do with beliefs, unless you count getting rich as a belief. Transmeta wants to sell processors - whatever they can do to sell more processors makes good business sense. Especially when it doesn't cost any money. Opening the code morphing source will sell more processors. It will make the software better. And it will help establish a loyal, perhaps fanatically loyal, core user base.
So why hasn't it happened? Well, I can only speculate that somebody in the executive suite doesn't get it. Yet. It's just a phase that will pass. With Torvalds in there to make the case I'll give this, hmm, six months, and I guess said suit will see the light. In the meantime, the pressure is going to increase. So far Transmeta is on a honeymoon with us - they can do no wrong at the moment and a little thing like the code morphing source code isn't going to dampen our enthusiasm for this technology. Much. But that's going to change - you'll see more frequent and more emphatic calls for a policy reversal on the open-source issues.
After a while we'll get what we want and Transmeta will be better off for it.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
So first, I'll make my defense of Capitalism from a more socialist viewpoint. Capitalism has the advantage of being (at least in the ideal, and to a closer extent than any other system in preactice) what is termed by economists, Paredo-Optimal. This means that the allocation of labor and resources is such that no two people have bundes of goods/services that they would gladly swap. i.e. cases where I have 8 chickens, and would rather have a cow, and you have a cow, and would rather have 8 chickens will be eliminated. (well, the transaction may go through middlemen, and may get lossy, but you get the point).
Capitalism is not, however, anything goes, it does involve rules (i.e. the transaction "you have 8 chickens, and I have a big stick, give me the chickens and I won't hit you with the stick" is verboten) chosen to make sure things keep working this way.
Enough Econ 101, what about Free Software/Open Source? Well, basically, things with software are no longer paredo optimal. I have a copy of MS word, you have a copy of MS excel. I have the labor/materials required to copy MS word, and would gladly trade those for a copy of Excel. You have the labor/materials to make one, and would for a copy of Word. Copyright laws don't let us do that.
Copyright laws (presumably) exist because without them, if spent lots of money/effort writing software, and then everyone just copied it without paying me, I'd lose out, and not being a dunce, wouldn't do it in the first place. So copyright laws prevent me and you from trading MS's stuff, to give MS an incentive to make software.
However, what happens, it's easier to make software in the first place, if you can copy bits from other peoples software... So in software, as the free software/open source software movement demonstrates, software can be created without these incentives, since removing them (allowing copying) makes software cheaper.
So the economist would say "Copyright restrictions on software create an unnecessary inefficiency in the software market", the capitalist would say "Open Source Software allows us to make software better and for less money, gotta be a buck in that somewhere" and the err... "socialist" would say "Free Software lets me share software with my neighbor, so we all benefit"
Know what? They're all right :)
How's this for an example... Take two companies, we'll call one..... Bruce. We'll call the other.... Eric. Bruce and Eric both have patents on processes used in their industry. They realise they could both make much more money if they had the right to use the other's patent. They agree to cross-license their patents. Another company comes along, we'll call it.... Brett. Brett comes up with a process that is better than Bruce and Eric's processes, but dependant on both. Brett wishes to use this new process, so approaches Bruce and Eric asking for permission to use their processes. They reply "sure, if you let us use yours".
Any restraint of trade here? No more than the patent system already imposes. If Brett wishes to use Bruce and Eric's Processes, they're free to license them. If they don't like the terms under which they're offered, they're free to refuse Bruce and Eric the rights to the improved process.
This sort of patent cross-licensing goes on every day...
No, the code he returns to you is licensed back under whatever terms he wishes, and can legally offer. If you, as the copyright holder, are willing to allow him to release his derivative work (contribution) under some other terms, he may legally do so. Those other terms may be that in return for getting paid, he gives you the right to distribute his work as you see fit.If he refuses to license it to you under any other terms than the GPL, then no, you can't distribute it under any other terms than the GPL. Of course, that sentence is still true removing both instances of the phrase "under any other terms than the GPL".
Next thing you know, Bob Metcalfe will demand that Terrorists open-source their AntiGravity machines. The fool!
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
Yes, and including a blatent troll at slashdot.org, is a sure way that your column will be 'slashdotted'. And sure enough, Slashdot posts the link, and IDG gets the page views.
I hate to think that VAndoverTaCo would do it, but if I were them I would be thinking seriously about demanding a kickback from places like IDG, TimeWarner and ZDNet for linking to one of their pages.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Question -- Why don't Unix font sets just include smart quotes in the extended-ANSI positions?
The characters are otherwise undefined, and the only other way to display them is through Unicode. Both Windows and MacOS seem to handle this situation by just extending the ANSI spec to define common characters that ANSI forgot to define.
“For Example, these quotes are using the correct HTML Unicode codes, not Windows extended characters.” I'll have to check later from a Linux box to see if they show up correctly. (If, however, I were to copy and paste them from this Windows box, they would be inserted into the buffer as Windows ANSI characters.)
More info at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/latin 1.utf8
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Will Windows NT / Unixware / Solaris run on the "32-bit only" chip? Or just Linux?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
A) I agree with you that FrontPage/Word etc. are "moronized" by letting the extended characters through as WinANSI characters rather than the HTML escapes. (Especially because the HTML escapes work on both Netscape and IE, on all platforms.)
/. users get flamed as Windows Sympathizers for cutting-and-pasting text from a web page. (Including one poor guy who was using Netscape/MacOS.) This makes me think the real solution is an Extended ANSI-to-HTML parser in Slashdot's comments.pl script.
B) I have the sneaky suspicion that the HTML Form text box only accepts single byte characters. If so, this makes impossible to post smart quotes without typing the HTML escapes yourself. This is a seperate case than FrontPage.
Now, smart quotes in the original post you replied to are clearly unnecessary, or should be entered as correct HTML. But I've seen a couple unsuspecting
And, while I agree that standards are standards, it just seems like bitch that while 99% of the world wants to think ANSI 147/148 are smart quotes, 1% is going to insist that it is a little meaningless blob. It's such a sad, small thing to make a stand over, and as you point out, looking at the little blobs is clearly annoying to Linux users.
(Of course, I will retract my opinon if someone can show that defining extended ANSI characters would break any Unix application. And, I just want to say that despite this post, I'm not a Bill Gates catamite or anything, just trying to point out how small this issue really should be.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
(Followup to myself on the MacOS issue.)
MacOS is actually potentially more broken than Windows in this respect. It uses a different character set than ISO8859-1, or "ANSI".
This means that all MacOS Internet programs must translate Mac Extended ASCII to ISO8859-1. Historically, there's been some software that didn't do this translation at all, which means that extended characters wouldn't display correctly on any non-Mac platform.
What Netscape and other programs seem to do on MacOS is translate to MS's extended version of ISO8859-1. This handles things like smart quotes in single byte character streams. I guess since Unix is already using ISO8859-1/ANSI, Netscape doesn't feel the need to do any translation.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Thanks for the correction -- I wasn't sure what to call it myself.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
OK -- maybe the "moronized" generator is Slashdot itself. It liberally accepts extend ISO8850-1 characters as "Plain Old Text", and then liberally generates incorrect HTML containing those characters.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Please run your Word(tm) mangled HTML through demoroniser before submitting your posts to /. Otherwise, it makes it damn hard for the rest of us to follow your questions.
Thank you.
-- ultra1
It was very saddening to read Rob's article. :(</p>
<p>It seems like he has a great deal of hate towards free software. I suppose
he does after all the Slashdotters flamed him in the past. Still, he should
not let that anger get to the point where he begins to write bullshit.</p>
<p>He talks about Slashdot being owned by VA Linux... Isn't VA Linux
into free software?</p>
<p>He calls free-software something utopic and says he welcomes it as long
as it better than Windows. When he says so, he seems to fail to grasp that
there would be no internet without free software.</p>
<p>After all, it is like all his anger against free-software advocating
flamers has forced him to close his eyes and become, in some sense, very
stupid... like he's making all sorts of ridicolous comments against free
software, just for the sake of attacking it.</p>
<p>How is Mobile Linux a problem about fragmentation?</p>
<p>Rob also seems to confuse free-software (or open-source) with
not-commercial software.</p>
<p>Oh well.</p>
<p>I suppose he shows how bad it is when you flamers out there send
hateful mail to persons publishing articles giving Linux a bad light:
You get them to act completely irrationally against it.</p>
<p>Seems like Metcalfe is getting old. He is welcome to publish things
against Linux if it pleases him to do so, but at least he should write
object articles worth of reading.</p>
<p>And note that my criticizing has nothing to do with the fact it is
GNU/Linux he attacks. He could attack Windows in the same way and his
articles would suck just as much as this one does.</p>
<p>Alejo.
One of the points that Bob, in his inflammatory way, was trying to express which is getting missed on Slashdot is: If Linus is a hardcore proponent of open-source, why do his principles/morals not prevent him for working for a company that is releasing "code-morphing software" as proprietary patent-pending? The point warrents discussion, since it is a potential hypocrisy. One other thing. According to Transmeta's marketing on announcement day, they are targeting their lower-end chip for Mobile Linux, and their high end chip for Windows. It seems odd, and this is may be what Metcalf was listening to, that they would market the high end chip "for Windows" when they could have just said any x86 OS.
>> It has been proved that a company can survive, not off of the revenues of its software sales, but off of other services such as support or advertising.
Really? My understanding is that RedHat and the other distributions are making most of their revenues from CD sales, *not* support and advertising. Yes, RedHat is saying that their primary revenue *will* be support and services, but right now it's not.
Also, RedHat and the other distributions aren't actually paying for development of the majority of the software they are selling. It's easy to give away something you haven't paid for.
Lets see 5 years down the line how many distributions/Linux companies will survive.
Je ne parle pas francais.
When was competition ever about fairness? Who wins by being fair?
Slashdotters are all behind Netscape, who was just as bad about changing standards as they saw fit.
The truth is, being against M$ is not because they are proprietary or because we have to pay money (who have ever paid for IE?), but because it's M$. MicroSoft could release all their software under the GPL, and they would still be accused of dumping and killing the competition and unfairness.
Lets be a little honest here. Having a devil is great for the movement. If M$ hadn't been there, OpenSourcers would have to invent one.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Transmeta doens't need to do an IPO. What makes you think they would? They have no need for a capital influx. Is there some rumour that I'm totally missing here?
Wrong. I'm a software engineer and I worked for a fabless semiconductor company for a couple years. You have no idea how similar the disciplines of SW and silicon engineering are. And, yes, if you have the talent, you can design chips at home for "effectively nil." Just like for SW, all you need is GCC and Make, with all the free stuff available for silicon dev, the same is true. Ya, you can spend millions on QuickTurn boxes and proprietairy development tools, but you don't have to.
...)
Well, I certainly wouldn't claim that I know everything there is to know about chip design, but I do know the basics. I still believe that it would cost significant money for the hobbiest to get involved in chip design. ANY expense over that of the standard computer is too much, IMHO. With software design, I can get involved with zero additional cost. With chip design I'd at least need to purchase a FPGA and possibly additional stuff.
Wrong again. Have you ever heard of FPGA's? (Field Programmable Gate Arrays like Xilinx, Altera,
Yes, I have. But what use are they to me personally? Can I plug one into my Pentium II slot on my motherboard and have it run? I'd need to purchase the chips themselves and presumably a board or some other device to program them, right? How much would that cost? I'd think it would be pretty expensive, as compared to the cost of a PC. You can purchase a relatively decent PC for $1000 now, and be able to get involved in OSS for $0 additional cost. How much are all the tools and hardware you'd need to get involved in FPGA's, and what use would it be when you're done? I admit I don't know the answers to these questions, and that's why I'm asking them, but I would expect the answer to be significant (meaning over $100 for EVERYTHING that you'd need).
While there are circuit and CPU emulators that help work with chip design that's pretty useless to the end-user/programmer. Wrong yet again. Do you really have no clue on how chips are designed? SW Emulators/Simulators are exactly the tools that would allow the guy at home to design, test, and debug his own chip. So chip development can be done on the cheap. The outsourcing of the fabbing is the only expensive part but there are ways around this. Some schools have small volume educational fabbing deals with some universities, and going to a venture capitalist with a finished proven design is more likely to equal investment than a slick sales pitch by itself.
I don't think you got my point. Even if you could take an OSS chip design and tweak it, what use would a FPGA be to the average hobbiest? Unless you could plug it into a standard motherboard to replace your "normal" CPU it's pretty useless in my view. Plus, you'd have the extra cost of the FPGA chips and any other required equipment as mentioned before. My point is that "on the cheap" is not equivalent to "free" or no cost.
Nope, hardware and software design are exactly the same, you just don't have the background/experience to realize this.
I admit I don't have the background or experience with hardware design, but it seems like common sense to realize that the cost involved and the benefit obtained from OS hardware as opposed to OS software are nowhere near the same.
He's sad really. He seems to hate open source with a passion, but is powerless to do anything about it. He doesn't understand most of what he writes about (given the glaring technical inaccuracies that often pop up in his writing), but he posses strong opinions anyway.
Don't flame him and don't write him explaining x86. Just let him sink into obscurity along with everyone else in this industry who cannot actually accomplish anything anymore, so they are forced to write about others accomplishments.
Finkployd
Microsoft is making huge profits. If anybody makes huge profits in a capitalist system, that's an indication of market inefficiencies. Open source eliminates those inefficiencies: it's an efficient way by which consumers, who currently pay unreasonably high prices for Windows, force prices down.
Open source is a completely natural, capitalist result of the cost structure of creating and distributing software.
The feature windows has that hasn't yet been developed for Linux is market share.
So, basically you admit that Open Source will not pay bills. Thank you.
Nice theory. Unfortunatelly, as it is now, niether of two sides can use "bits from other software" , thanks to copyright laws and GPL. ... you are allowed to use code only under very specific restriction. Basically, GPL "protects" rights of GPL developers in the same sense that copyright protects commercial products but only in regard to using the code by other developers. Its design is completely biased to the customer side who has all the rights and leaves developers with no asurance whatsoever that their idea will make them money...
In fact, if you look at this closely, GPL is just as restrictive as standart copyright
I don't like GPL.
I really wonder what's eating Bob Metcalfe. He pours out the most ridiculous claims and statements about Linux and some other stuff. Methinks the man has a problem.
TA
I couldn't have said it better!
It may not be a driver but it affects
functionality of the computer. Indeed,
if GNU were to write HURD microkernel
directly to Crusoe hardware bypassing the
emulation layer, it could probably be a
faster solution than Crusoe package and
an OS on top of it's code morphing code.
Porting stuff to underlying hardware would
be easier if reference code were open.
It'd make sense to open all non-fabbed
portions of Crusoe.
Metcalfe:-Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows.
smeng58:-"Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is."
I think he has a fair understanding of what the code is, he seems to be infering that Crusoe will run Windows specific code optimally. Is it unrealistic that code-morphing could listen out for specific Windows calls and to translate them into a more efficient single call to the processor?
Say, for instance, a chip subroutine exists which can instantly trap a BSOD without the crash getting to the kernel, to allow you to save the machine state for recovery? What use would that be in Linux?
Look at the URL! here's a hint : http://www.dorsai.org/~delchi/cnn.htm *ISNT* where the source code for anything is posted, and it's not where CNN posts their news.
I really wish Transmeta would release the specification for the VLIW core. It would be great to make it a GCC target.
However, I understand that Transmeta wants to keep the VLIW secret so that they can change it with no consequence.
I personally feel that if some people want to compile to a core that is going to change in the future, it should be there choice, not Transmeta's.
That would be my issue.
I would hope the speed would be worth it. Even though you aren't going to get run-time optimization. (run-time branch prediction, etc.) To skip the code morphing layer should make the processor "THAT" much faster. Then they could compete on the desktop.
Nice to see good humor
New things are always on the horizon
Bob Metcalf founded 3com and helped invent ethernet. However, in this article, he doesn't even pretend to understand the concepts behind the technology he is writing about.
Odd.
Quack
Quack
"Death before dishonor, but neither before breakfast."
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
He's not "trolling". Just the opposite. He's stirring up the hive. A flawed attack at St. Linus only serves to stoke the flames of zealotry.
Come on... it's the devil's advocate. Don't let yourselves be manipulated by such an old trick.
Simple: if hardware is not proprietary, someone with an existing chip factory will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (motherboard) for less and put you out of business; hardware and true physical-domain engineering (EE, MechE, CivE, EnvE) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work. The overhead on creating from scratch a chipset does not lend itself to the open source model.
Digital items can be "made" by the user, who copies one off an FTP site. Hardware is made from real natural resources which cost money, and someone, somewhere, will find a way to charge overhead for them. Open Source works great for digital items, but not for hardware... sorry.
--Jurph
physical domain engineer
perl newbie
I thought the Alpha processor is an X86 processor?
Somebody set me straight; what instruction set does Alpha use?
G.
An important thing to remember is that Linus is an employee of Transmeta. It's not his company. It's been stated by TM management that he's just another coder working for them, albeit a very good one. Just because he holds a position of high esteem in the Linux community does not mean he holds sway over any company he works for.
--John Riney
riney@scra.org
"I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free. Chips have to be manufactured -- with white coats, ovens, and stuff -- so maybe it should be OK to sell open-source Crusoe for the cost of its silicon, trace metals, media, and manuals."
...
.. and many other linux distribution don't need to do much R&D on the linux kernel in order to make it work, there are people all round the world to do the R&D, that is why they can make the whole OS with low cost, and distribute it open source.
...
... then there'll be some Debian chip, redhat chip .. !?
He still don't know what is driving Linux!? It's not a company that built Linux, it's people all over the world that built it. Transmeta used lot's of money on R&D, and you tell them to Open source their design ??
Red Hat, Debian, Corel
According to his theory, we should start designing a new open chip, then tell some people/company to goto the beach and find silicon to implement the design !?
.......... how about that tell transmeta to open their design, and you guys go to the beach and find some silicon and make your own chip
Look at the discription at the bottom of his artical.
He seems to think he has a sereous prospective.
He is trying (very hard) to stand between Microsoft and Open source and be critical of both.
This is an imposable task...
How can you be critical of Microsoft while repeating Microsofts FUD? You can't...
So Metcalfe opts to come up with his own bizzar comments...
True it would be nice if the code morphing source code were available... But it's Transmetas call and not up to Linus...
That may be what Metcalfe is getting at but in all his rantings he forgot to mention it...
But then has anyone asked Transmeta for it?
I don't actually exist.
