I had mod points yesterday. Today I see a comment that's badly moded, and my points are expired..
In any case, I second the note. No large-compamny CEO in his right mind is going to pay the stock prices at dell.com or ibm.com. They're going to call up their personal sales rep and say "I'm buying 4000 machines next month. What's the price without Windows?".
The people who have little choice but to pay stock price at the tier-1 manufacturers are also the same ones who have half a dozen friends who can point them to a local grey-box manufacturer who can give them a much better price with better local support. (i.e. they won't go: "Your CD died?? Well, first you have to load Windows on your box, then you have to reinstall it.").
For me, it's literally the computer store next door (OK: 2 doors down). He'll sell me a cheap box for $285CDN (about $230US) without windows, and another $100 ($80USD) for XP home.
The reason why Microsoft makes it so hard to get boxes without Windows at places like DEL and IBM is that they know that if home users can get easy access to Linux, they'll talk about how well it works when they get to work, and that'll infiltrate to the CEO who'll start a pilot project on the corporate desktop.
They also don't want corporate CEOs to just buy their $3000 home box with Linux installed on it 'on a lark' and (once again) find out just how much functionality and security they get (see previous paragraph).
If you want to grow your own, you might want to build an industrial-grade hot-air popper.
My suggestion would be to go out and rent a high-volume propane dryer/heater. You then want to get the air volume down, and the propane volume up to the point where the gas coming out of the thing is about the same temperature as comes out of a hot air popper (I don't have one, so I can't do the measurement for you -- those cheap oven thermometers that you can get in some dollar or grocery stores should do a good job of this).
Once you've tuned your dryer, then you need to pump the air from it thru a reasonably large drum with a mesh bottem nailed onto it. The mesh needs to be fine enough to hold popcorn kernels in (obviously). I'd suggest that you also weld some metal rods to the bottom to help keep the mesh from sagging, and a yard or two of piping between the heater and the popcorn bin, to keep open flame from any popcorn bits.. At a quick guess, you should be able to pop around 10 pounds of popcorn at a batch and get some number of cubic feet/minute.
some trivia:
Dunno how I did it, but I have a reasonably high-rated site on "making popcorn" (as opposed to, say "popping popcorn"). This goes well beyond what my site addresses.
Popcorn is used by some companies as a packing supply, so I don't think that it's going to be that highly flamable.. That having been said, It's far from flame-resistant. If you're going to do something like this you would probably be well off to make sure that the pilot lights on the furnaces and stoves (etc) are turned off.
The flame war over the flamability of popcorn got me curious, so I did a quick test. I did a batch of (oil-popped) popcorn, and tried lighting a small sample. It wasn't trivial to light (took a few seconds with a match to get it to light), but once lit it produced a growing flame. I'd suggest keeping a loaded garden hose nearby when you do this.
1 and 2 are a choice of style. many sites do NOT want conversational
filler. It just gets in the way of finding the facts needed for
the investigation.
These people probably go thru hundreds of complaint emails a day. My system is automated, so they sometimes will get 3 or 4 emails from me in a day. There's no real value in pretending that I sat down to write the thing in person. Again: Don't lie. It just gets in the way of the real work. I did deal directly with the supervisor at Shaw, and he didn't even vaguely ask for conversational patter.
As one TV investigator was prone to say: "Just the facts, mam."
I'm actually coming from the point of view that they intend to respond. If they're intending to respond, then I just want to get out of the way as much as possible. If they don't intend to respond, then I'm not going to waste my time on them. They're not going to hear from me again unless they email to ask me for more data or I get another attack from a machine in their IP range.
More important is to remove the ambiguities -- any opportunity for them to misread the heart of the message. For example: Looking back at my original letter, I see the line:
possible nimda scan detected from IP 10.161.0.88 (alb-10-161-0-88.attack-domain.com.) at 08/07/2002 17:26:56
'Possible nimda scan detected from' can be read two ways... I could be read that '10;161.0.88' is Detecting the attack. I would now change remove the word 'detected' and go with:
possible nimda scan by IP 10.161.0.88 (alb-10-161-0-88.attack-domain.com.) at 08/07/2002 17:26:56
$700 is an average, but it's far from telling the truth.
