>>They claim they don't want any recognition in return.
You're absolutely high. Not only is that not true, it is the exact oposite of the truth. For example, the basic idea behind the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" was that open source developers do it for recognition.
>>Reality check: you are not guaranteed anything beyond what is spelled out in your license.
Basically if you break the law, then you get sued. If you are impolite you get shunned. Licenses only cover what is legal not what is polite. (Not that I have an opinion on whether Red Hat was polite or not.)
>>what we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source fonts, but a few people who know what they're doing.
I remember when I first started college, I over heard one of the computer lab workers laughing about me (a freshmen) struggling to install Linux on my computer.
"Does he think that he is going program the source code or something? Heh Heh Heh."
Three years later, my first code was accepted into the Linux kernel.
I believe people have a calling to be creative. I code. Some people paint. Some create music. Their are millions of people in the world with untapped talents. It's time to give them tools and start tapping... Writing kernel code is much easier than people said. I doubt that it is so impossible to create a font...
Most of the things that people say about The Linux Desktop are either wrong or have already been said 3,894,092 times before, so I came to the article expecting to be disapointed. But this article turned out to be really interesting.
It's hard to say why some people love computers but other people hate them. I am one of the former. I think that I did used to get the feeling that the computer was waiting for me to give it input. There was something charming about amber text on a black background...
User interfaces these days don't give you that same impression. They're too demanding. Too gaudy. They're pushy and rude. Everytime you start your computer your programs flash across the screen and make honking noises. They flood your eyes with blinking advertisments. The software feels mass produced and ungainly. It insults my inteligence at every turn.
Unix computers come with fortune installed. It's fun. It's easy to use. Depending on how large the data files are, you could go on typing it for hours. I like the idea that everytime you turn on the computer there is something new to surprise and delight you.
It takes an average of 11 clicks to open a document in notepad. I'm sure that the windows version of fortune would be 38 clicks. I'm not sure my heart could handle that much happiness.
The trick is to find a way to make computers fun again. The article is not about Linux needs for the desktop, it is about all desktops.
>>Why should the material of the processor make such a difference?
I'm a little bit confused by the question, it sounds retorical but it's also on a FAQ list somewhere. The Open Source Philosophy[tm] answer to this question, is that software costs nothing to reproduce while hardware has large production costs...
I've used quite a few (4 at least) open source versions of Java. Mostly I switched from one to the other when I ran into limitations. It's frustrating..
I could never imagine releasing a Linux Java program simply because I know that it won't work across the various JVMs that people have installed. I've never actually installed a Linux Java program. I tried to get a Java ICQ client to work once but that was a horrid experience.
Java is a nice language in many ways. It has an extensive and well documented standard library. However, when mono becomes stable I'd probably use that rather than Java simply because it's too hard to release Java programs that are going to work with all the open source JVMs.
I'm even more likely to develop using Python where ever possible. Python is a slick language, it has good libraries, and it has qt and gtk bindings.
LWN is of course an exception. Their reporting was always excelent and interesting.
I used to always read their front page and their kernel page. The kernel page was written by one of the authors of Linux Device Drivers which is an excelent resource.
I'm interested to see a list of succesful "for pay" Linux websites. The fact is that professional websites are being put out of business by amature websites whether they are add based or "for pay".
Slashdot is a special case because it only creates a tiny bit of original content.
"the bottom line is that managers had no credible buss model for that company in the time like this,"
Please post again when you aren't high.
"So, LinuxGram's reporting that Turbolinux is going under is not far from the truth even if they missed something."
My point was not that they missed something but that they completely and deliberately missed everything. Should you trust a website that tries to misinform at every turn?
The first line of the Linuxgram article says, "Turbolinux, one of the four main Linux commercializers, closed down on Monday, multiple sources say." However, Maureen had already talked to Ashok Pandey and Koichi Yano thus there is no way Maurene O'Gara seriously believed that TurboLinux was closing.
"The company could not be reached for comment late last night when reports started filtering in." And yet she managed to talk to the presidents of the Asia Pacific and Japan operations.
"So has the so-called TurboLabs in New Mexico where it was supposed to be working on storage, high-availability and HPC." Cue the X-Files theme song... What did you think they were working on???
"By some reports, the company's Asian operations in Japan and China, its original base, have also been closed." Except that Maureen O'Gara already knew that these reports were false.
"Employees have reportedly not been paid for the July 1-15 period yet and the company supposedly owes a half-million dollars to its lawyers Morrison Forrester." At my last job, I worked two weeks, handed in my time card and got paid two weeks later. Perhaps it works the same way at TurboLinux. Only Maureen O'Gara would try to make the ordinary process of getting paid every two weeks a sign that Linux business was not viable.
