Slashback: BitKeeper, Maine, Novell

Slashback is back, with a largish handful of updates and new information about previously run stories. Topics this go-round include Xbox sales in Australia, the Novell / MySQL connection, Adam Smith (no, not that Adam Smith)'s bizarre anti-GPL statement mentioned yesterday, and more. Read on for the details.

I thought Adam Smith was in favor of free markets and the exchange of ideas. mrjive writes "The plot thickens. In response to yesterday's story, it turns out that the attack on the free software movement was attached to the end of the letter in question by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash, who happens to have Microsoft as his biggest beneficiary. The original authors of the letter have sent an angry response for essentially twisting its original purpose. Read the full scoop here."

For the even-fuller scoop, see Roblimo's article on NewsForge.

Not bottling it up inside of himself. An anonymous reader writes "Richard M. Stallman has responded to comments made a week ago in response to his own Linux kernel mailing list post about the BitKeeper controversy. 'A technical issue or project sometimes raises ethical issues,' Stallman began. He did not stop there. More on the (newly cached and therefore a little bit Slashdot-immune) Linux and Main . Be gentle."

Free knowledge for sale for free, etc. OverCode@work writes "The complete LaTeX source to Loki Software's game programming book, Programming Linux Games, is now available on the author's site. This book was reviewed here a while back. Mad props to the publisher for letting this happen."

Everybody'sSQL haggar writes "MySQL (commercial license) will be shipped as standard with NetWare according to this announcement. I consider it a follow-up to the Slashdot story about the PostgreSQL port for NetWare. Apparently, the options for NetWare users are widening, thanks to open-source products!"

An iBook in every (lobster)pot! Call Me Black Cloud writes "Some time ago Maine awarded a contract to Apple for laptops for school kids. MacCentral has an interview with Maine governor Angus King where he discusses the success of the program. Despite the Maine state legislature's attempts to kill the program, it continues on. Why? Well, a $1M grant from the Gates Foundation certainly helped. Over the summer Apple delivered 18,000 iBooks and installed 239 wireless networks in 239 schools."

So long as they're not mandatory. Polo writes "I noticed that the Garmin Rino 110 and 120 are shipping. If you don't remember, these are FRS/GMRS Radios with integrated GPS. You can transmit your position to other units so they can hear you and see where you are. Pretty cool. This is a follow-up to an older story"

What the market will bear. His Nastiness writes "Just a follow-up that I ran across that indicates that Steve Ballmer may have just been blowing hot air on not selling the XBox in Austrailia anymore. See the previous thread here."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[chimpo13]

The article says that the Gates Foundation kicked in a million dollar grant, and that the state of Maine thought, rightfully so, that Apple was a better product.

A quote, "The bids were roughly similar in price, but the iBook had a greater value than the other laptops".

I'm sure Gates will be a bit more careful in the future and add stuff like "Here's a million dollars worth of M$ stuff".

Gates Foundation and iBooks

[IdleTime]

Just a short note on the GF and iBook debacle.

I thought Microsoft had a large interest in Apple, interest as in stocks? Didn't they basically save Apple's ass a couple of years ago?

Then it doesn't matter what they buy, does it? Now, if they had tried to buy Walmart PC's with Lindows, I bet the foundation would have cried Foul Play!

Re:Gates Foundation and iBooks

[ChemGuy]

IIRC, a couple hundred million bucks worth of non-voting stock (out of Apple's market cap of many billions) and a promise to continue development of Office for Mac.

It was really a gesture of support. If they "saved Apple's ass", it was purely in a symbolic way.

Re:Gates Foundation and iBooks

[shking]

I thought Microsoft had a large interest in Apple, interest as in stocks?

No. They had a large interest in Apple (see below), but they've sold the shares

Didn't they basically save Apple's ass a couple of years ago?

No. They bought a swack of stock ($150 million I think) to settle a lawsuit out of court. Apple had sued them for breaking a contract & "borrowing" some of their technology

Re:Gates Foundation and iBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't they basically save Apple's ass a couple of years ago?

A common misconception among those who think $150 million is a lot to a "small" computer company with 4 Billion with a Captial B, dollars in the bank. Back in '99 it was about $3.6; now, $4.3

Since when did a company with a couple billion in the BANK(we're not even talking capital here. Just CASH) get its "ass saved" by a $150M stock purchase?(it was NOT a loan or a freebie.)

