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Microsoft's GPL IPv6 Web Server. Not Really.
So, quite a number of people have submitted this hideously poorly titled story that talks about a GPLed IPv6 Web Server that's on Microsoft.com. A number of people thought it means everything will be GPLed starting this afternoon - it's their research server called Fnord!. Now, please stop submitting it *grin*
Anybody who wants a usable POSIX subsystem to run
on NT buys Interix, which is now sold directly by
Microsoft. It represents an entire independent
POSIX subsystem that runs directly on the NT
kernel, and includes all the POSIX utilites, and
even a fully working copy of the GNU C Compiler.
They distribute the bare minimum of GPL'd utility
versions, of course, similar to the BSD OSes,
because there are BSD licensed versions of most
of the utilities.
Cygwin, on the other hand, is a psuedo-POSIX
implementation. It's just a thin layer that runs
on top of the Win32 subsystem, all wrapped in a
few DLLs,
INTERIX is a certified POSIX implementation, by
the way. When you install INTERIX on an NT
system, it's a legally branded Unix box, someting
Linux only wishes it could be.
(They've said much the same thing about multicasting too. Sadly, IMHO, multicasting is dying and will soon enter the Great Betamax in the Sky, where all wonderful, but pathetically handled technologies go when they perish from this Earth.)
Personally, I doubt the Microsoft IPv6 stack is even close in quality or readiness to, say, the KAME stack, or the Japanese alternative Linux IPv6 stack.
But that's not the point. The point is, this is Microsoft. Never mind it's not an "official" MS site. It's got the Microsoft label on it. All it would take is for one or two major news outlets (besides Slashdot!) to cover this, and IPv6 will be =THE= technology to use. Simply because of the label.
Played right, this could make or break IPv6, as a practical, day-to-day alternative to IPv4, simply because of the value on the sticker.
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)
It strikes me that the reason MS has been coming down so hard on the GPL could be to get managers at MS Research to keep people from doing this.
It seems to me that they could be worried that carelessness or malice at MS Research could put them in a situation of having GPLed code they own but whose licensing they can't withdraw infect their main products.
The entry is copied from the Jargon File. Maybe you can try asking ESR to add your example... =)
Oh, wait, it's Microsoft. Guess I do know.
Well, the production server that runs on www.apache.org seems to have been supporting IPv6 for a long time.
According to this document.
Apache is now IPv6-capable. On systems where APR supports IPv6, Apache gets IPv6 listening sockets by default. Additionally, the Listen, NameVirtualHost, and directives support IPv6 numeric address strings (e.g., "Listen [fe80::1]:8080").
[Jeff Trawick]
--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The fnord URL has mysteriously disappeared! ALso the link from MS's IPv6 research page has gone too! MS's PR department is obviously very quick and must be reading /. often
Hey, if y'all had lived through a four-hour power failure last night, like I did, you'd think this was funny too! I'm off to shop for a fuel cell...
If they haven't distributed the software, they are under no object to release the code. Since this is an internal R&D effort and has not been distributed, you don't get to see the code.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Maybe it's time to hire some real journalists?
"Real journalists" thought Linux was RedHats property..
The great IP shortage was news.. 2 years ago...
A hacker convention was a gathering of technology terroists.
Macintosh was news.. So was the release of Windows 95. But not SunOs, Solarus, or OS/2 warp.
Also Windows crashed durring a demo.. thats news.. Other demos crash.. not news.. Ok Slashdot agreed but there is the point...
When it comes to technology news the reason it's not reported on CNN isn't becouse they know better.. but becouse they don't understand it.
When they do they'll report garbage more often than Slashdot.
If you want good technology reporting you need to fork it over to publications that pay technology experts... not jernalists.. Taco is some sort of hybred between a jernalist and a tech expert.
Also you want the good people who still need to build a name for accuracy and technical understanding not the old guys who need only mouth press releases. The later is worse than Slashdot and almost as bad as jernalists.
Also you want publications with editers who know the diffrence between someone who understands technology and someone who mouths what Bill Gates or RMS say.
"How do you feel about FidoNet" would be an example of a question a good editor should ask of a prospective reporter..
It dosn't matter if his opinion matches the editors. As long as it's a coherent opinon that shows he knows what fidonet is...
I don't actually exist.
I considered it ethicaly and perhaps legally wrong.
;)
Yeah. Clearly the GPL is ethically and legally bankrupt - it impedes your employers "ability to innovate and to create Great Software(TM)".
I know this isn't what you meant, but it reads that way anyway
*Please* stop using that neologism - it's lame, it's intensely annoying, and it marks you out as a smug, arrogant fool.
