SCO probably doesn't, but in this case the fault probably lies with the OCR software and proofreading skills of some Groklaw-loving linux user; the original PDF looks fine.
At this point, the pretense of a case has almost been lost... SCO's public statements are so twisted and irrational that no lawyer can seem to follow it, and now every time I read a story about SCO, I can't help but think of Gollum... I wonder if we could get Peter Jackson to make a movie out of this?
Yeah, that's why people were working on Harmony before Qt's licensing changed. Similarly, it took a long time for a Free motif-compatible widget set to get written.
I'm not so surprised... I'm a programmer who has no interest in nice shiny desktop apps.:)
I didn't dispute that point, in fact I agreed with the author's (largely unstated) premise there.
Oh, please. Next you'll be telling me that all my C programs weren't written "BSD from the ground up" because I link to glibc on Linux, which is under the LGPL. You can write open source software that uses closed toolkits, you know, and it's still open source software. Another good example of this would be nedit, which I now link with Lesstif.
And Mozilla is a great example of how an open source project can serve commercial interests as well; its mere existence shatters all the silly "Open Source vs. Commercial Software" myths. (as if Red Hat wasn't enough, eh?)
I agree, but then, apache and gcc weren't my examples in the first place.:)
Yeah, you can use Linux as a commercial and home user's desktop OS, and I can see how a lot of users would be interested in saving $100-$300 by buying/building a PC, or breathing new life into an old computer. On the other hand, for the people who don't want to mess with it and *do* have a lot of money to throw away, well, they can buy a mac.:)
I'm not convinced that there is necessarily an "unusually high" asshole-density in the open source community (and really, what are we comparing this to?), but I do think that technology makes it easier for those assholes to make themselves heard; a lot of people in the open source community are relatively quiet; a "silent majority", if you will.
Of course, sales reps have to be very nice, polite, accommodating people. Why? Well, because they're trying to sell you something! I'm sure Red Hat's sales reps are very nice as well, and I wouldn't trust them either... they're sales reps, after all.:)
I'd like to mention that Mozilla, KDE, and OpenOffice.org are all open source, and in the case of the first two, were written that way from the ground up. As to the latter, Sun was nice enough to contribute and GPL OpenOffice.org. But yes, you're right--people trying to sell a product to end users have a financial interest in polishing up the interface as much as they can for them.
And actually, apache has extensive documentation, as do many open source projects. As for gcc, not only is it decently documented, but it also conforms to well-known standards--it's a C compiler, after all; you can get any of a multitude of books explaining how C works, how C compilers work, how to use a C compiler on Unix, etc., etc.
I wouldn't attribute malice to the average OSS developer's choice of user interface where there is none; they were probably just scratching an itch, and therefore the interface is at least as polished as they and their users need it to be. And for every arrogant OSS developer you can name, I'm sure I can name some quite modest and pleasant ones, although I don't see what this exercise is supposed to accomplish. Linus Torvalds comes to mind immediately, and Bruce Perens is also a mild and reasonable chap.
Nothing quite like seeing a grown man yammering about how "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" due to a hardware issue and a legal issue that he's having on his laptop.
I especially enjoyed the point that if you installed Windows out of the box on that machine, neither of those would work, either, and good luck getting a DVD player for it. Manufacturers go to a lot of trouble to get Windows working on their hardware; I reinstalled a machine once that supposedly was compatible with NT4--I have no idea how they did it.
No, they're probably bitching about Microsoft because people e-mail them Word DOCs and then say things like "please make this into a web page for me!", or "what do you mean that had a virus in it, it's just a document?!"
Even if (or when) Windows was the only OS I used, you can bet that I'd still have some good reasons to bitch about Microsoft.:)
Uh-oh... did linuxworld need to increase its ad impressions?
Seriously, you can't expect to start a reasonable discussion by spouting as many half-assed examples as you can think of, and then not backing any of it up with either facts or history. Although some of your points have a grain of truth in them here and there, your blind assertions do not help your case.
