That's okay, I've done the same thing! Mostly these days I just charge for the time I put into creating it, rather than the IP itself.
I was just pointing out that there is a big difference between using force to prevent someone stealing your bread and using it to prevent someone copying your ideas about how to bake it (whether by observation, reverse-engineering, or just taking your advice).
If we keep in mind that it's intellectual privilege, we'll more likely cherish, rather than abuse, it, because it's more clearly an accommodation made by society for society (not for the individual, though, thankfully, our society uses individual rewards and responsibilities as a foundation for its implementation).
Put another way: absent a government and its law-enforcement system, it's far more difficult to secure intellectual "property" than to secure physical property. That's why recognizing intellectual privilege as a compromise, or agreement, with society is wise, and why seeing intellectual "property" as a concept needing little support from society foolish.
Who will help me cut the wheat," asked Henny Penny.
[...]
"Who will help me eat the bread," asked Henny Penny.
When you steal my intellectual property, you steal my loaf of bread.
"We will cut wheat for ourselves now" said Goosey Loosey and Ducky Lucky.
"No, you won't, and I'll use the armed force of the government to prevent you from doing it, since the idea of cutting wheat to make bread is my intellectual property!!" said Henny Penny, waving a recently approved patent on the bread-making process.
When you claim that intellectual privilege is actually property, you not only ignore millenia of laws and reality, you steal everyone's loaf of bread.
...from a friend at the last company I worked for full-time, back around 1988. He said that, years earlier, he'd come up with some "thing" (not sure whether he invented it himself, but I think he did).
It was a panel formed in a way that light coming in perpendicular to its surface would cause light to come out one or more edges, kinda like the invention(s) described in this forum, except I don't know if his used fibre.
His device was comparatively inexpensive to manufacture.
But, turns out it'd stop working after awhile. Thinking about it later, I wondered if maybe it was kinda chaotic internally, except with only one path for light to leave. Maybe that meant the light would bounce around a lot. And maybe there's no such thing as a "perfect" reflector, so each "bounce" cost not just a bit of energy, but a bit of thermal transfer to the imperfect reflectors.
So I wonder whether the problem was that the heat would build up inside, due to all the excess reflections, and finally break down the structure itself.
Anyway, it sounded pretty interesting. He said the people who helped him look into what it'd take to "fix" it felt it'd cost so much more to manufacture it to not fail that it'd no longer be a cost-effective element of a system.
What I'm suggesting here is that the invention itself, functionally speaking, is probably not very new or exciting...but if it can be profitably manufactured and sold, that might be pretty exciting!
Which products, specifically? I'm curious, because I did some consulting awhile ago there, but didn't really get a good sense of the product line. Yet I get the impression there is at least one OSS variant corresponding thereto -- isn't there an OSS Verilog interpreter (or compiler)? -- though I don't think Cadence had anything to do with it.
Is there a web site somewhere that lists "desirables" for OSS projects of the sort you're looking for? And maybe links to such projects actually in progress?
Usually when you have numbered bullet points it implies more than one item in the list.
Maybe a/. bug or something? I see a "Read the rest of this comment..." link that just pulls up the comment with the same link!
So, I'm guessing there were more bullet points there, but/. just doesn't want to show them to me! Maybe if I reconfigured my user preferences or something...but ISTR I've seen much longer comments on/. before a link like that in the past?
I want someone to give me a good reason why I should vote for the president.
It shows you care. If you don't show you care, those in the Electoral College are entirely free to decide for you.
People who don't exercise their right to vote are, in most cases in the USA (including the Presidential elections), practically speaking, voting for the winner.
So if you don't bother voting for President this year, you are interpreted, by The System, as casting a vote in favor of either Bush or Gore.
You're right, TSNM was about DG, but the story did say Honeywell was a name you might recognize from the book...maybe the book mentioned about Honeywell? Given the timeframe I think it covered, I can't think of why it'd talk about Honeywell though...Pr1me, Digital, IBM, yes; but Honeywell? Maybe it talked about Multics or something.
Rather, I think of the GPL as inductive, in the sense familiar to computer scientists. I.e., if x is GPL'd, then successor(x) is also GPL'd.
That gets my vote as "coolest explanation of the GPL's nature of the millenium".
Seriously, where were you when we were fighting about these things on gnu.misc.discuss back in the early '90s? I think everyone (thoughtful ones anyway) would really have appreciated that characterization!
Even more seriously, think of turning that into your.sig or something...I'm going to try to commit it to memory.
I'm pretty "up" on Limbaughisms, but don't recall hearing this particular one used by him.
You might try checking this web site, which I thought was his (and only recently came into existence), but on my Netscape with JavaScript disabled, I get an empty document, so maybe I've got the wrong URL there.
Anyway, if you can find his web site, supposedly there are transcripts of shows (maybe the last few months since it went on-line?) -- try searching for "libberish".
BTW, a problem with "libberish" is that perhaps some could take it for "libertarian gibberish".
Oh, and the equivalent term for conservative ideas these days is "shrubbish".
(Okay, I admit, I just made that one up all by myself. Apologies to the next President.;-)
I guess I don't have enough experience with/. to know, but your complaints seem valid, at least on their face.
One thing that occurred to me a few days ago is perhaps/. needs to hire an ombudsman. That person would then be the one to post stories about/. itself ("meta-stories"), for example.
Don't know much more about the ombudsman role exactly, but my impression is that it's a job often created to provide a news outlet with a way to hear, and reach, those who feel the outlet itself is failing them, without them having to appeal to the exact people who are failing them.
You're right, everyone, including/. folk, should exercise a little more Golden Rule -- if you don't like having your mistakes publically aired before you're privately informed of, and given an opportunity to correct, them, don't publically air other peoples' problems before pointing them out in private!
As far as/. advocating the idea that OSS is the best way to produce quality code of any type, I'm not sure I see that notion being forwarded by the/. creators/editors per se, but it's one with which I disagree in a very persnickety way.
OSS doesn't ensure quality. It does allow a wider audience to participate in vetting and improving its quality than would be able to otherwise.
That's often simplified to "OSS == quality code", but that simplification is so easily shown to be wrong without even resorting to examples (e.g. one could create a bot that continuously grabs OSS software from the net, introduces random bugs into it, and distributes it, thus assuredly lowering the overall quality of all OSS software) that I like to think most thoughtful people see through the hype-like statement to the truth of the matter.
I'd prefer people say "OSS gives the end user more control over the quality of the software than any other distribution mechanism".
And note that'd go for/. too, since "no distribution" (or "only occasional distribution of what we were running a month ago", if you like) counts as "any other distribution mechanism".
Argued that way, it becomes more pertinent that/. considers whether its end users need that degree of control over the quality, and compares that to the "pain" of keeping up-to-date with OSS releases of its site's software.
And as far as cathedral vs. bazaar, that represents a continuum within the overall OSS model. I took a very strong cathedral approach to g77, which helped in many ways (especially initially, when I had basically no choice), but hurt in many others.
In the long run, the areas in which g77 could be easily hacked by outsiders were those in which it was usefully hacked to provide new features, fix bugs, etc.
But the poorer aspects of its design and architecture (and maybe the fact that some of these areas, e.g. lexing/parsing Fortran, are just plain hard) meant that there was precious little utility in having those chunks of code available as source, other than making it easier for others to compile and port, and for me to distribute along with the source to the rest of the front end (and, later, compiler as a whole, via the EGCS project).
My point is that the utility of opening up slashcode depends not only on the interest level in the code itself (which I'd guess is higher than that for g77) but on the hackability of that code -- the ability for people to learn, review, and modify small sections of code without having to learn how the whole thing works.
My impression, having not looked at/. code at all but only at discussions of it, is that even its authors recognize that it isn't architected to be easy for outsiders to hack as "quickie" projects.
That lowers the benefits of opening it up.
In the end, though, I do think not opening it up is worse for/. as well as the community, which is why I get the impression they're working towards opening it up more rather than less, sooner rather than later, I did not have sex with that woman,... wait, got off track there....
Anyway, the bazaar model for OSS development, to date, has struck me as a nice ideal that's hard to really achieve in a way that's anywhere near as efficient, for a programmer like myself, as is being an "insider" in a cathedral-model project, for many sorts of projects.
I mean, if you could see some of the vast changes I made to g77 over the years, including during its "alpha test" period as well as before it ever saw the light of day, you'd probably see why it'd be so much harder for me to have made those sweeping changes while having to check in and out modules, notify other developers that major things were changing, etc.
So, cathedral-style development has its necessities. It's the projects that are well-architected up front, and have decent tools in place to support bazaar-style development, that benefit most from them.
g77 wasn't as good an example of that as it could have been (by a longshot). If/code isn't either, they might be making the right decision for now, and I'd be very hesitant to call them "hypocritical" without seeing some very clear statements from them indicating they really believe others should distribute code for their "entertainment" web sites even if it's convoluted or whatever.
Accusations of hypocrisy are very strong ones to make, and should thus be made only when very clear evidence illustrated the hypocrisy can be provided. Again, it's a matter of applying the Golden Rule.
Tactics vs. strategy, first of all, suggests that while one might vote Bush rather than Harry Browne because one decides this would more likely lead to a less intrusive/oppressive gov't tactically, one might go ahead and vote Browne to implement a longer-term strategy.
Further, the electoral college just changes the specifics of tactics.