Madagascar, to take one example, has a population of 17.5million and a GDP of $14.3billion. There's a pretty wide disparity between the upper and lower classes. The upper 10% gets 30% of the income. The lower 10% gets 3% of the income, so that comes to an average of $233/year each -- or about $19/month. From that, you get to subtract food and rent, and Then start to save for a PC.
It's not too hard for most of us to spend $19/day on food, not to mention rent.
Given that most 3rd world companies tend to have a high disparity between the upper class and lower class, and 70% are below the poverty line, I'm guessing that most average villages are going to be full of people closer to $300-$400/year than the $800/year national average.
For people with an average income of $30/month, putting together $100 for a PC (even as a village) is still going to be a hard sell, no matter how much good we can see it doing for them. Putting together $400 for a current cheap PC would look all but impossible.
Microsoft has to include "your copyright and the BSD license" in every *binary* distribution as well.
OK: Oops on my part, but it need not be anywhere near obvious... The 'and/or other materials provided with the distribution' allows it to be burried in some well-forgotten corner. As an example, you may notice just how obvious it is(n't) what parts of Windows are still based on BSD code.
My point is that you're talking about stalinism, not communism.
Under stalinism what the workers saw is that they worked their asses off, and the party bigwigs lived on the high hog of the the workers' efforts -- Not much different than some 'capitalistic' corporations.
Communism is 'give according to capability, take according to need'. Stalinism is 'Give according to the party plan, take according to rank in the party.'
Since rank in the party mattered far more than what one contributed to the commons workers had no real incentive to work hard.
Communism is also supposed to be controled by the workers -- a democracy by another name. Stalinism would have none of that. -- thus the workers were working on the plans of distant bigwigs, with no input to the plan, and no real profit for their work (it all went to the same bigwigs). That pretty much sucks.
This is part of the reason why sweat shops work so well in impoverished 3rd and 4th world countries -- It's pretty much the same situation as stalinist russia, except for the fact that the workers are literally discardable. If the worker doesn't do exactly what you tell them to when you tell them to and how you tell them to, you can simply toss them out like a rag, and find somebody even more desperate than them to work under slave-like conditions. If they hold a strike, you can just call in the police (or a private security force) to shoot them.
Pretty much the same as the worst of the stalinist era -- or the US Circa the 1930s.
Sweden is an example of a socialist state -- with democracy, socialized health care and pretty much cradle-to-grave support from the government. The standard of living and productivity are both relatively high.
Mexico is another example of the extremes of capitalism. -- A very steep pyramid, with a few extremely rich and lots of extremely poor. There are few social services, lots of very desparate people and some really nasty problems with things like pollution from companies with very little public oversight.
My understanding is that the original MS TCP stack was heavily based on the BSD code, and that's why they included things like Telnet, ftp, ping, etc. Some of the broken behaviour was explicitly put in there to give IE an 'unfair' advantage when talking to IIS servers.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's been rewritten in the decade + since then.
Dunno about the history of the kerberos code, but if you take it as a hypothetical premise, it still stands as an example of what can be done with/to BSD licensed code.
Microsoft would have to be insane to knowingly include GPL code in Windows. With sanctions like $30,000 per willful infringement, if anybody recognized their code and proved it, MS would have to choose between giving billions of dallars to the FSF (or whomever owned the code) or opening up huge chunks of Windows code to the GPL. Both of those possibilities should keep Bill awake at night and sweating.
The companies most likely to attempt to purloin GPL code are smaller (startup) companies that have little to lose because they have little to start with. For the most part, I'd guess that the big companies that have been found using GPL code inside of proprietary releases are most likely to have done it by mistake (eg: a programmer under deadline snarfed the code and didn't tell their boss).
If the prospectus of the company says that you're going to focus on providing service and quality at the expense of possible profit, then they can't sue you for keeping your word.
