People who take BSD code and use it in GPL projects are like chicks who break up with you, go take hotness classes, and send you pictures of them naked afterwards. You get to see their newfound hotness, but you cannot touch it anymore. Companies who take your BSD code are like chicks who break up and still come back and give you pity sex. You know you aren't with them anymore, and they are out getting pounded by way more hot guys, but they still toss you a bone every now and then. Now do you see the difference?
If you ever want to see amusing, look at the idiots who post on the Second Life blog whenever their stuff goes down. You think "OMG My payments are 12 hours behind" is bad, try "OMG, I make a living selling virtual dildos and I cannot sell my product. It is the end!!!"
What is the deal with that? I could never figure out which was a good one for a "non enterprise" production box (as in, I can deal with 99.999). The "cool new one" always had huge warnings but seemed so tempting. Is there a FM somewhere that explains the difference between FreeBSD schedulers?
Oh yeah? Well Vista runs fine on 512mb of ram. I never see the pinwheel. Did you do something stupid like turn off ReadyBoost?
Oh wait. Wrong OS. Sorry.
FWIW, I get the pinwheel on my 1gb macbook sometimes while I'm in firefox sometimes. My "real" box that I do most of my work on runs Vista/w 2gb of ram and it does the same, only doesn't give me the visual queue that the mac does. All OS's suck in their own creative way. Your mileage may vary.
This is just more proof that servers know when it is a holiday. They just sit around all year long smile when you walk by them. Their cute little blue LED's blink at you with affection. But leave for a three day weekend and BAM!!! They stab you in the back!
Make no mistake my fine Slashdot friends. Servers are evil little bastards. They know. Oh yes. They know.
I've been doing slashdot since like 97 - right around senior year in high school. Back then I would have been a good little member of the cult of RMS, I would have been all "fuck the man" for software patents, I pirated software like hell (even had a really good warez server when comcast was beta testing cable modems) and I had gigs of mp3's.
If I'm anything like other people on Slashdot, I'm now older and wiser. I am about to plunk down $1,600 on Photoshop/Dreamweaver. I bought and paid for all the software on all my computers including Visual Studio, Quickbooks and Office Pro. I own two Vista boxes, one XP box and a Mac laptop. I've got half a rack of linux gear in the Westin building, but I've grown too old to pull my hair out with it's stability and I'm moving the farm to FreeBSD. I cannot wait until my business grows to the size then I have to plunk down cash for a wicked cool "big iron" system.
I've been through Slashdot and got bored. I went to kuro5hin before it died. I trolled with the best on adequacy before it died. I tried digg until it turned into youtube without video. It has been 10 years and despite everything, slashdot is still here going strong. As much as people diss slashdot, it is the only website of it's type that is still around. It may have new ajax tricks, but it is still the same as it was in 1997.
So has the traditional Linux stronghold been lost, or has the general slashdot population just grown up, got jobs and now see linux for what it is? A tool just like any other tool. And that is okay.
You just know that CPM guy is like one douchebag who changed his browser string. Hell, I've been temped to do exactly that (Say, Mozilla 4.0/Commodore PET 4048) just to throw off whoever checks their stats.
My website seems to be about the same as others here. About 35% firefox and pretty much everything else IE excepting like 5% for opera. The very good news is that IE7 has now overtaken IE6 60% / 40%. Once IE6 gets to about 10% I'll dump trying to work around transparent PNGs... thank god!
Does no distro of linux have any bugs right now? Yes, but see, yeah.. see you can theoreticaly um, you know, fix those if you like wanted to. I mean, if you are like, you know, too lazy to learn codebase for the Linux kernel (I learned it in 3 days, it is easy, you guys in c# (i mean c flat, right guys!?) with your IDE's just slow it all down!!), it isn't my problem linux has bugs. M$ has a monopoly on the computer, so they dont have to fix bugs because otherwise, they couldn't charge $200 for a license (with evil activiation) instead of free like linux. I mean, they ram the OS down everybodies through (for $200) and keep our Free Linux systems under wraps!
