FIRST POST via WI-FI
by
cdf12345
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
although it is my house, it is free!!
CHICAGO2600.NET
-- Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Please help me with the GPL
by
Michael's+a+Jerk!
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source". Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
--
I'm not Seth.
Re:Please help me with the GPL
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Please do your homework (i.e. use Google) , and get a knowledgeable lawyer. For instance, there IS Token Ring support on Linux, and you don't need to release under the GPL everything compiled with GCC.
Re:Please help me with the GPL
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
What is this? Astroturfing by software "freedom of choice" lobby? (Cheap astroturf full of holes)
Or is it those funky trolls again tickling my brain?;)
P
Re:Please help me with the GPL
by
TheMidget
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
What is this? Astroturfing by software "freedom of choice" lobby? (Cheap astroturf full of holes)
No, just the usual crop of garden dwarves. The Thank you for your time is a dead give-away. Oh, and although the dwarf noticed that there is no
token ring support in Linux, he forgot to mention that there is no support for mice either.
And even though he noticed that you can't defragment an ext2 fs he forgot to mention there are no virus scanners for Linux either. And no way to change the color of the bluescreen. And no dialog box to enter the license key.
Or is it those funky trolls again tickling my brain?;)
My mind blanks as the earth reforms. I focus on the the individual particles, it must be perfect, an action which would have taken me days and completely exausted me before, now takes only a few seconds. When the structure is completed I pick her up and levitate with her in my arms one last time. I set her down in the coffin, thinking about what could have been if I came to her help a few minutes earlier. I step outside the room and order the earth to seal it. Nobody shall ever know what lies beyond this barrier, I tell it. It obeys, knowing my pain.
I form a dagger of pure crystal out of nothing. I think about what powers will be lost to humanity, how many will die because I will not be there to help them, but it is meaningless to me. She was everything to me and I lost her to my greed. It is better this way, I tell myself.
I walk outside and see the sun setting behind the hills. It asks me if I need anything, and I tell it I need guardians. Moments later, the link is broken and out of the fire come four giant fire elementals. They request instruction. I tell them to destroy this forest and then return here, forever guarding this building, never to yield to any intruders. They turn and go.
I force my body fully into this plane. Feelings of vulnerability overwhelm me, I become mortal again. I walk back into the building and the earth understands, opening the passage for me. I sit next to her, touching her cold hand. I am sorry, I think, the thought echoing through the fabric of reality, a sign of how powerful I have become. I drive the dagger into my heart feeling not pain, but relief. I am sorry, I think again, and this time I feel she is responding. Perhaps we will be together in whatever is to come, I silently say to myself. I smile as I close my eyes and submit to the darkness.
But the powers that be will not let me rest. I have been assigned the role of the deathbringer of a strange world I have never seen before, with the promise that I will be reunited with my love at the end of time. There is nothing but death for those whom I set my gaze upon, and nobody understands why I do it. I am hated and feared by them, but I do not care.
I have become a Troll.
My Experience with the Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Indeed.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Re:My Experience with the Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
The ignorance & twisting is so brilliant! Aaargh... can't resist, must post.... I knew I should have never descended down to -1 level. I can't handle this. Where do these come from?
Could there really exist "consultants" having both; technological talent and 100% cluetron proof skull?
Somebody pulled these together on notepad and is now plastering them all over/. at -1 offtopic??:)
Damn Americans
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Think you're so special with your free WiFi internet access.
don't leave the foreigners out. *whimper*
FIRST HARRY POTTER SPOILER POST
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
No, you're not. You're going to post something modded +1 funny on Slashdot about all the neat ways you could punish the FCC by abusing this, then you'll go back to masturbating over pictures of Jennifer Garner in your parents' basement.
If 1% of what was promised or threatened on Slashdot came to pass, we could change the world. If it wasn't for all those pictures of Jennifer Garner, eh?
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You're in Luck! Purge the GPL as follows
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
GPL'd libraries purged of GNU virus
I have just now written a version of readline() that:
(1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API
(2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function
(3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL
Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a non-infective version of the library API,this means that readline() is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination.
Enjoy!
Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively purged of the virus.
Slashdot Mirror
although it is my house, it is free!!
CHICAGO2600.NET
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on
Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do
some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was
very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our
exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were
considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive
with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually
guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my
experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
I'm not Seth.
My mind blanks as the earth reforms. I focus on the the individual particles, it must be perfect, an action which would have taken me days and completely exausted me before, now takes only a few seconds. When the structure is completed I pick her up and levitate with her in my arms one last time. I set her down in the coffin, thinking about what could have been if I came to her help a few minutes earlier. I step outside the room and order the earth to seal it. Nobody shall ever know what lies beyond this barrier, I tell it. It obeys, knowing my pain.
I form a dagger of pure crystal out of nothing. I think about what powers will be lost to humanity, how many will die because I will not be there to help them, but it is meaningless to me. She was everything to me and I lost her to my greed. It is better this way, I tell myself.
I walk outside and see the sun setting behind the hills. It asks me if I need anything, and I tell it I need guardians. Moments later, the link is broken and out of the fire come four giant fire elementals. They request instruction. I tell them to destroy this forest and then return here, forever guarding this building, never to yield to any intruders. They turn and go.
I force my body fully into this plane. Feelings of vulnerability overwhelm me, I become mortal again. I walk back into the building and the earth understands, opening the passage for me. I sit next to her, touching her cold hand. I am sorry, I think, the thought echoing through the fabric of reality, a sign of how powerful I have become. I drive the dagger into my heart feeling not pain, but relief. I am sorry, I think again, and this time I feel she is responding. Perhaps we will be together in whatever is to come, I silently say to myself. I smile as I close my eyes and submit to the darkness.
But the powers that be will not let me rest. I have been assigned the role of the deathbringer of a strange world I have never seen before, with the promise that I will be reunited with my love at the end of time. There is nothing but death for those whom I set my gaze upon, and nobody understands why I do it. I am hated and feared by them, but I do not care.
I have become a Troll.
Indeed.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Think you're so special with your free WiFi internet access.
don't leave the foreigners out. *whimper*
Sirius does a Gandalf.
No, you're not. You're going to post something modded +1 funny on Slashdot about all the neat ways you could punish the FCC by abusing this, then you'll go back to masturbating over pictures of Jennifer Garner in your parents' basement.
If 1% of what was promised or threatened on Slashdot came to pass, we could change the world. If it wasn't for all those pictures of Jennifer Garner, eh?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
GPL'd libraries purged of GNU virus
,this means that readline()
I have just now written a version of readline() that:
(1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API
(2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function
(3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL
Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a
non-infective version of the library API
is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination.
Enjoy!
Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is
not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively
purged of the virus.
Freedline can be obtained Here
Rejoice!
I'll never forgive those bastards for destroying Sealab just because Murphy was running a pirate radio station.