On the other hand, (modulo the insanity of the.com boom), that kind of prospectus is unlikely to get much in the way of big-money investment. That's why most companies (explicitly or implicitly) claim that they're out to make big money first -- and that's where they get caught.
Microslft has the simple advantage of market force. If they make a 1% modification to your code, that is incompatible, they can deny you access to their changes and close off the modified version from you by never releasing the changes, and preventing you from duplicating them (e.g. by patent restrictions).
All they have to do is acknowlege that some of the code came from you. Under the more recent BSD license, that acknowlegement can be rather minimal.
The only place that Microsoft has to include your copyright and the BSD license is in the source code, and nobody outside of Microsoft (and people who sign an NDA) are likely to see that source code.
Microsoft modified the Kerberos code to be incompatible with (and less potable than) the original. Notice how many people are ripping out MS's code and replacing it with the original Kerberos code??? Chances are, that they can't because of MS's EULA which bars you from various forms of deconstruction, reverse engineering and modification.
If the original kerberos didn't already have a rather large market share outside of Windows, it would have been pretty esay for MS to make the original code effectively moot, and their own (slightly modified) version the 'official' version. They still may manage to do so and it has little, if anything, to do with how good the code is -- simply that MS controls the market.
Even though the original Kerberos writers still have access to their original code, the only way that they can legally use their code with the 90%+ market share that MS windows has is to pay hommage to Microsoft. I haven't seen MS's EULA for the documentation of the modifications, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would require the Kerberos people to donate their entire code base to Microsoft.
At that point, if closing off the modified code to your eyes doesn't qualify as 'taking' your code, I think that stongarming you into giving them full rights so that you can interoperate with what may be 99% your code on (your) Windows boxes should.
P
Point is: If you're fine with something like that happening, then you're free to use the BSD license. The GPL, on the other hand, is designed to make situations like that all but impossible, and that's at least part of the reason why so many people like it.
People run around screaming "Communist!" like it's a threat to democracy. It's really not. Soviet Russia suffered under Stalinism. True communism is really not much different than Capitalism, except for the fact that the profits are more evenly distributed to the workers and management gets minimum perks from their position (at least in theory).
Fact of the matter is that that's really the way that capitalism was meant to work under Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (considered by many to be the godfather of modern capitalism. Under his view, big multinational corporations were (are) no different than big government -- both result in centralized decision making which warps local economies.
What the GPL does is it forces decision-making back down to the local levels and prevents a big company from controlling the entire market by force. This is actually far closer to real capitalism than either Microsoft's market-warping monopoly. And also far closer to closer to capitalism than it it is to Stalin's market-warping communism.
It's also far more intrinsically democratic than either.
So, the next time Gates & company starts screaming 'communist', respond
It's not communism. It's financial democracy
Re:Here's why I love it:
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
- why do all companies have to be evil.
Not all companies have to be evil, but public companies are generally responsible to their shareholders and the management and directors will often be pushed by those same shareholders to produce maximum profit without regard to how. If that means doing evil stuff, some shareholders (especially bigger ones) often feel insulated from that effect.
It's the kind of process that allowed things like the holocaust... The people at the bottom claimed that they were only doing their job, while the people at the top claimed that they really didn't know what the people at the bottom were doing. The handfull of nastys who did the really nasty stuff could be conveniently hung out to dry from time to time, but the entire beomoth still profits from their nasty work.
You can protect some companies from the call of the dollar, but it takes a good deal of work, and gets harder if/when the company becomes more successfull (snd thus more attractive to the money-suckers).
Re:Here's why I love it:
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The GPL license provides freedom for the code. The freedom for the code provides future freedom for programmers (including the originator of the code). The BSD licens provides a little bit of extra freedom for the programmer (or more to the point for the company who hired the programmer) in the form of the freedom to 'enslave' the code (make it proprietary).
In the case of a large market beomoth like Microsoft, this means that they can now take that code, make minor (but incompatible) changes to it, and make their proprietary modifications the 'standard' by dint of their market force. At that point, you could be forced to pay for acccess to what is,. in fact, 99% your own code because your (free) version has been made irrelevant by MS's market force (even if the incompatible changes actually make the code inferior to your free version).