You use it, you owe it to the world to fix it yourself! YOu are an idiot if you can't patch kernel bugs in vim after two days. Hell my grandma just patched a bug in GIMP and was able to get back to doing production artwork for cereal boxes (they all use RGB down at the printer... CMYK is for PHB's and their brocure ware). Just yesterday, my four year old son fixed an SQL injection bug in Tux Racer. If my four year old son can fix that, you really are an idiot!.... did I get anywhere close?
I'm confused though. She just went to target and bought "Super Deluxe Pimpomediaplayer 2000" and it won't install. You mean, it wont run? Cory, this computer is messed up, can you come all the way over here and fix it sometime this week?
No thanks.
PS: Copilot.com is your friend. Saved me many trips fixing ye old parents computer.
I cannot wait to get Vista on my folks computer. My mother seems to trash their computer all the time. However, she'll aways call me whenever XP gives a "Are you sure, Dave?" message. With UAC, she'll be calling me every time she tries to install yet another DVD duplicator or some weird ass media player.
Ick! XP is ugly and feels slow compared to Vista. There are so many little things you pick up, like there is finally an easy way to see the full path to running processes, once you try to support people using XP you just get frustrated! Vista is a huge improvement over XP.
That doesn't mean there aren't bugs. Their new TCP/IP stack has all kinds of bugs. There is a bug (and I'm too lazy to find the KB on it) that fucks up how it sends ACK's to other devices. As it turns out, it will hang the MediaMVP in my bedroom. Some vendors software gets buggy too - Vista changed a lot of the API for explorer (the file one, dammit!) that seems to crash TortiseSVN every now and then (though explorer.exe is the one that does the crashing...)
Given a little more time to mature, I suspect many people will look at this like XP vs 3.1. They really just look and act that much different.
The stream is encrypted and the media industry doesn't want anybody to decrypt it without their blessing. Now. How do you get the blessing of the media industry? You agree to take it in the ass, basically. Microsoft felt they could afford the ass pillage and jumped through the hoops to get MCE blessed. In fact, I'm not sure if a beige-box MCE can do hi-def, let alone blu-ray or hd-dvd. All I know is us Myth/SageTV people are screwed out of hi-def.
Lets not even start with Google. Google (and netflix, amazon, etc) all want you to be paying them to download your favorite Full House reruns from them. You think the cable company wants that? Shit, what if you could do that in a way that was integrated with MCE or Sage/MythTV? All the cable company would become is just an ISP in that scenario!
Hopefully you can see why these companies are pissed. They are getting cut out of a huge new market because the media industry doesn't us joe-pc-average users deserve digital hi-def. If the media industry had their way, there would be little chips on each pixel of your LCD decrypting their oh so important content. After all, why go through all the trouble of making Pimp my Ride if there are no commercials?
Let the entertainment industry deal with it. 1) Windows Media Center Edition 2) XBOX 3) Zune 4) Windows Media Player 5) Hi-def hardware (capture cards, TV's, etc)
Of course, at least one of those companies is selling/making money from systems that won't allow you to exercise your fair use rights... You think any of them want to do that? You think Microsoft is happy they had to pour a gazillion dollars into some cockeyed DRM scheme dreamed up by coke snorting clowns?
Microsoft would be pleased as punch if customers could buy hi-def capture cards from Fry's that can plug into any computer and work with MCE. They would be giggling like school girls if a beige-box PC could record hi-def HBO without a set top box like Tivo. Google would be pleased as punch if you downloaded the show from them instead of used the hi-def capture card. Apple wants you to buy the latest "New Kids on the Block" single from their online store. RedHat wants all of the above to work on Linux.
All these companies are pissed because they cannot get access to the media their customers desire. While it may seem like all these companies, especially Microsoft, "support" DRM schemes, trust me they don't. Would you want to piss away a bunch of your developers time writing in crazy DRM crap that only keeps your company from innovating?
