You idiots: don't use active backplane switches (aka: Cisco). Drop me an email and I'll fix you up with something that falls into the "doesn't suck" category.
To Companies: Please don't comply w/ the GPL...
on
Tracking GPL Violators
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· Score: -1, Troll
Find and replace GPL'ed components with BSD components. Free enterprise and innovation from within corporations and small business will only happen if companies are able to protect their intellectual assets. Use of the GPL reduces or even eliminates the incentive for companies to innovate due to license entanglements with the GPL. The long term consequence to software will be stagnation of innovation and a reduction of brilliant people involved in said innovation. Using BSD licensed software eliminates this long term risk to innovation and software as a whole.
Companies: please don't support the GPL by compling with it. I implore all of you to not cave to the FSF and their sham of a license. Don't violate the license either. Instead, fix your errs and rip out GPL bits and replace them with BSD alternatives. It'll hurt, but that's the price that organizations need to pay for being braid dead and not thinking about the licenses involved in their products (or the price for letting managers circum to GPL zealot employees).
Companies sponsoring innovation (either internally or externally in the form of Open Source) will result in continued advancements in technology. The GPL poses a greater risk to the health of innovation than Microsoft. The long term consequence being small software businesses will find it harder to compete against large software corporations because the barrier to entry (base libraries, tools, software, data, etc.) for completing complex projects that can be sold will be sufficiently high and prohibitive. Who in business wants to create a product that you want to sell, but are obligated to give away for free?
Well written software doesn't require much service: it should sit in a closet and tick away for years, even decades (provided hardware will run for that long). The "paid commercial support" argument is flawed in that it only applies to substandard products that are either poorly written, buggy, are made of non-durable components and break, or is poorly documented and *requires* commercial support. BSD licensed software lurks like a dark horse on the Internet, free for the taking and often without support. How come? Because the market for support is too small to have proliferated into something mainstream. Why? BSD software is generally written or used by paid engineers who write/assimilate software with a high degree of skill. In short: it just works.
BSD licensed software makes markets work and allows free enterprise to exist for small businesses. GPL software stagnates markets and maintains superiority of large corporations due to licensing constraints.
As a commercial software vendor, if all OSS utilities became GPL'ed, I'd end up going and buying a Microsoft SDK to author a commercial product. The reason ASPs became a popular business model during the dot com rush was largely due to the fact that the OSS base libraries and tools that could get a company up and running easily, were all GPL'ed and prevented companies from shipping their product because that would've required shipping their source code too. Anyone want to bet that if companies shipped appliances instead of offering services via an ASP model, that more customers would still be using those appliances and that the technology crash would've have been as severe?
Support innovation. Cease using GPL software. Buck the trend and use BSD/MIT licensed alternatives to GPL software/libraries/operating systems. Compete effectively, efficiently, innovate where possible, and reap the rewards for technical excellence.
Whoever is publishing this book is going to take a bath on the project. I wish whoever did this wouldn't have been so stupid. And to whoever wrote this book, why did you push for a GFDL'ed online book? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Go ask Pearson publishing about this, they and many other publishers have first hand accounts of the failings of the GFDL. Unfortunately, this publisher will probably not write another book about BSD, even though it's the GFDL that is to blame. If Pearson Publishing Group (they own Addison Weseley, Sam, etc.) has a lesson to teach other publishers, it would be that GFDL is the problem, not the content. Hopefully this publisher is all the wiser. Stupid, stupid, stupid. On the bright side, at least this will go down as another failure for GNU and its licenses.... which isn't a bad thing. Hopefully more people will wake up to reality and stop being braindead. *sigh* One can hope. Death to the GPL and friends.
Picked up Vonage for both of my folks and they haven't looked back. I'm a week or so away from ordering a line for myself. At my folks', I've disconnected telco service completely at one location and have set the other to metered service (required for DSL). Other than Comcast sucking ass (Speakeasy + Vonage is the way to go, IMHO), I haven't had any complaints or problems and can only say, "this is the way phone service was supposed to be implemented."