For example, I live in Massachusetts. Let's say I'd prefer Harry Browne, or even the Constitutional candidate (whose name I forget), but would (as in the example above) much prefer Bush over Gore.
Now, a close race on a purely national-democracy level would suggest I'd better vote Bush, because my vote might make "the" difference (especially assuming I'm one of many, though obviously a small minority, who holds these beliefs).
But, being in Mass., I could reason this way:
If Massachusetts would go Bush if I voted for Bush, but would go Gore if I voted for Gore, then Bush will win the national election, because Mass. is a state with Democrat leanings. I.e. it's well off the "mound" of the "bell curve" for electoral college votes. Therefore my vote for Bush [or Gore] will not matter, so I might as well vote my "conscience" as well as my strategy.
So it's not black-and-white that one must vote for one of the two parties to get an outcome that reflects an incremental move towards one's ideal, even if that is the practical reality for the nation at this time (i.e. either Gore or Bush will win; nobody else will; or so goes the reasoning).
Oh, and the other thing that bugs me: if you don't vote but are eligible to, you are voting either for the ultimate winner, or, if you'd prefer to think of it this way, the ultimate winner of your local electoral college vote. Please don't think you can escape responsibility for whoever got elected by not voting -- that responsibility was thrust upon you, you chose to sidestep it, just as looking up at a skyscraper and seeing a baby falling towards you makes you responsible such that your simply stepping aside and saying "not my baby, I didn't throw it out the window, therefore [SPLAT!!] I am in no way responsible for its death" does not absolve you of its death.
And, by the way, Mr. Big Non Voter, whoever you might be, voting in the USA is much less risky than catching falling babies. I know! I've done experiments! (I'd post the pics, but my ISP won't let me.;-)
You hit the nail on the head! An impression I have is that Signal 11 wrote well and was rewarded for that as much as for anything else, although I don't really know all the ins and outs of/. articles, comments, etc. (I read only the ones that interest me.)
For Signal 11 to believe that his ability to gain tons of karma by posting "with the crowd" means the/. system is broken is to a) mistakenly believe it matters, as if more than 1% of the Internet population could write as well and clearly as he, and b) focus on the wrong system -- it's not/. that's "broken", it's humanity, in the sense that we have yet to build a "meta-system" that individual humans cannot outwit (and I don't mean "isolated humans" -- they're allowed to team up, as individuals, that's the system, man;-).
As I was explaining to my wife, human nature (especially nerd nature) is that when a system experiences, say, 100,000 "failures" per month as defined by its audience, there'll be a groundswell of sentiment to "modify" it (almost always this complicates, i.e. extends, the system) via a means that everyone agrees will fix 90% or more of the failures, and therefore be "worth it".
Fine, so the extension is made, and now there are only 10,000 failures.
At that point, even if there is no growth, someone like Signal 11 can come along, discern a pattern in those failures, reproduce them as a demonstration of the failures, thereby increasing their frequency...
...and then claim that the extended system is "broken" because it now has 20,000 failures per month, thanks to his poking a sharp stick in the wound, so to speak.
Add the reality that this system is growing, so the failures are now back to 100,000 (in my hypothetical example, if it grew like/.), and that "the people", the audience who applauded the extended system, are now much more sensitive to its failure, so they see the 100,000 failures as indicating a failure of the modified system...
...and you suddenly have a much larger audience consisting of roughly the same percentage of people who claim the system is "broken", could be fixed by this or that tweak, which, lo and behold, is claimed it'd take care of at least 90% of the current failures!
Oh, except now they can blame the previous extension ("moderation is broken" -- yeah, try using/. without it, if possible), since it was someone else who designed and/or implemented it.
Not that there aren't a lot of correct viewpoints or actions taken here, but the big picture is, no "system" ever proposed, other than extermination of the human species, would solve the problem of humans behaving as humans. If it did, humanity would have effectively created a system that enslaved it -- hardly a prospect worth looking forward to.
Believe me, if we can't keep cockroaches, mice, viruses, etc. out of areas inhabited by humans -- all these having highly distinct genetic characteristics, the equivalent of every/. troll voluntarily having a nick that begins "troll_" -- we aren't close to keeping out "unwelcome" human behavior. (And, yes, I believe the ecological concerns regarding handling pests do map pretty well to handling human pests.)
Ultimately/. chose to do what it chose to do (which I don't know enough to say was wise or unwise, other than suggesting CmdrTaco telling Sig11 he was being singled out when he wasn't and calling him an idiot in public was unwise) regarding Sig11 and other peoples' proposals vis-a-vis moderation.
And Sig11 chose to leave, which I can't disagree with (it's his decision), but am sorry I won't see his well-written comments, even if they are designed to proclaim the party line.
Whether I'll bother to go to another forum Sig11 occupies, given the extra time and effort that'd take me, is my decision, ditto for everyone else, of course.
There's a difference between "opening"/. and the other examples you describe.
/. isn't distributing its software as binaries to others.
The other cases, software is being distributed, so withholding source can have negative consequences for the recipients. (Also, you mention cases where license violations are occurring -- that's a matter of legality and honoring the ethical and societal concerns of our society. I don't see/. violating those by not releasing the code for its web site per se.)
In other words, your business or home doesn't get "burned" because of bugs in/. --/. gets burned, you might get inconvenienced, but the nature of/. is such that you don't lose big.
Before worrying about/. opening the source for its web site (which, strictly speaking, it has not done, I gather, although it's released earlier versions of it), I'd worry about E*Trade, Ameritrade, Schwab, banks, online retail outlets, etc. opening up the source code for their web sites...
...because bugs in those sites are much more likely to hurt users of those sites than is the case for/..
Think of it this way. If you use a combination of scripts you've hacked together to cope with and respond to various sorts of emails (such as detecting and responding to spam), that set of scripts is not much different, conceptually, from the code that runs/. -- sure, it's behavior (just like your own behavior) is "visible" to others, but the code itself isn't distributed to others in any form, certainly not in an obfuscated form (a general class of which binary executables, as a form, are an instance).
Should you therefore feel morally required to open it up?
I say not necessarily, unless you're convincing others to depend on the correct operation of your scripts for their business or personal use, and bugs in your implementation (or your going out of business, going down for a week, etc.) would seriously impinge on their ability to continue crucial aspects of their operation.
Remember, OSS is not a magic bullet for developers. It is only so for end users of software, who can do things with source they couldn't do without it, but not vice versa.
Since/. end users don't receive software, they aren't even in the "target zone" of the GPL. And since they can't (as a class) be said to "depend" on/. correctly operating, their status as end users is less critical than users of web sites that invite users to place substantially sensitive or critical information on those sites.
And since packaging up and distributing software as OSS is a significant undertaking beyond writing and deploying it in-house (there are plenty of legal and other ramifications of taking such a step)...
...I just don't see it as a black-and-white case of hypocrisy that/. doesn't constantly distribute the exact software it's running while it (as a forum, generally) advocates nearly exactly that for software distributed in binary form, such as Microsoft's offerings.
Still, I think it'd be great if/. distributed exactly what it was running, especially if that could be done easily (and making distributing OSS, dealing with patches, etc. "easy" is something of a holy grail for me).
Hey, I am the person who, in the free-software movement, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to have a free FORTRAN 77 compiler.
That doesn't mean I created "free", "FORTRAN 77", or "compiler".
And yet, I bet I had more to do with creating g77 than Al Gore had to do with creating the Internet.
So what Gore said still strikes me as yet another unnecessary exaggeration.
That's why he, more than GWB, must be elected President of the USA. After all, he is much more personally desperate for that sort of recognition, else he wouldn't repeatedly resort to these strange sorts of "hey, look at me!" type exaggerations.
GWB doesn't have a crying need to be President, on the other hand. He can get along quite nicely without it. Used to be people would talk about how that's just what we need in a President. They seem to have quieted down since GWB came around.
(Seriously, I'm probably not going to vote for Gore, but if we want to just "make people happy" rather than elect someone mentally, emotionally, and intellectually prepared to be President, Gore's got the biggest need, right?)
A ball of cells containing approximately 8 cells is destroyed and this is an abortion?
By those who consider the moment of conception to be the most clear delineation of when a new human life begins, yes.
This four-part series of articles contains the best encapsulation of the logic of many of the views people hold regarding abortion that I've seen on the web, and it comes down on the conception side of things, but not without offering clear reasoning for it (with which you can agree or disagree, of course). Definitely worth reading carefully and thinking through. Even if it doesn't change your mind, it will likely give your current beliefs greater clarity, if you're interested in that sort of thing. HTH.
When I was "hacking" on ARPANET-connected systems back in the 1970's, "hacker" definitely had many positive connotations.
But I'm pretty sure there were plenty of management types -- "suits" -- in charge of projects dependent on, or even part of, the ARPANET's infrastructure, who were aware of the term "hacker" and, just like today, had little awareness of the positive aspects that made up "normal" life of a hacker, yet great awareness of the damage hackers could do while exploring their curiousity.
My experience doesn't really go back farther than that on a national scale, but since around 1971 or so it's been my experience that a hacker's innate curiosity about how things work, how well they stand up to various sorts of stresses, etc., all of which is normal for people -- especially young teen males -- to explore, is just the sort of thing those who are just trying to "get work done" tend to view in a mostly, sometimes entirely, negative light.