First, let us assume that many developers do "scratch the same itch"... why do they do it? Well, generally it's because there's something about the other solutions that are already out there that doesn't meet their needs. Sometimes it's a licensing issue, sometimes two projects spring up at the same time.
Starting with "sound systems"... the two main ones we have now are OSS and alsa. Originally OSS had two different versions--free and non-free. The free version included in the kernel had iffy support for some cards, and comparatively few people purchased or used the non-free version. Then alsa was born (originally just for better Gravis Ultrasound support!), and it will be replacing OSS in the kernel. What's this? Consolidation of sound systems? Uh-oh... Well, perhaps you meant to say sound daemons or media players or something... let's move on to another example.
BSD vs. Linux, here's a great one. Why didn't Linus Torvalds just use BSD instead? Well, he couldn't at the time, due to licensing issues. He started writing Linux both to learn about the 386 and because he couldn't afford to buy a workstation from Sun. And by the time the *BSDs were unencumbered, Linux was already a viable Unix system on its own, and certainly more functional than Minix ever was. Oh well, I guess he wasn't writing code just to scratch the same itch... let's move on.
Gnome vs. KDE. This one boiled down to--you guessed it--a licensing issue! In this case, it was the licensing of Qt, the toolkit used in KDE, that was the issue. Some of this has since been resolved, but there are licensing issues surrounding Qt even today. That's because Qt was written by TrollTech and is sold as a commercial product, whereas GTK was written for The GIMP, "to scratch an itch". Interestingly enough, The GIMP doesn't have a lot of competition--maybe that's because of its quality, its licensing, and its extensible nature.:)
Debian vs. Red Hat. Yet again, two different products with two different ideologies, one of which is backed by commercial interests, yadda yadda yadda. Interestingly enough, Red Hat's successor, Fedora, is using Debian's package manager now. So maybe they aren't such bitter rivals as you may have thought?
As for the rest of your generalizations, I resent being painted with such a broad brush. Sure, there are zealots in the open source community; they're present in any and every community. If those are the only people you talk to, then you might get some odd impressions of how that community works. For example, most of the people in the US are Christian, but the few people who come up to you on the street and shout about Christianity are inevitably zealots, crazy people who can't be reasoned with. Does this imply that most of the US consists of crazy zealots who can't be reasoned with? No, it doesn't, the sample size is simply too small.
Similarly, I won't just read this one article and conclude that the people at Linux World are totally clueless about the Open Source Community and its history, that they're all too lazy to do research, and enjoy making grossly inaccurate generalizations instead. That would be unfair of me. Nevertheless, I hope this article is just an isolated incident, and not the start of a disturbing trend. I recognize that this is an opinion piece, but that's no excuse for FUD, or sloppiness.
Oh man, that's the funniest thing I've read all day!
Yeah, man, you sure wouldn't want SkyOS to go the way of Linux, and accidentally become wildly successful and widely used by people.
On the other hand, I'm sure development would be *much* slower if they didn't have all this open source code to ste^H^H^Hwork from in the first place...
Interestingly enough, Linus GPL'd Linux out of respect for GCC, a fact that these SkyOS people (and RMS) should probably consider.
whatever, dude; Netscape 3 has a horrible table renderer (as does Netscape 4), and complicated layouts with tables are what you'll get if you don't/can't use CSS for your layout.
As for your 28.8 modem argument, there's this amazing new invention called the "CD-ROM"; web browsers were distributed on these in the past, back when it would have been more onerous to download them.
Next time you do an article about virus writing, would you care to mention how Microsoft lowered the bar for virus writers by creating a simplistic macro system with no security and way too much power, (for a word processor, no less!) and has since done nothing to fix this systemic flaw in their products?
How about a little credit where credit is due here, or a little investigative reporting? You could run 'controversial' stories with headlines like "Do users have a right to expect secure software?" or something. At least you didn't start parroting word-for-word MS' old propaganda on the subject, but I'm still not impressed.
Has anyone else tried this, and actually gotten it to bootstrap?