I wish Speakeasy/Covad could offer "raw-dsl" (DSL w/o needing a phone number attached to the line), but I'll suffer until the telco's get smacked around by a new FCC chairman (let's face it, Powell doesn't have the guts to make this happen).
Is anyone else tired of Sun's copycat software development? Sun, go home, your development efforts aren't interesting to those who think outside of the box anymore. FreeBSD has had jails since March 2000. Sure jail(8) never had a marketing department come along to spiff up the name, but your software is of no interest anymore.
Now, what Sun can do with an Opteron, on the other hand, is of interest.
T SUN PLZ BE SHIPPINK ME A 32 WAY OPTERON TEST BOX K PLZ THX
Having once been a Linux user and now a convert to BSD, why exactly is this surprising to anyone but the Linux zealots? As someone who is security conscious, it's a no brainer that BSD is the place to be for security, reliability, and stability. BSD is designed, engineered, and tightly managed, whereas Linux is grown. clue_bat.apply(linux_users)
Anyone else find it ironic that companies using the GPL are complaining about an advertising clause in a BSD licensed software? What a bunch of hypocrits. Use FreeBSD. 'nuff said.
...not researching other OSes and for having used Linux for as many years as I did. What a waste of time and productivity killer... though a fun toy. I don't feel guilty for using my Mac and I especially don't feel guilty for saying that FreeBSD/KDE is my preferred desktop over even my Mac. Mac and FreeBSD, from the dawn of opening a new CD to the installation on a piece of hardware, is so close it's not even funny (props to the ports@/kde@ teams!). Here's the killer though, and the reason I use my Mac more than my PoS Dell FreeBSD laptop (good OS, bad hardware): the hardware and design is just too good to be true. Have any other Powerbook users ever wondered when the novelty of being able to have my powerbook snap out of sleep mode in less than 2seconds will wear off? Too many years of bad Intel hardware have left me with an all to permanent disdain for x86. I'm hoping that AMD will have decent x86-64 power management in the coming years and will be able to compete with Mac's Powerbooks, but until then... no, I don't feel guilty. If you're a mecanic, do you feel guilty for driving a BMW M5? I hope not, I know I wouldn't.
I beg to differ. Having a Mac around is becoming a cost of business as a large chunk of my software is run by Mac users. Qt/Mac++. My main desktop is, and always will be FreeBSD, but when it comes right down to it, there's no substitute for having a target platform easily accessable, nevermind that it's actually a halfway decent desktop that I don't mind using (though I do miss KDE's extensive keyboard shortcuts).
Buy a mac, play games on your mac, and dump your Win98 partition. I did and now I'm Microsoft free! A little KOffice, Keynote, and Safari, and I don't have a stitch of MS anywhere now that I've got Warcraft III for the Mac. A commercial operating system with commercial programs, with a BSD core. Happiness is OS-X and FreeBSD interoperability. Now to purge the world of that nasty little penguin and dolphin database and computing will be a place again.
Actually, I care a great deal. A native KDE is of huge interest to me. Being able to seemlessly move from my FreeBSD desktops to my os-x desktop would be absolutely KILLER! As for the comments about Safari vs. Konqueror, Konqueror is a power user's browser that I really enjoy using because of all of its options. OmniWeb is a dumed down version of Konqueror.... that said, give me Konqueror any day of the week and twice on Sunday, but as for my spouse? She'll take a copy of Safari, thank you very much. Different apps for different folks.
I know it's probably been said, but check out FreeBSD. Good crowd, standards, and lots of documentation that's well written. Apps are easy to install/deinstall/upgrade via the ports. I took my mom from Win2K -> FreeBSD over the phone a year or so back and she hasn't looked back since (and she's not technical, FWIW). -sc
WOA WOA WOA! Hold on a sec, Ruby is far from a hacked language. If you look at its design, the underlying language/structure, and its approach to solving problems, you'll find it significantly more elegant and well designed than both Perl and Python. Please read the source code or use the language before you start tossing around opinions. Having used all three languages and extended all three using C, I strongly suggest you step back and re-evaluate your position: you might be surprised. I know I was when I did....