Anyway, my recollection is that the term "hacker" got its public "spike" from a popular cartoon (not Dilbert, certainly not Peanuts, but I'd probably recognize the name if given a list to choose from) that used the term to describe activities we now associate primarily with "crackers".
Further, my impression was that the word "cracker" was willfully employed by the hacker community to respond to the public's sudden assumption that "hacker" (which many of us called ourselves at various times) meant "does nothing useful other than try to break into computer systems".
I think this particular cartoon debuted in the mid-1980s, but I really can't recall just where I was working when someone first showed it to me.
I have not said anything that wasn't demonstrated to be truthful.
False.
Let me tell you from what portion of your post I decided that from: "If that's your "best argument", you're neck-deep in buffalo dung, my friend, for that argument is exactly backwards."
Exactly. I was pointing out that you were, perhaps, surrounded by false arguments regarding Linux and GNU. That said nothing about your character, and you'll note I said "my friend". Christ Jesus himself could have been plunged into a pit of buffalo dung and properly said to have been "neck-deep" in it, without it being a hint of criticism. As I said in my previous post, based on what you said, I was assuming, at worst about you, that you had been sold, and accepted at face value, lies about the history of Linux vis-a-vis GNU, since you were repeating a whopper of one as your "best evidence".
Now, what was the first thing you said about me? Where I said "my friend" in referring to you, the first thing you said about me was that I was "gestapo".
Now you're apparently claiming anyone who claims someone is enveloped in buffalo dung is "gestapo". I guess in your world that constitutes an apology? How pathetic.
your immediate response is that I am completely wrong
That's correct, because you were completely wrong. You wrote "My best argument for this is that people were using linux before it came with GNU stuff. People weren't using GNU before it came with Linux". Wrong.
and implying that I am not only stupid but oblivious.
I implied no such thing, except perhaps in the sense that someone else might think that being uninformed or incorrect equates with stupid or oblivious.
(Many surely do in the case of George W. Bush, for example.) I can't help their inability to make such important distinctions. Besides, surely any reasonable person would have noticed by now that if I believe something and wish to say it, I actually say it, in a straightforward fashion. A person need not be stupid to be seriously misled. Nor need he be stupid to be oblivious. Now, many reading this might conclude that you've shown yourself to be both stupid and oblivious -- but not as the result of anything I have said or implied.
That is a sign of close-mindedness.
No, but what you say below is a sure sign of it.
And in portraying the other person as blatantly wrong and illustrating dominance *before* any arguments are made is an act of gestapo tactics - You will fear me now!.
Of course, I didn't do that, since you had made arguments (false ones) before I'd even posted a single item in the thread. I corrected the falsehoods (a basic function of even primitive human civilization, by the way). Rather than thanking me, you viciously attacked me. Yet in your state of self-delusion you think I am the problem here.
Meanwhile, you might want to actually read up on who and what the Gestapo was, and how they operated. Representing what you claim I did as "gestapo tactics" would make nearly every politician, media pundit, television anchor, and radio talk-show host "gestapo" in your world-view. Perhaps your knowledge of WWII Germany is on no more sound footing as your knowledge of GNU/Linux history, which is comparatively much more recent and surely within your own lifetime.
Oh, thank you I didn't know what GNU was running on before then... really.. I didn't... - I'm sure you are an authoritative figure to give history lessons. Hm.. you aren't? Damn, then I guess that makes you just a passionate and very interested follower, in order to know so much about it.
Here's where you display how close-minded you are.
I pointed out, quite clearly, that the extent of my "authority" regarding history includes the fact that I was using GNU software and systems before Linux even existed!! What do you think I meant by saying "we were using it" in my initial post?? I started using Linux at 0.96pl2 or thereabouts, but by that time, I'd been working on and using GNU Emacs, GNU gcc, and plenty of other GNU utilities on non-Unix kernels for almost a year, and I know for a fact that many others had been doing so for much longer than that.
Personal experience is authority to speak on the pertinent history. I would have thought that was obvious, but apparently it isn't to you, or at least you're willing to distort the facts to fit your crying need to continue portraying me as a "gestapo", "close-minded", "zealot".
Damn, here I thought that was a compliment, people believe in things - that is what makes arguments fun. But no, you have to assume I was smearing you with my "universal truths"
No, I said quite clearly you were smearing me with your smears. You used three of them. You then attempted to backpedal on one of them by claiming it was a "universal truth" -- in which case, I wondered, why say it about me at all? But, in that case, I admit it would not have been a smear...and yet continue to claim you intended it as such in your original post attacking my character, and I leave it to others to review your continuing pattern of ludicrous attacks to come to their own conclusions.
So now I've corrected your views, I'm sure you wish to apologize for your blatant misinterpretation
You have yet to offer any retraction of your smears on my character. Saying "everyone does it" doesn't count. And you certainly haven't shown that my interpretation of what you've written is wrong, much less blatantly so. I wouldn't waste my valuable time blatantly misinterpreting someone in any forum -- just because you're willing to do so doesn't mean everyone is.
I'll make you a deal. You find an objective third party that you trust, someone qualified (e.g. a professional in a pertinent field) to analyze such arguments. Assuming I approve these basic characteristics of said third party and am able to engage in an appropriate contractual relationship with them, we'll submit this thread to that third party, who will decide whether it is you, or I, who has engaged in the more uninformed and/or willful misinterpretation of what the other has said and of the other's character. The third party may use independent historical information, but not rely on other writings of the first two parties (you and I), to determine the veracity of our arguments, just to make it fair.
If the third party decides in my favor, you pay me $5000. If the decision is in your favor, I pay you $5000. If he says "it's a toss-up", we each donate $2500 to either the FSF or a similar pro-Linux charity.
Deal?
(If you're so convinced you're right, how can you turn down $5000, or at least $2500 of someone else's money sent to a charity supporting free software?)
Well, it has been very nice talking to you -- continue to believe what you want to believe, but understand that people have different perspectives and that's ok.
As far as I can tell, only one person agrees with you -- yourself -- and many consider you to be...well, read their comments on/. for yourself, and compare the moderation our initial comments received. (This would have been better moved to private email had you not publically attacked me and smeared my character, or had the good grace to quickly apologize and take it to private email. Oh well. I guess I get what I "deserve" for contradicting your misstatements of history -- you sure have an intense hatred for the truth, and I'm paying a modest, yet public, price for it.)
But try in the future, instead of immediately challenging the person (see buffalo-dung quote above) engage in a friendly debate, here's something a little different:
I did engage in a friendly manner. You misinterpreted "neck-deep in buffalo dung", which was even conditional, as a personal attack. It wasn't, unless you're a 3-year-old who, when he comes in the house covered in mud and his mommy says "why, you're covered in mud!", thinks his mommy doesn't love him anymore.
"Sorry, I really don't agree with you or see your point on this, GNU had been used on numerous different kernels before Linux was even a twinkle in Linus' eye."
I posted personal/collective experience saying basically that. That I suggested your "best evidence" claim could well mean you'd been sold a bill of useless goods, I could have skipped, and many others would have. As I say, I am willing to be called a "zealot" for truth-telling (though you have certainly been loathe to backpedal in that direction on my behalf, trying to characterize me as a zealot for GNU or RMS or whatever).
If you can't handle someone disagreeing with you without stating it "just so", by all means, get off the Internet.
See the difference between the two - one is friendly, one is not. If you choose the one that is not, don't expect the person to be nice afterwards.
This, coming from the person who responded to being called "friend" by calling the friend "gestapo", "close-minded", and "zealot", and has yet to apologize for any of it.
Again, you're not one to offer advice in this area. Physician, heal thyself. In the meantime, don't be surprised that people laugh at your attempts to come off as if you've taken the "high road" here.
Not one person in the united states knows all of the law.
Agreed, and you make excellent points. I was thinking more of the conceptual framework of the law, which, in the USA, is pretty much in tatters; seems like it's all ad-hoc now. (Not that it was ever tremendously solid, being interpreted by humans and all, plus it was often "augmented" by stupidities like racism, sexism, etc.)
Ask yourself this question. Do I believe in pluto? Do you? why?
Indeed, I'm eternally grateful to my sixth-grade teacher (Mr. Fisher) for asking us this very question (about France, actually) to get us to think more deeply.
IMO, it's an issue pretty reasonably handled via the use of the conditional, as in "If what 99% of the population accepts as true holds, then Pluto exists, in which case the debate over whether it is a planet has value vis-a-vis that population".
If you look at my public dribblings, you'll notice I make occasional use of this -- stating absolutes not so much, leveraging statements of fact or opinion off of what the other person, people, or agency has said more often.
It's not a complete defense, but since the same question about Pluto can be asked about language, survival, even existence, there probably is no complete defense.
So, the end game may well be complete chaos or randomness, but I still claim we can choose to create a society in which societal systems (like government, justice systems, computer systems) are themselves more, or perhaps less, predictable, reasonable, understandable, from the perspective of the typical member of that society.
And, lately, we've chosen to go in the direction of lower predictability.
This has serious ramifications: the less the typical member of society thinks they understand what's going on, the less they are willing to participate in participating in its ongoing construction in a coherent manner.
The result is a combination of long-term ruling by an increasingly tiny elite and a series of incoherent "rulings" by the populace, typically in the form of violent protest.