MIcrosoft did that with the BSD TCP stack, and the Kerberos code (and, I'm sure, other code with similar licenses). Apple came close to doing that with the entire BSD OS. If you like the ego bost of having a company like Microsoft take your code, close it off to you and make big money charging you (among other people) for access to your own code under their onerous EULAs, -- and if that ego boost is way more important than having your code free and useful to the entire community that uses it (and able to come back to you), then the BSD license is for you.
If you wish to ensure that everybody (including yourself) will have access to whatever version of your code people produce, then the GPL is probably a better kind of license for you.
Yes, there are other licenses, and people have investigated and used them. Some, like Sun's license force people to feed changes back to the original author so that they can make proprietary versions. This may seem good for the original author, but subsequent contributors may be wary of what will happen with their code and this may discourage contributions.
The reason why the GPL is so rampant is that it is carefully crafted to strike a very distinct balance, and it's done a good job of it so far. If a better license comes along, people will (hopefully) flock to it instead. In the menatime, the GPL is king, and I think that that's a good thing.
I ran into it on a poster at a store in Edmonton a long long time ago. I vaguely remember it being attached to a threat against people who insisted on smoking. In any case, I remembered it because it just seemed so.... cute.
As for organic food being tough, you must have run into a batch of really bad organic carrots -- one of the ones that'll beat non-organic food without wilting a leaf.
It's not like Microsoft's taking any sort of responsibility for their code. GNU code also comes with a disclaimer, but at least with Linux+ you have both the right and the ability to fix any bugs you find if your distributor isn't in the mood to fix it right now (or properly).
If you'd been rooted, chances are that someone was using your box as a zombie-bot to crack into other systems. The email that I sent out complained about a worm. The email that they got about you probably complained about a hack attack, dos attempt, or something like that.
They pretty blindly accept whatever complaint they get and don't seem to do much, if any checking. My letter said Nimda Virus, so they forwarded their 'nimda virus' letter. If you read the email that they sent to me, you should notice a complete lack of any information that could identify the machine that was supposedly infected or even the time of the complained attack.
"Copyright 2003 BetaMax Corporation",..... Founded in January 2004 in USA,
The web page was written in 2003... by a psychic who knew what results the companies (1.1) years of research would produce. Once the predicted results were produced, she sold the rights to her product to the company -- thus saving them weeks of web page development.
First of all, never lie. That can come back to bite you. In this case, if they paniced and misread the log, they might cut off our connection and then send the threatening email. This would be very bad.
The second issue is that these emails did not only go to shaw.They went to whichever ISP claimed responsibility for the offending IP. Sometimes they sent the complaints back to shaw tryin to pin the error on me. It just doesn't work to threaten to stop dealing with someone who you're not dealing with them to begin with.
Sometimes they have complete idiots reading the logs.
Back when the nimda worm was running around, I wrote a home-grown IDS to watch web hits, identify nimda-type probes and, if I could find a reporting address for the offending IP email a complaint off to the responsible ISP.
We were being serviced by Shaw Cable at the time, and every once in a while, they'd misread my complaints, and figure that my box was the source of the attack, and they'd send a nasty email to my roommate (who the connection was registered to) threatening to cut off our internet if we didn't delete the viruses install a firewall, etc. (we each had our own BSD firewall).
I got to know one of the supervisors there reasonably well, modified the letter I sent out to make it all but impossible for the people who read the email to confuse the attacking box with the defender, and he even added a note to the file for our connection, which resulted in a period of quiet after which we got yet another threatening letter.
I responded with this letter. My roommate (who took this very seriously because he was paying business rates to be allowed to run servers on the line) thought that I was being a bit flippant about something so important (flippant?! It took me an hour to write the damn thing!), but the supervisor at shaw said that he got a bit of a chuckle out of it when he phoned me to apologize for the error and promise a fix.
His explanation was that shaw had installed a new abuse reporting system and that the note about our account had been lost in the transition (but would be added back in).