I recently started an open source project and needed a language to prototype in. Perl doesn't have threads. Python is alright, but it hasn't ever struck my fancy and seems a tad anal. Ruby on the other hand has a host of great features that are very programmer friendly and, here's the kicker, are System Admin friendly!
Memory usage
speed, regexp
threads (platform independent!)
platform independence
GUI support
easy to extend via C
exceptions (similar to Java)
catch/throw
dynamically redefining the language
list goes on...
It's a total non-java dream!!! I don't ever do this, but for the M$ developers in the crowd, you have access to that side of the world too. This isn't a scripting language in the same way that sh or perl is a scripting language, instead I think of it as an actual language that's viable for large projects as well as the small sysadmin scripts that I've historically written in perl. Because Ruby is easier to extend than perl (don't know about python) it tends to see library and package updates more quickly than most and it's got a whole host of libraries to choose from (see your local FreeBSD ports collection for an idea). It really gives perl a run for its money in terms of module support (and often times exceeds perl). Anyway, some food for thought.
Check out ruby as a programing language. With ruby I've been able to drop perl as a language and java. It's very very nice! FWIW. -sc
Umm.... I agree with Microsoft on this point...
on
Microsoft and the GPL
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· Score: 1
Government funded software that is public domain shouldn't restrict the code's incorporation into the software that my business uses. I'd be annoyed as hell that my corporate tax dollars were being spent towards software that is useless.
BSD licensed software on the other hand, would be great. I wonder if the courts will rule the the GPL illegal for existing software that is federally funded and developed under the GPL.
I develop commercial software, I am an Open Source advicate, and I hate the GPL. I love the Apache and BSD style licenses because they allow me to create commercial products with relative ease and it allows me to not start my product from ground zero. All of you high-school zelots who haven't worked in the real world need to pipe down about the merits of the GPL because honestly, who the fu#@ would want to use it? If you want to advance your piece of software and want help from people who develop software for a living, use the BSD license. GPL is for the kiddies.
Database schema changes aren't a problem with versioned databases and reflection. If you're a proceedural programmer, this is a huge twist on reality. Some DBAs just can't handle this kind of world and their heads explode because it just doesn't compute. Normalized data sets are _no longer required_. It takes a while to chew on and digest, but I can't say as they're all that bad. -sc
Regardless of what the study has to say, I'm hoping that politics move to the Internet later than sooner. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician purchased an e-mail list? It's bad enough that I start getting political junk mail when I subscribe to magazines. The thought of getting stuff from the Republican party when I dump information into the Nasdaq or Forbes is pretty repulsive, or even from the Democratic national party when I submit something to a tree hugger's site. Let politics stay in the physical world as long as possible so that it has the farthest to catch up when it finally does move online. If the Internet is really about change, then let's not bring dead weight from politics into the mess of things in the online world. The seporation of the digital world from the physical one is something that I personally enjoy a great deal. Not hearing about Clinton (except when it comes to crypto) this, Bush that, or Gore bleah bleah bleah is almost comforting. Sure politics are important, don't get me wrong, I vote and like to think that I am good at educating myself about whatever is on the ballot before an election, but the absence of politics online... is nice to say the least. I hope politics stay offline for as long as possible... well... until the day when we have a canidate that knows (or knew) how to program in C and knows the first bit about how networks operate (or even the Internet for that matter, but I may be getting wishful at this point). The sad part is that I think I may have to settle... There are choices in soft drinks, operating systems, but not in politicians...::sigh::
Slashdot Mirror
You idiots: don't use active backplane switches (aka: Cisco). Drop me an email and I'll fix you up with something that falls into the "doesn't suck" category.