We could do better if we wanted, but most "thinkers" in the legal/political game favor the idea of a ruling elite over that of a simpler, more widely understood system, it seems. (Though I'd hazard a guess they aren't individually conscious of it; our "accepted theories" so generally fortify the elite-rule-is-good concept to the extent they call into question the wisdom of any society that overthrew a deity-appointed or heredity-based royalty! I Sam 8:6-9 contains the Judeo-Christian God's response to the people asking Him to appoint a King -- and thereby the first J-C government in any modern sense -- for them, and it's made me question, and reject, many of my own previously cherished beliefs about government.)
Kinda like how programmers, left to their own devices and "wisdom", construct systems that are needlessly complex and seemingly more about ensuring job security (or one's sense of one's own mastery), rather than honoring the KISS principle and delivering something that actually works without further tweaking.
Great points. I think what you're complaining about is the inevitable result when people become less able (and/or willing) to determine whether arguments stand or fall on their own. And I think that might well be the result, in this and other cases, of a combination of increasingly byzantine laws and a dumbing-down in our educational system vis-a-vis basic civil rights, responsibilities, and the histories of various sorts of societies.
The upshot? When your average high-school grad is told "Somebody said 2 plus 2 equals 5", she's less interested in analyzing the argument than in whether that "somebody" was John Rocker (in which case she'll probably disagree) or Bill Clinton (in which case she'll probably agree).
Truth denies personality; personality denies truth. Since the USA has decide to embrace The Lie, we have only personality left, and when we don't really know the personality, we have only the person's history, heritage (look how many people criticize, versus the tiny number who presumably applaud, George W. Bush for his ties to his father), and previous statements to look at -- not with the light of truth, but under the microscope of personality. (Remember, Starr once worked for "Big Tobacco", so he was Evil...pay no attention to what the Democrats asked him to do in the case of a certain famous "sexual harrasser" whose name was not Clinton.)
You are close minded. That isn't a lie, everybody is to a certain extent about certain things.
Nice attempt at a backpedal, but if you really believed that, you wouldn't have wasted space stating what you now claim is a universal truth. No, the simplest explanation is still what I believe: you made your claim to smear me, because I disagreed with you. And you have yet to present any evidence that I am closed-minded, "gestapo", or a zealot.
Anybody who says they are not are lying to themselves -- the worst person to lie to.
If by this you mean that I must accept that my own memories of actually using GNU systems prior to Linux even existing may well be false, else I'm closed-minded, then, yes, I'm closed-minded. I have little else to base my own concept of my own mind on other than my own memories. So sue me.
Instead of thinking about what I meant - you immediately had to take a confrontational approach, instead of asking for clarification on points.
Those are blatant lies, and I submit as evidence my own post. I took plenty of time to think about what you wrote, and clearly explained how and where it didn't make sense. You were the first to personalize the disagreement, you were the first to lie about my character, and now you are trying to squirm out of it, like a 6-year-old who has been caught stealing cookies and refuses to stop lying about it.
That is a sign of closed-mindedness if I ever saw one, but I could be wrong - I could have misinterpreted your response.. but judging from the way you wrote your second one that is not likely. You seem to have the "my way is right, here's facts to prove it" philosphy, which is good -- but don't ignore facts that disprove it either.
Just let me know when you decide to post any. I've posted plenty, with plenty of opportunity for anyone interested to follow up by studying pertinent historical documents on the web. And, if you think you have posted a "fact" I've ignored, feel free to post the evidence of this -- I'm unaware of any such instances at the moment, but will be quick to apologize (unlike yourself) if shown to be wrong.
And You are a zealot.
About what, exactly?
I myself am I zealot, just on the opposite side of the fence.
What fence? All I did in the beginning was point out the falsehoods in the history you offered as your "best evidence", or whatever you called it. I did that not out of zealotry, unless you count "correcting the public record" as done by someone who lived through the pertinent history as "zealotry". If so, please, in the future, try using the correct terms instead of words like "gestapo" (which I note you have not apologized for calling me, equating me with a regime that killed some 6 million Jews), "zealot", and "close-minded".
I think that we zealots are what make the world go around.
IMO, the world would continue spinning without zealots like yourself. I have wasted more than enough time on you.
And I do I agree I should have been more in depth with my original post (and on my second post).
Yet instead of filling in that depth, you backpedal on some of your gratuitous personal smears rather than apologize for them, and you persist in perpetrating the rest of those smears?
However, each time I'm confronted by an member of the church of RMS who is screaming, "GNU is the best! Linux is nothing without GNU, Only GNU can do it!" I recoil.
Who, specifically, are you talking about, and can you post evidence of such people actually saying stuff like that? I didn't pay close attention to the post you were responding to when you claimed Linux predated GNU in terms of usage; are you claiming that was an example, or that either of my posts was an example? Can you cull out specific quotes that illustrate this attitude?
It's a sign of arrogance in that community.
The only arrogance I see here is yours. I've posted nothing but facts, opinions identified as such (buttressed by historical info I personally have a strong hold upon, having "been there"), and refutations of your smear against my character, which illustrated your arrogance, in that by disagreeing with your incorrect take on history I must be "gestapo", etc.
I know that there is nothing that can be done about it, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.
You seem to enjoy smearing those who you decide, a priori, are your opponents. Apparently, I became one only because I posted a disagremeent with your view of history.
And besides, GNU could be made into a complete operating system (without a linux kernel) with about the same amount of effort as a linux kernel could be made into a non-GNU dependant operating system.
Not to my knowledge, because a) GNU has been a complete operating system on a wide variety of non-Linux kernels since before Linux existed, and b) certain Linux enthusiasts have threatened to create a viable, complete, non-GNU Linux system for years now, and to my knowledge haven't produced.
(I am discounting the kernel compile, because after the kernel is compiled there are ways around GCC dependancies).
That's a convenient discounting; you're saying a complete Linux system does not include the capability of recompiling the kernel? Yet that's been one of the main benefits of not only Linux, but most Unix distributions generally, for decades now!
Granted (and I've said this before) it is stupid to do so. Both technologies are good, but I really hate it when people say linux is a piece of crap that can't do anything and GNU is the only thing worth while.
Examples? Pointers to recognized GNU enthusiasts saying this? I'm sure there are some, my question is, where are you seeing them?
Here is the point of my whole thread with you. You said your "best evidence" was something that I knew was about 100% false. I pointed out (using plain language) that this might suggest most of your other evidence might well be about as false.
In other words, someone (or a website) has been convincing you of a bunch of "facts" that are nothing more than a load of bull manure, and you're accepting them wholesale, but when someone like me comes along and offers clear, personal evidence that your "best evidence" was false, you start hurling epithets at them and insist on "proof" for all sorts of things (many of which I hadn't even asserted).
Now, you're going on about all the stupid and obnoxious things said by GNU enthusiasts.
I'm just suggesting maybe all those "things" were not heard or read by you, but you're representing, second-hand, what could easily be lies, just as your claims I was "gestapo", "close-minded", and a "zealot" were lies, based on the evidence you had on hand.
If a few million people think something is good and worth using, then obviously there is some merit to it. (Combative argument usually used: Well, they're using GNU more than linux) Regardless, your average user could care less about GNU. However, that is not what RMS should be targetting really - the philosophy of Free Software is encapsulated within Linux without anyone knowing what glibc even is. That is what he should be aiming for - respect for the FSF and for free-as-in-freedom.
Which is exactly what he was been trying to accomplish (in his own, oft-incompetent, manner) for many years.
Not for a silly naming convention, bashing something that has made a tremendous leap in the computing industry (with the help of GNU) which has in turn helped GNU make a tremendous leap.
I fail to see how recommending "GNU/Linux" as a preferred name for the entire OS constitutes "bashing" Linux. Yet somehow, in your mind, that is bashing, but your calling me "gestapo" and "close-minded" is just a case of stating universal truths??
You, sir, are a hypocrite.
That, of course, can be claimed (using your own logic), as a "universal truth" about everyone, so please don't take it "personally". (Yeah, right; don't kid yourself, this time, it is personal, and you deserve to have it on public record against you.)
They work symbiotically, but RMS et al. is insisting that GNU is the foundation - and linux is this little pesky thing that you just have to have.
But you don't have to have it. That's the reality. However, if you want to have a more-GPL-based OS, then you do have to have it. Strange thing, that.
Look to his rewards speech from the IDG/Linus Torvalds award in 99 for evidence of that.
Link?
GNU would not have gotten where it was today if it weren't for linux. But none of RMS-disciples decide to look at it that way.
Replace "GNU" with "Y" and "linux" with "Z", and apply your own logic. Isn't it a universal truth, when it comes to things that intertwine in the historical record? So why say it? (Well, that was a waste of a paragraph, I'm sure, but I want to make the point that your backpedaling on your own personal insults of my character renders most of your statements pretty much redundant.)
Clearly GNU couldn't have gotten where it is today without Linux. But maybe it would have gotten further. Maybe I'd still be working on GCC if it wasn't for people like Linus telling us GCC people how wrong we were to not support all the extensions he'd decided to use (disregarding lack of specifications) and at the same time disregarding all the "pointy-headed academic" recommendations against using C to write a modern OS kernel. (I.e. Linus seemed to think C was obviously the best language to use for a kernel, at the same time he strongly pushed for all sorts of ad-hoc extensions to this supposed "wonderful language". My opinion: if the tool doesn't work for the task, either fix it yourself, or try another tool.) Who knows? Maybe as many people were turned off working on GNU by Linus as by RMS (though you'd have a hard time convincing me of that; RMS is rarely fun to work with).