If you read my letter, (which includes the original autocomplaint) then you'll understand just how far people are willing to go to misread log files.
What precautions do these LiveCDs take to prevent damage from occuring to the installed base system?
As far as I can tell, the only thing that Knoppix will mount r/w by default is a Linux swap partition.
Things like NT filesystems are only mounted read-only unless you specifically ask for it to be re-mounted read-write.
When you get to the boot prompt, instead of hitting 'enter' (or waiting for it to timeout and boot), you can go
knoppix noswap
That will cause it to ignore any swap partitions and not write ANYTHING to the disk unless/until you say so (good for forensic work.)
So the short answer is: If you've got a Windows box, I can pretty much guarantee that your disk is safe unless you work at doing damage to it. ((If you want to damage the data on a drive, and you want to do it as root, then Linux will simply get out of your way. The gui normally runs as the user 'knoppix' which doesn't have direct access to the hardware. Some programs like 'parted' run with root permissions, since they're designed to play with the partition table.))
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, I second the note. No large-compamny CEO in his right mind is going to pay the stock prices at dell.com or ibm.com. They're going to call up their personal sales rep and say "I'm buying 4000 machines next month. What's the price without Windows?".
The people who have little choice but to pay stock price at the tier-1 manufacturers are also the same ones who have half a dozen friends who can point them to a local grey-box manufacturer who can give them a much better price with better local support. (i.e. they won't go: "Your CD died?? Well, first you have to load Windows on your box, then you have to reinstall it.").
For me, it's literally the computer store next door (OK: 2 doors down). He'll sell me a cheap box for $285CDN (about $230US) without windows, and another $100 ($80USD) for XP home.
The reason why Microsoft makes it so hard to get boxes without Windows at places like DEL and IBM is that they know that if home users can get easy access to Linux, they'll talk about how well it works when they get to work, and that'll infiltrate to the CEO who'll start a pilot project on the corporate desktop.
They also don't want corporate CEOs to just buy their $3000 home box with Linux installed on it 'on a lark' and (once again) find out just how much functionality and security they get (see previous paragraph).
Should't that 'u' be an 'i'?
The proper link for my site on popping popcorn
My suggestion would be to go out and rent a high-volume propane dryer/heater. You then want to get the air volume down, and the propane volume up to the point where the gas coming out of the thing is about the same temperature as comes out of a hot air popper (I don't have one, so I can't do the measurement for you -- those cheap oven thermometers that you can get in some dollar or grocery stores should do a good job of this).
Once you've tuned your dryer, then you need to pump the air from it thru a reasonably large drum with a mesh bottem nailed onto it. The mesh needs to be fine enough to hold popcorn kernels in (obviously). I'd suggest that you also weld some metal rods to the bottom to help keep the mesh from sagging, and a yard or two of piping between the heater and the popcorn bin, to keep open flame from any popcorn bits.. At a quick guess, you should be able to pop around 10 pounds of popcorn at a batch and get some number of cubic feet/minute.
some trivia:
Dunno how I did it, but I have a reasonably high-rated site on "making popcorn" (as opposed to, say "popping popcorn"). This goes well beyond what my site addresses.
Popcorn is used by some companies as a packing supply, so I don't think that it's going to be that highly flamable.. That having been said, It's far from flame-resistant. If you're going to do something like this you would probably be well off to make sure that the pilot lights on the furnaces and stoves (etc) are turned off.
The flame war over the flamability of popcorn got me curious, so I did a quick test. I did a batch of (oil-popped) popcorn, and tried lighting a small sample. It wasn't trivial to light (took a few seconds with a match to get it to light), but once lit it produced a growing flame. I'd suggest keeping a loaded garden hose nearby when you do this.
These people probably go thru hundreds of complaint emails a day. My system is automated, so they sometimes will get 3 or 4 emails from me in a day. There's no real value in pretending that I sat down to write the thing in person. Again: Don't lie. It just gets in the way of the real work. I did deal directly with the supervisor at Shaw, and he didn't even vaguely ask for conversational patter.
As one TV investigator was prone to say: "Just the facts, mam."