With gcc/g++: had to add in a #include <unistd.h> that was missing (needed it for sbrk()); compiled fine, bootstrap died with lots of errors. (it looks like it generates lots of bad C++ code or something)
With icc: Compiled fine (modulo a few harmless warnings); bootstrap compile looks like it has hung (been going now for over 8 minutes!) -- but hey, at least it didn't die, right?
I guess I'll take another look at this one when it isn't pre-alpha.:)
bravo, and good riddance.
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No, maybe it's a sign when you take a Windows program and make a half-assed attempt to 'port' it using Wine, it doesn't work right, you slap broken registration code on top of that, and the bosses shout "SHIP!", hopefully over the objections of the engineers.
The failure of Kylix is just another example of the free market working, and in this case the value of Kylix to the consumer is less than zero. That's right, Borland would have to pay me quite a bit to 'switch' to Kylix for anything. And it still might not be enough, if it kept crashing unexpectedly.
But hey, YMMV; that was just my experience with it. And note that I managed to restrain myself to the point that phrases like 'flaming piece of festering monkey shit' never escaped my lips!
um... the benchmarks in question all have to do with improving web server performance, (specifically, the author's pet project of a web server) so does it matter whether or not the goals *are* targeted to produce a better benchmark, if the *results* end up being broader scalability?
Benchmarks are great tools to use for improving performance, and as long as you don't have to cheat to do better, (like some major video card companies who shall remain nameless) improving your scores on a good benchmark largely equates to improving performance across a whole host of applications.
If you'll remember, the same thing happened with the Netcraft debacle; performance deficiencies in Linux wrt. NT were highlighted, and fixed, and Linux is the better for it, with even faster webserving, and a better TCP/IP stack. I don't care about the alleged reasons, I care about the positive results.:)
I hate to say it, but even Microsoft gives better support guarantees than that. On the plus side, however, I never needed support from RedHat when I did use their products, and now that I've switched to Gentoo, I don't have to worry about it at all!
Best of luck to you, RedHat; hopefully this move won't anger too many large clients of yours...
Have you even been to a video game arcade lately? It should be obvious to everyone that the state of gaming has gotten worse on many levels--after all, entire *genres* of games have disappeared entirely.
I was and am a big fan of various different side-scrolling action/adventure/space games. Now, don't tell me that that genre is too old to make new games or something, because the fighting games in the arcade are even simpler. Back in the day, we had Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Shinobi, X-Men... you name it, we had it, and they were all great. Now, we have... what, Gauntlet Legends? There's simply no comparison.
You know, that's the funny thing--I did read the original slashdot articles, and somehow those posts have escaped me. Perhaps you could do us all a favor and post this information; I know that I'm not the only one wondering about this, and I haven't seen a comprehensive or official discussion about both the configurations of a node and the cost of a node together in one place.
That's probably what's causing this speculation, because the $5.2 million figure (let alone the $3.3 million figure!) simply doesn't jibe with the pricing that you can get from The Apple Store for their alleged node configurations. Now, it wouldn't have taken much on VT's part to clear this up, but this article certainly didn't do it.
I've been to the Apple Store too, you know; you can get the *base configuration* for $3,000, but that's it. Apple charges a huge premium on their RAM upgrades. And from what I've heard, these machines were specced out. So something's gotta give, in this story. Did he buy more RAM from a third party, later?
Otherwise, if I ever want to buy a G5, I'm talking to this guy first; I bet he can hook us up!
Here's to hoping they lose some of their latest lawsuits, and start being held responsible for the incredibly shoddy quality of their software, so the people can benefit. After all, it isn't like MS has been helping anyone else--including their shareholders--with that gigantic lump of cash they've been hoarding, illegally obtained through their extortive monopoly practices.
Ever take a look at the original code for the Bourne shell, for example? It looks like... a big shell script. Why? Well, due to a *lot* of #define abuse. It's quite scary.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO probably doesn't, but in this case the fault probably lies with the OCR software and proofreading skills of some Groklaw-loving linux user; the original PDF looks fine.