One thing for sure: Linux owes its existence to GNU and the GPL in a way that is not nearly true in the opposite sense. Linus himself has explained how and why that's true.
Instead of GNU taking linux where it is, they both helped each other and they both couldn't have gotten to where they are without the other.
Again, GNU was going strong before Linux existed, and continued along many paths during Linux' lifetime, including a substantial period when many important developments within Linux were withheld as contributions to GNU (due to a combination of factors, including problems on both the Linux and GNU sides).
My point is, give them both credit where credit is due.
I've done plenty of that in my career already. Or have you not even bothered to pull up my web site, search for my past USENET postings, etc.?
Linux did a lot, GNU did a lot. They are both good at what they do - Linux brought GNU to the mainstream, there is no denying that.
More precisely, Linux IPOs brought Linux to the mainstream. The percentage of people who have heard of GNU compared to those who have heard of Linux is probably vanishingly small.
Before 1992 (excluding 91 on purpose) how many people had unix on their desktop computers running a free operating system...
Nice to see you're placing importance on the word "free". As I acknowledged above, the real, tangible benefit of Linux was that it was the first time many of us were able to have a free OS kernel running underneath the free GNU system-without-a-kernel we had been running for years already. It sure made a huge positive difference in my life at the time, and I continue to enjoy using Linux on my PC at home.
Linux brought that to the world
Well, so did FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. IMO, the deciding factor was the use of the GPL for Linux code -- history now suggests it "wins" over the BSD license for when companies decide to distribute their own code, and seems to do better for competing products when high-quality software types decide to contribute to projects.
And without GNU and the GPL, Linux might have ended up as public domain (and probably died within a few years) or BSDed (and probably ended up with much less of the free-Unix market compared to the free BSDs).
But that's just guessing on my part. I'm aware there was a lawsuit threatened against some or all of the free BSDs that slowed development, but I'm unimpressed with the timeframe during which that threat existed compared to the overall timeframe we're talking about. And I'm also aware of all the claims about BSD-type licensing (including MIT X-type licensing) being preferred -- to which I agree, when it comes to how person/company FOO wants person/company BAR to license BAR's own software. It's what FOO chooses to use on their own software that seems to have been the deciding point, but I can't be sure.
And with it, a very useful and well designed philosophy and application/library suite.
I'm not sure I understand how and where Linux "brought" those to the community moreso than GNU or other contributors. After all, GNU as an architecture significantly predated Linux. What I do believe Linux brought that was a unique contribution was the importance of competent project management as being crucial to project success -- IMO, Linus is vastly better as a project leader than RMS (and much better than myself). (I mean "project leader" in a wide sense here, including cheerleader, yeller-atter, etc. Not just how it's used within a typical corporate environment. But comparable corporate titles seem inappropriate for a free-software, all-volunteer development team.)
The really sad thing about this thread is that you've apparently assumed I'm anti-Linux because I disagreed with one or more of your most cherished assumptions.
The reality is, in ordinary conversations when I tell people what I do (or used to do anyway), I focus much more on Linux and its importance, mentioning GNU mainly to make sure they understand I didn't actually spend most of the past 12 years of my life working on Linux per se.
It's too bad Linux enthusiasts include so many who interpret any disagreement with their positions as being from people who are "anti-Linux". Having profited substantially off of the Red Hat IPO thanks to my longstanding contributions to "Linux", I guess I'll just laugh in my milkshake as such childishness.
Slashdot Mirror
That's okay, I've done the same thing! Mostly these days I just charge for the time I put into creating it, rather than the IP itself.
I was just pointing out that there is a big difference between using force to prevent someone stealing your bread and using it to prevent someone copying your ideas about how to bake it (whether by observation, reverse-engineering, or just taking your advice).
If we keep in mind that it's intellectual privilege, we'll more likely cherish, rather than abuse, it, because it's more clearly an accommodation made by society for society (not for the individual, though, thankfully, our society uses individual rewards and responsibilities as a foundation for its implementation).
Put another way: absent a government and its law-enforcement system, it's far more difficult to secure intellectual "property" than to secure physical property. That's why recognizing intellectual privilege as a compromise, or agreement, with society is wise, and why seeing intellectual "property" as a concept needing little support from society foolish.
"We will cut wheat for ourselves now" said Goosey Loosey and Ducky Lucky.
"No, you won't, and I'll use the armed force of the government to prevent you from doing it, since the idea of cutting wheat to make bread is my intellectual property!!" said Henny Penny, waving a recently approved patent on the bread-making process.
When you claim that intellectual privilege is actually property, you not only ignore millenia of laws and reality, you steal everyone's loaf of bread.
Aside from other problems with comparing RMS' free-software ideas with Communism, keep in mind that RMS was no mass-murderer.
It was a panel formed in a way that light coming in perpendicular to its surface would cause light to come out one or more edges, kinda like the invention(s) described in this forum, except I don't know if his used fibre.
His device was comparatively inexpensive to manufacture.
But, turns out it'd stop working after awhile. Thinking about it later, I wondered if maybe it was kinda chaotic internally, except with only one path for light to leave. Maybe that meant the light would bounce around a lot. And maybe there's no such thing as a "perfect" reflector, so each "bounce" cost not just a bit of energy, but a bit of thermal transfer to the imperfect reflectors.
So I wonder whether the problem was that the heat would build up inside, due to all the excess reflections, and finally break down the structure itself.
Anyway, it sounded pretty interesting. He said the people who helped him look into what it'd take to "fix" it felt it'd cost so much more to manufacture it to not fail that it'd no longer be a cost-effective element of a system.
What I'm suggesting here is that the invention itself, functionally speaking, is probably not very new or exciting...but if it can be profitably manufactured and sold, that might be pretty exciting!
Which products, specifically? I'm curious, because I did some consulting awhile ago there, but didn't really get a good sense of the product line. Yet I get the impression there is at least one OSS variant corresponding thereto -- isn't there an OSS Verilog interpreter (or compiler)? -- though I don't think Cadence had anything to do with it.
Is there a web site somewhere that lists "desirables" for OSS projects of the sort you're looking for? And maybe links to such projects actually in progress?
Read the articles...the first several lines of the DNA of the bacteria contains the following RCS info:
That's how they know how old it is!Maybe a /. bug or something? I see a "Read the rest of this comment..." link that just pulls up the comment with the same link!
So, I'm guessing there were more bullet points there, but /. just doesn't want to show them to me! Maybe if I reconfigured my user preferences or something...but ISTR I've seen much longer comments on /. before a link like that in the past?
Oh well.
It shows you care. If you don't show you care, those in the Electoral College are entirely free to decide for you.
People who don't exercise their right to vote are, in most cases in the USA (including the Presidential elections), practically speaking, voting for the winner.
So if you don't bother voting for President this year, you are interpreted, by The System, as casting a vote in favor of either Bush or Gore.
(Unless, by some miracle, someone else wins.)
That gets my vote as "coolest explanation of the GPL's nature of the millenium".
Seriously, where were you when we were fighting about these things on gnu.misc.discuss back in the early '90s? I think everyone (thoughtful ones anyway) would really have appreciated that characterization!
Even more seriously, think of turning that into your .sig or something...I'm going to try to commit it to memory.
You might try checking this web site, which I thought was his (and only recently came into existence), but on my Netscape with JavaScript disabled, I get an empty document, so maybe I've got the wrong URL there.
Anyway, if you can find his web site, supposedly there are transcripts of shows (maybe the last few months since it went on-line?) -- try searching for "libberish".
BTW, a problem with "libberish" is that perhaps some could take it for "libertarian gibberish".
Oh, and the equivalent term for conservative ideas these days is "shrubbish".
(Okay, I admit, I just made that one up all by myself. Apologies to the next President. ;-)
It is time for everyone to simply think outside the BACHs!!
(Yeah, I know, but the alternative is for me to do some real work. ;-)
One thing that occurred to me a few days ago is perhaps /. needs to hire an ombudsman. That person would then be the one to post stories about /. itself ("meta-stories"), for example.
Don't know much more about the ombudsman role exactly, but my impression is that it's a job often created to provide a news outlet with a way to hear, and reach, those who feel the outlet itself is failing them, without them having to appeal to the exact people who are failing them.
As far as /. advocating the idea that OSS is the best way to produce quality code of any type, I'm not sure I see that notion being forwarded by the /. creators/editors per se, but it's one with which I disagree in a very persnickety way.
OSS doesn't ensure quality. It does allow a wider audience to participate in vetting and improving its quality than would be able to otherwise.
That's often simplified to "OSS == quality code", but that simplification is so easily shown to be wrong without even resorting to examples (e.g. one could create a bot that continuously grabs OSS software from the net, introduces random bugs into it, and distributes it, thus assuredly lowering the overall quality of all OSS software) that I like to think most thoughtful people see through the hype-like statement to the truth of the matter.
I'd prefer people say "OSS gives the end user more control over the quality of the software than any other distribution mechanism".
And note that'd go for /. too, since "no distribution" (or "only occasional distribution of what we were running a month ago", if you like) counts as "any other distribution mechanism".
Argued that way, it becomes more pertinent that /. considers whether its end users need that degree of control over the quality, and compares that to the "pain" of keeping up-to-date with OSS releases of its site's software.