What I find interesting is how all the big unix companies are now leveraging Linux. All of them are making it cheap for startups to build their application on a unix stack. Once the startup matures into a certain size, they'll find that Linux just ain't cutting it no more (support, stability, scalability) and they need to move up the computer food chain. While I've never actively researched it to verify, I would not be surprised if both Solaris and AIX provide a virtually seamless migration from Linux, perhaps even binary compatibility. Shit, Sun is even now making an open source, entry level version of Solaris; perhaps as a reaction to GPLv3? Basically, they are hoping that startups on a shoe string budget will take free (Linux) over quick & easy (Microsoft) and grow up into paying customers. It is really a brilliant strategy because without Linux, I doubt these companies would be around much longer.
While I personally think Microsoft serves a slightly different market on their server side than IBM or Sun, it is very clear why Microsoft want into the Linux market and it isn't Linux. Linux is not a competitor to Microsoft; IBM and Sun are. Microsoft wants us cheapsake startups who pick free (Linux) to use their tools (quick & easy) and when we grow up, we move onto their platform (Windows Server) instead of IBM or Sun. Same with Dell. They want us to build around Dell when we grow up instead of Sun or IBM servers.
Bottom line is Linux isn't a threat to any corporation. In fact, for IBM and Sun it is a great "my first UNIX" for companies who would otherwise build around Microsoft. For Microsoft, it is an issue only because of IBM and Sun. All of these companies have a vested interest in improving Linux to the extent it makes life easy to move back to the respective mothership.
GPLv3 makes it very hard for these companies to play this game. It also makes it hard for companies doing embedded systems too. Plus, the "leader" of the GPL world is clearly becoming a destabilizing concern. My ECON101-sense predicts that Linux is on it's way out as it looses all it's corporate developers. I can only hope they go beef up FreeBSD because someday I *do* hope to move up in the world to Solaris, AIX or Windows Server. I *am* exactly the company these people want to target.... the business world fascinates me:-)
If someone truly understands the GPL The only way to understand a legal document is reading the legal document. The preamble and the FAQ are useless bullshit. They only give political ammunition when companies like Tivo follow the legal document to the letter. You cannot haul somebody into court for breaking the FAQ that was never included in the distribution.
Maybe we should change the name from the "free software movement" to the "free software-user movement" to help idiots like that one because they do seem to be quite plentiful Maybe you should stop reading the ass-end of 1984 and be upfront about what the GPL is. Trying to redefine commonly used words makes you look like you are pushing your cult. The GPL is merely a way to insure that the source code for software always follows the binary upon distribution. That is all it is. Period. It is not a religion. It isn't a movement. It isn't going to take over the world.
The GPL is merely a legal document that attempts to spell it out. Under my definition, the GPL sounds pretty reasonable for some kinds of community projects.
Once you start frothing at the mouth, redefining English and being an overall jackass is when most people tune out. Look pal, software is a tool okay? The GPL is (or really was prior to v3) a great tool for people who want to create software projects and are worried about people leeching their effort. That is all it is. Once you accept that, your framework of living becomes easier.
Maybe someday you actually could take over the world, but I'll give you a hint, you'll have to let binary drivers into Linux first. And that means you'll have to understand that the GPL isn't religion and there are other ways to distribute software.
which would be defined as making something proprietary In other words, trying to feed my family using the skills I was born with. If you want to drag hitler into this fine, but your world is only possible to create by people with the um, "personality" of such a man. It takes a cult and a bunch of cool aid to get people to willingly give up their rights to *make a living from their labor*. What do you think IBM is doing? Don't you see they only want to leverage linux as a way to upsell expensive hardware and AIX?
If I had to pick a world of free vs proprietary, I'd pick proprietary every time. I have to eat and tech support sucks. In a world were everything is "open", yes there would be some innovation, but it would not be nearly as much as when you let people actually eat.