The rest of the article is the same blend of biased half truths with a misleading spin.
I do not know why LinuxGram prints this kind of crap all day long. Their other stories are exactly the same. It's all misleading, and I can't think of any motive for it.
I do hope they go out of business soon. To paraphrase CmdrTaco, "I can't think of a single person who reads LinuxGram." I can't imagine how they stay in business as it is. Perhaps they have some other source of income.
The difference really is not in the patches that they add but the testing that they do. Some of the stock kernels are very bad. They might not compile for example.
You're probably right that there is not always a lot of difference between stock kernels and vendor kernels. But I always tell people to only use vendor kernels, because if they break then the people can blame Red Hat or Suse but don't hassle the developers.
The post I was replying to was belly aching about.0 releases and thus falls under the "hassling developers" catagory. I'd be willing to bet that Red Hat and Suse didn't ship with the.0 version because they knew it wasn't trusted.
Mandrake may have shipped with it... They like to live on the edge.
But yes. You're right. There is nothing wrong with using stock kernels in production. I believe that Debian only uses stock kernels.
Making changes to the driver API in Linux is essentially free. Free as in "I don't have to pay for it".
The person who makes the changes in the API is responsible to make the changes in the drivers as well otherwise people start cursing at him. This person probably doesn't consider it free, but obviously must consider it cheaper than the alternative.
(This equation assumes that the few third party drivers that do exist are not a priority.)
>>Could somebody please explain to me why software should be excluded from patenting? If it's a legitimate innovation (i.e. not Microsoft "innovation") why shouldn't it be patentable?
Software is too easy.
If you start dressing it up with fancy vocabulary you can make it seem difficult. For example method and protocol objects sounds really difficult but if you just want to build a webserver into the kernel it's under 200 lines of code. Sure that's khttp vs TUX but you could just add 100 lines of code at a time and very soon khttp would be as good as TUX. Which 100 lines of code is worth a patent?
Bio-engineering is different because each product is just one or two ideas. Software is built from combining ideas. Any large project is 1000's of little ideas. If 100 of those ideas are patented what are you going to do?
The truth is that part of the reason that software seems different is because I am involved in it. If I made medicine in my spare time then I'd probably think those type of patents were bad too.
>>As long as the curriculum meets the needs of the students in real world applications and approaches.
The problem is that real world computer technology becomes outdated so fast. One must try to teach something that will be usefull to all the students for a lifetime, not merely useful to secretaries until the next version of Micrsoft Program 2005 comes out.
The key to being a competent computer user is the ability to recognize and work around bugs. What better way than to teach the students to program? In writing their own programs they will constantly have to work around their own bugs. This is the most valuable thing you can teach anyone about computers.
Remember the Red Hat piranah bug a couple years ago where there was a default password?
That default password existed--in beta software--for two weeks before it was found. Slashdot was up in arms about it. Alan Cox personally appologized for letting the default password slip by his check.
I believe that slashdot was correct to get upset about piranah. I think any vendor who distributes software with default passwords deserves the same.
You're not the first person to comment on the recent dirth of stable releases. According to the last changelog, Marcello has been holding off on releasing the next one because it includes some IDE changes that he wants tested. I'm not really sure what the IDE changes are... Andre Hedrick had some changes that let people use the new really large IDE harddrives, that might be the code, but I'm not sure.
Of course, people who like to take risks or who want to help test, are welcome to use the -pre patches. Right now it is up to -pre8. If you want to live on the very cutting edge, then you can download patches from this page. The patches here are updated every hour for the Marcelo's bk tree.
I believe that besides the IDE changes, there are several VM tweaks.
As far as I can tell Mozilla has only had that one javascript security bug. It was fixed the same day, and released as a nightly build.
You'll almost certainly have to download the whole browser. It would be too hard to deal with people upgrading from all the nightly builds and the 3 week milestones, etc.
This is not really a problem because, Mozilla is aimed at developers. Users are supposed to use Netscape or other Mozilla based browsers.
For Linux users, it would be up to the Linux distro to provide patches like that if they wished. But none of them will either. Too much work for no money.
Slashdot Mirror
They just don't have the same single minded commitment to evil.
>>They claim they don't want any recognition in return.
You're absolutely high. Not only is that not true, it is the exact oposite of the truth. For example, the basic idea behind the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" was that open source developers do it for recognition.
>>Reality check: you are not guaranteed anything beyond what is spelled out in your license.