Perhaps you'll understand when you're older.
*Please* stop using that cliche - it's lame, it's intensely annoying, and it marks you out as a smug, arrogant fool.
I *AM* older, and any time I hear somebody of my generation chiding a younger person with that taunt I cringe.
It very rarely has the effect they are looking for.
I don't think it is a joke. This truely was the name of a GPL webserver written by Brian Morin, who was a student at WPI. I've used Fnord! before. IT was a nifty web server for Windows. But then, Morin got hired by Microsoft and the project seemed to have been abandoned.
It's funny to see a Microsoft domain with completely unformatted text, just plain jane text, no graphics, funny verbage, etc. Everything they do on the web is so incredibly over-produced, it just screams "ad agency", but then you come to this page and it's just black text on a big white blank page. It reminds me of when I first started surfing the internet, and how everything was really content-driven instead of image-driven.
It bowled me over. I was actually excited to see this page, because I'm sure the guys who wrote it (and posted the server) are just as excited. They're working on cutting edge stuff (well, IPv6 is more cutting edge than MY projects) and they're probably having a blast. You don't hear about this often from the MS camp - by the time things make it to their web site, you get the feeling a dozen graphic artists and content managers have put their OK on it, and it's completely sanitized of humor.
I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to these poor guys when some image-driven schmuck from MS catches this page. "What?!? This is our first IPv6 web server, and it's this plain and ugly? It should be jazzy! It should have lots of IE-only controls! And take out that humor! Now hop to it!"
What's your damage, Heather?
Still, this is another example of shoddy, biased reporting in the Linux media. After all, why use the whole truth when half of it will do just as well! Now that's efficiency!
/. for cogent evaluations of bad reports, like the above. Also, news.com tends to "not get it" as much as the specifically Linux-oriented sites, but they have some excellent general technology reporting (in spite of being CNet).
Actually, Linux Today is one of internet.com's rags (INT Media Group, Inc). They are more mainstream media than most of the well-known on-line Linux news services.
I suggest that if you want decent Linux reporting you go to linux.com or LWN.net, or just read
I used to use that back when. May not have been the best web server ever written, but it was preferable to Microsoft's "Personal Web Server" and IIRC it was out earlier. I even got Perl CGI working on it!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
or MS has been infiltrated by the Illuminati.
The truth about this can be found here.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
With all the things that "corporate" Microsoft does, it's very easy to dislike everything that is Microsoft. But then, you see a page like this and you realize that MS has some pretty cool geeks workin' for them, too.
Note: If in any way you might take from this note that I consider myself a cool geek, DON'T.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
WELP, It's hidden now! They took it off their webpage. No GPL for you!, microsoft says. Bahhahahaha *Watches as 10 weeks of carefully planned PR Streak across the sky like the comet the killed the dinosaurs* (link)
yeah i remember using Fnord! in 1996 or so for my personal web site. wasn't Brian Morin involved in the ANSI art scene or something? i know a lot of ANSI scene people used Fnord! to host their art sites. i didn't know it was GPL though, but perhaps that's a recent thing.
- j
For the lazy(read: efficient) among us who find it too much work to hit google, would somebody care to describe the status of linux and apache with ipv6? or any other web server, for that matter. and since at least one freebsd freak is going to post 'we've had ipv6 working for ages now. that just proves we're better.' well, who cares? but post it anyway.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
Remember, GPL is a licence. The original author have the choice to do whatever he want's with his code but if it is released under GPL newer versions may or may not be GPL. What is released GPL stays GPL. If other programmers make changes and included it in his code he may not just take that source and release it with another licence. In short. you are still the owner of te source when you release GPL.
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Back in earlier days of the web, sometime around 1995 or 1996, I recall finding this on the website of the student who wrote it. At the time, I needed a personal webserver and I don't think that Apache had released a port to Win32 at that point (I may be wrong). Anyway, I installed this sucker and it ran beautifully. It also had a tiny little Illuminati pyramid that sat in the systray.
Interesting that M$ picked it up for experimentation. I would hasten to point out though that they are merely complying with the previous software license, since I doubt they would have used the GPL of their own accord.
Project ELF - Anonymous Distributed Filesharing
Heh. That's not what I think of when I see 'Fnord' :) Then again, I think reading the Illuminatus! trilogy did plenty of brain damage as well.
To be clear. What I ment was I just spent a summer working with one of the best web severs ever written. It would be grossly unfair to apply what I had learned to Fnord and release the result of that GPL.