Nothing personal, but I like paying rent every month and my life would not be possible without paid software. I cannot charge for software and give the code away. People telling me I'm unethical or "antisocial" are borderline evil and are a much worse threat to humankind than any jackasses at the RIAA.
Hahaha... the best part is when you map it out in your head the whole GPL vs NonGPL becomes somehow circular. I love it... take a copyright and turn it inside out. Up is down, left is right and gravity repels.
thanks man. you realy gave me something to ponder. too bad the whole damn thing is so infested with religious zealots. I cannot help but to think in the end the GPL is just academic dreaming. Carried to the extreme, the thing would never work. GPLv2 just hit that sweet spot between pragmatic and useful and theoretical and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
configure && make && make install
Come back to me with a real question, like a universal uninstall.
What, you can't use Lynx and Google?
What we really need to do is just drop back into emacs when X screws up.
I've got karma...
People who take BSD code and use it in GPL projects are like chicks who break up with you, go take hotness classes, and send you pictures of them naked afterwards. You get to see their newfound hotness, but you cannot touch it anymore. Companies who take your BSD code are like chicks who break up and still come back and give you pity sex. You know you aren't with them anymore, and they are out getting pounded by way more hot guys, but they still toss you a bone every now and then. Now do you see the difference?
If you ever want to see amusing, look at the idiots who post on the Second Life blog whenever their stuff goes down. You think "OMG My payments are 12 hours behind" is bad, try "OMG, I make a living selling virtual dildos and I cannot sell my product. It is the end!!!"
What is the deal with that? I could never figure out which was a good one for a "non enterprise" production box (as in, I can deal with 99.999). The "cool new one" always had huge warnings but seemed so tempting. Is there a FM somewhere that explains the difference between FreeBSD schedulers?
Oh yeah? Well Vista runs fine on 512mb of ram. I never see the pinwheel. Did you do something stupid like turn off ReadyBoost?
/w 2gb of ram and it does the same, only doesn't give me the visual queue that the mac does. All OS's suck in their own creative way. Your mileage may vary.
Oh wait. Wrong OS. Sorry.
FWIW, I get the pinwheel on my 1gb macbook sometimes while I'm in firefox sometimes. My "real" box that I do most of my work on runs Vista
Dude. And windows 3.1 rocked. You dont see many security bugs with Windows 3.1 do you? It is like the most secure OS ever!
This is just more proof that servers know when it is a holiday. They just sit around all year long smile when you walk by them. Their cute little blue LED's blink at you with affection. But leave for a three day weekend and BAM!!! They stab you in the back!
Make no mistake my fine Slashdot friends. Servers are evil little bastards. They know. Oh yes. They know.
I've been doing slashdot since like 97 - right around senior year in high school. Back then I would have been a good little member of the cult of RMS, I would have been all "fuck the man" for software patents, I pirated software like hell (even had a really good warez server when comcast was beta testing cable modems) and I had gigs of mp3's.
If I'm anything like other people on Slashdot, I'm now older and wiser. I am about to plunk down $1,600 on Photoshop/Dreamweaver. I bought and paid for all the software on all my computers including Visual Studio, Quickbooks and Office Pro. I own two Vista boxes, one XP box and a Mac laptop. I've got half a rack of linux gear in the Westin building, but I've grown too old to pull my hair out with it's stability and I'm moving the farm to FreeBSD. I cannot wait until my business grows to the size then I have to plunk down cash for a wicked cool "big iron" system.
I've been through Slashdot and got bored. I went to kuro5hin before it died. I trolled with the best on adequacy before it died. I tried digg until it turned into youtube without video. It has been 10 years and despite everything, slashdot is still here going strong. As much as people diss slashdot, it is the only website of it's type that is still around. It may have new ajax tricks, but it is still the same as it was in 1997.
So has the traditional Linux stronghold been lost, or has the general slashdot population just grown up, got jobs and now see linux for what it is? A tool just like any other tool. And that is okay.