Find and replace GPL'ed components with BSD components. Free enterprise and innovation from within corporations and small business will only happen if companies are able to protect their intellectual assets. Use of the GPL reduces or even eliminates the incentive for companies to innovate due to license entanglements with the GPL. The long term consequence to software will be stagnation of innovation and a reduction of brilliant people involved in said innovation. Using BSD licensed software eliminates this long term risk to innovation and software as a whole.
Companies: please don't support the GPL by compling with it. I implore all of you to not cave to the FSF and their sham of a license. Don't violate the license either. Instead, fix your errs and rip out GPL bits and replace them with BSD alternatives. It'll hurt, but that's the price that organizations need to pay for being braid dead and not thinking about the licenses involved in their products (or the price for letting managers circum to GPL zealot employees).
Companies sponsoring innovation (either internally or externally in the form of Open Source) will result in continued advancements in technology. The GPL poses a greater risk to the health of innovation than Microsoft. The long term consequence being small software businesses will find it harder to compete against large software corporations because the barrier to entry (base libraries, tools, software, data, etc.) for completing complex projects that can be sold will be sufficiently high and prohibitive. Who in business wants to create a product that you want to sell, but are obligated to give away for free?
Well written software doesn't require much service: it should sit in a closet and tick away for years, even decades (provided hardware will run for that long). The "paid commercial support" argument is flawed in that it only applies to substandard products that are either poorly written, buggy, are made of non-durable components and break, or is poorly documented and *requires* commercial support. BSD licensed software lurks like a dark horse on the Internet, free for the taking and often without support. How come? Because the market for support is too small to have proliferated into something mainstream. Why? BSD software is generally written or used by paid engineers who write/assimilate software with a high degree of skill. In short: it just works.
BSD licensed software makes markets work and allows free enterprise to exist for small businesses. GPL software stagnates markets and maintains superiority of large corporations due to licensing constraints.
As a commercial software vendor, if all OSS utilities became GPL'ed, I'd end up going and buying a Microsoft SDK to author a commercial product. The reason ASPs became a popular business model during the dot com rush was largely due to the fact that the OSS base libraries and tools that could get a company up and running easily, were all GPL'ed and prevented companies from shipping their product because that would've required shipping their source code too. Anyone want to bet that if companies shipped appliances instead of offering services via an ASP model, that more customers would still be using those appliances and that the technology crash would've have been as severe?
Support innovation. Cease using GPL software. Buck the trend and use BSD/MIT licensed alternatives to GPL software/libraries/operating systems. Compete effectively, efficiently, innovate where possible, and reap the rewards for technical excellence.
FuckOffYou, unsecured residential AP
Whoever is publishing this book is going to take a bath on the project. I wish whoever did this wouldn't have been so stupid. And to whoever wrote this book, why did you push for a GFDL'ed online book? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Go ask Pearson publishing about this, they and many other publishers have first hand accounts of the failings of the GFDL. Unfortunately, this publisher will probably not write another book about BSD, even though it's the GFDL that is to blame. If Pearson Publishing Group (they own Addison Weseley, Sam, etc.) has a lesson to teach other publishers, it would be that GFDL is the problem, not the content. Hopefully this publisher is all the wiser. Stupid, stupid, stupid. On the bright side, at least this will go down as another failure for GNU and its licenses.... which isn't a bad thing. Hopefully more people will wake up to reality and stop being braindead. *sigh* One can hope. Death to the GPL and friends.
Vonage++
Picked up Vonage for both of my folks and they haven't looked back. I'm a week or so away from ordering a line for myself. At my folks', I've disconnected telco service completely at one location and have set the other to metered service (required for DSL). Other than Comcast sucking ass (Speakeasy + Vonage is the way to go, IMHO), I haven't had any complaints or problems and can only say, "this is the way phone service was supposed to be implemented."