And as far as cathedral vs. bazaar, that represents a continuum within the overall OSS model. I took a very strong cathedral approach to g77, which helped in many ways (especially initially, when I had basically no choice), but hurt in many others.
In the long run, the areas in which g77 could be easily hacked by outsiders were those in which it was usefully hacked to provide new features, fix bugs, etc.
But the poorer aspects of its design and architecture (and maybe the fact that some of these areas, e.g. lexing/parsing Fortran, are just plain hard) meant that there was precious little utility in having those chunks of code available as source, other than making it easier for others to compile and port, and for me to distribute along with the source to the rest of the front end (and, later, compiler as a whole, via the EGCS project).
My point is that the utility of opening up slashcode depends not only on the interest level in the code itself (which I'd guess is higher than that for g77) but on the hackability of that code -- the ability for people to learn, review, and modify small sections of code without having to learn how the whole thing works.
My impression, having not looked at /. code at all but only at discussions of it, is that even its authors recognize that it isn't architected to be easy for outsiders to hack as "quickie" projects.
That lowers the benefits of opening it up.
In the end, though, I do think not opening it up is worse for /. as well as the community, which is why I get the impression they're working towards opening it up more rather than less, sooner rather than later, I did not have sex with that woman, ... wait, got off track there....
Anyway, the bazaar model for OSS development, to date, has struck me as a nice ideal that's hard to really achieve in a way that's anywhere near as efficient, for a programmer like myself, as is being an "insider" in a cathedral-model project, for many sorts of projects.
I mean, if you could see some of the vast changes I made to g77 over the years, including during its "alpha test" period as well as before it ever saw the light of day, you'd probably see why it'd be so much harder for me to have made those sweeping changes while having to check in and out modules, notify other developers that major things were changing, etc.
So, cathedral-style development has its necessities. It's the projects that are well-architected up front, and have decent tools in place to support bazaar-style development, that benefit most from them.
g77 wasn't as good an example of that as it could have been (by a longshot). If /code isn't either, they might be making the right decision for now, and I'd be very hesitant to call them "hypocritical" without seeing some very clear statements from them indicating they really believe others should distribute code for their "entertainment" web sites even if it's convoluted or whatever.
Accusations of hypocrisy are very strong ones to make, and should thus be made only when very clear evidence illustrated the hypocrisy can be provided. Again, it's a matter of applying the Golden Rule.
Tactics vs. strategy, first of all, suggests that while one might vote Bush rather than Harry Browne because one decides this would more likely lead to a less intrusive/oppressive gov't tactically, one might go ahead and vote Browne to implement a longer-term strategy.
Further, the electoral college just changes the specifics of tactics.
For example, I live in Massachusetts. Let's say I'd prefer Harry Browne, or even the Constitutional candidate (whose name I forget), but would (as in the example above) much prefer Bush over Gore.
Now, a close race on a purely national-democracy level would suggest I'd better vote Bush, because my vote might make "the" difference (especially assuming I'm one of many, though obviously a small minority, who holds these beliefs).
But, being in Mass., I could reason this way:
So it's not black-and-white that one must vote for one of the two parties to get an outcome that reflects an incremental move towards one's ideal, even if that is the practical reality for the nation at this time (i.e. either Gore or Bush will win; nobody else will; or so goes the reasoning).
Oh, and the other thing that bugs me: if you don't vote but are eligible to, you are voting either for the ultimate winner, or, if you'd prefer to think of it this way, the ultimate winner of your local electoral college vote. Please don't think you can escape responsibility for whoever got elected by not voting -- that responsibility was thrust upon you, you chose to sidestep it, just as looking up at a skyscraper and seeing a baby falling towards you makes you responsible such that your simply stepping aside and saying "not my baby, I didn't throw it out the window, therefore [SPLAT!!] I am in no way responsible for its death" does not absolve you of its death.
And, by the way, Mr. Big Non Voter, whoever you might be, voting in the USA is much less risky than catching falling babies. I know! I've done experiments! (I'd post the pics, but my ISP won't let me. ;-)
For Signal 11 to believe that his ability to gain tons of karma by posting "with the crowd" means the /. system is broken is to a) mistakenly believe it matters, as if more than 1% of the Internet population could write as well and clearly as he, and b) focus on the wrong system -- it's not /. that's "broken", it's humanity, in the sense that we have yet to build a "meta-system" that individual humans cannot outwit (and I don't mean "isolated humans" -- they're allowed to team up, as individuals, that's the system, man ;-).
As I was explaining to my wife, human nature (especially nerd nature) is that when a system experiences, say, 100,000 "failures" per month as defined by its audience, there'll be a groundswell of sentiment to "modify" it (almost always this complicates, i.e. extends, the system) via a means that everyone agrees will fix 90% or more of the failures, and therefore be "worth it".
Fine, so the extension is made, and now there are only 10,000 failures.
At that point, even if there is no growth, someone like Signal 11 can come along, discern a pattern in those failures, reproduce them as a demonstration of the failures, thereby increasing their frequency...
Add the reality that this system is growing, so the failures are now back to 100,000 (in my hypothetical example, if it grew like /.), and that "the people", the audience who applauded the extended system, are now much more sensitive to its failure, so they see the 100,000 failures as indicating a failure of the modified system...
Oh, except now they can blame the previous extension ("moderation is broken" -- yeah, try using /. without it, if possible), since it was someone else who designed and/or implemented it.
Not that there aren't a lot of correct viewpoints or actions taken here, but the big picture is, no "system" ever proposed, other than extermination of the human species, would solve the problem of humans behaving as humans. If it did, humanity would have effectively created a system that enslaved it -- hardly a prospect worth looking forward to.
Believe me, if we can't keep cockroaches, mice, viruses, etc. out of areas inhabited by humans -- all these having highly distinct genetic characteristics, the equivalent of every /. troll voluntarily having a nick that begins "troll_" -- we aren't close to keeping out "unwelcome" human behavior. (And, yes, I believe the ecological concerns regarding handling pests do map pretty well to handling human pests.)
Ultimately /. chose to do what it chose to do (which I don't know enough to say was wise or unwise, other than suggesting CmdrTaco telling Sig11 he was being singled out when he wasn't and calling him an idiot in public was unwise) regarding Sig11 and other peoples' proposals vis-a-vis moderation.
And Sig11 chose to leave, which I can't disagree with (it's his decision), but am sorry I won't see his well-written comments, even if they are designed to proclaim the party line.
Whether I'll bother to go to another forum Sig11 occupies, given the extra time and effort that'd take me, is my decision, ditto for everyone else, of course.
The other cases, software is being distributed, so withholding source can have negative consequences for the recipients. (Also, you mention cases where license violations are occurring -- that's a matter of legality and honoring the ethical and societal concerns of our society. I don't see /. violating those by not releasing the code for its web site per se.)
In other words, your business or home doesn't get "burned" because of bugs in /. -- /. gets burned, you might get inconvenienced, but the nature of /. is such that you don't lose big.
Before worrying about /. opening the source for its web site (which, strictly speaking, it has not done, I gather, although it's released earlier versions of it), I'd worry about E*Trade, Ameritrade, Schwab, banks, online retail outlets, etc. opening up the source code for their web sites...
Think of it this way. If you use a combination of scripts you've hacked together to cope with and respond to various sorts of emails (such as detecting and responding to spam), that set of scripts is not much different, conceptually, from the code that runs /. -- sure, it's behavior (just like your own behavior) is "visible" to others, but the code itself isn't distributed to others in any form, certainly not in an obfuscated form (a general class of which binary executables, as a form, are an instance).
Should you therefore feel morally required to open it up?
I say not necessarily, unless you're convincing others to depend on the correct operation of your scripts for their business or personal use, and bugs in your implementation (or your going out of business, going down for a week, etc.) would seriously impinge on their ability to continue crucial aspects of their operation.
Remember, OSS is not a magic bullet for developers. It is only so for end users of software, who can do things with source they couldn't do without it, but not vice versa.
Since /. end users don't receive software, they aren't even in the "target zone" of the GPL. And since they can't (as a class) be said to "depend" on /. correctly operating, their status as end users is less critical than users of web sites that invite users to place substantially sensitive or critical information on those sites.
And since packaging up and distributing software as OSS is a significant undertaking beyond writing and deploying it in-house (there are plenty of legal and other ramifications of taking such a step)...
Still, I think it'd be great if /. distributed exactly what it was running, especially if that could be done easily (and making distributing OSS, dealing with patches, etc. "easy" is something of a holy grail for me).
That doesn't mean I created "free", "FORTRAN 77", or "compiler".
And yet, I bet I had more to do with creating g77 than Al Gore had to do with creating the Internet.
So what Gore said still strikes me as yet another unnecessary exaggeration.
That's why he, more than GWB, must be elected President of the USA. After all, he is much more personally desperate for that sort of recognition, else he wouldn't repeatedly resort to these strange sorts of "hey, look at me!" type exaggerations.
GWB doesn't have a crying need to be President, on the other hand. He can get along quite nicely without it. Used to be people would talk about how that's just what we need in a President. They seem to have quieted down since GWB came around.
(Seriously, I'm probably not going to vote for Gore, but if we want to just "make people happy" rather than elect someone mentally, emotionally, and intellectually prepared to be President, Gore's got the biggest need, right?)
By those who consider the moment of conception to be the most clear delineation of when a new human life begins, yes.