At this point, the pretense of a case has almost been lost... SCO's public statements are so twisted and irrational that no lawyer can seem to follow it, and now every time I read a story about SCO, I can't help but think of Gollum... I wonder if we could get Peter Jackson to make a movie out of this?
Not 26 yet. :)
There's nothing new about the concept--there's prior art in Unix, and they're called 'inodes'. :)
Yeah, that's why people were working on Harmony before Qt's licensing changed. Similarly, it took a long time for a Free motif-compatible widget set to get written.
:)
I'm not so surprised... I'm a programmer who has no interest in nice shiny desktop apps.
I didn't dispute that point, in fact I agreed with the author's (largely unstated) premise there.
:)
:)
Oh, please. Next you'll be telling me that all my C programs weren't written "BSD from the ground up" because I link to glibc on Linux, which is under the LGPL. You can write open source software that uses closed toolkits, you know, and it's still open source software. Another good example of this would be nedit, which I now link with Lesstif.
And Mozilla is a great example of how an open source project can serve commercial interests as well; its mere existence shatters all the silly "Open Source vs. Commercial Software" myths. (as if Red Hat wasn't enough, eh?)
I agree, but then, apache and gcc weren't my examples in the first place.
Yeah, you can use Linux as a commercial and home user's desktop OS, and I can see how a lot of users would be interested in saving $100-$300 by buying/building a PC, or breathing new life into an old computer. On the other hand, for the people who don't want to mess with it and *do* have a lot of money to throw away, well, they can buy a mac.
I'm not convinced that there is necessarily an "unusually high" asshole-density in the open source community (and really, what are we comparing this to?), but I do think that technology makes it easier for those assholes to make themselves heard; a lot of people in the open source community are relatively quiet; a "silent majority", if you will.
:)
Of course, sales reps have to be very nice, polite, accommodating people. Why? Well, because they're trying to sell you something! I'm sure Red Hat's sales reps are very nice as well, and I wouldn't trust them either... they're sales reps, after all.
I'd like to mention that Mozilla, KDE, and OpenOffice.org are all open source, and in the case of the first two, were written that way from the ground up. As to the latter, Sun was nice enough to contribute and GPL OpenOffice.org. But yes, you're right--people trying to sell a product to end users have a financial interest in polishing up the interface as much as they can for them.
And actually, apache has extensive documentation, as do many open source projects. As for gcc, not only is it decently documented, but it also conforms to well-known standards--it's a C compiler, after all; you can get any of a multitude of books explaining how C works, how C compilers work, how to use a C compiler on Unix, etc., etc.
I wouldn't attribute malice to the average OSS developer's choice of user interface where there is none; they were probably just scratching an itch, and therefore the interface is at least as polished as they and their users need it to be. And for every arrogant OSS developer you can name, I'm sure I can name some quite modest and pleasant ones, although I don't see what this exercise is supposed to accomplish. Linus Torvalds comes to mind immediately, and Bruce Perens is also a mild and reasonable chap.
Nothing quite like seeing a grown man yammering about how "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" due to a hardware issue and a legal issue that he's having on his laptop.
I especially enjoyed the point that if you installed Windows out of the box on that machine, neither of those would work, either, and good luck getting a DVD player for it. Manufacturers go to a lot of trouble to get Windows working on their hardware; I reinstalled a machine once that supposedly was compatible with NT4--I have no idea how they did it.
No, they're probably bitching about Microsoft because people e-mail them Word DOCs and then say things like "please make this into a web page for me!", or "what do you mean that had a virus in it, it's just a document?!"
:)
Even if (or when) Windows was the only OS I used, you can bet that I'd still have some good reasons to bitch about Microsoft.
Uh-oh... did linuxworld need to increase its ad impressions?
:)
Seriously, you can't expect to start a reasonable discussion by spouting as many half-assed examples as you can think of, and then not backing any of it up with either facts or history. Although some of your points have a grain of truth in them here and there, your blind assertions do not help your case.
First, let us assume that many developers do "scratch the same itch"... why do they do it? Well, generally it's because there's something about the other solutions that are already out there that doesn't meet their needs. Sometimes it's a licensing issue, sometimes two projects spring up at the same time.