Heh.. And we got slammed for publically calling Bob Metcalfe a 9.9 richter-scale idiot 8 months ago.
Don't say we never told you so.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
I don't think it's so much about hardware vs. software, but REVOLUTIONARY technology vs. MUNDANE technology.
You see the linux core for all intents and purposes of the cutting edge isn't really revolutionary, and it doesn't NEED to be! Now every other OS has a journaling file system, ok let's build one for linux. Firewalling, ip chains, etc etc... I'm not a hard core linux developer so I'm party speaking from ignorance, but does ANYONE know of a significant technological advance that linux has spearheaded??
So ReiserFS is pretty kewl, and xscreensaver kicks ass. Bash is a masterpiece and mozilla is on it's way in. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of extremely high quality pieces of ART that the free software community has produced. But there's nothign revolutionary about it.
Now we've got the brains behind it... and we're making steady progress... so what happens when one of us makes up something EXTAORDINARY?! Do we give it away for free and be so do we take Metcalfe's stereotype of the Open Source community and say: "for the greater good i give up all my worldly posessions so that someone can exploit me"???
No! we do what anyone convinced that they have produced a genuine invention would do: develop it in secret, patent it once it works, sell it to the highest bidder (or market it yourself), all the while integrating support for Linux and maybe even giving them a free lisence for it!
In 8 to 12 years when you've made your fortune and your utillity patent is up for renewel, you let it expire. And hey, don't forget that patents aren't incompatable with the GPL! Hey you could GPL your patented invention and have a legal double-whammy for anyone who violates your patent!!!
Hey, if RT-Linux is revolutionary, or if code morphing is really revolutionary (sounds just a bit like a beefy emulator/finer grained scheduler on a better CPU, but I can't honestly know if it was that original or not), or if some little project i'm workin on happens to light a fire under whatever market it's viable in and we patent our inventions... this does not mean that we're sellouts!
if Metcalfe posted on slashdot:
Re:Crusoe Code Morphing (Score:-1, Troll)
by Bob Metcalfe (metcalfe@idg.net) on 1:01 Friday 11 February 2000 PDT (#0)
(User Info) http://www.infoworld.com/op inions/morefromtheether.html
Nah, nah, OPEN SORES!!! Linus Torvalds Naked and Petrified eating goat cheeze and being a hyppocrite!!!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
I think that Bob Metcalfe has a strong grasp of x86 code. Code morphing, in and of itself, is nothing new and is a part of both Intel's and AMD's advanced processors. If I'm not mistaken I believe AMD refers to the product of converting x86 opcodes as RISCops, in which the internal machine is very RISCy. This code morphing is hardware based, and is limited to one instruction set (x86) being morphed to the internal RISC opcodes. Transmeta's value added is that they exposed and optimized the hardware layer hidden in the Intel and AMD processors in such a way that it become possible to emulate nearly any current processor instruction set.
No, I support Metcalfe's pointing out the strong smell of hypocrisy surrounding certain actions by some in the Open Source community. Let's go over some of Metcalf's points:
SUN Microsystem's own website (http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/communitysou
Yep, there's that ugly serpent in the Open Source Garden, software patents. How many articles have been published, and how many flames delivered, to the "clueless" individuals who would dare to tie up innovation and hamstring the inevitable march to victory of the Open Source Movement?
What more can I say? Intel comes out and shows Linux ported and running, first on Itanium emulation, and later on Itanium silicon. Further, the Trillium group, to great fanfare, releases the kernel source. Notice that Windows NT wasn't anywhere around, because Windows NT, being "beneath contempt", wasn't worth the effort to port and show running at the various Itanium showings.
Linux Torvalds may not have intended this, but he has taken situational ethics to new ground with his employment at, and tacit support of, Transmeta. It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you're going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences. If the Open Source movement and philosophy are strong enough that companies such as Red Hat, SuSe, TurboLinux, VA Linux, and others are willing to build a business around it, then Transmeta, with Open Source's icon as an employee, should be out in front of everbody else. Instead, they cynically use Linus to garner interest and at the same time to shield themselves from criticisms of the company's behaviors.
Errmm..not that it matters at this point, but:
GPL code is owned by the copyright holder. In the case of GNU software, this is the FSF. But in the case of Linux, for example, there are many copyright holders, but the principle copyright holder is Linus Torvald's, so he said to "own" the code.
My journal has hot
One of the key issues in this difference is ownership. Take the WordNet definition:
On the other hand, the Open Source community does have the concept of ownership. Check out this excerpt from Homesteading the Noosphere: there definitely is a strong sense of ownership within the community.
Plus, in general, the Open Source community is tolerant of capitalism. Companies like Red Hat, VA, and Transmeta are cheered on, despite their obvious capitalist nature. Yes, it is expected that these companies will give back to the Open Source community, but the idea of making money on Open Source software is encouraged rather than discouraged, as it would be in a a truly communist society.
My journal has hot
Why uses code morphing?
-because AIUI (as I understand it)
the code morphing/translation software IMPROVES performance of the chip.
Furtermore, it's so Transmeta can change the VLIW instructions for future chips, without breaking compatiblity.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
"X86 = processor platform. Solaris, Mac OS 8, Linux, BSD, Windows, BeOS, DOS and others run on x86. "
Mac OS runs on x86? Since when?
___________________
rooooar
The current MacOS is 9.0. Darwin is going to be part of MacOS X (ten). If he had said "Mac OS X" he still wouldn't be right because there is nothing other than rumors to suggest Apple is porting MacOS X to any other platforms. Supposedly these rumors have been substantiated somehow, but I'll believe it (Mac OS on anything other than Motorola/PPC) when I see it.
___________________
rooooar
it seems to me that Bob Metcalfe is thinking in terms of some king of open source red scare. He thinks that all open source advocates are mindless followers of a cult whose idea is that everything should be open source and free.
I admit that sometimes the open source public goes too far like the flame wars against whether the BSD license should be considered open source.
The truth is (and even some people who embrace the open source ideals sometimes needs to be reminded of this) that proprietary software (windows) is not hated just for the sake of being proprietary. we hate it because we're paying money for something that the developer sees not need to improve. why pay for a new version of something if all the developer the did was inflate the version number and shove the same piece of crap into a new box? futhermore proprietors attempts to change the standards (ie: IE) so that their competition can't keep up. while sometimes imposing proprietary standards on software improves it's quality, it is unfair to their competition.
A short but acurate definition of communism: From each according to his means, to each according to his needs. Or if you don't like that, how about : that which is held in common? Sounds damn like GPL'ed software ends up being damn like communism according to that definition of it. Perhaps you're getting confused with ideas about gulags and state capitalism and authoritarianism? One has rights and responsibilities under communism too - many would argue that you have fairer more useful ones!
OK, I totally concur with your post. I shouldn't have added the line that you object to.
Crush
Untrue. The code/means-of-production are available to all of us. It's out there now and I'm working with it as are a large number of other people. It has already been handed over to us.
I disagree that open source is necessarily communist. Many others including myself and most notably Eric Raymond, have asserted that Open Source is really more Libertarian than communist. One of the key issues in this difference is ownership. Take the WordNet definition: 1. a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership On the other hand, the Open Source community does have the concept of ownership.
Do you exclude GPL'ed Free software (the kernel and most of the utilities and a large number of applications) from the set of code that is Open Source?
No? OK, then - who owns the GPL'ed code sitting running your machine at the moment?.
You may well be correct that the Open Source people are more keen on allowing private ownership, in fact that's what many suspect them of (else why change it from Free if not to shift the emphasis?), however as it would appear that somehow or other Free Software is included in this you can't get away from the fact that Free software is communally shared - there is no single, hoarding, controlling owner. This is much closer to the idea of communism that libertarianism. Under libertarianism you would be negotiating with several other thousands of coders for the rights to use their contributions and would be tied up in insanely complex individual arrangements. Libertarianism is taking the valuable idea of individualism to a ludicrous and non-workable extreme.
Each gives according to his ability and takes according to his needs" is specifically Marxist is not correct. That idea is much older, and is more properly termed communism. So, the order of inclusive sets would be:
There are very old traditions of the principle of holding things in common widely spread across different ethnographic groups
There were plenty of theorists on the scene before Marx cropped up who considered the obligations of indivduals to each other that forms a society
Anarchism is an alternative at this level of the typological hierarchy. The most vociferous critic of Marx was Bakunin who believed that Marx was too authoritarian and that in paying too much attention to the end goal of communism Marx was falling into the trap of using methods which would ultimately make this non-acheivable. This lead to the split of the First Working Men's International
Bolshevists were the majority of those that adhered to the principles of Marxism. They believed in immediate revolution, the use of force and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The alternative was Menshevism which disagreed on these points and others to varying degrees. Other alternatives included (I think, I'm not sure how much of Marxist ideology they accepted) the ideas of the Social Revolutionaries (I get the impression that they may have been essentially social-democrats but I'm really ignorant on their policies)
Alternatives at this level are Democratic Socialism and Trotskyism. The former asserted that there was no necessity for a revolution and that change could be acheived through the mechanism that had been set up by the capitalists to control society - representative democracy and the law. Trotskyists are hard for me to pigeon-hole as they adhere to most tenets of ML that I can see yet appear to have been even more authoritarian
Anyway, my short point is that the GPL results in a situation like the simplest, original meaning of communism. It's definitely not Marxism and it's not the bogeyman that the US has been fighting for years.
1) Linus is only an employee of Transmeta.
2) Linus has contributed greatly to OSS, before we even had this OSS evangelist movement.
3) X86 != windows. Linux will run on these things just fine.
4) The code-morphing is brand-new stuff they have invented. What I want to know is.. have their patents been granted? I remember they applied...
if and when the patents are secure, I would imagine they may release more information on the actual chip itself.
1) Linus doesn't control Transmeta. He is an employee.
2) Linux runs on Transmeta processors just fine.
3) Linus is not 'now in control' of Linux. He has final say on kernel builds, anyone who wants to could maintain their own branch of kernel development, but the fact is, the core kernel developers *like* having linus maintain the tree. In other words linus 'controls' it because nobody else wants the job, which in the OSS world, translates to nobody thinks they can do it better.
4) comparing this to animal farm really stinks. If what you say made any sense, I would say it's insightful.. but your article is just full of inaccuracies. VA bought slashdot? Yes.. and taco & hemos made *SURE* that they had *complete* editorial control over slashdot. THEY decide what happens to it, not VA, VA just gets to say that they own it. It adds percieved value, which is very important for a publicly traded company.
*LOTS* of OSS developers have real jobs, for real companies who do some proprietary software work.. why don't you go tear a strip out of them?
As for windows being replaced..you are exactly right. Anyone is free to develop something better. And where does our anger come from, Bob? Those of us who are *very* informed, find that Linux (or indeed, any unix) is MUCH better, in many circumstances, as a server platform than Windows. Our anger stems from the fact that we have this fucking WALL that MS built that stops us from using it.. our managers question us, make us look like zealouts, and have managed to turn the whole NT -vs- Unix game into a political one, not based in reality at all.
So get back on your bus and go back to the institute.
Bob has made his opinions on "open sores" (as he calls us) very clear in the past. He is just attacking Linus and the movement now. Hopefully, he'll be proven wrong in no more than a few years.
Let's remember Crusoe has only more software "in the dice" than other microprocessors, but it's still hardware. Hardware patents are an entirely different issue than software ones. Unfortunately, free HW has a long way to go =(
Salu10
Hugonz
No doubt this is true. But.
Open source is about getting more points of view, if Transmeta keep the instruction set closed, nothing comes to the open source community because of their work. Nothing goes back to Transmeta.
What is the best instruction set to run linux? What is the best instruction set to interface to?
Questions many will never be able to ponder because of the way Transmeta have gone.
Surly you are not going to claim that X86 is the ultimate program interface.
No I think Transmeta has made a mistake, but to blame it all on one of their programmers is a bit rich.
It's not Like Linus owns the company. It's just his day job. He's not the first open source programmer who writes proprietary code for a living. If he had a say whether code morphing would be open source or not, maybe he would, but since it's not even his choice it's wrong to call him a hypocrite.
Metcalfe also doesn't seem to get what Linus said about fragmentation. Had he actually listened to it rather than read some 2 line quote in the news, maybe he would have realized that there's actual good fragmentation too (or so Linus says). Fragmentation's bad when it leads to incompatibilities and duplication of effort (which is what happened to UNIX). It can be beneficial though when a product is moving in different directions and would otherwise be held back by the legacy of it's original purpose. As long as they share what's common between them, fragmented projects don't have to be at odds with each other. s.
You ever eat so much bean chili, that your gut aches for 30 minutes, before you hear big rumblings and gurglings, only to lift your leg and FWAAAAAAARP out it comes. This is how Metcalfe writes. He has nothing to say, he just want's to be heard. Thanks for ethernet - now fuck off home, Bob.
(my first post ever)
Might we not see...
Java running 'native' via the translation layer?
Amiga / PSX / Nintendo etc emulators running 'native'?
I'm sure at least some of these projects would attract the right skills for open source.
On the other hand, consider insidious viruses like the C compiler trojan, but built in to the chip (ok so that may not be possible - I don't know how flexible Crusoe's 'firmware' language is).
I really don't see where Metcalfe has a point -- Torvalds never claimed to be a free software fanatic -- in the sense that all software should be free (as in GPL'd). Rather, he does support OSS, which is entirely pragmatic in approach. Some software is better developed in a cathedral, others in a bazaar. Unless Transmeta (and Torvalds by extension) want to deal with people exploiting portions of the Crusoe architecture that are subject to change, it's makes more sense for them to keep it private indefinitely. Otherwise, they'll have very difficult compatability problems to solve in the future. And besides, there's an aweful lot of intellectual property in that source code. That stuff costs a LOT of money, you know.
Anyhow, Torvalds is a much different sort of hacker than Stallman. Whereas Stallman considers hackers to be some sort of political animal devoted to making all information free, Torvalds just likes to solve difficult and interesting programs. If you're the sort of person who thinks is unethical to solve a problem and not tell everyone else how you solved it or give them an opportunity to solve it better, than so be it; whine all you want. Hell, everyone argues about privacy issues here -- what's the difference between keeping your source code private and keeping your other knowlege private? It's all the same to me...
Incidentally, free software is entirely different from "free speech." Free speech gives you the right to say what you want. Stallman's fanatic ideolgy would make it illegal to not say things you don't want to say. (and before someone brings up issues like publishing source code of crypto, this actually is the same thing as free speech -- but it has nothing to do with Stallman's conception of 'free software'). It's be like denying a person the 5th Amendment (for non-American's, the right to not say something that could incrimintate you) because "all of your knowledge should be public."
I'm with Torvalds on this one. GPL your code when it makes sense (like if you want to make a new operating system and you realize you can't do it all by yourself). If there are specific issues which would make it stupid to do so (like intellectual property), then withhold it. Don't let a bunch of commie-nerds tell you you're being unethical.
-NooM
I think farmers ought to open-source their crops. I mean, what's with all this archaic "market price" business model, and the propietary use of individual plots of land? They must not get it.
In that the taxes we pay are what keep terrorist antigravity machines from being turned on, yes.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Good journalists check their facts.
MTT
Yeah, He's a fool, we know that, but the solid argument against his craziness is:
1) Open Source development is cool (read: cost effective and resource efficient) when it allows a previously existing pool of inhouse support staff accross industry to become the primary development source for a peice of software, breaking the cost up to tinny bits everyone can swallow.
2) Chip design is NOT such scenario, their are no developers which could aid Transmetta in this field that do not work for their direct competetors.
Long term, I see 'code morphing' as becoming a basic part of software development, but it would be insane for Transmeta to dump that much cash into a development project and then just 'give' it to Intel.
The important thing is that they have proved this software 'CAN' exist, and work well. So lets get the CS theorists to figure out the general case, and then you can have your open source code morphing.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
>> Long term, I see 'code morphing' as a basic part of software development,
>> but it would be insane for Transmeta to dump that much cash into a
>> development project and then just 'give' it to Intel.
>
>Isn't this the founding theory behind Open Source? Write software and release it without any cost to the consumer in the hope that they will
>A) Use it
>B) Take the source and improve upon it
>
>The amount of time and development that goes into some open source projects has been staggering. It has been proved that a company can survive, not off of the revenues of its software sales, but off of other services such as support or advertising.
The founding theory behind 'Open Source' development is NOT commercial at all, and I can't stand the idea that it might be. The idea is:
A) I want your code so I can play with it.
B) You give it to me because you EXPECT to get something out of it, not because "Code should be free", though that might be what you expect out of it.
In this case the only people who can 'Play' with it are (currently) Chip makers. Who are in direct competition with Transmeta.
Or, more to the point, Open Source assumes their are no 'Consumers' as such, but merely other users. Transmeta's product IS a product, the software infrastructure does NOT currently include this sort of thing, and so Transmeta selling 'suport' to 'users' who would all be competing chimp makers is silly. Admit it.
I support 'Open Source' software because where it works, it works beautifuly. But it should not be a religion, thats just stupid.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
particularly because it points out the cluelessness of Bobby.
Oh, did anyone else notice that every single one of us was likened to an ignorant pig by Bobby? He was actually asserting that we were so dumb that we couldn't tell what was "really happening" in the open source world.
Tovalds works at Transmeta - he doesn't own it or even run it. He is an engineer there. That's it. He has no control over it being open source or free or anything.
Also: If I remember correctly, in one interview I read, he said that he didn't create Linux in order to become some sort of open source hero - he did it for the technical challenge... and for him, the technical challenge is no longer there in developing Linux, so he moved on to Transmeta where there is a challenge for him. If I find the interview, I'll post it later.
Why we want free software? If one read the Copying file of GPL, one would know the concern by Stallman. There are a lot of ways to use a piece of software, and most can be done by everybody in the world cheaply. When software are proprietary, all these uses becomes unrealistically expensive.
In an earlier article by Stallman (forgot which), he commented on the Open Hardware project. His vision is that Open Hardware is not as needed as free software, because modifying and making a new piece of hardware (i.e. chip) is expensive anyway.
Code Morphing is somewhere in between. You have to make a new hardware before you need actually rewrite code morphing substantially. In this way, most of the people who want access to source code of code morphing is probably hardware makers who want to produce a chip using the same technology, not the general public. There can be small changes to the code which is useful even without modifying the underlying hardware, but that is not going to be really necessary because on top of that the chip is completely programmable.