This four-part series of articles contains the best encapsulation of the logic of many of the views people hold regarding abortion that I've seen on the web, and it comes down on the conception side of things, but not without offering clear reasoning for it (with which you can agree or disagree, of course). Definitely worth reading carefully and thinking through. Even if it doesn't change your mind, it will likely give your current beliefs greater clarity, if you're interested in that sort of thing. HTH.
But I'm pretty sure there were plenty of management types -- "suits" -- in charge of projects dependent on, or even part of, the ARPANET's infrastructure, who were aware of the term "hacker" and, just like today, had little awareness of the positive aspects that made up "normal" life of a hacker, yet great awareness of the damage hackers could do while exploring their curiousity.
My experience doesn't really go back farther than that on a national scale, but since around 1971 or so it's been my experience that a hacker's innate curiosity about how things work, how well they stand up to various sorts of stresses, etc., all of which is normal for people -- especially young teen males -- to explore, is just the sort of thing those who are just trying to "get work done" tend to view in a mostly, sometimes entirely, negative light.
Anyway, my recollection is that the term "hacker" got its public "spike" from a popular cartoon (not Dilbert, certainly not Peanuts, but I'd probably recognize the name if given a list to choose from) that used the term to describe activities we now associate primarily with "crackers".
Further, my impression was that the word "cracker" was willfully employed by the hacker community to respond to the public's sudden assumption that "hacker" (which many of us called ourselves at various times) meant "does nothing useful other than try to break into computer systems".
I think this particular cartoon debuted in the mid-1980s, but I really can't recall just where I was working when someone first showed it to me.
False.
False.
Exactly. I was pointing out that you were, perhaps, surrounded by false arguments regarding Linux and GNU. That said nothing about your character, and you'll note I said "my friend". Christ Jesus himself could have been plunged into a pit of buffalo dung and properly said to have been "neck-deep" in it, without it being a hint of criticism. As I said in my previous post, based on what you said, I was assuming, at worst about you, that you had been sold, and accepted at face value, lies about the history of Linux vis-a-vis GNU, since you were repeating a whopper of one as your "best evidence".
Now, what was the first thing you said about me? Where I said "my friend" in referring to you, the first thing you said about me was that I was "gestapo".
Now you're apparently claiming anyone who claims someone is enveloped in buffalo dung is "gestapo". I guess in your world that constitutes an apology? How pathetic.
That's correct, because you were completely wrong. You wrote "My best argument for this is that people were using linux before it came with GNU stuff. People weren't using GNU before it came with Linux". Wrong.
I implied no such thing, except perhaps in the sense that someone else might think that being uninformed or incorrect equates with stupid or oblivious. (Many surely do in the case of George W. Bush, for example.) I can't help their inability to make such important distinctions. Besides, surely any reasonable person would have noticed by now that if I believe something and wish to say it, I actually say it, in a straightforward fashion. A person need not be stupid to be seriously misled. Nor need he be stupid to be oblivious. Now, many reading this might conclude that you've shown yourself to be both stupid and oblivious -- but not as the result of anything I have said or implied.
No, but what you say below is a sure sign of it.
Of course, I didn't do that, since you had made arguments (false ones) before I'd even posted a single item in the thread. I corrected the falsehoods (a basic function of even primitive human civilization, by the way). Rather than thanking me, you viciously attacked me. Yet in your state of self-delusion you think I am the problem here.
Meanwhile, you might want to actually read up on who and what the Gestapo was, and how they operated. Representing what you claim I did as "gestapo tactics" would make nearly every politician, media pundit, television anchor, and radio talk-show host "gestapo" in your world-view. Perhaps your knowledge of WWII Germany is on no more sound footing as your knowledge of GNU/Linux history, which is comparatively much more recent and surely within your own lifetime.
Here's where you display how close-minded you are.
I pointed out, quite clearly, that the extent of my "authority" regarding history includes the fact that I was using GNU software and systems before Linux even existed!! What do you think I meant by saying "we were using it" in my initial post?? I started using Linux at 0.96pl2 or thereabouts, but by that time, I'd been working on and using GNU Emacs, GNU gcc, and plenty of other GNU utilities on non-Unix kernels for almost a year, and I know for a fact that many others had been doing so for much longer than that.
Personal experience is authority to speak on the pertinent history. I would have thought that was obvious, but apparently it isn't to you, or at least you're willing to distort the facts to fit your crying need to continue portraying me as a "gestapo", "close-minded", "zealot".
No, I said quite clearly you were smearing me with your smears. You used three of them. You then attempted to backpedal on one of them by claiming it was a "universal truth" -- in which case, I wondered, why say it about me at all? But, in that case, I admit it would not have been a smear...and yet continue to claim you intended it as such in your original post attacking my character, and I leave it to others to review your continuing pattern of ludicrous attacks to come to their own conclusions.
You have yet to offer any retraction of your smears on my character. Saying "everyone does it" doesn't count. And you certainly haven't shown that my interpretation of what you've written is wrong, much less blatantly so. I wouldn't waste my valuable time blatantly misinterpreting someone in any forum -- just because you're willing to do so doesn't mean everyone is.
I'll make you a deal. You find an objective third party that you trust, someone qualified (e.g. a professional in a pertinent field) to analyze such arguments. Assuming I approve these basic characteristics of said third party and am able to engage in an appropriate contractual relationship with them, we'll submit this thread to that third party, who will decide whether it is you, or I, who has engaged in the more uninformed and/or willful misinterpretation of what the other has said and of the other's character. The third party may use independent historical information, but not rely on other writings of the first two parties (you and I), to determine the veracity of our arguments, just to make it fair.
If the third party decides in my favor, you pay me $5000. If the decision is in your favor, I pay you $5000. If he says "it's a toss-up", we each donate $2500 to either the FSF or a similar pro-Linux charity.
Deal?
(If you're so convinced you're right, how can you turn down $5000, or at least $2500 of someone else's money sent to a charity supporting free software?)
As far as I can tell, only one person agrees with you -- yourself -- and many consider you to be...well, read their comments on /. for yourself, and compare the moderation our initial comments received. (This would have been better moved to private email had you not publically attacked me and smeared my character, or had the good grace to quickly apologize and take it to private email. Oh well. I guess I get what I "deserve" for contradicting your misstatements of history -- you sure have an intense hatred for the truth, and I'm paying a modest, yet public, price for it.)
I did engage in a friendly manner. You misinterpreted "neck-deep in buffalo dung", which was even conditional, as a personal attack. It wasn't, unless you're a 3-year-old who, when he comes in the house covered in mud and his mommy says "why, you're covered in mud!", thinks his mommy doesn't love him anymore.
I posted personal/collective experience saying basically that. That I suggested your "best evidence" claim could well mean you'd been sold a bill of useless goods, I could have skipped, and many others would have. As I say, I am willing to be called a "zealot" for truth-telling (though you have certainly been loathe to backpedal in that direction on my behalf, trying to characterize me as a zealot for GNU or RMS or whatever).
If you can't handle someone disagreeing with you without stating it "just so", by all means, get off the Internet.
This, coming from the person who responded to being called "friend" by calling the friend "gestapo", "close-minded", and "zealot", and has yet to apologize for any of it.
Again, you're not one to offer advice in this area. Physician, heal thyself. In the meantime, don't be surprised that people laugh at your attempts to come off as if you've taken the "high road" here.
Agreed, and you make excellent points. I was thinking more of the conceptual framework of the law, which, in the USA, is pretty much in tatters; seems like it's all ad-hoc now. (Not that it was ever tremendously solid, being interpreted by humans and all, plus it was often "augmented" by stupidities like racism, sexism, etc.)
Indeed, I'm eternally grateful to my sixth-grade teacher (Mr. Fisher) for asking us this very question (about France, actually) to get us to think more deeply.
IMO, it's an issue pretty reasonably handled via the use of the conditional, as in "If what 99% of the population accepts as true holds, then Pluto exists, in which case the debate over whether it is a planet has value vis-a-vis that population".
If you look at my public dribblings, you'll notice I make occasional use of this -- stating absolutes not so much, leveraging statements of fact or opinion off of what the other person, people, or agency has said more often.
It's not a complete defense, but since the same question about Pluto can be asked about language, survival, even existence, there probably is no complete defense.
So, the end game may well be complete chaos or randomness, but I still claim we can choose to create a society in which societal systems (like government, justice systems, computer systems) are themselves more, or perhaps less, predictable, reasonable, understandable, from the perspective of the typical member of that society.
And, lately, we've chosen to go in the direction of lower predictability.
This has serious ramifications: the less the typical member of society thinks they understand what's going on, the less they are willing to participate in participating in its ongoing construction in a coherent manner.
The result is a combination of long-term ruling by an increasingly tiny elite and a series of incoherent "rulings" by the populace, typically in the form of violent protest.
We could do better if we wanted, but most "thinkers" in the legal/political game favor the idea of a ruling elite over that of a simpler, more widely understood system, it seems. (Though I'd hazard a guess they aren't individually conscious of it; our "accepted theories" so generally fortify the elite-rule-is-good concept to the extent they call into question the wisdom of any society that overthrew a deity-appointed or heredity-based royalty! I Sam 8:6-9 contains the Judeo-Christian God's response to the people asking Him to appoint a King -- and thereby the first J-C government in any modern sense -- for them, and it's made me question, and reject, many of my own previously cherished beliefs about government.)