I wish Speakeasy/Covad could offer "raw-dsl" (DSL w/o needing a phone number attached to the line), but I'll suffer until the telco's get smacked around by a new FCC chairman (let's face it, Powell doesn't have the guts to make this happen).
Now if we could only get the FCC to open up telephone lines for "raw DSL" (DSL service without telephone service), I'd really be happy....
Is anyone else tired of Sun's copycat software development? Sun, go home, your development efforts aren't interesting to those who think outside of the box anymore. FreeBSD has had jails since March 2000. Sure jail(8) never had a marketing department come along to spiff up the name, but your software is of no interest anymore.
Now, what Sun can do with an Opteron, on the other hand, is of interest.
T SUN PLZ BE SHIPPINK ME A 32 WAY OPTERON TEST BOX K PLZ THX
Having once been a Linux user and now a convert to BSD, why exactly is this surprising to anyone but the Linux zealots? As someone who is security conscious, it's a no brainer that BSD is the place to be for security, reliability, and stability. BSD is designed, engineered, and tightly managed, whereas Linux is grown. clue_bat.apply(linux_users)
Anyone else find it ironic that companies using the GPL are complaining about an advertising clause in a BSD licensed software? What a bunch of hypocrits. Use FreeBSD. 'nuff said.
F- the GPL. I need to write an updated version of this that follows a more legally friendly format, but:
http://people.freebsd.org/~seanc/ossal/
The GPL is the worst thing to happen to software development and stability in the last 20 years.
...not researching other OSes and for having used Linux for as many years as I did. What a waste of time and productivity killer... though a fun toy. I don't feel guilty for using my Mac and I especially don't feel guilty for saying that FreeBSD/KDE is my preferred desktop over even my Mac. Mac and FreeBSD, from the dawn of opening a new CD to the installation on a piece of hardware, is so close it's not even funny (props to the ports@/kde@ teams!). Here's the killer though, and the reason I use my Mac more than my PoS Dell FreeBSD laptop (good OS, bad hardware): the hardware and design is just too good to be true. Have any other Powerbook users ever wondered when the novelty of being able to have my powerbook snap out of sleep mode in less than 2seconds will wear off? Too many years of bad Intel hardware have left me with an all to permanent disdain for x86. I'm hoping that AMD will have decent x86-64 power management in the coming years and will be able to compete with Mac's Powerbooks, but until then... no, I don't feel guilty. If you're a mecanic, do you feel guilty for driving a BMW M5? I hope not, I know I wouldn't.
I beg to differ. Having a Mac around is becoming a cost of business as a large chunk of my software is run by Mac users. Qt/Mac++. My main desktop is, and always will be FreeBSD, but when it comes right down to it, there's no substitute for having a target platform easily accessable, nevermind that it's actually a halfway decent desktop that I don't mind using (though I do miss KDE's extensive keyboard shortcuts).
Buy a mac, play games on your mac, and dump your Win98 partition. I did and now I'm Microsoft free! A little KOffice, Keynote, and Safari, and I don't have a stitch of MS anywhere now that I've got Warcraft III for the Mac. A commercial operating system with commercial programs, with a BSD core. Happiness is OS-X and FreeBSD interoperability. Now to purge the world of that nasty little penguin and dolphin database and computing will be a place again.
Actually, I care a great deal. A native KDE is of huge interest to me. Being able to seemlessly move from my FreeBSD desktops to my os-x desktop would be absolutely KILLER! As for the comments about Safari vs. Konqueror, Konqueror is a power user's browser that I really enjoy using because of all of its options. OmniWeb is a dumed down version of Konqueror.... that said, give me Konqueror any day of the week and twice on Sunday, but as for my spouse? She'll take a copy of Safari, thank you very much. Different apps for different folks.