You just know that CPM guy is like one douchebag who changed his browser string. Hell, I've been temped to do exactly that (Say, Mozilla 4.0/Commodore PET 4048) just to throw off whoever checks their stats.
My website seems to be about the same as others here. About 35% firefox and pretty much everything else IE excepting like 5% for opera. The very good news is that IE7 has now overtaken IE6 60% / 40%. Once IE6 gets to about 10% I'll dump trying to work around transparent PNGs... thank god!
You use it, you owe it to the world to fix it yourself! YOu are an idiot if you can't patch kernel bugs in vim after two days. Hell my grandma just patched a bug in GIMP and was able to get back to doing production artwork for cereal boxes (they all use RGB down at the printer... CMYK is for PHB's and their brocure ware). Just yesterday, my four year old son fixed an SQL injection bug in Tux Racer. If my four year old son can fix that, you really are an idiot!
I'm confused though. She just went to target and bought "Super Deluxe Pimpomediaplayer 2000" and it won't install. You mean, it wont run? Cory, this computer is messed up, can you come all the way over here and fix it sometime this week?
No thanks.
PS: Copilot.com is your friend. Saved me many trips fixing ye old parents computer.
I cannot wait to get Vista on my folks computer. My mother seems to trash their computer all the time. However, she'll aways call me whenever XP gives a "Are you sure, Dave?" message. With UAC, she'll be calling me every time she tries to install yet another DVD duplicator or some weird ass media player.
Ick! XP is ugly and feels slow compared to Vista. There are so many little things you pick up, like there is finally an easy way to see the full path to running processes, once you try to support people using XP you just get frustrated! Vista is a huge improvement over XP.
That doesn't mean there aren't bugs. Their new TCP/IP stack has all kinds of bugs. There is a bug (and I'm too lazy to find the KB on it) that fucks up how it sends ACK's to other devices. As it turns out, it will hang the MediaMVP in my bedroom. Some vendors software gets buggy too - Vista changed a lot of the API for explorer (the file one, dammit!) that seems to crash TortiseSVN every now and then (though explorer.exe is the one that does the crashing...)
Given a little more time to mature, I suspect many people will look at this like XP vs 3.1. They really just look and act that much different.
It is stalling Microsoft Bob SP1 too you know.
The stream is encrypted and the media industry doesn't want anybody to decrypt it without their blessing. Now. How do you get the blessing of the media industry? You agree to take it in the ass, basically. Microsoft felt they could afford the ass pillage and jumped through the hoops to get MCE blessed. In fact, I'm not sure if a beige-box MCE can do hi-def, let alone blu-ray or hd-dvd. All I know is us Myth/SageTV people are screwed out of hi-def.
Lets not even start with Google. Google (and netflix, amazon, etc) all want you to be paying them to download your favorite Full House reruns from them. You think the cable company wants that? Shit, what if you could do that in a way that was integrated with MCE or Sage/MythTV? All the cable company would become is just an ISP in that scenario!
Hopefully you can see why these companies are pissed. They are getting cut out of a huge new market because the media industry doesn't us joe-pc-average users deserve digital hi-def. If the media industry had their way, there would be little chips on each pixel of your LCD decrypting their oh so important content. After all, why go through all the trouble of making Pimp my Ride if there are no commercials?
Excuse me sir, we are busy trying to do man stuff, please take your chick flick Pride and Prejudice crap elseware.
The very fact that I know were your reference comes from scares me.
2) XBOX
3) Zune
4) Windows Media Player
5) Hi-def hardware (capture cards, TV's, etc)
Microsoft would be pleased as punch if customers could buy hi-def capture cards from Fry's that can plug into any computer and work with MCE. They would be giggling like school girls if a beige-box PC could record hi-def HBO without a set top box like Tivo. Google would be pleased as punch if you downloaded the show from them instead of used the hi-def capture card. Apple wants you to buy the latest "New Kids on the Block" single from their online store. RedHat wants all of the above to work on Linux.