Answer: it didn't. In fact, 60% of Apple stock is owned "institutionally", ie, by other companies- they're the only ones that can afford to do so. There are 360 million shares outstanding currently, and each is worth about $12 or so. Do the math, troll. $150 million in stock works out to less than 5% of Apple's stock.

There were very strict terms on the sale of that stock. It was basically a long term investment by Microsoft, which has more money than they know what to do with(literally. They actually have difficulty investing enough of their cash reserves; corporations have a responsibility to return an investment on cash that's lying around.) Given that they make one of the most popular MacOS programs, MS naturally would want to invest a little money in a company which, by all accounts, seems to do EXTREMELY well on its books...they're not in debt(see the $4B), their margins are usually good, etc(this quarter, they did loose $50M I think, but again, that's literally pennies to them.)

What was also in the deal, and far more important, was an MS/Apple agreement to share technologies and give better access to each other's operating systems; ie, Apple was able to integrate quicktime technologies better into Windows. I think MS also agreed to commit, on paper, to releasing Office for quite a while, but that could be something separate, I don't remember.

By the way- Word, Excel, etc were all released on the Macintosh -first-.

Try spending some of that "Idle Time" on learning, kaaay?

Re:gps radio

[jasonkohles]

The don't communicate via satellite, they get their position from the gps satellites just like other gps receivers, then they can transmit their position to other users using the radio.

Info on the Gates Foundation

[Chromonkey]

First read about them here: Gates Foundation

Here's a few highlights of the year ending 12/31/2001

Financial Position highlights
Amounts are in thousands of dollars.
Net assets: $32,751,466
(note: That's BILLIONS)

Grants Paid

Global Healthcare: $855,567

Education: $177,944

They are the largest private contributor fighting global health issues (and it is believed to be the largest driving force behind malaria eradication in the world)

Re:Info on the Gates Foundation

[JohnGalt42]

Note that the Grants Paid information is in terms of thousands of dollars:

Global Health $855,567
Education $177,944
Libraries $43,176
Pacific Northwest and Other $36,868
Special Projects $33,403

TOTAL: $1,146,958

More on the Gates Foundation

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Their website has a lot of information on what it's done, and I must say, the foundation rocks. Click on the "Grants" link for a graph of grants given. $5.5B. That's a lot of mo... In 2001 (from the annual report), "...we gave over $1 billion in grants in support of more than 2,050 grantees." You may hate the company, but that monopoly is doing some good somewhere!

Here's more about the grant to Maine.

Re:European-style representation

[Anonymous Coward]

'Bicameral' means 'two chamber' and refers to a two-house legislature, the House and the Senate in the case of the United States Congress. It has nothing to do with the political parties involved.

While I agree that the bicameral (two-house) system is quite efficient and is a good legislative solution, please remember that the Constitution has absolutely nothing to say about political parties.

Ignore parent comment

[yerricde]

Apparently, BitMover has removed the most objectionable term (the non-compete agreement) from the no-cash BitKeeper license. Please moderate down the parent comment.

MSoft didn't save apple (common misconception).

[juuri]

This gets battered around a lot, but Microsoft has a very tiny interest in Apple. When someone tells you "I heard Apple was bailed out...blah blah..." they are probably more than a little confused.

Microsoft's supposed bail-out was an investment of $150 million dollars into a company that had over 4 billion in reserves at the time. Apple still has over 4 billion in "liquid" like investments.

Re:European-style representation

[irix]

they also get stable, mostly competent majority governments most of the time

No, we get stuck with a middle-of-the-road Liberal party in power becuase the other interests in the country can't get their act together and get them out. And thanks to the lack of term limits and anything resembling the power of the US house/senate, we get essentially a dictatorship that has been in power so long that they are corrupt.

At least you have change in government every now and again, and some way to oppose a decision taken by the president.

Re:Gates Foundation != Microsoft

[n-baxley]

GF might have simply chosen what computer would benefit students the most.