In this sense, I don't see there is a big need to free Crusoe, at least from a viewpoint I understand by reading Stallman's writing.
All software is tied to hardware in some way. If transmeta did open the source to the code morphing, then you or I, and huge bankroll could design our own chips that used the technology, or we might be able to use it at some other level.
Just because it's low level doesn't make the rules different. Metcalfe just doesn't understand the rules.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
Metcalfe is wrong, but for different reason than many people have posted here.
First of all, Metcalfe is right in saying Cursoe could have been developed open-source and be sold near free. Yes the economics of hardware are different from the economics of software, but the differences talked about so far do not present an insurmountable barrier to open source hardware development.
Using open source takes IP and makes it into a commodity. It is a much together market, because nothing is given to you by right, you must work hard for each and every sale. In Cursoe's case, much of the propietary development is actually software. If it was open source you could have thousands of eyes trying to make the interpretations and optimizations better than any single company could. Also by open sourcing as much as possible of the chip, you could make it a standard. Had open source been choosen, Cursoe could have become an even bigger commercial event than Linux. Yes, you would still need a fab plant to actually produce this open source chip... but not to fix bugs with the emulation software.
Now, that part that Metcalfe asks and just doesn't seem to understand is "so why aren't we booing Crusoe down?". The answer is simple. We don't boo propietary software when it is actually innovative and there is no open source equivalent. Now suppose I came out with a new CPU chip tommorow. Suppose it was designed for to be compatible with other cpu's and it's behavior was programmable. Let's say it was inferior in terms of speed, power usage, and had a few bugs. Lets also say I also released a simulation program and all of the docs for it under something like the GPL. Such a chip could be produced for next to nothing in Taiwan and would scare Intel much more than AMD and Transmeta do combined. You see, eventually someone smart would see how to make the chip faster and better. It might take as long to catch up to Intel as Linux takes to catch Microsoft, but I would win just by changing the way the game is played.
Money makes the world go 'round.
is money what keeps me from flying off into space too?
+&x
no it isn't.
/. does, link to other content, and you post talking about, they serve ads, /, serves ads, it's how things work for ad supported sites. They (outside sites) don't care 'cuase they get hits, and /. gets the posts. More content for all. NO big deal.
Don't you idiots realize that what you are getting is more free content? How many of you clicked on banner ads? That's what
BTW, Metcalfe is a fool, or got hit/bought on the head.
+&x
I think you may find two distinct camps in the open source world: The socialist-like view that we should all help each other and give our source away for free. The other camp are the capitalist pigs that see good business sense in open source.
The first camp I don't understand, the second, which I subscribe to, has a lot of profit potential. In short, I see the US, definitely, and the world, maybe (I live in the states, not sure about you foreigners. :-) ) as having more and more of a service based economy. Open source fits quite nicely in that type of economy. Software is viewed simply as a means to provide the services. Service based companies do not want to develop software to sell, they just want to use it. Therefore, if they need something that isn't available, whether open source or commercial, they can start development and release it as open source. Others that are in the same boat can improve upon it, fix bugs, etc. The new features and bug fixes are available to the original company. In short, they put forth a small effort and got larger rewards.
Again, it all hinges on whether you are in the software business. If you aren't and don't want to be, open source makes a lot of sense. If you are it still might make sense. You open source the framework and add commercial features. The framework will be more solid and will also serve to expand your user base, making it more likely that you will be able to sell your add-ons.
Finally, if software is your only business, such as Microsoft, Corel, and Transmeta (yeah they make chips, but that part is easy, the software on the chip is the cool part), then open sourcing would not be a smart move.
If I remember correctly Metcalf claimed that the internet was a fad a few years back and that it wouldn't last. He's said other dimwitted things in the past as well. I don't know how he gets anyone to pay him to write columns at all.
His claim to fame is that he was the principle creator of ethernet back when he was at Xerox PARC and later went on to found 3com.
Being a good engineer doesn't mean you understand the social or economic ends of this industry. The fact that he doesn't seem to understand the role that the Crusoe's software layer plays makes me wonder if he's even much of an engineer. This software layer isn't the kind of code that would even benefit from being open source. Saying it should be open source is about as intelligent as saying that Maxtor should make the firmware on their hard drives open source or that that AMD should release the schematics and masks to the K7. None of these things would be useful to anyone creating open source software and their being properietary does not threaten the open source status of linux or other software packages.
His entire article is poorly disguised mudslinging. I also hear a distinct whine when I read it. What gives here?
And of course the crusoe runs windows, its x86 compatible. If Metcalfe doesn't understand what that means then maybe I should have his job.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The open source model is not the only viable model. There is nothing wrong with a company creating software using the closed source model.
The open source model works best for things like Operating systems or development tools or libraries. It doesn't work so well when the people who the product is targeted to are not the ones doing the development.
This is why the only open source end user application that performs on par with commercial offerings is Gimp. It is the only one. In any other catagory the open source products are either perpetually in development, or substandard.
Perhaps in the furure this will not be so true, but for now it is.
Also, bashing a company because they aren't willing to make their code open isn't right. This is something they worked hard on and they can do whatever the hell they want to with it.
The source code to a program isn't community property unless the person or company which created it makes it so. Opening the source may improve the quality of the product, but what happens if the company which originally wrote the program finds themselves unable to make any money anymore? Technical improvements to a program's functionality and the elimination of bugs are not the only concerns.
I'm sure I'll be moderated down by the zealots here who are too young to understand things like car payments and morgages. But that is ok, they will learn soon enough and along the way they will realize that there is no one answer to everything and that includes software development.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It's firmware/microcode. Making it open source wouldn't benefit anyone. Transmeta makes processors, which are naturally proprietary since they are hardware. They are compatible with the x86 instruction set which is an open standard. How they acheive this compatibility is not important as long as they are successful in doing so. The changes and improvements that Transmeta has made to linux are all open source. Why? Because linux is software that transmeta wants to run on their chips. They want to sell chips and linux helps them do that. Making their microcode open source doesn't help them do that and it doesn't help anyone else either. I hate zealots, especially ones who try to apply a generally good idea to an extreme case where it doesn't fit or isn't relevant. Ragging on Linus because he works for a company that doesn't release its firmware as open source is pretty brain dead. Open source is an idea for smart people, and a religion for the stupid. Which are you?
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Brett, give up.
Every single line of code that has been licensed under the GPL has been licensed as such because the AUTHOR OF THE CODE WANTED IT THAT WAY.
This is an important point that you seem to not understand. Programmers have the right to decide what should be done with their work. In the real, adult world that isn't the playground, sharing is a voluntary activity that is engaged in because it makes sense.
If you want to use a line of someone else's code in an application you're writing, believe it or not that's actually FINE. You are NOT required to release your software under the GPL if you don't release the software at all, and in the real world, much software isn't distributed.
If you want to DISTRIBUTE even a SINGLE line of someone else's code, you have to have their permission. Anything else is a clear violation of their rights as a programmer.
The GPL is a sort of "you have my permission to do specifically this". However if I wanted to use a line or module from a GPL'd app and distribute it under something else, I'm fully free to CONTACT the author and ASK his permission; and if what I'm doing doesn't violate what HE SPECIFICALLY AS A HUMAN INDIVIDUAL wants, then he'll allow me to do it.
Brett, your points simply have no merit, and stem from a need to hate things which are successful. Hatred is just too easy; try something else.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Try Clickbait. It's related to Flamebait, but instead of replies he's after hits for IDG. The formula, Trash something, wait for links on news sites that people actually read, and watch the hitmeter go crazy. Then tell the advertisers "Metcalfe's coloum got XXXXX hits last week, Want an ad for next week?"
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
This guy is just looking for some shit to stir. I read the atricle and laughed out loud. He may or may not believe what he says, but he sure can get people all riled up. Infoworld probably read some of his flaming articles and realized he could get some mad hits/press for ther organization.
Anyway...
A few more links: The Freedom CPU and Free-IP: ASIC and FPGA cores for the masses. There is also an EETimes article (by the Free-IP site owner) about the benefits of open-source hardware IP.
Yumpee
James
People do prefer to get paid for work
how much thought have you really put into that stament? or are you just repeating canned speechs? have you every thougth that just maybe we dont have to work, to live?
me thinks that you havent really thought or explored gnu.org's website...
ie under Philosophy of the GNU Project, there is this gem.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
Linus is obviously a believer in open source, but that's not the same as him being an open source crusader. Everything I've ever read about Linus points to him being 100% practical and down to earth rather than motivated by free software idealism (for that try RMS or ESR). He didn't start Linux to create a free OS for others, or with any intent to further open source (a term which didn't even exist at the time), but simply to fill his own needs. His intent was never to start a distributed development project - he was in fact surprised when people started sending him patches.
If Transmeta even asked Linus for advice on if they should "open source" any aspect of the Crusoe technology (why would they?), I'm sure that his answer would have been a pragmatic one based on Transmeta's own interests and his own as a Transmeta employee and presumably option holder. I think it's his pragmatism that is probably the reason for Linux's success as a distributed OS project.
That's just plain dumb. To compile an OS from the source, you need a compiler (also free.) To make a chip, especially something modern like Crusoe, you need tens of millions of dollars worth of fab equipment. You are Metcalfing.
I have considered FPGA's numerous times. However, they are useless for any real processor purpose. They consume more power and are slower. In addition, you cannot nearly put as much stuff on them. 1 mil is nothing when it comes to modern processors, esp. ones with on-chip caches. No, to make real, production quality chips that are state-of-the-art and that people would actually buy for performance, you definetly need a fab. At least until FPGA's get ten times faster and more compact.
At first, I had just skimmed the article. Now I've read the whole thing, and WOW! I have to say, Slashdot has done a disservice to the community by even linking to this man. His rant is so innane, I can only imagine that he hoped that by being this inflamitory, he would get top-billing on Slashdot. Sad when Infoworld is hurting so badly for hits that they have to go rattle Slashdot.
As for content.... Where to beign. He's just wrong on so many points. As I pointed out before, he keeps trying to imply that Linus is senior management at Transmeta. He knows this is wrong, doesn't he? For another point, what precident is there for Open Source firmware? Certainly no where near as much as in the software world. I could see Transmeta treading those waters in order to capitolize on the good-will of the Linux community, but not before getting the product out the door! Bob seems to not even know there is a distinction.
He also drops the ball on what it means to be X86 compatible. That means you can run Windows, SCO, Solaris x86, Netware, Linux, *BSD and any number of other OSes. Transmeta is not making a WinCPU(tm), they're making an Intel x86 compatible chip. This is neatly glossed over in the article.
Hemos, next time do yourself a favor and just ignore anything Bob Metcalf has to say. This guy is just a troll. I've now seen the ultimate argument for article moderation....
After the last time I saw Metcalfe on /. I thought and hoped he would never again be able to make it back onto "our" frontpage, but he did it again. He really is just trying to get the Slashdot Effect (TM) on his page and I really, really doubt he believes what he preaches.
:)
And off course I'm just pissed off he got me again, he got my hit, I read the article and wasted another 5 minutes on him. Hemos, please don't post these kind of articles. Please!!!
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
Thankyou for letting the flamebaiters know about where the source is. It amazes me that just because Linus works for a company that wants to make a profit, he automatically is seen as a hypocrate because his employers have created a chip that can run any OS including Windows. Get off your high horses people and face reality. Not everyone is ever going to use open source OS or software. It is nice how ever to have a commercially or productively viable software top compete.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Sorry about this folks, but a friend of mine was spoofing me when this was posted. Matters have been taken into hand and been corrected. "Thankyou sir, may I have another!"
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Dear Bob, I was in the audience at the Web Conference at Santa Clara (Spring 1997) when you had to eat your column which had predicted the collapse of the Internet in a few months. Beware, a Transmeta chip is little, but harder to swallow...
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
First, he only tries to write a "flaming column", he a quite bored man after all.
:-)
Second, he invented Ethernet (mainly used in LANs) while looking for a wireless radio application, se we may call him the "Christopher Columbus of the network"
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
Look no one is begrudging you anything you idiot. Write your own software, use your own code and do whatever the fuck you want with it. The GPL can't touch you. If on the other hand you decide that you want to use other peoples code then pay their price. The price of GPLed code is that you must give back to the community which you took from.
What is so complicated about that?
War is necrophilia.
If you hate it don't use GPLed code. What part of that did you not understand you shmuck? Nobody is forcing you to use GPLed code.
I have read some of your posts on this thread and I have to say you are one greedy bastard. You want to use other peoples code to make something and then profit from it while not compensating those people. If you want to profit from your code don't build on other peoples labor. Build it from scratch and sell it for whatever you want but you don't have right to steal other peoples code.
War is necrophilia.
no, richard stallman, the man that made free software as we know it HAPPEN, and is personally responsible for about 87% of the stuff on my mandrake system here ever getting written...
Juln
open sores is just stupid. So are the MS things you mentioned, but in a different way.
Now, 'Internet Exploiter' is, in fact, a perfectly accurate representation of how Microsoft envisioned and has used their product, which was released solely to take advantage of the world wide network developed by the UNIX society. In fact, nothing like the interent would exist if MS had been in charge f developing it - we would have a closed, expensive, propietary network called 'MSN' that you could only access through MS software. They tried that (copying AOL), and then changed it once the REAL internet dwarfed their stupid experiment.
Anyway, I just had to defend my favorite MS pun/slur. 'Open sores' is just stupid, and has nothing to do with reality, and , as the previous respondent said, it is a step above booger jokes, barely.
Juln
It is just sooo incredibly stupid, seeing that makes me want to strangle whover thought of it. As if open source is a bleeding wound for the foolish companies and individuals who allowed them selves to get sucked in, and now they find themselves in a quagmire, or somehting? Not to mention it is gross.
Yep, Bob is going off here. It is very sad how uninformed and spiteful he sounds.
Juln
I can think of at least three good reasons
1). Transmeta like any other good startup needs capital for development and research. Investors aren't likely to be receptive to a company that spends the investors development money then gives away the results (at least until a good foundation of welth open-source billionaires comes about)
2) The GPL and other similar licences have not been well tested in litigation.
3) I've emailed OpenSource.org before with the idea that some areas of software aren't well suited to OpenSourcing. In particular Drivers. Look at the recent damage to the video card industry. Used to be that the only real difference between video card manufacturers was the quality of their drivers. Sure, some companies went the extra mile and went beyond the video chip manufacturer's reference board design, but the big difference was in driver quality (and memory speed). The entire industry was pretty much decimated when NVidia started cranking out the TNT chips. When it was discovered tyhat NVidia's reference drivers were better than anything the card vendors could put together the industry turned into a commodity market. Companies like Canopus left the gaming desktop market all-together. Some companies fought to differentiate themselves by adding features like onboard DVD hardware and Video capture, but these niche market can't support all the companies.
At its essence, Transmeta's programmable cpu technology is a driver. Call it an Operating System driver. If they give away their driver then all they become is another chip design company in an overcrowded market dominated by companies like Intel.
Add to this the trend in the PC industry where hardware manufacturers are integrating components, hardware distributors are moving to system integration and the bottom end is getting squeezed. Niche players like Transmeta have to fight even harder to keep any advantage.
This isn't a knock on Open Source. In some areas it clearly has advantages.
I think it is more or less clear by now that Metcalf has a beef with the whole open source concept and ideals. It seems strange for someone who is, or at least was, a brilliant inventor, but when you consider his personal history it does make some sort of sense. Metcalfe made a brilliant invention, started a company around it, was forced out of the company by the resident corporate baffoons, and has since been marginalized to a nothing collumist in some god forsaken magazine where he can only get attention by trolling away.
Given that, one can understand why he carries a grudge against the open source ideals of giving away you inventions rather than trying to capitalize on them, and people like Linus in particular. Linus (and the likes of Tim Bereners Lee) is a living reminder that he could have chosen another route for his invention, one where he would not have been forced out by a bunch of idiot beaurocrats, and could still be a respected senior hacker rather than a senile Anonymous Coward wannabee.
That said, I do think he has a point about this. He seems to forget that Torvalds works at Transmeta but doesn't own it (just like the rest of the press, really), and his statement that Transmeta shouldn't hype Windows performance is ludicrous. They have to sell the damn chip, and they obviously prefer Linux to Windows or they would have worked with MS to get CE on Crusoe portals (oops, I mean make them Windows Powered). But, I would still like to hear Linus' opinion on the fact that Transmeta, cool product or not, obviously don't endorse openness at all. They are keeping the code to their chip completely closed, and they have even patented the software.
Personally, I would think long and hard before working for a company like that if I could pick and choose like Linus can. The fact that it doesn't seem to bother Linus at all _is_ a thorn in the side of the honesty and clarity of his motives, as much as I hate to say it. I would never raise myself to the level of judging Linus, there are few people alive today for whom I have as much respect, but I have to admit that I can't help but wonder what makes the two legged house dwellers at Transmeta different from those and Sun and Microsoft.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Is that your logic? ;)
I think Linux is great and I run it on all of my personal machines. As the operating system on my machines, it is the single most important piece of software on my systems -- and the one that benefits the most from being open source software.
I have no qualms about non-open source software. However, I have no patience with companies that can and do abuse their proprietary position by taking advantage of their customers. Meanwhile, I have no objection to programmers making their living by selling their wares. Do you?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I read his tribe weekly in InfoWorld just for the sake of seeing what stupid thing he'll say next. It's damn funny. I think he's a moron that is getting crotchety in his old age. InfoWorld should put an editor's note beneath his column. "Editor's Note: Infoworld does not endorse the horse puckey that Bob Metcalfe writes. In fact, we'd fire him, but we get such a kick out of his writings and it'd be a shame not to have at least one good laugh a week."
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
It's being done by Sun with the picoJava and SPARC cores.
eg3.com has a list of Open Source hardware links.
Tom Coonan has donated a free 8-bit microprocessor core to the Open Source IP community. One interesting aspect of this is that you can "build it yourself" using an FGPA booted from an EEPROM you can burn yourself.
And speaking of FGPAs, Xilinx has a whole page of IP for downloading and burning into their FGPAs here. What makes this super-spiffy is that you can write logic for these things and program them yourself--they download the gate configuration logic from an external ROM (or EPROM) or other source. In fact, many people are using these things by downloading the gate configuration from other sources, such as a data file.
