Slashdot Mirror
Green Hills Software Decides Linux Isn't So Bad
An anonymous reader submits a link to this report on LinuxDevices.com, which begins "An outspoken open source detractor has paid Linux a back-handed compliment. Green Hills Software (GHS), known for diatribes against Linux in military/aerospace applications, is shipping 'Padded Cell technology' intended to enable the company's proprietary real-time OS to take advantage of the wealth of Linux application software." You may remember GHS's Dan O'Dowd, who's claimed that the embedded Linux Tools Market is a myth and that the open source nature of Linux makes it a threat to national security.
SCO claims ownership of code
I can tell you lots about padded cells and straight jackets and basket weaving.. oh wait this is Slashdot.
Oh wait, that's right this IS Slashdot. Want me to continue?
Jon Katz idiot.
"I don't think I'm all that controversial," Jon Katz says.
By his own account, you wouldn't know that Katz is, in fact, a lightning rod. The media critic and author of numerous works, including Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, is often flamed by readers who call for his ouster every time one of his stories appears on Slashdot, the site he calls home. Katz gets accused of everything from self-aggrandizement to Faith-Popcorn-style trend mongering to -- worst of all -- not being a real geek.
He's maligned and even dissed by members of his own constituency who fail to recognize him for what he is: a leader of one of the important social movements of the Internet Age.
Or was. Katz has more or less stepped down from his role as lead scribe of the "anti-bullying movement" -- a loose coalition of students, parents, commentators and educators who argue that to write off school harassment as "kids being kids" is to ignore a very real threat to students' physical and mental health.
Now, the one-time crusader for the geek underclass has decided to concentrate on writing more general technology articles and media commentary. And the efforts of Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary aside, no one's really picked up where he left off.
Katz cites burnout as one of the reasons for his recent decision to branch out beyond tales of grief. "I was actually close to getting obsessed about it," he says during a phone interview. "A bunch of my friends said, 'You've got to stop doing it, or you're just going to become -- I mean, your whole life's work is just basically being a transmitter of all this misery.'"
All this misery. An electronic river of pain. That's how Katz variously refers to the torrent of messages that he says crashed three of his computers and hasn't completely subsided yet: messages from kids ostracized by their peers; teenagers alienated from both fellow students and authorities; thirty-somethings who still haven't forgotten the pain of being different. All of them reached out to Katz because he had the temerity to suggest in a 1999 article entitled "Why Kids Kill" that there was something wrong with schools that treated disaffected geeks as potential killers in the wake of Columbine.
"As a writer, I've never in my life touched a deeper chord," he says of the article, and the many-part Slashdot series, "Voices from the Hellmouth," that was based on the e-mail messages "Why Kids Kill" provoked. For almost two years, Katz wrote of geeks beaten up, threatened, and sexually harassed by their peers. And ignored, disciplined, and sent into counseling by school administrators.
"Why Kids Kill" may not have been the most likely starting point for a revolution. Published on Slashdot, it was more of a media think piece than a report from the front lines. In it, Katz takes journalists to task for concentrating on computer games and the Internet as possible causes for Columbine.
"It was the final break between me and the media," Katz says now. "I never got over the coverage of he Columbine shooting."
Despite having worked for venerable old-media outlets like The New York Times and Rolling Stone, as well as Wired, Katz more or less left print journalism for the in-your-face world of Slashdot, which bills itself as, simply, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Stories are posted and immediately analyzed and dissected by users. Katz describes it as "the best job I've ever had in my life."
When asked why he doesn't try to spread the geek-movement word with a well-placed op-ed in The New York Times, or maybe a longer piece in The New Yorker, Katz dismisses the idea. "People like me tend to be attacked, trivialized, marginalized," he says. "To write a token op-ed piece is not going to change anything."
And how have Slashdotters repaid him for joining their ranks, both as a chronicler of their stories and as a technology columnist? Katz seems generally happy with the feedback he gets. "I get probably t
Thank you!
My company worked on a web-based database front end for internal company use at a Fortune 100 company about a year ago. It seems some GPL zealot got wind of our decisions to use modified Linux kernels to improve (0)1 scheduler performance and RDBMS access beyond what the volunteers are capable of. We received a letter from the "Free Software Foundation" demanding that we hand over every piece of code we wrote as part of the project, plus any other code we owned that was going to be implemented in any way as part of the project. It seems the viral nature of the GPL, and our use of gcc, supposedly infected all of our code with a licence we tacitly agreed to by downloading GPL'd software.
I wish I had known about this before thinking about touching so-called "free" software. Anyone who tries to separate the FSF and Linux from communism hasn't run into the commissars who will happily use the American legal system and copyright to get their lazy hands on your code, without contributing anything back; indeed, working to undermine the economy we rely on for prosperity.
We trashed the entire project, at great expense, rather than let these freeloaders take our intellectual property. We ended up using a combination of SCO OpenServer for the database backend and web serving, and Windows 2000 machines for internal client access. At least those companies have respect for the spirit of intellectual property law and capitalism.
Lawyers generally make very fine people, at least all the ones I've ever met in a professional or non-professional sense. It's the people who hire them who are likely to be shitty people. It normally takes at least one shitty person for a matter to end up in court, so you're likely to have at least a 50% shitty person rate right off the bat.
Random and weird software I've written.
In Korea, only the elderly decide Linux isn't so bad.
Sorry, I just had to try it out.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
That scenerio is much more likely when code is written once by one person and never touched again. Free software is rewritten all the time. Closed source is more venerable to bug insertion by malicious employee, offshored work and especially an undetected break in to code servers. When it's closed, you don't really know if they got some guy in Moscow to write it, do you? The larger problem is bug removal, which free software excels in.
The compatability layer allows software written for embedded Linux to run on Green Hills's OS. Thus eliminating the alleged risk
I don't see the elimination of risk. Instead, I imagine they will create tons of bugs by trying to make a non free interface layer that will be difficult to write and maintain. My small experience with non free modules that have to be compiled along with kernel source has been dismal. The non free world does not have the resources to keep up with improvements and changes in the free world.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh so lawyers only get involved when the matter goes to court?
Don't think so mate.