Starting with "sound systems"... the two main ones we have now are OSS and alsa. Originally OSS had two different versions--free and non-free. The free version included in the kernel had iffy support for some cards, and comparatively few people purchased or used the non-free version. Then alsa was born (originally just for better Gravis Ultrasound support!), and it will be replacing OSS in the kernel. What's this? Consolidation of sound systems? Uh-oh... Well, perhaps you meant to say sound daemons or media players or something... let's move on to another example.
BSD vs. Linux, here's a great one. Why didn't Linus Torvalds just use BSD instead? Well, he couldn't at the time, due to licensing issues. He started writing Linux both to learn about the 386 and because he couldn't afford to buy a workstation from Sun. And by the time the *BSDs were unencumbered, Linux was already a viable Unix system on its own, and certainly more functional than Minix ever was. Oh well, I guess he wasn't writing code just to scratch the same itch... let's move on.
Gnome vs. KDE. This one boiled down to--you guessed it--a licensing issue! In this case, it was the licensing of Qt, the toolkit used in KDE, that was the issue. Some of this has since been resolved, but there are licensing issues surrounding Qt even today. That's because Qt was written by TrollTech and is sold as a commercial product, whereas GTK was written for The GIMP, "to scratch an itch". Interestingly enough, The GIMP doesn't have a lot of competition--maybe that's because of its quality, its licensing, and its extensible nature.
Debian vs. Red Hat. Yet again, two different products with two different ideologies, one of which is backed by commercial interests, yadda yadda yadda. Interestingly enough, Red Hat's successor, Fedora, is using Debian's package manager now. So maybe they aren't such bitter rivals as you may have thought?
As for the rest of your generalizations, I resent being painted with such a broad brush. Sure, there are zealots in the open source community; they're present in any and every community. If those are the only people you talk to, then you might get some odd impressions of how that community works. For example, most of the people in the US are Christian, but the few people who come up to you on the street and shout about Christianity are inevitably zealots, crazy people who can't be reasoned with. Does this imply that most of the US consists of crazy zealots who can't be reasoned with? No, it doesn't, the sample size is simply too small.
Similarly, I won't just read this one article and conclude that the people at Linux World are totally clueless about the Open Source Community and its history, that they're all too lazy to do research, and enjoy making grossly inaccurate generalizations instead. That would be unfair of me. Nevertheless, I hope this article is just an isolated incident, and not the start of a disturbing trend. I recognize that this is an opinion piece, but that's no excuse for FUD, or sloppiness.
Oh man, that's the funniest thing I've read all day!
Yeah, man, you sure wouldn't want SkyOS to go the way of Linux, and accidentally become wildly successful and widely used by people.
On the other hand, I'm sure development would be *much* slower if they didn't have all this open source code to ste^H^H^Hwork from in the first place...
Interestingly enough, Linus GPL'd Linux out of respect for GCC, a fact that these SkyOS people (and RMS) should probably consider.
I've gotta ask... doesn't slashdot use mod_gzip? Was that factored into the bandwidth estimates?
whatever, dude; Netscape 3 has a horrible table renderer (as does Netscape 4), and complicated layouts with tables are what you'll get if you don't/can't use CSS for your layout.
As for your 28.8 modem argument, there's this amazing new invention called the "CD-ROM"; web browsers were distributed on these in the past, back when it would have been more onerous to download them.
Dear BBC,
Next time you do an article about virus writing, would you care to mention how Microsoft lowered the bar for virus writers by creating a simplistic macro system with no security and way too much power, (for a word processor, no less!) and has since done nothing to fix this systemic flaw in their products?
How about a little credit where credit is due here, or a little investigative reporting? You could run 'controversial' stories with headlines like "Do users have a right to expect secure software?" or something. At least you didn't start parroting word-for-word MS' old propaganda on the subject, but I'm still not impressed.
Has anyone else tried this, and actually gotten it to bootstrap?