Not to stomp on the Gate's foundaton, but they didn't choose this technology. They dontated money for educational computers and Maine decided to go with Apple.

laptops

[daoine_sidhe]

I live in Maine, AND was one of the estimators involved with the laptop program. Our company was subcontracted by apple to do the physical installations (244 of them in all) in every school, and I have this to say: we spoke to many of the teachers; yes, many were against it to start. By the end of THEIR training, the vast majority of them were in love with the program. It comes down to this; you CANNOT overspend on education. That combination of words has no place in America; or shouldn't, at any rate. Yes, the laptops were expensive, and yes some kids may damage them; but the state was also given a (quite hefty) warranty program by Apple, and rules on whether they (the laptops) go home with the students or not are set individually by each school. It gives not only the schools a sense of independence and technological edge, but the students as well. They know that they are some of the only students in the world involved with a technology initiative this big. Also, it's well known that students who start using computers early and often are those people who don't need a dissertation on double-clicking in order to get "online" later in life :-).

It's Simple

[LadyJessica]

I don't know why people have trouble with this. This isn't about the GPL, or Stallman per se. It's about the fact that you can't develop for both the Linux kernel and a source code control system (e.g., CVS) at the same time without paying for BitKeeper.

Obviously RMS has set himself up for flaming. People on any mailing list people tend to be very touchy about what they consider topical. :-) On the other hand, if you are a kernel developer using BitKeeper, then you can't work on CVS without paying money to BitKeeper.

Re:Gates Foundation?

[User 956]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that philanthropy is a wonderful tax write-off, especially as Gates can donate money to his own foundation, from which he receives money back via administrative and charitable expenses.

Re:Bitkeeper license breaks separation of jobs

[kubrick]

Even if working on Linux and working on Subversion are separate jobs, the restrictions of the Bitkeeper license apply to the person and thus cross from one job to the other

From my reading, it applied to the person or organisation the developer is working for; Larry and IBM negotiated a special exemption, for example.

So, by being a Subversion developer, it's possible for you to stop hundreds (or even thousands) of your fellow employees from being able to use the free version of Bitkeeper to work with the Linux kernel, even in their own private time at home. (And of course one cannot be a developer of a competing system and use the free version of Bitkeeper as a trivial case of this restriction.)

Re:Vote Grammar Nazi!

[smyle]

Wrong again. If you're on the right (like me), vote Constitution Party. It's like libertarianism, but with morals.

Re:Republicans and Democrats

[3Bees]

Urrrrrkkk, no coffee, brain hurts

We do not have a two party system, it is just that currently (and usually) only two of the parties are able to garner enough votes to even be considered.

Pay attention in a couple weeks at election time, or better yet in a couple of years when we get the chance to de-throne George II. On a national level there is very little formulazation of the two-party system (apart from the way that commitees are formed and government election money is aportioned), but at the intersection of the local/state and the national there is quite a bit.

Check the laws on how votes are tallied, on how districts are formed and on how electoral votes are decided are often implicitly if not explicitly two party. A lot of this comes not from a specific party bias (parties tend to die off and get replaced every 50-70 years aprox. in the US), but from a paradigm of politics that views candidates as being the important piece of the puzzle. This is viewed best in contrast to a proportional view (most of European government) that put the emphasis on the party: that is to say, on the ideology.

The system has virtually no input because virtually nobody votes. It is rare to even get a 20% turnout. There are major differences between the parties, it is just that they are rarely talked about on political TV ads. Instead, the ads state

You are not considering the why behind these non-votes. The reasons are/could be legion but all boil down to a percieved dis-empowerment at the personal level. A great deal of this could be seen to arrise from the fact that the winner takes all in an election. If you vote for a loser, your vote is discarded entirely. Also, as you state, there are differences between the parties, but not between the candidates. But, who do you vote for? Even if you vote the party line, you are still voting for candidates, not parties. See how much that affects the advertisements?

The are four main political views in America today. They are Libertarianism, Conservativism, Liberalism, and Socialism.

That is such a gross generalization and simplification that it is not even worthwhile responding to this or the paragraphs of useless platitues and personal assumptions that follow it.

Re:Vote Grammar Nazi!

[smyle]

As well they should - I think we can all agree that murder is morally wrong (my right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose). The constitution party (as a platform) believes fetuses are human, therefore defining them as such in a legal sense would be tantamount to making abortion illegal.

As for their other "moral" stances (drugs, gambling), they deal very little with the individual and deal greatly with government regulation (in other words, the same thing as libertarians). The only other stance they have taken (IIRC) that would be contrary to the libertarian viewpoint is opposition to same-sex marriages - they explain why, but I don't recall at the moment.