I'm actually coming from the point of view that they intend to respond. If they're intending to respond, then I just want to get out of the way as much as possible. If they don't intend to respond, then I'm not going to waste my time on them. They're not going to hear from me again unless they email to ask me for more data or I get another attack from a machine in their IP range.
More important is to remove the ambiguities -- any opportunity for them to misread the heart of the message. For example: Looking back at my original letter, I see the line:
'Possible nimda scan detected from' can be read two ways... I could be read that '10;161.0.88' is Detecting the attack. I would now change remove the word 'detected' and go with:Madagascar, to take one example, has a population of 17.5million and a GDP of $14.3billion. There's a pretty wide disparity between the upper and lower classes. The upper 10% gets 30% of the income. The lower 10% gets 3% of the income, so that comes to an average of $233/year each -- or about $19/month. From that, you get to subtract food and rent, and Then start to save for a PC.
It's not too hard for most of us to spend $19/day on food, not to mention rent.
Given that most 3rd world companies tend to have a high disparity between the upper class and lower class, and 70% are below the poverty line, I'm guessing that most average villages are going to be full of people closer to $300-$400/year than the $800/year national average.
For people with an average income of $30/month, putting together $100 for a PC (even as a village) is still going to be a hard sell, no matter how much good we can see it doing for them. Putting together $400 for a current cheap PC would look all but impossible.
OK: Oops on my part, but it need not be anywhere near obvious... The 'and/or other materials provided with the distribution' allows it to be burried in some well-forgotten corner. As an example, you may notice just how obvious it is(n't) what parts of Windows are still based on BSD code.
Under stalinism what the workers saw is that they worked their asses off, and the party bigwigs lived on the high hog of the the workers' efforts -- Not much different than some 'capitalistic' corporations.
Communism is 'give according to capability, take according to need'. Stalinism is 'Give according to the party plan, take according to rank in the party.'
Since rank in the party mattered far more than what one contributed to the commons workers had no real incentive to work hard.
Communism is also supposed to be controled by the workers -- a democracy by another name. Stalinism would have none of that. -- thus the workers were working on the plans of distant bigwigs, with no input to the plan, and no real profit for their work (it all went to the same bigwigs). That pretty much sucks.
This is part of the reason why sweat shops work so well in impoverished 3rd and 4th world countries -- It's pretty much the same situation as stalinist russia, except for the fact that the workers are literally discardable. If the worker doesn't do exactly what you tell them to when you tell them to and how you tell them to, you can simply toss them out like a rag, and find somebody even more desperate than them to work under slave-like conditions. If they hold a strike, you can just call in the police (or a private security force) to shoot them.
Pretty much the same as the worst of the stalinist era -- or the US Circa the 1930s.
Sweden is an example of a socialist state -- with democracy, socialized health care and pretty much cradle-to-grave support from the government. The standard of living and productivity are both relatively high.
Mexico is another example of the extremes of capitalism. -- A very steep pyramid, with a few extremely rich and lots of extremely poor. There are few social services, lots of very desparate people and some really nasty problems with things like pollution from companies with very little public oversight.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's been rewritten in the decade + since then.
Dunno about the history of the kerberos code, but if you take it as a hypothetical premise, it still stands as an example of what can be done with/to BSD licensed code.
Microsoft would have to be insane to knowingly include GPL code in Windows. With sanctions like $30,000 per willful infringement, if anybody recognized their code and proved it, MS would have to choose between giving billions of dallars to the FSF (or whomever owned the code) or opening up huge chunks of Windows code to the GPL. Both of those possibilities should keep Bill awake at night and sweating.
The companies most likely to attempt to purloin GPL code are smaller (startup) companies that have little to lose because they have little to start with. For the most part, I'd guess that the big companies that have been found using GPL code inside of proprietary releases are most likely to have done it by mistake (eg: a programmer under deadline snarfed the code and didn't tell their boss).
On the other hand, (modulo the insanity of the .com boom), that kind of prospectus is unlikely to get much in the way of big-money investment. That's why most companies (explicitly or implicitly) claim that they're out to make big money first -- and that's where they get caught.