The Open Source Hardware community apparently is thinking along the lines of using FGPAs to experiement with creating a various open source microprocessor cores in order to get the bugs out. Once the bugs are out, you can then create an ASIC core from the same data files and burn chips for production. What makes this strategy interesting is that probably for around $500 (or less) in hardware, you can build your own test bed. In fact, I could see building an FGPA "loader" which is basically a 6502 and a UART chip connected to your serial port which contains all the logic necessary to boot and download logic into an FGPA from your desktop as a sort of "in-circuit" emulator.
But my hardware days are behind me, at least for now...
As others pointed out, Hardware open source is a completely different beast than that of software. I can't just build the crusoe in my spare time as a recreation. I have to devote serious resources.
Same has been said about operating systems. So don't expect an open source operating system any time soon...
Xilinx makes a field programmable gate array which allows you to wire the thing on the fly. That is, they'll sell you a chip which contains anywhere from 100,000 gates to 1,000,000 gates which can be dynamically wired to provide all sorts of functionality, from microprocessor cores to UARTs to RAM cells. You don't need millions in fab equipment. Just one of these chips and an EEPROM programmer and some freeware software (links here) will do the trick.
It's not the same as editing masks using a VLSI design tool, but it does the trick.
Further, most people who design chips don't have or need millions in fab equipment. When I was at Caltech about a dozen years ago, I took a class on VLSI design where we simulated the results, and for the final, sent our design to a fab house which specializes in one-off fabrication for testing. One-off fabrication costs a few hundred to a few thousand per chip, but gives you a way to test your designs in hardware once your prototype checks on the simulator software.
Beyond that, you don't really even need to do this if you simply want to translate your FPGA design into an ASIC core for mass production. There are several fab houses who will take your FPGA data and turn it into an ASIC core for you by automatically laying out the chip-level logic from the FPGA data.
So no, you don't need "tens of millions of dollars worth of fab equipment." Far from it; just a couple of FPGA samples from Xilinx, and some software, and some descrete components for building prototype circuitry that uses your FPGA circuit from a company such as Electronix Express will do the trick.
And hell, just poke around the Free IP site; they've got two processor cores available for download, including one of which simulates the 6502 very well on several FPGA vendor's products.
I really cant stand it when people writing for an industry based magazine or journal start to stray from the truth and facts toward tabloid style headline grabbers - in the eyes of the general public it hurts the innocent and in the eyes of the knowledgable it hurts the columnist. No-one gains from any of this - unless of course Box is an AMD/Intel stockholder..... ;o)
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Forgive me if someone already posted something along these lines but I feel that this little point has been understated in any case. Open source software was put out there so that CUSTOMERS who were unhappy with the software that they were given could do something about it. Opening up the source on hardware would only help out the VENDORS. The whole idea of open source is so that people can affect what they don't like, or just want to improve upon. This would not be the case for Transmeta. All that opening the source would do would be putting Transmeta out of buisness. I don't personally know many people who have access to the material to make use of that information. Don't flip people, just think about it for a couple of seconds, which is a couple of seconds more than poor ol Bob did.
~Jester
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
It's very easy. Let me spell it out.
1) Anyone has the *right* to share anything they have.
(Equivalently, nobody can restrict you from sharing what you have).
2) No-one has the *obligation* to share anything they have.
(Therefore *if* you share your stuff, you can't stop the people you share it with from sharing it some more).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
1) I was stating (my understanding of) the position of RMS and the FSF, not my own.
2) you have still completely failed to grasp the point. Nobody expects you to give anything away. I don't know where you've got this idea from.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Do you have any evidence which shows that RMS hase *ever* opposed the use of strong crypto *by the general public*? (As opposed to his colleagues keeping secrets from each other)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Do you advocate a legal system which bans "copyleft"? Or do you think people have the right to license their work as they choose?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
No. People are free to choose whether to listen to RMS or not. In a communist country, people don't have the freedom to ignore the government. Anyway dictatorship != communism.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I'm interested ... what do you think of typical proprietory EULAs?
(e.g. "You may only use this software on the computer it came with", "By accepting this EULA you agree that this program may not work at all and it's all your problem", etc)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> Will open source reduce the corporate demand for computer programmers?
With a growing pool of free software tools and libraries to draw on, programmers can become more and more productive. It becomes practical to tailor existing software to the needs of a particular corporation, thus creating a whole range of jobs in the bespoke software business. Nevertheless, this is a hypocritical question, coming from the industry which has charged ahead into destroying more traditional jobs than any other industry (though at the same time creating many more service jobs).
> What limits are there on the kind of products that can be created? Obviously games are out of the picture since 1 company would develop the engine and the others would leech off their work.
The Quake engine is already GPL'd. If a few free engines get very good, it may become cheaper to tailor these engines to your game's needs than to build a new engine from scratch. It makes more sense for game companies to concentrate the "content" rather than the engine; this is what happens in the non-electronic world. Monopoly is a popular game because of how it works, not because of the wood pulp it is printed on.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I can't comment on the validity of your claims, so I shall presume they're accurate. But FSF accounts have passwords, and the current license terms for Emacs don't prevent anyone from using it who agrees to the license terms, including MIT, Microsoft and Saddam Hussein. The GNU project has developed the GNU Privacy Guard, which assists untappable communication. So whatever the background was to the situation you describe, RMS and the FSF clearly uphold the right privacy today.
Your comment about books and music is just plain wrong. RMS has said he finds it acceptable for authors/composers to prohibit large-scale redistribution of their novels/music, provided people are free to give copies to a few friends. His view on software manuals is that they should be free, including the freedom to commercially redistribute.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I believe the government should not grant everlasting monopolies to software companies. I don't believe that the state should have a monopoly on the creation and distribution of wealth, or that the state should have a monopoly on rights at the expense of the individual, or that income should be equally distributed.
You shouldn't relate the two concepts just because they both seem alien to you; they are almost entirely unconnected.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
One of RMS's main objections to the APSL was that it didn't let you keep your modifications private.
Which link shows that the FSF opposes the right to privacy?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Brett's anecdote must date back to at least 1983. Wage data probably wasn't on the MIT computer in those days. Do you have evidence that RMS or the FSF believe, or have ever believed, that people's bank info should be publically available?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Cool - we agree on something. Let's hope UCITA fails. (And this damn encryption thing we have looming in the UK...)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I think that's fine for the download or Cheapbytes version. However I think a company should be broadly responsible for what they sell. If there are errors in Red Hat which cause major problems to a customer, I think the customer has a right to a refund, at least.
It's different for a $2 CD. Neither the vendor nor the authors should be responsible for any errors in this.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
RMS believes people should be able to keep their code private. (And also other knowledge)
He, and the FSF, just believe that you shouldn't be able to prevent others from sharing the code that you give them, or to not provide someone with source code if you expect them to be able to run your binaries.
RMS must be the most misquoted hacker of all time. His, and the FSF's, position are made quite clear in about 3 pages of text here, yet people seem to continually misunderstand.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"I'm thinking that Crusoe chips, which are mostly software, should be open source and basically free,"
Yeah, what is UP with you Open Sores people? Why don't you open source hardware so I can get a free computer, already? I would also like my car, my house, my stereo, my furniture, and large appliances open sourced. Thank you.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
All Transmeta really needs to do is give away some SDK that allows people to "plug in" their own ISA, or "flash" the rom or something. People /don't/ need to know the native destination ISA, they just need a mechanism for exploiting the chip's abilities by supplying their own ISAs. I think this would be great for Transmeta, because without breaking compatibility, they would gain all the ISA's that anybody wants to provide. The only issue is a change to the code morphing software spec/implementation /itself/. If this changes, then the SDK has to be re-released, and ISA's will have to be regenerated for the new software, etc.
I think they just want the ball in their park for a while, which is understandable.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
And can't I, as an author who has licensed previous code under the GPL, relicense a new version of that code (only my code!) under any other license, say, some proprietary license?
Technically I should be able to license a file under the GPL, add some whitespace, then license the new version for $10K a pop.
Right? The power is in the copyright holder's, i.e. my, hands.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The first point where I see this is where you say, "Torvalds wrote and now controls Linux." Linus Torvalds did not write the entire Linux kernel. Although he originally created it, you imply that he wrote the entire thing. In this same sentence, you say that he "controls Linux." How is it that he controls Linux? There are currently fifty to one hundred copyright owners that own various parts of the Linux kernel. What Torvalds owns does not amount to anything near a full kernel, and so it would not be functional. You imply that Torvalds actually gains more control of Linux, however this is not true. Originally, he had more control. With each new patch, however, others gain more control. Whenever someone submits code, they are the rightful copyright owners of that code. That is the system that Torvalds has set up so that he could not be influenced to make the kernel closed.
Another point where you do not understand the situation is where you ask why, if "Torvalds 'gets it,'" isn't Crusoe open-source. Torvalds does not control Transmeta, he is merely an employee there. He cannot dictate to the company that they release their software open-source. Apparently, you seem to believe that Torvalds is the owner, chairman, and CEO of Transmeta, with control over every aspect of the company.
You also say that Crusoe runs x86 software, "and in particular, Microsoft Windows." Would you rather have Crusoe not run x86 software? This would leave out a plethora of products that would fail to run on Crusoe, consequently making the product less useful. Microsoft Windows is a product that has x86 instructions. A product that emulates x86 instructions has the ability to run Microsoft Windows. You don't seem to understand what x86 code is. If somehow Transmeta had put some sort of method in to prevent Windows from being run on the chip, I believe you would be writing the same article, except saying that it's not very "open" of Transmeta to block Microsoft Windows.
You then proceed to say "doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt." Here, you fail to understand Linux advocates. Everyone in this "open-source community" does not believe the same thing or feel the same way about anything. Some people feel that Windows is beneath contempt; however, most of these people would not feel that somehow blocking Windows from running on a processor is not necessarily the best thing to do. Others merely believe that the open-source development model is a better one than the Windows development model. Everyone in a group of people does not believe the same thing. Should I say that "everyone in the media loves Linux?" No. That's an incorrect statement.
Further, you say that Torvalds does not "hold the party line that Linux will not fragment." It is much more difficult to fragment something when the fundamentals of it are open. If something in Mobile Linux is useful for the Linux kernel, it will find it's way in because the source of Mobile Linux is open.
I believe that you need to more accurately research your articles before you post them, as a less informed consumer might take all you say as the truth.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
You ever done any hardware hacking? You should leave the code morphing software to those who know how to do it, but you shoudln't be forced to.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Look. You wouldn't see someone like Stallman doing this. Clearly there are lots of people who could benefit from Transmeta's code -- I'm sure several companies would like to make crusoe compatable silicon and sell it with the software. Furthermore, the community could fix bugs and improve the code morphing program. These are the arguments which are used to justify everything else being open-sourced. Why shouldn't it apply to everyone. The only reason you think Transmeta is so damn cool is because Linus is there. If he's betraying his ideals to be there, I don't see how you could find that admirable.
Okay, so don't accept it.
Problem solved.
Most venture capitialists(sp?) really push for the IPO. To a VC that's sort of the finish line, and where they make all the money to invest in the next crop of companies.
I'd be very suprised if Transmeta remainded privately held for more than a year.
Myddrin
You are assuming that intellectual property is a valid form of property. Not every one accepts this, nor has the concept existed for the majority of human existance.
The concept that OSS even apporximates Marxism is rediculous. If I contirbute to a GPL project, my contribution is *mine* I have *chosen* to let others use it and modify it freely, provided that they agree to meet certain conditions. There is _NO_ economic or political side effect of that. It is a choice that I and some other developers make, because we feel that it makes our end product better.
In the OSS there programmers who are Libertarians, Comunists, Republicans, Democrats(me, for example), Socialists, Anarchists and so on.
To try and label all OSS as XXXXXX, just really doesn't make anyone in the conversation look real bright.
Myddrin
Not everyone even accepts that there exists a valid form of property. Those who believe exclusively in weaker notions of
"property" are still anti-property, but less so than those who don't acknowledge any concept of property.
Intellectual property is corollary of capitalism. Take away intellectual property and you remove financial incentive to produce
intellectual works, including software. It is awfully hard to honestly say "I'm a capitalist", then say in the same breath "I don't
believe in intellectual property".
Capitialism existed very well without the concept
of intellectual property until the 1800's. The concept of "Copyright" did exist until 1900.
For example, (true story) my great-grandmother wanted a very specific Lennox pattern for her china. Sadly, the family had hit on hard times and couldn't afford the real thing. So in a perfectly _legal_ transaction, my great-grandfather went to the local craftsman and had an exact duplicate made. Today this would be copyright infringement, but at the time (unsure but we do know that the plates date to pre-1900) it was considered to be perfectly normal thing to do. (I have these plates hanging on my wall....)
Myddrin
OOPS! I forgot to add, I wasn't disagreeing with you per se about the Marxism. For that part I was more commenting on the entire discussion. This is the third or fourth time I've read Metcalf say the same thing and it's starting to get on my nerves. Those comments would most probably be sent to Metcalf himself. However, I enjoy making an ass of myself in public. :)
Myddrin
that's a good point
Perhaps not stupid, but he is certainly blinded by his own biases. Despite the fact that ESR, the leading advocate of open source, is a true blue American libertarian (not to mention a gun freak), Metcalfe is convinced that the OS community is either an Animal Farm (ie. communist) or Utopian (ie. fascist). In short, he really wants the "open source movement" to be something it's not.
From the article:
No one in the OS movement has ever demanded that companies that use OS software must make all of their software OS as well. (Why else would there be support for NT in so many OS and GNU tools?) Nor have we demanded that people use OS exclusively (the FSF would never have been able to write the GNU utilities without functioning proprietary UNIX machines).What you don't get, Mr Metcalfe, is that there are two ways to support and encourage the open source "movement" (in order of importance):
- Use open-source software
- Write open-source software
Transmeta does both. The fact is, it's next to impossible to find a company on the planet that doesn't use open source software. This, more than anything, is what made OSS a success.Well... the pig's were actually pretty smart in Animal Farm.
Linus has never, in my opinion, had any sort of an "official" opinion on fragmentation; if I can recall correctly, he had once stated that the possibility of fragmentation worried him a bit, but that he wasn't worried about it. Maybe he's decided that it can be good after having thought about it more- who are *you* to decide how his opinions should be?
Next: Metcalfe has never been right from what I can tell. I've never had any respect for him and I don't like being compared to farm animals, and even less to Communist farm animals. One thing that you should realize is that this is really a new paradigm in the whole processor arena- and how many people here enjoy being ruled by the Intel monopoly? Argue as much as you want, and yes, AMD is a threat- but as far as everything goes, Intel owns the market; if the Code-morphing software and its entire API were opened, Intel could take over and crush Transmeta. Personally, I don't enjoy monopolies myself, so I will be voting iwth my money for a Crusoe-powered laptop when the time comes.
Linux isn't working for anything- if you meant that Linus is now working for a proprietary software/hardware company, why don't you look at his alternatives? This is the BEST POSSIBLE option that he could have chosen, IMHO. The only non-proprietary hardware/software companies I can think of :
Software: RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake... Linux distro-producers etc..
Hardware: None
By joining any kind of a Linux company, he gives that company an unfair advantage in the market - "Look! Linus Torvalds works for RedHat! They must have the best version of Linux out there!" So his options are kind of limited. I think that Transmeta has got something here; just because they prefer to stay alive in the process of being the owners of a great new product has no effect on my opinion of them.
Also, there is some small difference between an application and the hardware instructions that the Code-Morphing software provides. Mainly that an application provides a way for people to use a computer, and the Code-Morphing software provides a way to use the processor.
Kurt has no control over Rob releasing the code to Slash. Try to get a real argument together next time.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Metcalfe seems to think people take him seriously. He is very wrong. Metcalfe is the same buffoon who thinks Linux is flawed because it is "based on 30 year old technology". He of course was referring to Unix. If we were to apply Metcalfe's line of reasoning to other areas, we should not be using the telephone, automobile, radio, tv, etc. because they are all based on ancient technologies as well.
Metcalfe seems to have an ulterior motive. I don't know what it is yet but I don't think even he believes the crap that he so frequently spews. At any rate, since Metcalfe is 30 years removed from doing anything significant, I propose that he is flawed and as such should be put out to pasture.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Methinks the esteemed Mr. Metcalfe is spluttering sour grapes now that Open Source in general, and Linux in particular, is doing so well despite his highly informed, fully researched, and eminently trustworthy predictions to the contrary.
After all, his colleague, the almost but not quite so esteemed Mr. Petreley, has not only not been seen eating any headwear lately, he is apparently making no preparations for such a meal.
Alas alas! So very esteemed and so very wrong! But then, lesser minds like the most respectable Inventor Of Ethernet can seek solace in the fact that even a great mind like Einstein was wrong once in a while (eg. Cosmological Constant).
See back issues of Infoworld if ye don't grok what I be blabbing about.
-M
That's the point of a SEC form 10-Q - to disclose all the possible downsides of investing in this company. That it sounds bad is unsurprising, because it's supposed to sound bad; it's supposed to sound very, very bad indeed.
But is it proof of anything? Nothing at all: all it says is that you can lose money investing in the equity market, which is hardly news. At least not since the early nineteenth century.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Yes, in HIS time, Linus is devoted to furthering the Open Source effort. On transmeta's time, however, he is an EMPLOYEE and therefore does his job, which in turn allows him to feed his family.
I know how he feels. At home all my machines run Linux, my applications are Open Source, and personally I think its the best thing to happen to the Computer industry. At work, however, I train people to use NT, and I admin NT servers. I work for a traning company that MUST use NT. I would never even consider advocating the use of Linux there. How are people going to earn MCSEs using Linux? My point is that it is not always appropriate to apply Open Source technology. It is not hypocritical to use Closed Source when you are an Open Source advocate. Because I recommend to people that they buy a PC (for instance, im not interested in this debate..), does not mean that if someone handed me a powerbook or a G2 I would throw it in the bin.
The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux.
Well, the article may be total bullshit, but I read it 4 times and I'm still looking for the statement quoted above. It isn't there. The only mention of x86 code is, and I quote, "Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt?".
Is someone at Slashdot gunning for an editorial position over at ZDNN, or what?
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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
In most of the interviews that Linus gives, he says that he's an engineer first of all. That if you really want an open source advocate, pick Stallman instead, he's more of an ideologist. Look at his motive and you'll see that he's very honest about it. He started Linux because it is a cool and interesting project. It still is, the same way he finds the job he does at Transmeta to be very interesting.
The way I understand it, he sees the open source movement as being a way to reach a mean, but not necessarily the mean by itself. It's an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean that other ideas aren't interesting.