:-)
As for my personal view of GPL and free software, lets just say I'm more conservitive than Karl Marx and more liberal than Jim Allchin. But lean a lot closer to Jim Allchin.
Henry Fnord
It's funny how these things just keep comming back. I always got a kick out of seeing it show up on the Netcraft survey (at least at recently as a year ago.) Anyway I guess a few comments are in order (easy Karma too.)
I wrote Fnord back in my Junior yeah of college (96-97.) Partialy because EWACs (or something like that) was the dominant web server at the time with IIS just comming around with it's magical version 3. Partitialy just to learn how they worked under the covers. The name Fnord was a joke that stuck. The thought of Fnords on the web being served by a Fnord Sever had a certain ring to it. Why GPL? Since part of my goal was understanding how these things work and would work under NT, GPL was as good of a way as any to share my work with others. I ended getting a little help from a couple people in the process. Overall, it was a fun experience I learned a lot from.
The summer of '97 I accepted an internship at Microsoft on the IIS ASP team. In the process I learned a hell of a lot about stuff I didn't know that I didn't know. After that experience, by my own initiative, I ceased to work on Fnord. I considered it ethicaly and perhaps legally wrong. So it laid idle on my homepage at WPI. Around then I got a letter from Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games asking me to cease and desist using the pyrimid and eye icon. However, by that point there wasn't much to cease and desist doing. Being a fan of his work made it all the more humorous. After graduation I accepted a postion at Microsoft.
After working for Microsoft for about a year, someone from research called me and asked me if they could use Fnord as an example for their IP6 effort. They needed a server example, releasing a subset of IIS was not possible (I suspect size and intellectual property issues) so Fnord fit the bill. Other than saying yes and being glad Fnord still was of some use to someone, I had no other role in MS release it.
Currently, I'm still working for Microsoft in XBox Online.
Hope this sheds some light on how this little inside joke came to be.
Brian Morin
aka
Henry Fnord
Get your facts straight. The software is on Microsoft's site because they ported it to W2K. It doesn't just happen to work with W2K, as you implied. From their page:
Fnord! is a web server for Windows NT/2000 which we have ported to run on our IPv6 stack.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Come on folks, as if Microsoft would ever GPL any of their stuff! I mean, if they're anything, they're always looking out for their bottom line, and they're not going to do something so obviously dangerous to their profitability...
Still, this is another example of shoddy, biased reporting in the Linux media. After all, why use the whole truth when half of it will do just as well! Now that's efficiency!
I know that these sites are strictly amateur, but amongst professionals like myself it just tarnishes the reputation of free software as a whole when such blatent propaganda pieces come to light.
Maybe it's time to hire some real journalists?
Jon Erikson, IT guru
What are you talking about? I don't see the fnord.
or MS has been infiltrated by the Illuminati.
I think the second one is more likely, I can even feel the mind control beams emenating from the NT I'm typing at.
fnord
1. A word used in electronic mail and news messages to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humour, especially in connection with Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?"
I should ask dictionary.com to include "MS releases a server under the GPL." as an example.
BOSTON SUCKS!
Ok everyone, calm down. Fnord isn't written by MS. The researchers probally choose it because they needed some kind of server application to test out on their IPv6 machine, and adding IPv6 support to IIS isn't pratical for their research and testing. So they found this small open source webserver that they could hack at and get running on IPv6 in a few hours. As required by the GPL, they've released their modifications to the public. Personally, I think it would have been fun if they forced you to download the code via IPv6. Would have given the /. community a reason to setup IPv6.
5 -25-005-20-OS-MS ) and automatically reject the story (since you're motivation for posting this story was "stop fscking submitting it!")
In the grand scheme of things, there really isn't much to see here. It's a Microsoft research/test server running something besides IIS, on IPv6. The webserver is a small, GPLed little server that they made a few patches to. I'm still trying to figure out how the hell this is newsworthy. Did everyone download the fnord code and check them for GPL complience? Don't bother. It's there. The author of the Linux today article obviously has no idea about the orgin of fnord, or the nature of research. Why the hell would IPv6 support get into IIS before their IPv6 stack was ready? Why would a small research team modify IIS to support IPv6? They wouldn't. That's what MS pays the IIS developers to do. Please, use you're grey matter just a little bit.