Kinda like how programmers, left to their own devices and "wisdom", construct systems that are needlessly complex and seemingly more about ensuring job security (or one's sense of one's own mastery), rather than honoring the KISS principle and delivering something that actually works without further tweaking.
The upshot? When your average high-school grad is told "Somebody said 2 plus 2 equals 5", she's less interested in analyzing the argument than in whether that "somebody" was John Rocker (in which case she'll probably disagree) or Bill Clinton (in which case she'll probably agree).
Truth denies personality; personality denies truth. Since the USA has decide to embrace The Lie, we have only personality left, and when we don't really know the personality, we have only the person's history, heritage (look how many people criticize, versus the tiny number who presumably applaud, George W. Bush for his ties to his father), and previous statements to look at -- not with the light of truth, but under the microscope of personality. (Remember, Starr once worked for "Big Tobacco", so he was Evil...pay no attention to what the Democrats asked him to do in the case of a certain famous "sexual harrasser" whose name was not Clinton.)
Nice attempt at a backpedal, but if you really believed that, you wouldn't have wasted space stating what you now claim is a universal truth. No, the simplest explanation is still what I believe: you made your claim to smear me, because I disagreed with you. And you have yet to present any evidence that I am closed-minded, "gestapo", or a zealot.
If by this you mean that I must accept that my own memories of actually using GNU systems prior to Linux even existing may well be false, else I'm closed-minded, then, yes, I'm closed-minded. I have little else to base my own concept of my own mind on other than my own memories. So sue me.
Those are blatant lies, and I submit as evidence my own post. I took plenty of time to think about what you wrote, and clearly explained how and where it didn't make sense. You were the first to personalize the disagreement, you were the first to lie about my character, and now you are trying to squirm out of it, like a 6-year-old who has been caught stealing cookies and refuses to stop lying about it.
Just let me know when you decide to post any. I've posted plenty, with plenty of opportunity for anyone interested to follow up by studying pertinent historical documents on the web. And, if you think you have posted a "fact" I've ignored, feel free to post the evidence of this -- I'm unaware of any such instances at the moment, but will be quick to apologize (unlike yourself) if shown to be wrong.
About what, exactly?
What fence? All I did in the beginning was point out the falsehoods in the history you offered as your "best evidence", or whatever you called it. I did that not out of zealotry, unless you count "correcting the public record" as done by someone who lived through the pertinent history as "zealotry". If so, please, in the future, try using the correct terms instead of words like "gestapo" (which I note you have not apologized for calling me, equating me with a regime that killed some 6 million Jews), "zealot", and "close-minded".
IMO, the world would continue spinning without zealots like yourself. I have wasted more than enough time on you.
Yet instead of filling in that depth, you backpedal on some of your gratuitous personal smears rather than apologize for them, and you persist in perpetrating the rest of those smears?
Who, specifically, are you talking about, and can you post evidence of such people actually saying stuff like that? I didn't pay close attention to the post you were responding to when you claimed Linux predated GNU in terms of usage; are you claiming that was an example, or that either of my posts was an example? Can you cull out specific quotes that illustrate this attitude?
The only arrogance I see here is yours. I've posted nothing but facts, opinions identified as such (buttressed by historical info I personally have a strong hold upon, having "been there"), and refutations of your smear against my character, which illustrated your arrogance, in that by disagreeing with your incorrect take on history I must be "gestapo", etc.
You seem to enjoy smearing those who you decide, a priori, are your opponents. Apparently, I became one only because I posted a disagremeent with your view of history.
Not to my knowledge, because a) GNU has been a complete operating system on a wide variety of non-Linux kernels since before Linux existed, and b) certain Linux enthusiasts have threatened to create a viable, complete, non-GNU Linux system for years now, and to my knowledge haven't produced.
That's a convenient discounting; you're saying a complete Linux system does not include the capability of recompiling the kernel? Yet that's been one of the main benefits of not only Linux, but most Unix distributions generally, for decades now!
Examples? Pointers to recognized GNU enthusiasts saying this? I'm sure there are some, my question is, where are you seeing them?
Here is the point of my whole thread with you. You said your "best evidence" was something that I knew was about 100% false. I pointed out (using plain language) that this might suggest most of your other evidence might well be about as false.
In other words, someone (or a website) has been convincing you of a bunch of "facts" that are nothing more than a load of bull manure, and you're accepting them wholesale, but when someone like me comes along and offers clear, personal evidence that your "best evidence" was false, you start hurling epithets at them and insist on "proof" for all sorts of things (many of which I hadn't even asserted).
Now, you're going on about all the stupid and obnoxious things said by GNU enthusiasts.
I'm just suggesting maybe all those "things" were not heard or read by you, but you're representing, second-hand, what could easily be lies, just as your claims I was "gestapo", "close-minded", and a "zealot" were lies, based on the evidence you had on hand.
Which is exactly what he was been trying to accomplish (in his own, oft-incompetent, manner) for many years.
I fail to see how recommending "GNU/Linux" as a preferred name for the entire OS constitutes "bashing" Linux. Yet somehow, in your mind, that is bashing, but your calling me "gestapo" and "close-minded" is just a case of stating universal truths??
You, sir, are a hypocrite.
That, of course, can be claimed (using your own logic), as a "universal truth" about everyone, so please don't take it "personally". (Yeah, right; don't kid yourself, this time, it is personal, and you deserve to have it on public record against you.)
But you don't have to have it. That's the reality. However, if you want to have a more-GPL-based OS, then you do have to have it. Strange thing, that.
Link?
Replace "GNU" with "Y" and "linux" with "Z", and apply your own logic. Isn't it a universal truth, when it comes to things that intertwine in the historical record? So why say it? (Well, that was a waste of a paragraph, I'm sure, but I want to make the point that your backpedaling on your own personal insults of my character renders most of your statements pretty much redundant.)
Clearly GNU couldn't have gotten where it is today without Linux. But maybe it would have gotten further. Maybe I'd still be working on GCC if it wasn't for people like Linus telling us GCC people how wrong we were to not support all the extensions he'd decided to use (disregarding lack of specifications) and at the same time disregarding all the "pointy-headed academic" recommendations against using C to write a modern OS kernel. (I.e. Linus seemed to think C was obviously the best language to use for a kernel, at the same time he strongly pushed for all sorts of ad-hoc extensions to this supposed "wonderful language". My opinion: if the tool doesn't work for the task, either fix it yourself, or try another tool.) Who knows? Maybe as many people were turned off working on GNU by Linus as by RMS (though you'd have a hard time convincing me of that; RMS is rarely fun to work with).
One thing for sure: Linux owes its existence to GNU and the GPL in a way that is not nearly true in the opposite sense. Linus himself has explained how and why that's true.
Again, GNU was going strong before Linux existed, and continued along many paths during Linux' lifetime, including a substantial period when many important developments within Linux were withheld as contributions to GNU (due to a combination of factors, including problems on both the Linux and GNU sides).
I've done plenty of that in my career already. Or have you not even bothered to pull up my web site, search for my past USENET postings, etc.?
More precisely, Linux IPOs brought Linux to the mainstream. The percentage of people who have heard of GNU compared to those who have heard of Linux is probably vanishingly small.
Nice to see you're placing importance on the word "free". As I acknowledged above, the real, tangible benefit of Linux was that it was the first time many of us were able to have a free OS kernel running underneath the free GNU system-without-a-kernel we had been running for years already. It sure made a huge positive difference in my life at the time, and I continue to enjoy using Linux on my PC at home.
Well, so did FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. IMO, the deciding factor was the use of the GPL for Linux code -- history now suggests it "wins" over the BSD license for when companies decide to distribute their own code, and seems to do better for competing products when high-quality software types decide to contribute to projects.
And without GNU and the GPL, Linux might have ended up as public domain (and probably died within a few years) or BSDed (and probably ended up with much less of the free-Unix market compared to the free BSDs).
But that's just guessing on my part. I'm aware there was a lawsuit threatened against some or all of the free BSDs that slowed development, but I'm unimpressed with the timeframe during which that threat existed compared to the overall timeframe we're talking about. And I'm also aware of all the claims about BSD-type licensing (including MIT X-type licensing) being preferred -- to which I agree, when it comes to how person/company FOO wants person/company BAR to license BAR's own software. It's what FOO chooses to use on their own software that seems to have been the deciding point, but I can't be sure.
I'm not sure I understand how and where Linux "brought" those to the community moreso than GNU or other contributors. After all, GNU as an architecture significantly predated Linux. What I do believe Linux brought that was a unique contribution was the importance of competent project management as being crucial to project success -- IMO, Linus is vastly better as a project leader than RMS (and much better than myself). (I mean "project leader" in a wide sense here, including cheerleader, yeller-atter, etc. Not just how it's used within a typical corporate environment. But comparable corporate titles seem inappropriate for a free-software, all-volunteer development team.)
The really sad thing about this thread is that you've apparently assumed I'm anti-Linux because I disagreed with one or more of your most cherished assumptions.
The reality is, in ordinary conversations when I tell people what I do (or used to do anyway), I focus much more on Linux and its importance, mentioning GNU mainly to make sure they understand I didn't actually spend most of the past 12 years of my life working on Linux per se.
It's too bad Linux enthusiasts include so many who interpret any disagreement with their positions as being from people who are "anti-Linux". Having profited substantially off of the Red Hat IPO thanks to my longstanding contributions to "Linux", I guess I'll just laugh in my milkshake as such childishness.