:)
With gcc/g++: had to add in a #include <unistd.h> that was missing (needed it for sbrk()); compiled fine, bootstrap died with lots of errors. (it looks like it generates lots of bad C++ code or something)
With icc: Compiled fine (modulo a few harmless warnings); bootstrap compile looks like it has hung (been going now for over 8 minutes!) -- but hey, at least it didn't die, right?
I guess I'll take another look at this one when it isn't pre-alpha.
No, maybe it's a sign when you take a Windows program and make a half-assed attempt to 'port' it using Wine, it doesn't work right, you slap broken registration code on top of that, and the bosses shout "SHIP!", hopefully over the objections of the engineers.
The failure of Kylix is just another example of the free market working, and in this case the value of Kylix to the consumer is less than zero. That's right, Borland would have to pay me quite a bit to 'switch' to Kylix for anything. And it still might not be enough, if it kept crashing unexpectedly.
But hey, YMMV; that was just my experience with it. And note that I managed to restrain myself to the point that phrases like 'flaming piece of festering monkey shit' never escaped my lips!
um... the benchmarks in question all have to do with improving web server performance, (specifically, the author's pet project of a web server) so does it matter whether or not the goals *are* targeted to produce a better benchmark, if the *results* end up being broader scalability?
:)
Benchmarks are great tools to use for improving performance, and as long as you don't have to cheat to do better, (like some major video card companies who shall remain nameless) improving your scores on a good benchmark largely equates to improving performance across a whole host of applications.
If you'll remember, the same thing happened with the Netcraft debacle; performance deficiencies in Linux wrt. NT were highlighted, and fixed, and Linux is the better for it, with even faster webserving, and a better TCP/IP stack. I don't care about the alleged reasons, I care about the positive results.
I hate to say it, but even Microsoft gives better support guarantees than that. On the plus side, however, I never needed support from RedHat when I did use their products, and now that I've switched to Gentoo, I don't have to worry about it at all!
Best of luck to you, RedHat; hopefully this move won't anger too many large clients of yours...
Have you even been to a video game arcade lately? It should be obvious to everyone that the state of gaming has gotten worse on many levels--after all, entire *genres* of games have disappeared entirely.
I was and am a big fan of various different side-scrolling action/adventure/space games. Now, don't tell me that that genre is too old to make new games or something, because the fighting games in the arcade are even simpler. Back in the day, we had Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Shinobi, X-Men... you name it, we had it, and they were all great. Now, we have... what, Gauntlet Legends? There's simply no comparison.
You know, that's the funny thing--I did read the original slashdot articles, and somehow those posts have escaped me. Perhaps you could do us all a favor and post this information; I know that I'm not the only one wondering about this, and I haven't seen a comprehensive or official discussion about both the configurations of a node and the cost of a node together in one place.
That's probably what's causing this speculation, because the $5.2 million figure (let alone the $3.3 million figure!) simply doesn't jibe with the pricing that you can get from The Apple Store for their alleged node configurations. Now, it wouldn't have taken much on VT's part to clear this up, but this article certainly didn't do it.
I've been to the Apple Store too, you know; you can get the *base configuration* for $3,000, but that's it. Apple charges a huge premium on their RAM upgrades. And from what I've heard, these machines were specced out. So something's gotta give, in this story. Did he buy more RAM from a third party, later?
Otherwise, if I ever want to buy a G5, I'm talking to this guy first; I bet he can hook us up!
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Yep, that's what patents, copyrights, trademarks, contracts, licensing agreements, EULAs, and lawsuits are for. Sorry, Proteron, too slow!
and their customers lose. Surprise, surprise.
Here's to hoping they lose some of their latest lawsuits, and start being held responsible for the incredibly shoddy quality of their software, so the people can benefit. After all, it isn't like MS has been helping anyone else--including their shareholders--with that gigantic lump of cash they've been hoarding, illegally obtained through their extortive monopoly practices.
Ever take a look at the original code for the Bourne shell, for example? It looks like... a big shell script. Why? Well, due to a *lot* of #define abuse. It's quite scary.