All they have to do is acknowlege that some of the code came from you. Under the more recent BSD license, that acknowlegement can be rather minimal.
The only place that Microsoft has to include your copyright and the BSD license is in the source code, and nobody outside of Microsoft (and people who sign an NDA) are likely to see that source code.
Microsoft modified the Kerberos code to be incompatible with (and less potable than) the original. Notice how many people are ripping out MS's code and replacing it with the original Kerberos code??? Chances are, that they can't because of MS's EULA which bars you from various forms of deconstruction, reverse engineering and modification.
If the original kerberos didn't already have a rather large market share outside of Windows, it would have been pretty esay for MS to make the original code effectively moot, and their own (slightly modified) version the 'official' version. They still may manage to do so and it has little, if anything, to do with how good the code is -- simply that MS controls the market.
Even though the original Kerberos writers still have access to their original code, the only way that they can legally use their code with the 90%+ market share that MS windows has is to pay hommage to Microsoft. I haven't seen MS's EULA for the documentation of the modifications, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would require the Kerberos people to donate their entire code base to Microsoft.
At that point, if closing off the modified code to your eyes doesn't qualify as 'taking' your code, I think that stongarming you into giving them full rights so that you can interoperate with what may be 99% your code on (your) Windows boxes should. P Point is: If you're fine with something like that happening, then you're free to use the BSD license. The GPL, on the other hand, is designed to make situations like that all but impossible, and that's at least part of the reason why so many people like it.
Fact of the matter is that that's really the way that capitalism was meant to work under Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (considered by many to be the godfather of modern capitalism. Under his view, big multinational corporations were (are) no different than big government -- both result in centralized decision making which warps local economies.
What the GPL does is it forces decision-making back down to the local levels and prevents a big company from controlling the entire market by force. This is actually far closer to real capitalism than either Microsoft's market-warping monopoly. And also far closer to closer to capitalism than it it is to Stalin's market-warping communism.
It's also far more intrinsically democratic than either.
So, the next time Gates & company starts screaming 'communist', respond
Not all companies have to be evil, but public companies are generally responsible to their shareholders and the management and directors will often be pushed by those same shareholders to produce maximum profit without regard to how. If that means doing evil stuff, some shareholders (especially bigger ones) often feel insulated from that effect.
It's the kind of process that allowed things like the holocaust... The people at the bottom claimed that they were only doing their job, while the people at the top claimed that they really didn't know what the people at the bottom were doing. The handfull of nastys who did the really nasty stuff could be conveniently hung out to dry from time to time, but the entire beomoth still profits from their nasty work.
You can protect some companies from the call of the dollar, but it takes a good deal of work, and gets harder if/when the company becomes more successfull (snd thus more attractive to the money-suckers).
The GPL license provides freedom for the code. The freedom for the code provides future freedom for programmers (including the originator of the code). The BSD licens provides a little bit of extra freedom for the programmer (or more to the point for the company who hired the programmer) in the form of the freedom to 'enslave' the code (make it proprietary).
In the case of a large market beomoth like Microsoft, this means that they can now take that code, make minor (but incompatible) changes to it, and make their proprietary modifications the 'standard' by dint of their market force. At that point, you could be forced to pay for acccess to what is,. in fact, 99% your own code because your (free) version has been made irrelevant by MS's market force (even if the incompatible changes actually make the code inferior to your free version).
MIcrosoft did that with the BSD TCP stack, and the Kerberos code (and, I'm sure, other code with similar licenses). Apple came close to doing that with the entire BSD OS. If you like the ego bost of having a company like Microsoft take your code, close it off to you and make big money charging you (among other people) for access to your own code under their onerous EULAs, -- and if that ego boost is way more important than having your code free and useful to the entire community that uses it (and able to come back to you), then the BSD license is for you.
If you wish to ensure that everybody (including yourself) will have access to whatever version of your code people produce, then the GPL is probably a better kind of license for you.