If it means that Linus has some little selfishness in him by working for a close-sourced project that he likes, and doesn't focus his whole life on open source projects, does that make him bad. No, he has to eat like everyone else and he probably wants to try different things now and then. He never said he was like that, so please don't say he's not being honest and start questioning his motives because he works for Transmeta.
The sooner we stop hitting links leading to Metcalfe the sooner the poor guy finds his peace in retirement. He's not going to "get it" in this lifetime.
What suprises me though is why the highly-esteemd Infoworld still publishes his tabloid column.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
No, I don't think you're a loonie, but for starters have a look around yourself. Do you have schemas for any single one of those (hardware) gadgets around you? For PCs, monitors, printers, modems, TVs, radios and what not...? I didn't think so.
Transmeta happened to sink billions into the development of a chip that goes into a gadget. It happens to have a partially "soft core" but it's still there to run your software like any other CPU or DSP. Now, unless Transmeta stands out from the hardware crowd and open sources their Crusoe schemas you're labelling their employee-of-the-month Mr Torvals as a GNU-traitor or his employment there as an ethical compromise? Are you saying that Torvalds could not work for any hardware company without losing his integrity in your eyes?
As your examples for ethical (?) companies you cite SuSE, Turbolinux and VALinux. The former two do have closed source enhancements and applications in their distros, no? VALinux doesn't give you the schemas for their hardware either, do they? Transmeta builds a new chip (and even optimizes it to run Linux), open sources the Mobile Linux distro they've worked on as they should but they are somehow evil? Like IBM and other large hardware companies that have come around to support Linux?
You "support Metcalfe's pointing out the strong smell of hypocrisy surrounding certain actions by some in the open Source community". It only smells like ludicrucy and sour grapes in here.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
This is about the 5th time he's done this:
--Write column bashing Linux
--Get flamed by Linuxphiles for his lack of clues
--Write another column detailing the worst flames
--Write third colume rebutting chosen points
--Collect check from Microsoft
This allows him to be the center of a controversy for very little work. How else is he going to stay relevant? He is clueness on purpose.
Do him some real damage...Ignore him.
---
Unfortunately, people like black and white ideas, so they tend to make the mistake in assuming that when someone says "X is sometimes good" or "X is usually good" that they actually mean "X is always good". Then they brand them a hypocrite when they do anything buy X. But the error is not in the alleged hypocrite but in the accuser.
This isn't just an "Open Source" issue. This sort of mistake goes on everywhere in every sort of politics. It is, unfortunately, what tends to drive out the middle on contensious issues.
The cake is a pie
The whole "Animal Farm" is, of course, used to imply that open source is communist. Sigh.
The cake is a pie
One would hope, but then, a browse of his archives show another article where he likened Stallman to Marx and Torvalds to Lenin.
The cake is a pie
This is, while true and interesting, besides the point in the article in question in that Metcalfe isn't talking about RMS. He is talking about Linus Torvalds. As we all know, they don't necessarily hold the same opinion.
The cake is a pie
You can:
- Believe that "Software Should be Free" and all source code should be released to the public regardless.
- Believe that releasing the source improves program quality in a manner that usually brings more benefits then the lost revenue caused be the source release.
While both are "open source" beliefs, one does not preclude some closed source projects. Everything I've heard about Torvalds leads me to believe that he is in the second camp.The cake is a pie
Ah, but this line is completely, utterly and totally untrue in both the "Open Source" and "Free Software" worlds. The "community" can "need" a certain sort of e-mail client, but can't make ESR (the guy with the ability) make one for me. The "communitay" can "need" a certain sort of Emacs mod, but it can't make RMS (the guy with the ability) make one for me. Were I to try either case, I'd get laughed at. Even if I was dirt poor and really did need it.
A much more accurate version would be "from each according to what he wants to do to whoever happens to want it."
The cake is a pie
Do you think you have a right to take the fruits of my labor, without restriction, even if it is unpaid and volunteer, then resell it for money to further your livelihood?
....) has an estimated value in the multi-billion dollar range. Why should we, the group who created that value, share that wealth with you, without restriction, unless you're willing share any additions to that wealth BACK so the rest of us can enjoy the new pool? Regardless of your answer, its OUR choice how it is to be shared, and tough luck, you have to respect that.
Just because I didn't earn money doesn't mean that that labor doesn't have value, the GPL/LGPL codebase (linux, emacs, gcc, glibc, bash,
Yes, we require that you share back any additions to that pool of wealth, but is that so high of a price to pay for the billions of dollars of code sitting in it? There are even exceptions to that requirement; you don't have to share back your additions if they're for your own use. You can even use any of the software in it completely freely.
Few individuals get free(monetary) access to billions of dollars of code. Fewer get access and the ability to alter and redistribute it how they wish. Why do you not thank your lucky stars that you and we are so fortunate and lucky to?
Your world may revolve around money and jealousy over not getting any. I like to think that other things are more important... Like a system that's stable, flexible, and powerful and does what I want. (Which is a value without price, I might add.)
Actually, Linus has mentioned his views on fragmentation in his last two public interviews. One of them is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/09/042824 0
So, please don't accuse someone of making up something which is actually a current event.
I do agree with you on Metcalfe, though. Every article I've read of his in the last year or so has been equally as clueless.
As far as non-proprietary software, there are more and more companies doing it. I think what many companies are learning, is that programs that are mainly written for internal benefit - i.e. performing a task inside their company - can be released as open source, with more good effects thatn bad ones. I am working on a project right now that is mainly for my employer, but is also open source. Unless a company's main income was built on proprietary software, it makes sense to open source internal projects. However, sometimes the "value added" part of a product depends on the software, such is the case with Transmeta, and maintaining a closed product can have a sink-or-swim effect on the company. I don't blame them, in this case, for keeping the lid on their software, at least in the short term.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Transmeta has spent a great deal on R&D, and therefore needs to recouperate both those costs, and that of outsourcing fabrication [to IBM?]. The code itself is intimately related to inner details of the processor. With the Crusoe being as simplistic as it is, published source code would greatly accelerate reverse engineering. Therefore the big boys could easily steal the idea with minimal development cost.
This is the idea of intellectual property. If someone else can completely know how you did something, then what is to stop them from doing it. Or as with the nuclear arms race between China and the US, their knowledge of how we did certain things helps them to not waste time making the same mistakes that we made.
As others pointed out, Hardware open source is a completely different beast than that of software. I can't just build the crusoe in my spare time as a recreation. I have to devote serious resources. And so I feel a bigger loss if some other industry steals my ideas, and makes their product and nobody buys mine.
Still, I think it would be nice to eventually have all Crusoe code public domain. They could benifit from the same sorts of optimizations that key software technologies have had ( e.g. with gcc or the core of Linux, where everyone has a vested interest in focusing ). But unfortunately, it becomes an economic issue. I doubt they benifit enough from Open source to outweigh the competative negatives.
-Michael
I know this and never said otherwise. My point was that I didn't think hardware should be free, as in speach, until after a manufacturing company has the chance to recoup their cost of building the plant, etc. I think the current system of protecting for 17 years is way out of wack for high technology. A timeframe of more like 3-5 years, the same timeframe businesses account for the cost of high technology devices such as PC's and workstations, is more applicable.
The more I thought about it the more I find myself agreeing. See my later post which describes my latest thoughts (as of 13:49 EST5EDT). In short I now belive the software should be Free for consumer use when product is actually shiped in consumer available form. It should also be available to businesses that wish to offer competitive code morphing software engines that run on Transmeta CPUs. However, I think that it should not be available to business competitors to be used in designing competitive CPU designs because of the patents on the CPU. I also note that I don't believe in software patents and that they should be limited to 3-5 years for the computer industry.
That's one of the great things about Slashdot, you get other peoples opinions and feedback quickly that helps shape your own opinion for better or worse...
Hmm,
Me thinks you are right, but I believe that is a good thing. Seems there are at least two diametrically opposed theories on how software should be treated. "Old school" software developers (i.e., Microsoft, not the "original" software developers before Microsoft) believe in very strong copyright protection and don't believe in code-sharing. "New school" software developers (i.e., RedHat, VA Linux, etc) do believe in code-sharing and believe in strong copyright protection, but for a completely different reason. To expect "new school" software developers to support "old school" developers by allowing them to take code they developed and use it in closed software is not realistic. So, the GPL and licenses like it "protect" the investment that new school companies are contributing to the community from being used by old school companies to put them out of business.
Makes perfect sense to me, and I honestly can't understand some peoples complaint that you can't use GPL'd software in proprietary projects. It's like they expect to get all of the benefits of open source or free software for no equal investment. No, let me correct that, it's clear that they do want to reap the benefits of open source or free software without any investment on their part. IMO, that's unethical and borders on immoral.
It is (the use of GPL software in proprietary systems) very similar in many respects to stealing someone else's property. With open source/Free software protected by the GPL it forces people to not steal software and make an equal exchange by forcing them to contribute any changes or enhancements back to the community. Now, the GPL doesn't force or protect against end-users from sharing code, but selling software is not the source of income for new school companies, services are. So, someone could take the RedHat distribution and copy it and sell it, but who cares? Are they going to be able to support you as well as RedHat who made the distribution? Probably not. I don't know why anyone would want to purchase support and services from a company that simply copied RedHat's software without making any enhancements instead of going to RedHat themselves. So, they (the people who simply copy and sell the RedHat software) are not really taking any income away from RedHat. If the company does take RedHat software and enhance it, there may well be a good reason for people to purchase that software instead of the stock RedHat software, but they are forced to give back to the community (RedHat) any enhancements. So, this is in effect the payment to RedHat and makes this not stealing. RedHat is free to use the enhanced software in it's next revision and entice customers back to it's camp. RedHat is, in effect, getting free R&D for it's product that is paid for by one of it's competitors!
But, to expect RedHat to write software and allow Microsoft or some other old school company to use it and NOT release any enhancements is a totally unbalanced transaction. While Open Source/Free software may not be totally balanced, it is on the opposite end of the arguement that you are trying to make (no, you didn't explicitly state this, but from your post you seem to be arguing against the opposite view. Since I can't think of any other reason I have to assume this is what you believe. If I'm wrong, reply and let us know why you think the GPL is so bad).
I think I figured it out. Brett Glass IS Bob Metcalfe. And, Bill Gates has taken over the mind of Bob Metcalfe, and hence Brett Glass, to be his spokesperson against Open Source. It's the only thing that makes sense!
I think what he doesn't get is one of RMS' concepts which I believe is that software should be free because of the zero cost of duplication or manufacturing. Hardware is in a different "realm" when it comes to manufacturing. Chip companies have to pay billions of dollars to make a chip plant capable of producing the latest chips. Even though Transmeta may not be making the chips themselves, and PAY IBM to make them in their chip plants, they still have to PAY to have them made.
I can't speak for RMS on whether the Transmeta morphing code should be free or not, but it seems to me that it is in a different category because it is "tied" directly to hardware, which should not be free (due to the cost of manufacturing). AND the "tying" is not on purpose to make a profit, it's because it's an intergal part of the way the hardware works.
I personally believe that companies should have "rights" to sole-source HARDWARE for a limited amount of time in order to be able to make a profit on the investment in time needed to develop the hardware, built the processing plants, etc. Kind of like a patent, but severely reduced at least for the computer industry. I'd guess the MAXIMUM timeframe for retaining exclusive rights would be 5 years. This would be enough time for companies to recover their development costs and make a healthy profit, but force them to innovate in order to stay in business. Could you imagine if Intel no longer had the rights to the Pentium core, and possibly the Pentium II core (I don't know when the Pentium II was released)?
I also personally think that we can't, or shouldn't if we could, FORCE people to release their software as free. If Microsoft or some other company wants to keep their source closed, then let them. I believe that in the long run free software will show better quality and capabilities than closed software, and the market will reveal this soon enough.
I think that if Bob Metcalfe is truly a believer of journalism that he would at least practice it.
OR IS THERE SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG WITH JOURNALISM ?
Get a free ipod.
*duck flames*
Now granted it would seem Mr. Metcaclf has of "some" of his facts wrong here. However I wonder if he was right fundamentally if it would be that big of a deal? It would be nice if everyone who contributed to the open source movement would release software in that manner, but if you support OSS must ALL of your software be so?
First of all Linus works for this company and doesn't run it (that I'm aware of), I have several friends who work on OSS software in their spare time but work for a commercial company who (like most) don't release their code. So should they quit, find another job, perhaps have to move their families and such? I'd say no.
Secondly lets say that he did own the company. Would this be the end of the world? Mr. T releases some code that's not OSS. So what? It's sad but often it seems that some more vocal advocates of the OSS movement has become somewhat more "harsh and angry" and implies that all software must be OSS, ignoring the fact that people still are free in many of the countries of the world. I wonder if that helps or hurts as the movement moves into the general public's eyes in the future. Now granted many of the OSS movement are perfectly nice people, but some seem to have taken on an angry feel and that worries me.
However if this were true, and Mr. T had control if the software is OSS or not, and he didn't release it as such, is that so bad? I'd still think he was an alright guy, I wouldn't like it, but it's his choice. If he wanted to make some $ working for a company that interests him and that doesn't release it's software, no biggie to me.
LOL
/.
Amen.
I like that they put the comments from the person who submitted the article up there. However they should at least ask the person who submitted it if they can edit TOTALLY inaccurate information that's in it. I've seen this happen several times before, and sadly somewhat more frequently as of late, I don't mind if it could possibly be a judgment call or posed as the submitters opinion (even if it is way off). However outright stating that something is in the article that is not in the article just is disappointing coming from
...a tragic story.
After the fall of Kerensky's government, the Bolsheviks seized the Metcalfe family estates near Smolensk, as well as their summer home in St. Petersburg, and in the turmoil Bob Metcalfe's family were all forced to emigrate to Germany. A couple years later his father, Ivan Andreivich, was murdered by schismatic open source advocates at an emigres's meeting in Munich. These traumatic events molded young Bob's personality.
So naturally whenever he hears the phrase "open-source" he gets all angry and irrational. And he firmly believes Marx is the anti-Christ, even though, like so mant other intransigent critics, he only knows Marx's works third hand.
Yours, S. Freud - WKiernan@concentric.net
> It's the GPL that "takes, takes, takes."
That's not true; that's grossly unfair. You can hack the living daylights out of GPL code, and then use it to your heart's content. What you can't do is pass on the GPL code - which belongs to the original owner, who was free to license his code any way he pleases - to the next guy and squeeze a profit out of the transaction, against the expressed desire of the original coder who wrote the program on which your additions rest.
How could you object to that? Here, for example, is a copy of Windows NT Workstation, which I am presently reinstalling (that famous Windows bit rot struck again) on my office PC. I have a CD burner; suppose I make a copy of the \i386 directory, and then add original improvements of my own design, and sell it as "WDK Windows NT 4.1++" Is that illegitimate? Obviously it is. OK, suppose I just take one little bitty MS application - say, NOTEPAD.EXE, so I can show how WINE works - and include it in my Linux distro? Is that illegitimate? Microsoft's corps of lawyers would argue that it is. So why does it suddenly become legitimate, and even morally righteous, to appropriate any part of an open-source program for your own profit in contravention to the desires of its creators and owners?
Why do you insist on holding GNU software to such vastly higher standards of selflessness than commercial software? Unlike proprietary software, GNU software gives you the program with source for free, and for unlimited use, but this isn't enough for you? I really don't get this attitude, and I have to admit I find it almost offensively grabby, like when a guy on the sidewalk asks me for spare change and I hand him a dollar, whereupon he starts demanding two dollars.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> It requires him or her to give away his or her work
> to the entire world for free.
Yep, that it does.
> It's a Faustian bargain which asks too much
Linus and countless others don't think it's too much; they license under GPL entirely of their own free will. You're free to disagree, concerning your own original code. License that any way you like.
> and therefore should not be accepted.
Then don't accept it. But in that case, hands off the GPL code; it's not yours. If you can't accept the license terms, return the unopened package to the store where you bought it and I'm sure they'll give you your money back.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> "The EMACS *Commune*"
And your point is, Senator McCarthy?
Yours, D. Trumbo
> The Nation...the most anti-capitalist magazine around today.
Don't be silly. I subscribe to at least one magazine far to the left of the good old moderate Nation, and I can think of several others.
Nice of you to come visit Frownland. I would have had a look at your web site too, but alas you are an Anonymous Coward with an "a". What's the matter, guy, are you afraid of voicing your unpopular and controversial anti-kommie viewpoint over your own naked signature? Don't worry, the worst that can happen to you after Der Tag is a few invigorating years in the healthy, primitive, "back-to-nature" environment of the People's Republic's Bourgeois-Reeducation camp. Hee hee, when you least expect it, ol' Karl's red-eyed revenge-mad ghost is gonna come drifting up out of Highgate Cemetery and get you! BOO!
Good night komrades! - WKiernan@concentric.net
> it's not the bogeyman that the US has been fighting for years.
But it is! The bogeyman is anything that threatens any capitalist's profits. It's pretty obvious that even today Linux is undercutting the profits of manufacturers of proprietary server software. As Linux gets more popular and begins to penetrate the desktop market, the situation can only get "worse." ("Worse" for big companies and their stockholders; hackers and/or end-users would probably not think it so bad to get superior software for free.) Why else do you think Metcalfe's got his shorts all in a bunch over it?
Conversely you can go far beyond Marxism, beyond Bolshevism, beyond even the wildest excesses of Maoism, and still win the approval of the U.S. State Department, provided that State decides your actions might somehow benefit capitalism in some tactical sense. Here I refer, of course, to the support, both covert and open, given by the U.S. government, under the Carter and Reagan Administrations, to the totally-berserk Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, after their genocidal "Democratic Kampuchea" regime was ousted in 1978 by the Vietnamese Army.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Okay, anyone here contribute to open source projects? Anyone here maybe even head one up? I would say "many thanks for sharing your hard work," but Metcalfe would have me go on to ask: do you have a day job? Do you have to do something besides your open source project in order to eat? Oh, bad you, guess you betrayed the movement and now I have to hate you.
Jeez. Anyone remember where I put my cluestick?
A comment on the Subject line. The GPL does NOT force forfeture of IP. IP only exists through a copyright, a patent or a trademark. You don't hold any of the above on a GPLd work that you modify, unless you hold the initial copyright (in which case nothing is forfeited). How can the GPL force forfeiture of a property right that you didn't hold?