Why not add a feature to slash that will look for a URL ( in this case http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/fnord.htm and http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-0
Ok, I think I'm done now.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Nope. It stands for "Foundation for Neuro Ontological Research and Development.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Yeah, and the icon is a pyramid with an eye in it. *shiver*
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
They're still distributing GPL'd software, whether they wrote it or not, whether it's an official capital-R Release or just something a few engineers threw up one weekend...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Perhaps you'll understand when you're older.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Of course, Microsoft already include a bunch of GPL'd software with the NT4 Resource Kit, including a horrible old build of Perl, some GNU utilities etc. IIRC these were licensed from MKS. Anyone know whether the W2K Resource Kit comes with similar goodies? Or have MS noticed that everyone who wants a usable Windows system these days gets this stuff (and tons more) from cygwin?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
It's gone now...nuttin' left but a 404 page.
Why does it say "not really"? How is this not really releasing a GPL IPv6 Web Server? Just because it isn't shipping with windows 2000 doesn't mean it isn't out there in the wild. I think this is great! It IS gpl'd and it IS microsoft.
Someone is probably about to get fired tho when the higher ups get wind of this.
---
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Actually, that was inherent in the metaphor. Consider: my first trip into the 'dacks, I picked a flower for a girl I liked, who didn't like me and was a consumate woodsman. "You shouldn't pick the flowers," she said, "because there aren't many wild flowers left. If you pick them, they won't grow back, and then there won't be anything left for the next group."
Wise young girl, with the exception of her taste in guys...her current boyfriend is a dipshit.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You know, I've always thought something like this had to exist at Microsoft.
.Net, ASP), has been doing a lot of great shit. Fast XML parsers. Semi stable windowing OSs. A decent scripting language (or, rather, engine...i write my WSH stuff in Perl or JavaScript). All of these things well documented in MSDN with text files that were obviously not hit with the same marketeering technical writers who tried to sell us on Windows Media 8, the death of the paper clip or the "excitement" of .Net: The Network is the Comput-oh wait, that's not .Net!
You see, I've seen a lot of smart, talented young coders and scientists get recruited by Microsoft. Half of them go in for the huge stock options, their name on a blue MS shirt, and, of course, the booth babes. The other half are misfits and nutjobs who really want to change the world. In fact, that's the reason why I'm not anti-MS...I've known too many good men entering the behemoth to think that it's all fluff and marketeering.
We all like to think of Windows as an underpowered, oversimplified mush...but Microsoft, despite its market crap (XP,
This "Fnord" box is apparently the house of some of these innovators at Micrsoft. The ones taking the ideas that UN*X users come up with and adapting them for the mass market. These are the guys that are going to eventually build the Ipv6 core that us Windows users will have underneath it all in four or five years -- before marketting makes them paint it yellow and cover it with MSIPv6 logos.
Don't hate MS for looking at GPL code...that's what GPL code is for. Hate the marketeers who cover this free code with bumper stickers and sell it back to us at a premium. We're all in a field of flowers, but Microsoft is picking them and selling them to folks who are too lazy to come to the countryside.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
We're all in a field of flowers, but Microsoft is picking them and selling them to folks who are too lazy to come to the countryside.
Too true. And in the process, they first have to destroy that which they are selling us.
Nope, no sig
1) This isn't new. I downloaded their IPv6 version of Fnord! 3 months ago, and it's been around longer than that (The oldest version on their FTP server is from 9/2000.)
/pub, /users, and several other directories.
2) This isn't 'hidden', it's linked off the Microsoft Research IPv6 homepage, which in turn is linked off of the Current Research page (Although they want you to register if you go in that way).
3) This isn't Microsoft, the OS maker, it's Microsoft Research, the R&D Lab.
4) Microsoft didn't write Fnord!, it specifically says on their page 'Fnord! is a Windows web server we found on the net and ported to run on our stack.' and 'Fnord! was apparently written by Brian Morin while a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.' The readme.msr goes on to give the URL of the authors website (now defunct) and a URL of a Tucows mirror where the original could still be found when they wrote the readme. (I didn't check if that mirror still works.)
5) Yes, they included the source code in their port. No, it's not for Visual C++. It's actually a Borland C++ 4.5 project, although I believe their binaries are compiled with VC++.
6) Finally, I'd like to point out that there are a lot of other interesting-sounding files available on ftp.research.microsoft.com, from the
-Jade E.
If you look a little longer than your nose you will notice that the fnordserver is written by somebody else but is put on the Microsoft site because it works on W2K.
It isn't Microsoft's software; it's just hosted there.
Yeah, they are happy with building shell over shell on top of their crappy early-80's OS. (stolen). :)
Personally, I'd like to run a vaccum-tube/plugboard simulator and play with all the ballistics stuff from even earlier. Now *that* would be an OS...
Yeah, no doubt they are infiltrated, but how does it come I can see the Fnord!?
And is this the first step towards the end-phase for Illuminatus Primus Bill Gates, whatever this might be?
However, I am scared...