Yes, there are other licenses, and people have investigated and used them. Some, like Sun's license force people to feed changes back to the original author so that they can make proprietary versions. This may seem good for the original author, but subsequent contributors may be wary of what will happen with their code and this may discourage contributions.
The reason why the GPL is so rampant is that it is carefully crafted to strike a very distinct balance, and it's done a good job of it so far. If a better license comes along, people will (hopefully) flock to it instead. In the menatime, the GPL is king, and I think that that's a good thing.
As for organic food being tough, you must have run into a batch of really bad organic carrots -- one of the ones that'll beat non-organic food without wilting a leaf.
It's not like Microsoft's taking any sort of responsibility for their code. GNU code also comes with a disclaimer, but at least with Linux+ you have both the right and the ability to fix any bugs you find if your distributor isn't in the mood to fix it right now (or properly).
They pretty blindly accept whatever complaint they get and don't seem to do much, if any checking. My letter said Nimda Virus, so they forwarded their 'nimda virus' letter. If you read the email that they sent to me, you should notice a complete lack of any information that could identify the machine that was supposedly infected or even the time of the complained attack.
The web page was written in 2003... by a psychic who knew what results the companies (1.1) years of research would produce. Once the predicted results were produced, she sold the rights to her product to the company -- thus saving them weeks of web page development.
It's obvious when you think about it...
First of all, never lie. That can come back to bite you. In this case, if they paniced and misread the log, they might cut off our connection and then send the threatening email. This would be very bad.
The second issue is that these emails did not only go to shaw.They went to whichever ISP claimed responsibility for the offending IP. Sometimes they sent the complaints back to shaw tryin to pin the error on me. It just doesn't work to threaten to stop dealing with someone who you're not dealing with them to begin with.
Back when the nimda worm was running around, I wrote a home-grown IDS to watch web hits, identify nimda-type probes and, if I could find a reporting address for the offending IP email a complaint off to the responsible ISP.
We were being serviced by Shaw Cable at the time, and every once in a while, they'd misread my complaints, and figure that my box was the source of the attack, and they'd send a nasty email to my roommate (who the connection was registered to) threatening to cut off our internet if we didn't delete the viruses install a firewall, etc. (we each had our own BSD firewall).
I got to know one of the supervisors there reasonably well, modified the letter I sent out to make it all but impossible for the people who read the email to confuse the attacking box with the defender, and he even added a note to the file for our connection, which resulted in a period of quiet after which we got yet another threatening letter.
I responded with this letter. My roommate (who took this very seriously because he was paying business rates to be allowed to run servers on the line) thought that I was being a bit flippant about something so important (flippant?! It took me an hour to write the damn thing!), but the supervisor at shaw said that he got a bit of a chuckle out of it when he phoned me to apologize for the error and promise a fix. His explanation was that shaw had installed a new abuse reporting system and that the note about our account had been lost in the transition (but would be added back in).
If you read my letter, (which includes the original autocomplaint) then you'll understand just how far people are willing to go to misread log files.
At first I thought he was talking about slashdotting a bittorrent server....
I'm guessing that their first production release is going to be 'horny toad'.
You should never tell your boss to get a woody.-- at least, not unless you're sleeping with him (and, even then, not in front of workmates)
As far as I can tell, the only thing that Knoppix will mount r/w by default is a Linux swap partition.
Things like NT filesystems are only mounted read-only unless you specifically ask for it to be re-mounted read-write.
When you get to the boot prompt, instead of hitting 'enter' (or waiting for it to timeout and boot), you can go
knoppix noswap
That will cause it to ignore any swap partitions and not write ANYTHING to the disk unless/until you say so (good for forensic work.)
So the short answer is: If you've got a Windows box, I can pretty much guarantee that your disk is safe unless you work at doing damage to it. ((If you want to damage the data on a drive, and you want to do it as root, then Linux will simply get out of your way. The gui normally runs as the user 'knoppix' which doesn't have direct access to the hardware. Some programs like 'parted' run with root permissions, since they're designed to play with the partition table.))
Not that reading the book is going to help you understand much of anything (much less certain ultimate answers), but it's certainly worth the read.