Sharing has several meanings, one of which is identical to 'giving' which is the meaning you are using. The meaning GPL advocates use is "to partake of, use, experience, occupy, or enjoy with others". The sharing in the GPL involves a community, a community that gives back.
Most people recognize a moral responsibility to give back to those who share. Sharing the blessings of liberty morally implies giving them to others. This recognition is what motivates people to give back under the MIT X license or BSD license.
RMS noticed that some people were taking advantage of the free work of others without sharing. That's not sharing, that's taking. He developed the GPL to correct this. If you don't intend to not share, it's not restrictive. This is exactly the agreement that all other contributors to GPLd software made their enhancements. Seems symettrical and fair to me.
This is an absurd hyperbole. Most individuals don't contribute the majority of the work in any single GPLd work (if they do, they are probably completely philosophically aligned with the FSF movement). It's more like saying "Here, have a car, a house, my bank accounts. Just let me have use of them, also, and you can share in all the improvements we make to them."
More ridiculous exaggeration. Nobody is asking anyone to sign a contract to give up their livelihood. The contract implies that you can't make your livelihood off of selling derivatives from this particular piece of software. Exactly no different than many commercial source licenses, but nobody talks about being denied a livelihood there. With GPLd softwaer can still make your livelihood off of contracting to those who need changes made to this software, or supporting configuration of systems using this software.
RMS is hardly a good analog to the antagonist in Faust. RMS writes lengthy diatribes, easily available, clearly stating that the profit to be made off of GPLd software is not in it's sales. The Devil tried to downplay and hide the consequences of signing his contract.
-Jordan Henderson
I've addressed this elsewhere, but it bears repeating.
Stallman does not advocate the confiscation of anyone's intellectual property.
IP exists as either copyrights or patents. The GPL does nothing to appropriate someone's copyrights or patents. It's the programmers who are not allowed to "confiscate" the IP of the GPLd work when a copyrighted work is covered under the GPL.
Show me one instance where someone's else's copyright is confiscated via the GPL.
-Jordan Henderson
All you've shown is how the GPL protects the IP of the FSF (or other copyright holder who release under the GPL), not how it "confiscates" (your word) other people's IP.
Confiscation has a very specific meaning. It means to take. You agree to give your work to the community when you modify GPLd sources.
This is some kind of fantastic inversion of the Trotsky "property is theft". In your view, "property is theft" if that property is not allowed to be put to commercial use.
Not so. GPLed software has zero market value, since it is available for free to all users. Therefore, programmers should be able to use it completely freely in their own work, whatever that work may be, at no charge and with no obligation. Why does the GPL begrudge them this? Because by doing so it undermines their livelihoods.
Boy, this is a bizaare world view. Because something has no market value it should be allowed to be appropriated? The Washington Monument has no market value. The one existing smallpox virus sample has no market value. Nuclear Weapons (by law at least) have no market value. My children have no market value. I guess you advocate that these can be abducted and used for whatever purpose that anyone wants "at no charge and with no obligation" because they have no market value?
The GPL denies certain uses because that's what it was designed to do. The purpose of the GPL is to build up a body of work to be shared by the community.
Does a commercial source license "deny" certain programmers their livelihoods because they can't modify that source and sell it?
-Jordan Henderson
Yet you advocate the MIT X and BSD licenses as being "true" sharing licenses. These licenses allow you to take and take and take from the work of others and "not share proportionately or fairly" or at all with the original authors.
So, it could be said that these other "Open" licenses discriminate against programmers who wish their works to be extended only by those who are willing to share those extensions back to the original author.
Yes, you can say that the GPL discriminates against programmers who wish to profit from the works of others and give nothing back. It does so in favor of users who need real software reuse and the accretive benefits of a large body of code.
Every license is targeted to a certain advantage, a certain group. That's the reason for licenses. Even the absence of a license (Public Domain) is advantageous to some while detrimental to others.
I think it's about time that we, as an industry, put the emphasis on the poor user who just needs to get work done. God knows they've been ignored long enough.
This boogeyman about how the GPL is going to put programmers out of work is just fantasy. Somehow, with the explosive growth in the use of GPLd software in the last few years, the acute deficit in programming personnel grows worse every day. Most programmers do maintenance work or custom contract work. These programmers will be helped by a large body of code from which to draw.
Other programmers who wish to sell only proprietary works can continue to do so. These programmers may find that they are at a competitive disadvantage against the body of GPLd work, but maybe not. If they can't compete, then it clearly shows that the user has benefitted. The user will be able to get products at a low cost that can always be self-maintained, or contract with programmers to maintain them for them, that is of high enough quality that commercially licensed software can't compete. Finally, it is possible for the user to benefit from true software reuse. I guess there's no cloud that doesn't have a silver lining for someone, eh?
-Jordan Henderson
I think that this has exposed one of the major rifts in the open source "community."
There is the Stallman camp: Anything other than OSS is wrong. (I know I am taking some liberties here.)
Then there is the Torvalds camp: OSS works really well for a lot of things.
I happen to be a "member" of the second group. I also happen to think that this is the more rational position.
There is no more hypocrisy in Linus contributing to proprietary software than there is in someone writing CGIs in Perl and a math program in C. They are tools, not religions.
Closed thinkers dismiss alternatives out of zealotry. Don't be one!
-Peter
Transmeta's Mobile Linux will fragment Linux 2.4, but in a good way.
If I understood all the noise about Crusoe correctly, isn't Transmeta's Mobile Linux just another distribution? I don't see why the kernel needs to be fragmented just to support another architecture, and a fully x86 compatable one at that.
So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages.
I used to think the crap that Metcalfe has said in past stemmed from him being a grumpy old man that wanted to rain on the parade. Eventually I realized that he likes being contrary to get attention. This is what we call a troll.
One explanation about why the VLIW set isn't released is because it changes from chip revision to chip revision. The software layer is absolutely necessary to maintain compatability. On the other hand, the details of the code-morphing software are a trade secret that I'm sure competitors would love to get their hands on. This combined with the fact that developers don't need it gives Transmeta very little incentive to realease the source code. How long before Intel or AMD or someone else figures out how to do the same thing on their own? I'm sure Transmeta needs to keep their lead here as long as they can if they want to stay competitive in the processor market.
I also remember a couple years ago when he said that the Internet would suffer massive breakdowns and outages which would render it unusable. He then said he would eat his words if it didn't happen within the year. So in the end he held a press conference where he put his article in a blender then ate it or drank it or something. More publicity for him.
This is business as usual these days for Metcalfe. It's a shame to see him reduced to trolling after all he's accomplished.
numb
n 1: a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership
One of the prerequisites to match the definition is that it's a 'form of socialism.' which I think you'd have a difficult time proving.
I think even saying that it abolishes private ownership would be a little iffy.
Lemme pull up a quote I found from the esteemed Bob Metaclfe:
So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages.
Does he have a clue about technology? I guess co-inventing Ethernet is pretty important in our current computing world. Does he have a clue about trends and how people and technology interact? Your call.
Jay
-- polish ccs mirror
There is only three responses to a man who writes a completely wrong article:
1. Call the man a dumbass (I did not do that).
2. Ignore him until he goes away (which he hasn't).
3. Write back, pointing out every factual innaccuracy in the article.
I have no doubt that my points will be ignored. But, at least I tried.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
This is 2000. You do not need raw materials to design anymore. And you only need Emacs to make a mask which is getting cheaper and cheaper. It can be done. Plus if it's so difficult to make a chip, by your argument how could anyone compete with you in the first place even if they made one off your designs. The worst it would be is free advertising.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
X86 = processor platform. Solaris, Mac OS 8, Linux, BSD, Windows, BeOS, DOS and others run on x86.
x86 is ruling the market right now. Intel, AMD, Rise, IDT, make x86 clones to stay in the market. Neither of them make straight x86 CPUs, not even Intel. They all do x86 compatibility over a RISC design because of the code on the market. They all realize x86 is a mangled twisted beast grown out of pure laziness in design. Alpha is straight RISC, which is why it beats x86 compatibles hands down.
As for Open Source/Free Speech CPUs. Ever heard of SPARC? Built by students at a university.
Get with the program, it's not rocket science.
Rares Marian
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Darwin will be Mac OS X (10)
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Never mind that 20 year old technology he invented: "ethernet" I think it's called...
Now lets be facing it, Bob Metcalfe is not a stupid man. He knows as well as you and I that Linus does not own or control Transmeta, the very suggestion that a commercial company should give away it's prized possession for free goes against every principle of the free market. It's also completely silly to suggest that should be done just because one Linus Torvalds is currently employed there.
Point is that Linus has hardly been a quiet pundant. How did he put it? "Software is like sex, it's better when it's free". Ok, I want "free" code morphong please. Point is, Linus shouldn't be bashing MS (he does it all the time in his speeches) to gain beenie points. It certainly makes him look 'arrogant' to me.
And Metcalkfe is totally right about Linus' changing views. Now commercialsm is GREAT, and fragmentation can be GOOD...what's next? This man is just trying to start an argument. Linus has done a vast amount of good for the open source community, should we really be attacking him for being involved in a closed source project for his current employer?
Not for contributing heaps to open source projects. Attacking him because he's been such a propronent for open source with a "holier than thou" attidude to non open source projects/companies. This project is hardly a small project for transmeta, it's huge, and it's hugely software - so Linux is now working for a proprietry 'software/hardware' company. What a pity it's only stylish to bash the other software company.
Well, he does make a few points. I do still think he's still an overrated gasbag (kinda like Jon Katz [oops sorry hehe]). He obviously has a chip on his shoulder over open source, but anyway...
;)
:)
He's right about one thing... there is *nothing* stopping Transmeta from making everything they do open to the public. In fact, it would be really cool of a semi conductor company would open up their chip specifications to the public and the public could give them feedback on how things should work, problems, and ways to make things faster. There are a lot of engineers out there.
However, it's not as convenient to do as software, and it certainly takes more upfront knowlege.
I understand, at least at this point why a hardware manufacturer doesn't do that. There really hasn't been a proof of concept for the hardware side of things, but it's only a matter of time before somebody does and it sure would be nice if Transmeta were the first *hint* *hint*
You know what else would be cool...
If the government (including the FBI, NSA and CIA) did everything they did open to the public...
and the law system worked open to the public (except maybe in the few cases where somebody specifically requests privacy, but definitely corporate law should be open)...
oh and everything else while we were at it
I actually remember reading somewhere that a non-private society might work. A society where absolutely nothing is private, everything about everybody is available to everybody. It's kinda freaky (something we're obviously not used to) but an interesting concept. Nobody would hold the keys to information.
The Article did not seem very objective. I mean as if....
1. Linus made it very clear way back when he joined Transmeta that he was not Going to Polorize the development of Linux, open source, or anything like that by working for a Linux company. He did say that he would be able to continue with Linux related Activites from work, but that wasn't his job. He made it clear that he wanted a kinda normal job(normal being relative).
2. Transmeta is not OS centric. This seems to be a hard thing for people to get into their heads including Metcalf. The desktop verion of the Crusoe processor is Fully Intell x86 compatible, and runs Windows95/98/NT. I could be wrong, but doesn't it run on some big list of 27(?) other OS's that work on the Intell x86 platform. This is fact, and on the Transmeta marketing Mumbo-jumbo, but I would have to hunt for the link. I'm too lazy, but I assure everyone who is not as lazy as myself that they can see for themslef that this isn't just me ranting here. So please don't argue that Transmeta has some big thing with being windows comatible. They don't.
3. Code Morphing is not the same type of code that is typical of the word "software". The code itself would have to be burned into a chip of some kind to get the speed needed for 200+Mhz opperations. This is cutting edge stuff! Only a non-programmer like Metcalf would argue that only GOOD would come to Transmeta from giving away Code Morphing. I see only harm befalling all of Linus's hard work on the Code Morphing if it was open source. Releasing the instructions to build the CodeMorphing software would probably reveal various secrets on the 128 bit VLIM architecture of Crusoe. Bad.... very bad!!
4. Linus made Linux open source with the GNU style licence for many reasons. I belive one of his primary motivations was to prevent people from taking his hard work, then forking, and making Linux something he couldn't control. One of the side effects of open source is the Code can improve over time with people adding to the main body of code. That is not the primary motivation for his patents on the certain parts of the Kernel that he retains control of. No, in fact the open source part of the whole thing takes a huge Burden off his shoulders while letting him play God with the general progression of Linux development. Kinda like a CEO of a huge corporate entity.
5. I always laugh at people who run around and open source everything. Enough already! What is the point? I mean, aside from the huge amount of totally valid reasons to have open source software: Furtherence of human understanding of programing, and the ease of distribution of code, etc... Non of those apply here! This isn't a project intended to exist in an open source environment.
6. Linus is just one of the many Smart guys at Transmeta. To be Blunt, he doesn't even control the company. The guy how practically invented RISC school of thought way back when...... is the head of the company!! But don't stop there, they got a dream team of smart guys from a cross section of the entire software/hardware industry. Now here comes the Clincher, knock-down blow to Metcalf's whole theory in my mind: With all the smart people involved with transmeta why have they not made the Code Morphing open source? Don't answer, its a rehtorical question. The reason they haven't is because they have a good reason or two. Their good reason is in their best intreast. Their best intreast is developing their new revolutionary architecture and protecting their labor investment.
Enough said??
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Metcalfe just says stupid stuff for the sake of being controversial.
in 1995 he started predicting the collapse of the internet. We're still waiting.
in 1999 he predicted that the internet stocks would tank on Nov. 8 - we're still waiting.
He occasionally has something intelligent to say, but mostly it's just provocation to keep his readership. PATHETIC
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
The author in his reply admitted that he intended to "provoke--and even promote some flame mail" so that he might learn what people really thought. I did not, could not, reply to that.
Over the last few years I've seen similar behavior very often from Metcalfe; he's really not worth reading anymore.
Don't take these trade rag hacks seriously. It's a waste of cycles.
-Peter
I've just stopped reading Metcalfe's columns. I respect the man for what he once was, that being a pioneer of the computer age. I appreciate ethernet. But he just doesn't seem to understand it any more. For instance, he says that if Linus is *the* open source man, why isn't the Crusoe software open source? My first guess would be *because he doesn't own it* - Transmeta does. And they can do whatever they want with it. Anyway, Metcalfe just seems to pick out the little dumb things, and the quality of his articles has been declining for quite some time. Read Cringely instead.
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
If I could extract one of the (few) valid points in the guy's article...
I'm not going to cast blame on Torvalds, since I don't think he necessarily controls anything, but if one believes in Open Source, shouldn't the Code Morphing code be released?
It would be interesting to know where RMS comes down on this, and firmware in general, such as the downloadable Microcode in Intel chips.
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Metcalf's comments on the VLIW morphing code seem to be spot-on, if you take our history of hardware vendors with proprietary drivers into account.
Ok, well, who said anything about drivers here? The code morphing software isn't anything like a driver, becuase, in essence, it IS the heart of the processor.
Here, allow me to give you a bit of a litmus test. Something is a driver when it tells the operating system how to access the hardware. Code Morphing technology is at a lower level than this, and the operating system is blind to it completely. Drivers are operating system specific, and this is instruction set specific.
Creative and Nvdia would like to open source dirvers so that people can port them to other operating systms (like Linux), because they really don't want to take the time themselves. Transmeta stated that it would all but be a simple matter to add support for other instruction sets like UltraSPARC or PowerPC or whatever. And if they wanted to, without putting their technology in danger, release the "real" instruction set of the Crusoe, people could help translate it to whatever, and Transmeta could take the "cut and paste" time to implement it in Code Morphing tech. But this isn't really helpful, because Transmeta could do it much faster and easier than anyone I know who is involved in Open Source (no offense intended).
So yes, if Metcalf had a clue, he would have been right, but he didn't, so he wasn't. The chip will not be able to do less, and will not be less reliable in the same sense of hardware and closed source drivers. It will, if anything, EXPAND the ability of a piece of hardware to adapt and grow and do more, and fix itself. Instead of releasing a new piece of hardware to fix a bug, all they need do is release a software update. Almost like flashing your BIOS but better. So it is definitely a step above current hardware tech. But it's definitely NOT anything that needs to be Open Sourced. Not at this stage in the game anyway. And that all goes back to what I have said, plus what everyone else has said regarding cost coverage of developing hardware (This applies in that, if you open source the code morphing, it would be relatively simple to design a chip to match the specs of the Crusoe and undercut Transmeta's costs, thereby putting them out of business).
jdwilso2
The point was that apples (drivers) were being compared to oranges (instruction sets) and the connection was non-existant. And aside from that, they have chosen to make it closed source. That's their right, and in my opinion, the right thing to do. End of story.
most of the projects out there are done becuase the authors needed it, not becuase the author wanted to make money out of it.
they write what they need, they gain information and with that information, they make money out of it. people like to hire smart people with information.
"you get hit and your head goes ping" --rocky horror picture show
"Holier than though attitude to non open source projects"?! That's why Linus has allowed Red Hat et al. to make money from his idea. He didn't have to release Linux under the GPL. He could have made his own licence that would have precluded the idea of any commercial use of the Linux kernel. But he didn't. Show me one quote where he "bashes" the idea that software can/should make money.
As for the anti-MS quotes, IIRC, they concern the inherent crapness (come and see the crapness inherent in the system!) of their OS. Not the fact that they make money. Or even because they make proprietary software. RMS has criticised Linus in the past because he has a "soft" stance on proprietary software.
Of course I haven't touched on the fact that he's merely an employee of Transmeta, and is probably not in a position to force the open sourcing of the Crusoe software. There are other comments in this thread that do so far more eloquently than I could.
Well, for those who were never forced to study "Animal Farm" at school, it is a parody of the Russian revolution set on a farm where the pigs take the role of the communist leaders.
As you correctly pointed out, this article could have been read, as Bob implying that open source was akin to Communism. From the tone of the article however I prefer to read it as him likening the open source movement to a revolution that is turning full circle. Maybe I'm just a nice guy but I prefer to think of Bob as a self justified fool, not as a vindictive bigot that would slap the communist label on something he doesn't like in order to start a witch-hunt.
I really have to admit I was expecting an article along these lines to come out sooner or later. For those who haven't read the article it likens Linus going along with a closed source windows targeting system to the pigs in the Orwell's 'Animal Farm' slowly becoming what the revolution supposedly toppled.