All these companies are pissed because they cannot get access to the media their customers desire. While it may seem like all these companies, especially Microsoft, "support" DRM schemes, trust me they don't. Would you want to piss away a bunch of your developers time writing in crazy DRM crap that only keeps your company from innovating?
What I find interesting is how all the big unix companies are now leveraging Linux. All of them are making it cheap for startups to build their application on a unix stack. Once the startup matures into a certain size, they'll find that Linux just ain't cutting it no more (support, stability, scalability) and they need to move up the computer food chain. While I've never actively researched it to verify, I would not be surprised if both Solaris and AIX provide a virtually seamless migration from Linux, perhaps even binary compatibility. Shit, Sun is even now making an open source, entry level version of Solaris; perhaps as a reaction to GPLv3? Basically, they are hoping that startups on a shoe string budget will take free (Linux) over quick & easy (Microsoft) and grow up into paying customers. It is really a brilliant strategy because without Linux, I doubt these companies would be around much longer.
... the business world fascinates me :-)
While I personally think Microsoft serves a slightly different market on their server side than IBM or Sun, it is very clear why Microsoft want into the Linux market and it isn't Linux. Linux is not a competitor to Microsoft; IBM and Sun are. Microsoft wants us cheapsake startups who pick free (Linux) to use their tools (quick & easy) and when we grow up, we move onto their platform (Windows Server) instead of IBM or Sun. Same with Dell. They want us to build around Dell when we grow up instead of Sun or IBM servers.
Bottom line is Linux isn't a threat to any corporation. In fact, for IBM and Sun it is a great "my first UNIX" for companies who would otherwise build around Microsoft. For Microsoft, it is an issue only because of IBM and Sun. All of these companies have a vested interest in improving Linux to the extent it makes life easy to move back to the respective mothership.
GPLv3 makes it very hard for these companies to play this game. It also makes it hard for companies doing embedded systems too. Plus, the "leader" of the GPL world is clearly becoming a destabilizing concern. My ECON101-sense predicts that Linux is on it's way out as it looses all it's corporate developers. I can only hope they go beef up FreeBSD because someday I *do* hope to move up in the world to Solaris, AIX or Windows Server. I *am* exactly the company these people want to target.
The GPL is merely a legal document that attempts to spell it out. Under my definition, the GPL sounds pretty reasonable for some kinds of community projects.
Once you start frothing at the mouth, redefining English and being an overall jackass is when most people tune out. Look pal, software is a tool okay? The GPL is (or really was prior to v3) a great tool for people who want to create software projects and are worried about people leeching their effort. That is all it is. Once you accept that, your framework of living becomes easier.
Maybe someday you actually could take over the world, but I'll give you a hint, you'll have to let binary drivers into Linux first. And that means you'll have to understand that the GPL isn't religion and there are other ways to distribute software.
Talking yes, but take a close look at the licenses of most of your application stack.
If I had to pick a world of free vs proprietary, I'd pick proprietary every time. I have to eat and tech support sucks. In a world were everything is "open", yes there would be some innovation, but it would not be nearly as much as when you let people actually eat.
Nothing personal, but I like paying rent every month and my life would not be possible without paid software. I cannot charge for software and give the code away. People telling me I'm unethical or "antisocial" are borderline evil and are a much worse threat to humankind than any jackasses at the RIAA.
Hahaha... the best part is when you map it out in your head the whole GPL vs NonGPL becomes somehow circular. I love it... take a copyright and turn it inside out. Up is down, left is right and gravity repels.
thanks man. you realy gave me something to ponder. too bad the whole damn thing is so infested with religious zealots. I cannot help but to think in the end the GPL is just academic dreaming. Carried to the extreme, the thing would never work. GPLv2 just hit that sweet spot between pragmatic and useful and theoretical and useless.