Basically if you break the law, then you get sued. If you are impolite you get shunned. Licenses only cover what is legal not what is polite. (Not that I have an opinion on whether Red Hat was polite or not.)
>>If it's original code it would have to be public domain.
A program is a collection of original pieces of code. The peices that they authored would be public domain.
>No copyright, no GPL, end of story.
The government could release the code as public domain and it could be used in a GPL project.
>>what we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source fonts, but a few people who know what they're doing.
I remember when I first started college, I over heard one of the computer lab workers laughing about me (a freshmen) struggling to install Linux on my computer.
"Does he think that he is going program the source code or something? Heh Heh Heh."
Three years later, my first code was accepted into the Linux kernel.
I believe people have a calling to be creative. I code. Some people paint. Some create music. Their are millions of people in the world with untapped talents. It's time to give them tools and start tapping... Writing kernel code is much easier than people said. I doubt that it is so impossible to create a font...
Most of the things that people say about The Linux Desktop are either wrong or have already been said 3,894,092 times before, so I came to the article expecting to be disapointed. But this article turned out to be really interesting.
It's hard to say why some people love computers but other people hate them. I am one of the former. I think that I did used to get the feeling that the computer was waiting for me to give it input. There was something charming about amber text on a black background...
User interfaces these days don't give you that same impression. They're too demanding. Too gaudy. They're pushy and rude. Everytime you start your computer your programs flash across the screen and make honking noises. They flood your eyes with blinking advertisments. The software feels mass produced and ungainly. It insults my inteligence at every turn.
Unix computers come with fortune installed. It's fun. It's easy to use. Depending on how large the data files are, you could go on typing it for hours. I like the idea that everytime you turn on the computer there is something new to surprise and delight you.
It takes an average of 11 clicks to open a document in notepad. I'm sure that the windows version of fortune would be 38 clicks. I'm not sure my heart could handle that much happiness.
The trick is to find a way to make computers fun again. The article is not about Linux needs for the desktop, it is about all desktops.
>>Why should the material of the processor make
such a difference?
I'm a little bit confused by the question, it sounds retorical but it's also on a FAQ list somewhere. The Open Source Philosophy[tm] answer to this question, is that software costs nothing to reproduce while hardware has large production costs...
I've used quite a few (4 at least) open source versions of Java. Mostly I switched from one to the other when I ran into limitations. It's frustrating..
I could never imagine releasing a Linux Java program simply because I know that it won't work across the various JVMs that people have installed. I've never actually installed a Linux Java program. I tried to get a Java ICQ client to work once but that was a horrid experience.
Java is a nice language in many ways. It has an extensive and well documented standard library. However, when mono becomes stable I'd probably use that rather than Java simply because it's too hard to release Java programs that are going to work with all the open source JVMs.
I'm even more likely to develop using Python where ever possible. Python is a slick language, it has good libraries, and it has qt and gtk bindings.
In general I agree with your post.
>>witness the not insignificant number of people who have un-Opened their work
I haven't witnessed that... There are a few examples of source code being un-Opened but these are noteworthy precisely because it happens so rarely.
LWN is of course an exception. Their reporting was always excelent and interesting.
I used to always read their front page and their kernel page. The kernel page was written by one of the authors of Linux Device Drivers which is an excelent resource.
I'm interested to see a list of succesful "for pay" Linux websites. The fact is that professional websites are being put out of business by amature websites whether they are add based or "for pay".
Slashdot is a special case because it only creates a tiny bit of original content.
"the bottom line is that managers had no credible buss model for that company in the time like this,"
Please post again when you aren't high.
"So, LinuxGram's reporting that Turbolinux is going under is not far from the truth even if they missed something."
My point was not that they missed something but that they completely and deliberately missed everything. Should you trust a website that tries to misinform at every turn?
And TurboLinux Asia Pacific will be soon.
TurboLinux US may be shutting down, or it may be downsizing in the same way that Suse did last year.
In my view, the real lesson to be learned is that you should not believe things you read on disreputable web sites.
The LinuxGram article is deliberately misleading.
The first line of the Linuxgram article says, "Turbolinux, one of the four main Linux commercializers, closed down on Monday, multiple sources say." However, Maureen had already talked to Ashok Pandey and Koichi Yano thus there is no way Maurene O'Gara seriously believed that TurboLinux was closing.
"The company could not be reached for comment late last night when reports started filtering in." And yet she managed to talk to the presidents of the Asia Pacific and Japan operations.
"So has the so-called TurboLabs in New Mexico where it was supposed to be working on storage, high-availability and HPC." Cue the X-Files theme song... What did you think they were working on???
