Public Software Fund's First Project

Russ Nelson writes "The Public Software Fund's first project has been funded for two months worth of development. Tom Jennings (of Fidonet fame) will be writing software to do peer-to-peer file sharing of free software RPM packages, improving the existing free software packages up2date, /current/, and BitTorrent. This will keep new distro releases from being slashdotted."

Comments

please no more

[mike13down]

cjb links.. my eyes are burning

Re:please no more

[mike13down]

slow night

Re:please no more

[Anonymous Coward]

Mister, you're eating a candle.

Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[corebreech]

Story I submitted that got rejected follows. Yeah, it's off-topic. Bite me.

The New York Times tells us (after we register for free) that Gnutella developer Gene Kan has committed suicide. Let's see, he was young (25) and just over a year ago saw the company he started bought by Sun Microsystems. It would be wrong to jump to conclusions here. It would also be wrong to not start asking questions.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really no surprise that such a person would choose to commit suicide. Many criminals are seriously troubled souls. Many of these turn to alcohol and become the bums you see on the street. Others turn to drugs and street crime. Others like Kan turn to pursuits like criminal hacking because being able to control the computer gives them a sense of God-hood and exhilaration.

People who have these criminal thoughts always seem to turn inward eventually. Some find spirituality, others find nothing. Kan found nothing and that's what we have today. Sometimes there is something to be said for early identification and mandatory treatment for those who exhibit criminal behavior. It would save us all a lot of heartbreak.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[buzzbomb]

It would be wrong to jump to conclusions here.

What if I have a mat specifically built for this purpose?

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the movie Anti-Trust?

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[ceejayoz]

Asking questions? About what? Suicide is, unfortunately, not an unusual occurance. What, do you think RIAA had him assassinated? They may be one bastard of an organization, but killing people is pretty damned far-fetched.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

There has been much speculation over on the Free Republic that the MPAA or the RIAA might have had him whacked. Or perhaps one of the Hollywood moguls had him whacked.

I seriously doubt the kid really killed himself. I believe it was murder.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you're right. Nobody has ever killed anybody over dollars before.

Especially not billions and billions of dollars.

Only crackheads kill for personal gain.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from the idiotic conspiracy theories, which posts do you find mean spirited and nasty?

This one?

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[josh crawley]

(whatever score) : Offtopic

LIKE HELL. The guy, Gene Kan, is one of the original people to create P2P for the masses. Simply calling him "offtopic" is meaning the _oh_so_great_editors_ are offtopic, and we are on.

Now, it's just a pride issue. And they have more -1:shut_up power. (Insert Slashdot censor head)

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[corebreech]

But surely you don't mean to say that this isn't news for nerds. That this isn't stuff that matters.

All stories have mean and nasty comments associated with them. Why do we not cringe at the sight of a new story. OK, maybe we do, but does that mean we shouldn't be posting new stories?

Peer-to-peer is seen by many to be a threat to their very way of life. Gene was working on JXTA (why is this site down?) which could easily have threatened to become an unstoppable peer-to-peer toolkit that would've let anyone easily write P2P software that would run atop of anything.

The powers that be may shut off access to this port or this service, but with JXTA, you could easily piggyback over whatever existing channels they leave open via some kind of tunnelling protocol thing. JXTA was about figuring out how to deal with the Network Address Translation and firewall issues that prevented P2P from being ubiquitous.

I can't imagine a technology more hated by the status quo than what Gene was working on.

We have every right to ask questions about his death. I'm sorry, but his privacy has to take a backseat here to what it might mean for our future should this turn out to be foul play.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[rob-fu]

While it may be straying offtopic even further, I thought it was interesting that Kan had a weblog entitled "This place sucks." Underneath the title, he added, "Earth sucks. Let me enumerate the ways." The last entry is dated at June 28th. It's eerie -- the posts, which Kan philosophized about various subjects -- religion, US-Israel relations, etc -- get shorter and shorter in length until the last one.

I guess we can only imagine what was going through his mind; it's a shame that he believed things in his life were so bad that the only solution was to end it himself.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was he cremated before news of his death released?

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[rob-fu]

For anyone who is interested, the link to Kan's weblog is here.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[rob-fu]

I've seen this theory tossed about on /. and a lot of other websites but I think this is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in awhile. Perhaps I'll be sacrificing karma by not posting AC but I think that the mere thought of Kan being murdered by the RIAA or the MPAA is incredibly outlandish.

Kan played a part in making P2P what it is today, but why would they have him killed? There were a lot of others who developed Gnutella. WHy not whack them too? It makes zero fucking sense.

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[rob-fu]

Read this article.

Kan was severely depressed, i.e. Prozac, suicide hotlines, the whole thing.

From the article:

The signs of impending awfulness were there, Oliver said. Very recently, Gene had changed his resume, which was stored on the University of California at Berkeley's server, to read: "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure."

Sad. I think this pretty much dismisses the conspiracy theory...

Re:Peer-to-peer pioneer kills self

[Cryptnotic]

This is Funny(+1) if you've seen Office Space. On the other hand, it is definately Offtopic(-1). But it is definately NOT a Troll(-1).

yay

[Dreamacyde]

great 3rd post..ill never get a 1st post.screw you jeff../

*BSD is dying by poopbot

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying


- poopbot: news for turds, stuff that splatters

CNN has story on this as well (with pic)

[Anonymous Coward]

This be it.

Re:CNN has story on this as well (with pic)

[CProgrammer98]

So does Gnutella but they didn't mentioned he shot himself.

Very Very sad.

this sound have been posted on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very important news, how they denied it I have no idea...

I wouldn't be surprised if he was killed by the movie industry... I am deffinately not going to any more movies now

Re:Tom Jennings

[Anonymous Coward]

From the link Turing, an extraordinary British homosexual mathematician

Why did they feel the need to mention the guy was homo?

Re:Tom Jennings

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. They already called him a British mathematician.

How rendundant can you get?

Re:Wait til the RIAA hears about this!

[gazbo]

Yeah. But it's not a patch on her more experimental '-ac' work ...

Why doesn't she create an account?

San Jose Mercury News has stories too

[Anonymous Coward]

Monday's story
Tuesday's story
Wednesday's story

Why so many offtopic mods?

[shepd]

Some of the more inquisitive than offensive posts have clearly been modded offtopic by someone who can't stomach the slightest questioning into someone's unusual death.

Why is that? I find that just as insulting as some of the comments desgined to be mean-spirited.