I know it's probably been said, but check out FreeBSD. Good crowd, standards, and lots of documentation that's well written. Apps are easy to install/deinstall/upgrade via the ports. I took my mom from Win2K -> FreeBSD over the phone a year or so back and she hasn't looked back since (and she's not technical, FWIW). -sc
WOA WOA WOA! Hold on a sec, Ruby is far from a hacked language. If you look at its design, the underlying language/structure, and its approach to solving problems, you'll find it significantly more elegant and well designed than both Perl and Python. Please read the source code or use the language before you start tossing around opinions. Having used all three languages and extended all three using C, I strongly suggest you step back and re-evaluate your position: you might be surprised. I know I was when I did....
Actually, you'd write something like the following:
(0..20).each do |x|
print x + "\n"
end
If you think about it, a for loop is just a range, which is a built in class into ruby (over ridable though, of course).
I recently started an open source project and needed a language to prototype in. Perl doesn't have threads. Python is alright, but it hasn't ever struck my fancy and seems a tad anal. Ruby on the other hand has a host of great features that are very programmer friendly and, here's the kicker, are System Admin friendly!
It's a total non-java dream!!! I don't ever do this, but for the M$ developers in the crowd, you have access to that side of the world too. This isn't a scripting language in the same way that sh or perl is a scripting language, instead I think of it as an actual language that's viable for large projects as well as the small sysadmin scripts that I've historically written in perl. Because Ruby is easier to extend than perl (don't know about python) it tends to see library and package updates more quickly than most and it's got a whole host of libraries to choose from (see your local FreeBSD ports collection for an idea). It really gives perl a run for its money in terms of module support (and often times exceeds perl). Anyway, some food for thought.
-sc
PS Here's a list of ruby modules that are included in FreeBSD.
Check out ruby as a programing language. With ruby I've been able to drop perl as a language and java. It's very very nice! FWIW. -sc
Government funded software that is public domain shouldn't restrict the code's incorporation into the software that my business uses. I'd be annoyed as hell that my corporate tax dollars were being spent towards software that is useless.
BSD licensed software on the other hand, would be great. I wonder if the courts will rule the the GPL illegal for existing software that is federally funded and developed under the GPL.
I develop commercial software, I am an Open Source advicate, and I hate the GPL. I love the Apache and BSD style licenses because they allow me to create commercial products with relative ease and it allows me to not start my product from ground zero. All of you high-school zelots who haven't worked in the real world need to pipe down about the merits of the GPL because honestly, who the fu#@ would want to use it? If you want to advance your piece of software and want help from people who develop software for a living, use the BSD license. GPL is for the kiddies.
Database schema changes aren't a problem with versioned databases and reflection. If you're a proceedural programmer, this is a huge twist on reality. Some DBAs just can't handle this kind of world and their heads explode because it just doesn't compute. Normalized data sets are _no longer required_. It takes a while to chew on and digest, but I can't say as they're all that bad. -sc
it's called FreeBSD.
Regardless of what the study has to say, I'm hoping that politics move to the Internet later than sooner. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician purchased an e-mail list? It's bad enough that I start getting political junk mail when I subscribe to magazines. The thought of getting stuff from the Republican party when I dump information into the Nasdaq or Forbes is pretty repulsive, or even from the Democratic national party when I submit something to a tree hugger's site. ::sigh::
Let politics stay in the physical world as long as possible so that it has the farthest to catch up when it finally does move online. If the Internet is really about change, then let's not bring dead weight from politics into the mess of things in the online world.
The seporation of the digital world from the physical one is something that I personally enjoy a great deal. Not hearing about Clinton (except when it comes to crypto) this, Bush that, or Gore bleah bleah bleah is almost comforting. Sure politics are important, don't get me wrong, I vote and like to think that I am good at educating myself about whatever is on the ballot before an election, but the absence of politics online... is nice to say the least.
I hope politics stay offline for as long as possible... well... until the day when we have a canidate that knows (or knew) how to program in C and knows the first bit about how networks operate (or even the Internet for that matter, but I may be getting wishful at this point). The sad part is that I think I may have to settle... There are choices in soft drinks, operating systems, but not in politicians...