Linus (like most of us) is a true supporter of open source and everything it stands for, he (also like most of us) is a realist who realizes the world isn't what we would like it to be. Linus makes very little out of linux and contrary to what the article states does not really 'control' it. The article makes stupid statements like the following:
Now lets be facing it, Bob Metcalfe is not a stupid man. He knows as well as you and I that Linus does not own or control Transmeta, the very suggestion that a commercial company should give away it's prized possession for free goes against every principle of the free market. It's also completely silly to suggest that should be done just because one Linus Torvalds is currently employed there.
If I had any choice in the matter, every thing I write would be free and open source, my mortgage would magically pay itself and the world would be free of hunger and poverty. However since reality requires me to get a job I chose to get a job that interested me. For the last 5 years I've been working as a 3D programmer in the games industry, now would Bob suggest that SCI (my previous employer) should open source Carmageddon2 just because an employee (me) who is an open source advocate played a small role in it's development. I expect Linus took a job with Transmeta for the same reasons, because it looked like a fun and interesting thing to do. Transmeta employed linus because he is a damned good programmer, of course the fact he is the man behind linux was never going to hurt.
The article goes to the depths of saying
This man is just trying to start an argument. Linus has done a vast amount of good for the open source community, should we really be attacking him for being involved in a closed source project for his current employer?
All in all this is Bob Metcalfe doing the 'tabloid thang' and trying to attack the open source community in the lowest possible way
Crusoe reminds me of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Arnold's character was probably full of Crusoe processors. Skynet may be a reality someday. (Shudder)
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IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
I have had run ins with Metcalfe myself concerning his thoughts on old technology as he called it (GNU/Linux/OSS etc.). The fact is Metcalfe is brilliant when it comes to wire(less) columns, but he does not know a great deal about Operating Systems. I specifically recall when he asked me why NT had taken over the marketplace which was far from true, but, simply asking showed a great deal of ignorance (the obvious answer was marketing). He is unable to see the difference between marketing and good architectures. In regards to Transmeta and Open Sourcing the morphing software, I believe that while Opening up the source certainly sounds cool, we need to take more time to think about it in general. I am guessing that Transmeta considered this and had decided (again -- obvious Marketing reasons aside) for the time being it might not be wise. This idea is a bit new and it should be deliberated at great length by a number of groups, although I am somewhat upset that it has not come to the discussion table before. The sick side of this is Metcalfe and his rantings have helped bring the subject to the forefront - so maybe he does have a purpose in the Universe aside from mentioning Linux to draw hits.
" -- ow my brain hurts again -- "
Whether they can carry through with their ideas is another question, but the point stands.
Wanting Linus to release everything *everything* he does as open source, even if he only wrote a part of it, just because he has released *some* of his work (ok, admittedly an important piece of his work) as open source/free.. would be like asking me to donate all my salary to charities because I was spotted the other day giving some spare change to a beggar on the street.
Irrfeutable, but also irrelevant.
Actually, Bruce, Bob is responding to your bitterness, and that of others who advocate the use of open source as a weapon.
In your talk at LinuxWorld Expo this year, you labeled anyone who didn't give away the farm to the open source community as a "parasite." You even advocated changing the GPL -- which is already designed to undermine programmers' livelihoods -- so that ISPs and ASPs would be forced to forfeit the value they had created.
In the same talk, you mentioned that you yourself had become wealthy and were drawing handsome paychecks as a result of serving on the boards of several corporations. In short, you, even though you were now wealthy, could make demands on struggling new companies -- most of them much poorer than Transmeta. But if they wanted to use GPLed code, you begrudged them their futures.
Metcalfe writes:
Orwell's farmhouse is full of open-source pigs, which are now almost indistinguishable from the humans they once overthrew.
Metcalfe is correct, for many reasons. The GPL, and its "copyleft" provision, are a good case in point. It allows anyone to use GPLed code in the way that benefits him or her most -- except for commercial software developers. Why? Because "some users are more equal than others."
The truth may sting, but Metcalfe is right, Bruce. You're being hypocritical. And you have no right to demand access to Transmeta's intellectual property.
--Brett Glass
--Brett
--Brett
Of course, it's just holding the code "in trust" for the proletariat until it has reached the proper level of "political consciousness...." NOT. It has no plans to do any such thing. Rather, it seems inclined to gain complete control of as much software as possible.
--Brett Glass
--Brett
Yes. That's what sharing is about. If you insist on something back, it's not sharing. What's more, what the GPL demands is not that the developer give code to the author of the original work, but rather that he or she give it to the whole wide world, for free, forever. And, by doing so, forfeit his or her chance to make any money from the work he or she invested in it. It's like saying, "Here, have a breath mint. But in return, I expect you to give me your house, your car, and the contents of your bank accounts."
People do give back under the MIT X and BSD licenses, but in reasonable amounts. They don't give away the farm, and are not required to. That's fair.
So, it could be said that these other "Open" licenses discriminate against programmers who wish their works to be extended only by those who are willing to share those extensions back to the original author.
Again, the extensions are not merely shared with the original author. The programmer must give up his or her livelihood. A Faustian bargain.
Of course, that's the way it's designed. The entire purpose of the GPL is to destroy programmers' prospects of making money.
--Brett Glass
Maybe there's a "camp" (as you call it) because there's a consensus that it's so.
You got it backwards, Brett. Can you guess why I am working on the problem of modifying a license (not necessarily the GPL) for the situation of ASPs? Because some ASPs asked me to. Why did they ask me? To protect their work and their competetiveness. They want to put out Open Source software and benefit from the collaboration of other ASPs and the community. They want to create a commons in which no one party to has an unfair advantage over the other in this collaboration.
Translation: They really don't want to be competitive. Rather, they want to force their competitors to reveal the technology which might keep them ahead of the game. This is anti-competitive, not competitive.
But then, the GPL is, too. The GPL is intended to undermine programmers and hurt their livelihoods by giving away equivalents of their products for free and denying them access to that code so they can't add value.
So, they will put their own code behind whatever license I come up with.
Hmmm. Since when did you become "King Bruce?" It seems that, by attempting to dictate terms and restrict access to code, you are in fact becoming the very thing that open source was originally designed to avoid. The parallels to "Animal Farm" are obvious.
The GPL treats commercial software developers the same way as everyone else. In fact, only paragraph 3(c) of the GPL even has a reference to commercial vs. non-commercial distribution, and not in a way that would impair commercial distribution.
No, the GPL specifically targets commercial software developers by attempting to force them to give away the fruits of their labor. Distributors might be able to make a living (if they're lucky!) by pressing disks. But the programmers themselves -- whom Richard Stallman wished to reduce to the level of starving graduate students -- get nothing.
You can't understand this sharing thing, can you?
I understand it better than you do, Bruce. The GPL is not "sharing;" it's a variation on the old-fashioned, cruel playground game of "keep-away." True sharing means sharing with everyone.
Want to use my GPL code? Fine! Share it with this excellent set of sharing rules we've cooked up called the GPL. Return value equal to the value I put in, and treat me as I treat you.
No, this is not what the GPL says -- nor what it does. It says, "Some people can share the code for free, while others have to pay a price that's so steep that it will destroy their livelihoods." Again, "Some users are more equal than others."
But you're saying no share! gimmie!
No, that's what you're saying -- to one specific group. Programmers. This discrimination violates the very "Open Source Definition" that you wrote, since it discriminates against a field of endeavor.
There are indeed licenses that truly share. They're called the MIT X and BSD licenses. They don't discriminate against a field of endeavor. The GPL does.
Go over to freshmeat.net and look at all the GPLs on new code. Every one is offering you partnership in that code, if you can just learn to share.
What this shows, Bruce, is that the GPL has successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of many people. If you are ethical, you will fix this. If you merely want to ride the GPL to wealth, and are as greedy as those you revile, you will show this by continuing on your current course.
And it happens that yes, I am on some corporate boards. I'd rather have me there than someone who doesn't believe in Open Source,
From the above, Bruce, it appears that you yourself do not believe in open source. You believe in source that's open to some people, but not to others. And you want to get to do the choosing, according to who strokes you, pays you, or otherwise happens to get on your good side. You're a sellout, Bruce, and this shows it.
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
You, Tom, and Bob Metcalfe.
And many more already. There will be more still, as people begin to recognize the true origins and motivations of the GPL.
The GPL was born of spite and malice. It was written by a man who harbored such a grudge -- such bitter anger -- against commercial software developers that he succumbed to carpal tunnel syndrome in an obsessive effort to sabotage them. This is all well-documented.
Wrong. Their competitors are not forced to do anything unless those competitors choose to be partners on the same piece of code. Don't use the code, you don't have to obey the license. Together, the collaborators on an open source project are a bigger and better competitor.
In other words, what you are encouraging is collusion among some vendors to destroy others. This is anti-competitive behavior, Bruce, and is highly illegal as well as unethical.
Actually, that's not true. You can add value to your own GPL code and put it out with a commercial license.
This doesn't work, Bruce, and I happen to have a tape of you saying so yourself at the Fall 1999 LinuxWorld.
The promise of being able to "dual license" is, alas, a trap which the GPL sets for unwary developers. It seduces developers into stamping the GPL onto their code.... But then, once they do so, they discover that it is virtually impossible to license their work for money. Here's why.
First, when the GPLed code is released, the author will doubtless receive suggested changes and improvements -- often in the form of code. The problem is that, since the initial code was licensed under the GPL, the code which is contributed back is licensed exclusively under the GPL because that's the license under which the contributor got it.
Thus, if the original author accepts a single contribution, his whole work is irrevocably licensed ONLY under the GPL and his ability to legally dual-license goes away.
What if the author refuses to accept the changes to avoid this? In this case, a second mechanism kicks in. The contributor -- or anyone else -- can fork the project to create a GPL-only work that competes directly with the author's and drives him out of business.
Finally, dual licensing does not work because only a very un-savvy businessman would license code for money when there's a GPLed version available. This is true for two reasons. First, the existence of the GPLed version effectively reduces the market value of its functionality to zero; anyone can get that functionality for free! Thus, if one pays money to license GPLed code, one is paying for something which has no market value to end users. This puts the commercial developer "in the hole" from the start. Second, the GPL often allows the author's potential licensees to use the code without licensing it. (For example, some vendors of print drivers for UNIX invoke GNU Ghostscript but then post-process the output through their own software after that. They don't change GhostScript itself.) So, in many cases, they have no need to license the GPLed code, and the author loses.
You've almost got that right. When I give you GPL code, you must share that with me and everyone else equally.
Translation: I must give everything away to the whole wide world. Which means that I must give away the farm. In short, what the GPL really obliges the programmer to do is not to pay back other developers; it's to forfeit any opportunity to make money from his work.
He may well choose to give some things to the world, and in practice that happens frequently. That's what the BSD and MIT X license are about. But he should not be forced to do that. Forced "giving" isn't giving; it's confiscation.
Here you go accusing me of being unethical again, Brett. It doesn't shed a good light on you.
The first rule of any code of ethics is, and must be, "Do no harm." The GPL is intended to do harm (Stallman explicitly said so in his "GNU Manifesto") and as such is per se unethical.
I think that to recognize this, and reject the GPL, sheds a very good light on anyone. To use, promote, or further the ends of the GPL is to intentionally hurt others by perpetuating an agenda of spite and malice. That's not ethical, Bruce.
--Brett
Not true, Bruce, and it's disingenuous for you to say so. When you add one line of other people's GPLed code to you work, you must give away all of your own code in that product. Not share proportionately or fairly with the author who wrote that one other line, but give it all away, to the entire world, forever.
It's the GPL that "takes, takes, takes." And that's its purpose.
--Brett Glass
This is not so. At the MIT AI Lab, Stallman -- who served as a system administrator and system programmer -- even refused to let users put passwords on their accounts!
Yes, 'tis true, and it's documented. People who were at MIT at the time report that Stallman decrypted password files and sent messages to users saying, "I see your password is X. I suggest that you switch to the password [carriage return]. It's much easier to type, and also stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords."
He also modified the system code so that it would echo users' passwords to a public system console and system log as they logged in -- perhaps the first documented case of "password sniffing."
Steven Levy's book "Hackers" describes other ways in which Stallman fought security measures. Levy writes:
And all because the system -- which was on the rapidly expanding Net and therefore subject to cracking -- required passwords! To him, these simple provisions to prevent tampering and to keep information private were "fascism."
Stallman has also come out strongly against the notion of artists' rights. He believes that all intelletual property should be abolished and that authors of books and music not be able to hold copyrights.
--Brett Glass
"Copyleft" is legally suspect for a number of reasons, and I frankly believe that it is unenforceable.
--Brett Glass
What's more, it discriminates -- specifically against programmers. Anyone can use the code in the way that benefits him or her most, except the programmer who seeks to make a reasonable living by licensing his or her code. Shades of Animal Farm: "Some users are more equal than others."
Why do you insist on holding GNU software to such vastly higher standards of selflessness than commercial software?
Because it claims to have "such vastly high standards of unselfishness."
--Brett
Not so. Red Hat has never made a dime and has in fact lost millions of dollars per employee. What's more, it does not own Linux -- the product it sells -- so it also has virtually no assets other than computers, desks, chairs, etc. No profits? No assets? Doesn't sound like a strong business proposition to me.
Red Hat's own Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC, states:
--Brett Glass
It just so happens that I support open source vigorously. However, the GPL is not open source, because it is not open to all. Anyone can use GPLed software in the way which benefits him or her the most -- except commercial software developers. This discrimination was explicitly intended, by Richard Stallman, to reduce programmers' economic prospects to those of starving graduate students. He says so in his "GNU Manifesto."
The GPL is not a valid open source license, even according to the "official" Open Source Definition posted at http://www.opensource.org. Why? Because it violates a key principle listed there: an open source license must not discriminate against a field of endeavor. The GPL discriminates against the well-established field of commercial software development and is thus not a legitimate open source license. It is unethical to use the GPL for this reason.
The MIT X License and the BSD license, by contrast, do qualify because they do not discriminate.
Stallman advocates its use for precisely that purpose. In his essay, "What is Copyoleft?" Stallman advocated the surreptitious use of GPLed code by programmers who wish to create GPLed software on their employers' time and then force the employers to give away the result:
It's the programmers who are not allowed to "confiscate" the IP of the GPLd work when a copyrighted work is covered under the GPL.
Not so. GPLed software has zero market value, since it is available for free to all users. Therefore, programmers should be able to use it completely freely in their own work, whatever that work may be, at no charge and with no obligation. Why does the GPL begrudge them this? Because by doing so it undermines their livelihoods.
--Brett Glass
I remember this column he posted awhile back about W2k beating Linux to a bloody pulp! But the link to this article returned a 404. :)Here is the /. article Just proves this "LART" is looking for fire. hmmmmm " the truth is out there!"
Monday June 21, @08:06AM EDT Bruce Inglish writes "InfoWorld Pundit (and inventor of Ethernet) Bob Metcalfe just posted his 99/6/19 column entitled: "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" in which he predicts that "Linux will fizzle against Windows" and compares the Open Source community to communism and the Back-to-the-Earth Movement. "
Sig
Uhhh....cause they worked pretty darned hard on it, and they want to make a profit? jeez, we do live in a capitalist society...
BTW...fp? Nah....
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Metcalf as usual tries to make inflamatory comments about something that is totally irrelevant and unrelated to open source. The VLIW code morphing technology is proprietary and that has nothing to do with Torvalds because he is just an employee. The fact is that he was hired to make a special copy of Linux for crusoes. What should he have done? Turned down a really cool job which I assume pays well and get a mediocre job at M$, Apple, Adobe, etc? He has a family to think about as well you know.
Linus it would seem now respects the rights of a company or person to not make their code open source. That is a critical thing because it will make open source less fringe in the eyes of the mainstream of society. I think open source is great but I think a few things need to be addressed first: -Will open source reduce the corporate demand for computer programmers?
-What limits are there on the kinds of products that can be created? Obviously cutting edge games are out of the picture since 1 company would develop the engine and the others would leech off their work.
-Probably the most important of all, will Unix/Linux/BSD open source developers ever finally accept Win32, BeOS and Mac open source developers as equals? Believe it or not but there is fairly thriving open source community among BeOS developers and Be encourages open source development.
Just some things to keep in mind
I agree pretty much completely with you. IMHO, open source is the future of the computer industry. But right now, too many companies are thinking that open source will mean their profit margins will go up in smoke.
No, I don't like Transmeta hiding various specifics of their processors. But what does Linus have to do with this? He has to eat, and thus has to keep up a job. And, as you pointed out, managers/executives often don't like the idea of open-sourcing a product, no matter how enthusiastic about it their tech people are. In this case, IMHO, Linus == Tech Person.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Next, he'll insist Intel has "open door R&D sessions" where the general public can come and comment, make suggestions, and help guide Intel's processor devlopment. Perhaps Seagate could start selling "Build Your Own Hard Drive" kits in unassembled packaged, with little slips inside that outline steps 1-12 for putting together your very own 10k RPM SCSI-LVD drive (please note: level 5 clean room required).
Hardware and manufacturing is a whole different ballgame then software.
Bob needs to understand that Crusoe is not Linux, even if Linus works for Transmeta. I actually wrote quite a long response to the article, but after looking at it a little bit, I've realized that it is very difficult to analyze an incoherent article like that. I think the Animal Farm references are inappropriate. OSS isn't about politics, it's about software. If we do it better than Microsoft, so be it.
I really loved his pun though, I mean how many people would have thought to call Open Source "Open Sores"? That adds some real credibility to the article!
By the way, if an article could be a troll, that would've been one. (It sure got me!)
Gah
I think you two are talking about different things. You seem to be talking about the ISA and hes talking about the actual logic/mask level design.
Well at least I hope thats how you meant it, because otherwise its easy to see how somoene could easily compete with you... they dont have to recoup development costs.
Open sores (how clever), and his look in that picture? A pop psychologist might suggest this dude is packing a lot of anger to project somewhere.
Maybe he doesn't know. I was kind of surprised to hear a BBC radio report on the day of Transmeta's big splash... they made it sound like he was the boss.
Dragging Linus into Transmeta going Open Source with their code is ridiculous. Linus doesn't own the company, he is just an employee (correct me if I am wrong). What's that go to do with double standards ? I also believe in Open Source, but that doesn't mean I will only work for a company that opens up their souce codes for the world... end of the day, people still need to make $$$!
Hardware is best developed in the cathedral because new hardware can't be manufactured in a hacker's basement. OS and application software is best developed in the bazaar because it can be developed in a hacker's basement just as easily as elsewhere.
I am not a lawyer.