"By some reports, the company's Asian operations in Japan and China, its original base, have also been closed." Except that Maureen O'Gara already knew that these reports were false.
"Employees have reportedly not been paid for the July 1-15 period yet and the company supposedly owes a half-million dollars to its lawyers Morrison Forrester." At my last job, I worked two weeks, handed in my time card and got paid two weeks later. Perhaps it works the same way at TurboLinux. Only Maureen O'Gara would try to make the ordinary process of getting paid every two weeks a sign that Linux business was not viable.
The rest of the article is the same blend of biased half truths with a misleading spin.
I do not know why LinuxGram prints this kind of crap all day long. Their other stories are exactly the same. It's all misleading, and I can't think of any motive for it.
I do hope they go out of business soon. To paraphrase CmdrTaco, "I can't think of a single person who reads LinuxGram." I can't imagine how they stay in business as it is. Perhaps they have some other source of income.
The difference really is not in the patches that they add but the testing that they do. Some of the stock kernels are very bad. They might not compile for example.
.0 releases and thus falls under the "hassling developers" catagory. I'd be willing to bet that Red Hat and Suse didn't ship with the .0 version because they knew it wasn't trusted.
You're probably right that there is not always a lot of difference between stock kernels and vendor kernels. But I always tell people to only use vendor kernels, because if they break then the people can blame Red Hat or Suse but don't hassle the developers.
The post I was replying to was belly aching about
Mandrake may have shipped with it... They like to live on the edge.
But yes. You're right. There is nothing wrong with using stock kernels in production. I believe that Debian only uses stock kernels.
A bazillion more people test the kernel after it hits the .0 mark and so of course mistakes are going to show up.
If you need stable kernels you should get them from Linux vendors like Red Hat and Suse etc. That's the way it has been for a long time.
Making changes to the driver API in Linux is essentially free. Free as in "I don't have to pay for it".
The person who makes the changes in the API is responsible to make the changes in the drivers as well otherwise people start cursing at him. This person probably doesn't consider it free, but obviously must consider it cheaper than the alternative.
(This equation assumes that the few third party drivers that do exist are not a priority.)
Software is too easy.
If you start dressing it up with fancy vocabulary you can make it seem difficult. For example method and protocol objects sounds really difficult but if you just want to build a webserver into the kernel it's under 200 lines of code. Sure that's khttp vs TUX but you could just add 100 lines of code at a time and very soon khttp would be as good as TUX. Which 100 lines of code is worth a patent?
Bio-engineering is different because each product is just one or two ideas. Software is built from combining ideas. Any large project is 1000's of little ideas. If 100 of those ideas are patented what are you going to do?
The truth is that part of the reason that software seems different is because I am involved in it. If I made medicine in my spare time then I'd probably think those type of patents were bad too.
The problem is that real world computer technology becomes outdated so fast. One must try to teach something that will be usefull to all the students for a lifetime, not merely useful to secretaries until the next version of Micrsoft Program 2005 comes out.
The key to being a competent computer user is the ability to recognize and work around bugs. What better way than to teach the students to program?
In writing their own programs they will constantly have to work around their own bugs. This is the most valuable thing you can teach anyone about computers.
That default password existed--in beta software--for two weeks before it was found. Slashdot was up in arms about it. Alan Cox personally appologized for letting the default password slip by his check.
I believe that slashdot was correct to get upset about piranah. I think any vendor who distributes software with default passwords deserves the same.
You may as well. You've payed for it already when you buy your hardware.
thanks...
:(
my spelling is abizmal...
Some people have already started: http://kernelnewbies.org/status/latest.html. Some of these will probably get backported into 2.4.
Some of the big changes/additions are: block IO, JFS (IBM file system), alsa, support for 64bit amd, preemption, a new NTFS driver and ide clean ups.
Of course, people who like to take risks or who want to help test, are welcome to use the -pre patches. Right now it is up to -pre8. If you want to live on the very cutting edge, then you can download patches from this page. The patches here are updated every hour for the Marcelo's bk tree.
I believe that besides the IDE changes, there are several VM tweaks.
As far as I can tell Mozilla has only had that one javascript security bug. It was fixed the same day, and released as a nightly build.
You'll almost certainly have to download the whole browser. It would be too hard to deal with people upgrading from all the nightly builds and the 3 week milestones, etc.
This is not really a problem because, Mozilla is aimed at developers. Users are supposed to use Netscape or other Mozilla based browsers.
For Linux users, it would be up to the Linux distro to provide patches like that if they wished. But none of them will either. Too much work for no money.