Is this guy trying to incite a flameware or something. Not only was his article completely misinformed. I think he is missing a major point. Yes free software is good but If all software is free then where is the incentive for companies to develop cutting edge stuff. Come on give me a break Torvalds has to pay the rent somehow, not to mention that he is slamming Torvalds, it isnt Torvald's company he isnt the CEO, or even the CIO he is an engineer(a brilliant famous one), but still an engineer, he doesnt have control over what Transmeta does with it products. I going to stop now this article dissapoints me.
I agree that /. should make sure they are reporting accurately, however, in the intrest of time (ie. how long it takes from submission to posting) I think having the poster edit his submission would be prohibitive.
I think a better soulution would be to have the poster point out any inaccuraces in the submitter's message. It would be Bad and Wrong for a poster to change the submitter's spelling/grammer/ideas, but he could post the comment unedited and place corrections afterword as they do on occasion when they want to add their own commentary.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''What? You are either open source or you are not. So, Transmeta is going to sell a chip and closed source software. Anyone, Wintel here? Sorry. Someone please explain this to me intelligently. No cursing, slamming, or other moronic needed.
If Transmeta were to open source their technology - i.e. give away the schematics for the chip - try to think who would be able to produce "open source" varieties of the chip.
./er would have their very own chip fabrication plant.
Well I certainly don't and I don't think even your average
But the people who do have the fabrication plants are the likes of Intel and AMD. So if Transmeta went and released their secrets their competition would effectively digest it, combine it with what they have and use it against Transmeta and they would most likely be a business no more.
Come on give Transmeta a break here. Although it would be nice to see and to get our hands on play with. The simple fact is that the econimcal situation they are doesn't allow for it.
Who said the bedrock of open source includes anti-forking and anti-commercial sentiments? Dig deeper and you'll find the ideology of science beneath it all, an ideology that has no argument with independent derivative works or the accruing of private benefit from openly shared knowledge.
First of all, I don't really care about what he said. Noone has actually seen a Crusoe in a machine (except, of course, at the presentation) so I guess it is way too early to speak about this.
As for what he said, well, not only that he doesn't have a clue about software industry, but he didn't even understand Animals Farm (in the eventuality he read it - perhaps he only saw the cartoon).
Anyway, I don't think this is the kind of flame we should be paying attention to
PS. Beware of stupid poeple because they are smarter than you.
Did anyone else catch that spiffy Windows 2000 ad on that web page? Look at the ads on the page to see where he gets the inspiration for his article.
The transmeta thing made me look into the world of open-source hardware and I was pleasantly surprised to find it was bigger than I thought it would be, I guess it doesn't shout loud enough.
To my mind the success of OSS is that usually the best apps are created by one group to solve a specific problem they have and their efforts are shared with the world so that no sweat of human endeavour is wasted on re-inventing the wheel. Think Linux / TeX / php / MySQL / gcc etc. etc.
As much as I try and convince myself that hardware is different I can't. All I can think of is the cost involved in building a fab or whatever. In OS theory I should be able to drive to my local Fabs-R-Us and ask them to build me the chip from the design I have on disk.
I was disappointed to hear in the Webcast that Transmeta are not even going to release the Instruction Set! "No need, just write x86 code" because "The instruction set is not fixed"
Linus is not a god no matter what people think / say from what I gather he was taken on to :
- Squeeze Mobile Linux into ROM
- Buy some PR
- Play Quake
Mobile Linux will be OS.OS hardware I'm sure will gain strength and momentum just like OS software did and we'll all be better off.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm sure it's a typo but I like it
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
:-)
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is fairly straight-forward: Making money at a day job, and pursuing a hobby (read: Open Source software development) are two entirely different things for many people. Some fortunate people at a growing number of companies get to develop "free" software and be paid for it, but a lot don't... and that's fine. OSS is -not- a de-facto industry; it's a well-developed hobby, purused by thousands and thousands of people around the world.
Linus Torvalds' day-job has nothing to do with his hobby, which is a sort of stweardship and direction-provider for the Linux kernel. Sure, Linux is part of the Transmeta strategy; why? Not because Linus works for them, but becuase they're smart... it doesn't take a lot of marbles to figure out that the Linux kernel is a very suitable fit for the 'portable computing' and 'internet appliance' market, than, say, the Windows 98 kernel.
Of course, they also got Windows to operate on their platform, which is really just a demonstration of 100% x86-compatibility. Good for them; it shows that they're not blind to where a good chunk of the market is still at.
You said: If the Open Source movement and philosophy are strong enough that companies such as Red Hat, SuSe, TurboLinux, VA Linux, and others are willing to build a business around it, then Transmeta, with Open Source's icon as an employee, should be out in front of everbody else. Instead, they cynically use Linus to garner interest and at the same time to shield themselves from criticisms of the company's behaviors.
Uhh, no. Transmeta isn't targeting just the Linux audience. Linus is there, helping with the Linux end of things; that doesn't exclude Transmeta from creating something that's Windows-compatible, too. And let's face it, the Technology behind Transmeta is pretty darned cool (literally!)... But he's not a decision-maker there by any means. He's an employee.
So what if he's world-famous for the work he's done outside of the context of Transmeta? It's a hobby...
Daltorak.
(P.S. For what it's worth, more and more companies are putting up "open source"esque pages. Why? Cause they want to give the appearance that they're 'with it', and they want to attract the attention of the otherwise hard-to-impress segment of computing society -- the geeks)
While I am not horribly familiar with specific statements that Linus might have made, I do think that you have a made a crucial error in judgement in the assumption that Linus is a rabid opensource fanatic (ala RMS). Because linux is GPL'd, most people seem to think that he thinks that everything should be opensourced. While I have some code that I give away (binaries, source, everything), it doesn't mean that I think that other people's code should be free, or that even other code I make should be free. This is the view that seems most logical to me, seeing as how Linus was also a college student when Linux started. By his working at Transmeta, it would seem that he believes like I have said, that you can give away source w/various licenses, or you can keep it private. This isn't some great moral debate about someone being a hypocrite, it's a lot of people trying to tell other people what someone elses beliefs are.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Dear Signore Dirrettore Now I am tella you a strory how I was treated at your hotella. I am comma from Roma as tourist to London and stay as younga christian man at your hotella. When I comma in my room I see there is no shitin my bed. How can I sleep with no shit in my bed? So I calla down to receptione and tella: 'I wanna shit!' They tella me: 'Go to toilet'. I say 'no, no. I wanna shit in my bed.' They say: 'You better not shit in your bed you sonnawabitch!' What is a sonnawabitch? I go down for breackfast into ristorante, I order bacon and eggs and two pissis of toast. I getta only one piss of toast. I tella waitress, and pointa of toast: 'I wanna piss'. She tella me 'go to toilet'. I say: 'No, no. I wanna piss on my plate!'. She then say to me: 'You bloody hella , not piss on the plate, you sonnawabitch!' What is a sonnawabitch? Later I go for dinner in your ristorante. Spoon and knife is laid out, but no fock. I tella waitress: 'I wanna fock!' and she tella me: 'Sure everybody wanna fock!' I tella her: 'no no. You dont understand me. I wanna fock on the table!' She tella me: 'So you sonnawabitch wanna fock on the table? Get your ass out of here!' So I go to receptione and ask for billa, I no wanna stay in this hotella no more. When I heve paid the billa, the portier say to me: 'Thank you and peace on you'. I say: 'Piss on you too, you sonnawabitch! I go back to Italy. I never comma stay at your hotella,' your sonnawabitch! SINCERELY
You can't handle the truth.
Bob Metcalf has greatly contributed to networking by inventing Ethernet but since then he's been making lots of non-sensical statements (like his numerous predictions on forthcoming 'Internet meltdown', just to remind people he was still alive. He simply doesn't have a clue.
Linus doesn't want to show support for any one Linux vendor or open-source company. He recognizes that by doing so he would endorse the company very strongly. It is clear to me that he wants to be as impartial as he can, while promoting the commericialization of Linux. For example, he says that he installed Redhat at home and Suse at work for a reason (maybe it was vice- versa, I can't recall).
He is an honorable person.
I have to agree, it would be interesting to see what instruction sets people come up with.
I quite like the idea of a code morphing layer for MMIX (mentioned in this interview with donald Knuth at advogato).
Why shouldn't I be able to write programs for MMIX and have them work on the next chip just by rewriting the code morphing layer?
-----------------------------------
-----------------------------------
D BREAK - CONT repeats
a) Linus does not own the company (though he probably will get stock options)
b) Code Morphing is playing around with processor instructions, at super-high efficiency. If it's not all assembly code, it's probably pretty close. They probably had to write custom compilers for it, that don't make sense to anyone else anyway, without giving away so much info that intel could rip it off and drive them out of business.
c) How many open-source hackers do proprietary coding for their day jobs? I'll bet a whole lot of them do. Why should Linus be any different?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Linus always said that Open Source is good for Linux, but in other cases closed Source is ok too. It would be quite easy to screw up the code morphing software for those who don't know the internals of the Crusoe chip. So it's probably better to leave the code morphing software to those who know how to do it. And Transmeta is not Linus. Crusoe was in development for years before Linus joined them. So Transmeta should change to Open Source just because they hired Linus? From what I've heard, Linus didn't write much of the code morphing software, he was mainly occupied with Linux.
We like to speak of principles in the free software community. Principles like freedom == power, and proprietary == tyranny. For me, a principle is something that applies in all situations, no matter what.
I believe this is what Bob is speaking to. I certainly do not mean to disrespect Mr. Torvalds, far from it. Linux has brought me numerous gifts, both in kind and in heart. But it does seem that Linus is "sleeping with the enemy", so to speak.
Now, some may say it is just Linus' business, and I disagree with that idea. He is one of our leaders, and accountability is another principle we speak of in this community. I would like to hear what he has to say...I think it is an interesting topic, if he is willing to share. I imagine that at some points he has faced conflicts between his beliefs in free software principles and the need to make a living and do something not only groundbreaking, but really cool.
Another point, and get your moderator points out to mod me down, cuz that's what happens when people post the unpopular truth out here... Mr. Metcalfe has received a totally reprehensible and immature treatment out here on /. today. It is OK to disagree with him, and don't sell me short, I disagree with a lot of what he has to say. If you be one of the Bob-slammers, take note: learn to disagree without being disagreeable. Pay the man a little respect. Only a fool would say we would be using the 'net today without his contribution. Saying he's wrong is one thing, even saying why he is wrong is cool too, but personal attacks...well, that just reflects poorly on all of us.
cat
1. intel releases the transmorphium
2. transmeta gets bankrupt
BM did note that the open source community places Linus on a pedastal. Albeit deservedly so, it's our responsibility to continually question those who rise to prominence in the open source community, as to whether they are acting in the best interest of the community or not. In that sense, Metcalf does make a valid point which is somewhat lost in the big ballyhoo on /. over this article.
Keep in mind, I have nothing against anyone making a profit. Indeed, I'm out to do the same. However, there is nothing which suggests that hardware or software development is a zero sum game. Why can't the interests of corporate America and the Linux community be reconciled? Mostly, it's because corporate America realizes that they profit if they play by the rules, and they profit even more if they don't.
Coming full circle to my point about Torvalds: he does have a responsibility to conduct himself in a manner which is consistent with the community's expectations of him, rather than simply maximizing Transmeta's profits. Transmeta could very well regress to being the next Intel, or could leave behind a greater legacy than chipzilla. the choice is theirs, of course, but Linus has no small part in this picture, and as such he should wield his influence in a responsible manner.
Flame away folks :)
-Junta
I'm going to start off by saying what many of you already have: Metcalfe obviously doesn't understand that the Crusoe doesn't support windows because it was designed for a Microsoft OS, but rather because it was designed for compatibility with existing x86 code. If the world ran the way he thinks it does, Motorola's PowerPC chips would be designed for MacOS only, leaving IBM's AIX in the dust. The reality is that Motorola, Transmeta, and any other company you care to name doesn't make chips for a specific OS.
;)
Next, the UNIX fragmentation issue. UNIX became a half-open/half-proprietary mess because it started off proprietary with AT&T, and even the valiant efforts of BSD could easily be corporatized because of the weak licensing. So, we have open source Unices and closed source ones, with merely inadequate standardization efforts (POSIX was the best one, and even with that can you run Solaris code on Linux? I thought not.) The GPL doesn't have those weaknesses. We've seen in the past with the various hardware ports of Linux that all the forks wind up being reunited. All roads lead to Linus (at least where the Kernel's involved).
So anyway, now we can get to the issue of code morphing software. This is software that handles things that in any other processor would be done in hardware. Do you see Intel GPL'ing the blueprints for the P3? I didn't think so. Most of the value of the Crusoe chip comes from the software, not the very simple hardware.
But that doesn't mean that the code morphing software shouldn't be open-sourced. That also doesn't mean that Intel, AMD, Sun, and Motorola should keep their chip designs a secret. We haven't seen it yet, but wouldn't open-source hardware be cool? I want a fab plant in my basement churning out Athlons! (OK, so I can't afford a fab plant, but I can dream, can't I?)
If Transmeta were to open-source the code-morphing software, we would probably see modified versions allowing us to run IA64, PowerPC, Sparc, or Alpha code. And we'd see even better x86 support. All on the same ultra low-cost chip. Cool, huh?
BTW, Open Source may not be the only development model that's good for the developer, or even the consumer, but it is the only one that's good for the soul.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Profit and the contribution of IP to the community at Transmeta, Rehdat/Cygnus, VA, Corel, etc. is NOT mutually exclusive so long as the timing is right. Everyone who believes in open-source needs to earn a living and sometimes that means keeping things proprietary in the short-term; wouldn't Bob really be forced to eat his words if Transmeta did "open-source" its technology: chip designs, patents etc. Not only would Metcalfe be proven wrong but the philosophy itself will be proven right-- yet again.
A. Wait
Profit and the contribution of IP to the community at Transmeta, Rehdat/Cygnus, VA, Corel, etc. is NOT mutually exclusive so long as the timing is right. Everyone who believes in open-source needs to earn a living and sometimes that means keeping things proprietary in the short-term; wouldn't Bob really be forced to eat his words if Transmeta did "open-source" its technology: chip designs, patents etc. Not only would Metcalfe be proven wrong but the philosophy itself will be proven right-- yet again.
A. Wait
This is why they have disclaimers that say the opinions of the employee (Linus) do not necessarily represent the opinions or interests of the company (Transmeta).
Erm.. sometimes it is A Good Idea (TM) to give away the most prized possession of a company. But only when it will make them more viable and profitable.
Take my employer for example, Digital Creations. In November 1998, they were a product company, with a great product. A Web Application Server that, if only the customers would see it, was much better than what all the multi-billion-dollar companies were offering. Not many people were listening to the tiny voice of this company though.
Then a VC convinced them to make that product Open Source, and switch to services, solutions build upon that product. Now, over a year later, the company is hiring like crazy, O'Reilly has started funding the company, and the product is making great inroads in the marketshare of those aformentioned multi-billion-dollar companies. Going Open Source is paying off.
Anyone of you ever heard of Zope? Let's just say that 85% of all people I asked at LWE did. Long live Open Source, long live the free messengers.
Not that this little story has any impact on Transmeta of course. They have a solid business model based on a product that just would not benefit from going Open Source. Their voice is being heard, they are making the inroads just like that. And not that Metcalf cares. Change is just scary, but he'll get over it.
Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope
"The truth shall make ye fret" -- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
This *%%$^$@#@ just has no opinion at all.
Dear Slashdot, The slashdot.org discussion of my current column about Transmeta starts with Hemos mischaracterizing what I wrote at infoworld.com/metcalfe, but what else should we expect? Hey, I never said that Crusoe only runs Windows. Enough of that. Read my column before flaming -- I need the hits. BTW, shouldn't it be slashdot.com instead of .org? Half of the hundred e-mails I got tonight said nothing more than that I am a moron, an idiot, clueless, ..., and just like Rush Limbaugh. Guys, you got to me, except I'm a Rush fan. On the X86 thing, why does Crusoe have to be X86 to run Linux? Wouldn't it be better to have Linux run native VLIW on Crusoe? Why bother morphing and caching Linux into VLIW if you can just compile it? /Bob Metcalfe
Polaris Venture Partners
Dear Slashdot.org/com (again), Am continuing to read the 100s of /. posts reacting to my InfoWorld column on Transmeta. Thank you... If I were a big fan of the open source movement, I would worry about the kind of people who seem to be on its side, or at least the majority of those making slashdot posts. Whew. Ugly mob... Hate to be a nit picker, but my name is spelled Metcalfe (with an e on the end) and my columns are at infoworld.com/metcalfe... It is true that I benefit when a lot of people read my columns. It is false that I am a big fan of Microsoft. It is true that I favor engineers and entrepreneurs. It is true that I oppose luddites and marxists (by whatever name). And it's really cruel the way some of you people refer to me as a "has been." Please do not waste even the energy it takes to ignore me... Now, about pigs. In my Transmeta column, I made a perfectly reasonable literary reference to Orwell's Animal Farm, in which certain lead characters happen to be pigs. I am sorry to those in the open source movement who think I called them pigs. Fact is, I live on a farm, and we love our pigs. Dogs look up to people, cats look down on people, but pigs is equal, we say. It was in the same neutral way that I have likened Microsoft to a skunk... Also, there seems to be confusion about the difference between hardware and software, which these days isn't much. Transmeta itself says that Crusoe is mostly software... So why shouldn't Crusoe mask sources be open? Many people have written that people can change Linux but not Crusoe, so Linux can be open but not Crusoe. But most people using Linux (99%+) don't look at the sources, and would never think of changing them. Similarly Crusoe. But were Crusoe to be open, other chip makers could access Crusoe sources, they could help debug them, help evolve them, be free to customize them, competitively manufacture them -- you know, all that good open source stuff. So, why not? Seems to me that all arguments against Crusoe being open apply to Linux as well... /Bob Metcalfe
Polaris Venture Partners
What Metcalfe doesn't realize is that Transmeta is a company that is out to change the comuter industry and make some money while their at it. They have to, how else are they going to pay off their debits they acquired while creating their Cruseo chip. If Transmeta made their VLIW code open source then they wouldn't make their money back. Peolpe would find ways to make chips like Cruseo. Intel would have something similar out in less than a year. Remember Linus works for Transmeta he doesn't own them or even run them, so why should Transmeta make their software open source. By not making VLIW open source Transmeta is keeping the ball in their court, they can control the progress and integerity of their product.