The real reason that Stallman wants this is that he early on correctly perceived that Linus is totally ideology agnostic, and so he wanted to put the idea of GNU/Linux out there so people would talk about the ideology. I don't think this is bad or anything. I think the ideology needs to be heard more widely.
It could also be argued that without the GNU project, Linus wouldn't have had a license ready to use for Linux, and I think that contribution by the GNU project weighs at least as much as all the userspace tools which someone would likely have eventually written anyway.
I agree pretty strongly with you on this. From what I've read massive vehicles aren't any safer for the people riding in them, and a lot more dangerous for everybody else. Not only that, but a lot of people who drive them drive them because they think they're safer, then drive like idiots because they think they can't get hurt. Also, many people who get them are just generally really insecure about their ability to drive which will make them bad drivers even if they don't feel invulnerable.
As far as I know, all algorithms based on factorization or the discrete logarithm problem are in danger. The includes Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal, and RSA. All of the elliptic curve algorithms are also affected as these algorithms are mathematical transforms of existing problems.
I don't know of any other algorithms that are currently used for public key encryption or signing. If all the algorithms that can be used to implement the basic idea are broken by quantum computing, the basic idea itself is effectively broken.
As a somewhat unlreated aside... I see a lot of really stupid and misinformed people always commenting on the cryptography stuff. And few people know enough for the right information to float to the top. I think maybe Slashdot needs to post an article linking to a cryptography FAQ or primer or something so people at least have the basic ideas right.
For example, many people I know think that all cryptography is just a contest between the code makers and the code breakers and that all encryption algorithms are fundamentally flawed and the idea is unworkable. And that's not really true at all. It's quite likely that there exists a strong symmetric encryption algorithm that's nearly as hard to break as it is to brute force the key. In fact, as far as anybody knows today, AES is just such an algorithm.
And that's just one example. There are so many people who think they understand this field and so few people who actually do. It's scary. I think that fact is the biggest source of security risks in modern cryptography.
Unfortunately, no sane discussion of ODFs limitations and problems can exist while OOXML exists. It doesn't matter what about OOXML might be better or worse. The fact is, it's a booby-trapped standard and everybody knows it. Any standard would be better than that one. Additionally, it truly does contain many undocumented highly Microsoft specific tags and fields. A tag to use Word97 formatting while not even describing exactly what that is? Come on!
IMHO, the requirements for a standardization process should include there being at least one Open Source implementation that fully handles the standard and is not encumbered by patents. And there should also likely be at least two implementations of the standard from independent parties that inter-operate.
The first requirement is because no standards document is complete. The only complete standards document is code. The second requirement is just plain common sense. Any standard that doesn't have two inter-operating implementations just doesn't deserve the name. OOXML completely fails to meet either requirement. ODF at least partially meets them both.
Though I am a white person myself, if I were to see a group disparaging white people I would assume it would target self-absorbed suburbanites with their cookie-cutter consumer culture and fleet of SUVs.
Just as there are light colored people who participate in black inner-city youth culture, I'm sure there are dark colored people who participate in the bland suburbanite culture I describe. But I still associate it with white people.
I think what you describe as 'white privilege' might be better described as an inferiority complex on the part of people who use that term. Note that having an inferiority complex in no way implies any actual inferiority.
I agree. One of the worst thing about all these advertising driven social networking sites is the potential for advertisers to use threats to suppress free speech.
These groups are seemingly well meaning but basically horribly evil. This one wants to suppress F**k Islam. One on LiveJournal (which LJ partially caved in to) wanted LJ to clear out any accounts that listed pedophilia as an interest. It is most distressing to me, and quite telling how one of the first things they try to go for is the advertisers.
I guess, like the bonsai kitty protesters of years past, they don't really understand free speech or the full ramifications of their actions. I do not want to live with a whitewashed Internet, and I don't think most members of the various groups in question do either. But they become blinded by hatred and intolerance towards one particular idea that they feel doesn't deserve to be heard and they take the steps to make it so eventually no controversial idea will be heard.
And even worse, though it seems that the commenters here recognize this attempt at censorship for what it is, it doesn't seem like the people who write the article blurbs do.
IMHO, that violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the GPLv3. It's still evil, but it's not that kind of evil. I also strongly suspect that it will be much more subject to being hacked than something that disallows any software changes at a hardware level.
I would be disappointed if the GPL tried to address this issue in a future version because I do not believe that it's within the scope of things it ought to address.
I disagree with Linus in that I think the GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause really does address an issue that should be in the scope of a free software license. There's no sense in allowing you to create modified versions of software if you can't actually run them on the hardware they're intended for.
I would say that Artifakt's post is extremely relevant as it illustrates the point. The post would never have been made had the word 'god' not appeared in the post it was replying to.
The first of those two is self-explanatory. High-quality, high-performance Free 3D drivers for good hardware.
The second...
I want some (not all) kernel developers to stop using throughput based metrics to measure performance, and instead use a metric based on interactive performance. I have a suggestion for such a metric...
The time between user input and the user input having a noticeable affect on an output device like a display. And I don't think this time should be as short as possible, though that's a good goal. The time should be as consistent as possible while remaining short. I propose a metric that measures this latency and plots the standard deviation of the latency and uses that as the main metric with that average latency being a secondary metric.
It certainly seems like that conflict resolution mechanism might more frequently lead to desirable results. That is, of course, presupposing that the winner is largely selected by random chance, which is a pretty big assumption I'll admit.
I think that you are correct, mostly. It's a matter of perception and how arguments are presented. If the Artistic License is successfully bundled in a category of licenses that include the GNU license in a legal argument, then it's possible this ruling could have an effect.
The law is as influenced by politics and perception as are the more wild and woolly arenas of the legislative and executive branches. It's just that the influence is a lot more obtuse and subtle. The kind of perception shift involved in bundling all these licenses together and treating them similarly from a legal perspective is just the sort of politics I would expect from the judicial branch.
This seems like a nice idea, but there are too many dimensions of variability for a simple one-dimensional line like you're talking about.
Perhaps a tick-mark table like one of those market-speak product feature comparisons might work better. It would be good to have licenses categorized in some way.
I think it is a very reasonable thing to require that any Open Source license submitted by Microsoft allow the code they release under it to be distributed in conjunction with GPL code. Microsoft should not be permitted to divide the community with a license, even if it does meet the Open Source definition.
Now that Microsoft has begun their divide and conquer strategy, I would make this requirement of most of the other industry players as well. History has show that there is a good chance that Microsoft would get puppets to do their work for them if their license was refused because it was from Microsoft. Microsoft's overall strategy and history are well known so I think it is perfectly reasonable to ensure that they are forced to play nice in this way.
You have the freedom to make your Tivo do whatever you'd like. Don't confuse the Tivo-imposed difficulty in doing so with the lack of a right to do it.
I have two responses to this. First, you're wrong. It is illegal to modify your Tivo in this fashion. One of the purposes of the GPL in general is to work around broken copyright law by using it against itself. So I think it's perfectly reasonable for the GPLv3 to work around the DMCA by essentially stating that if you design your hardware in such a way as to be able to invoke it when people modify it then you may not use software covered by the GPLv3.
My second response is that you can say much the same thing about binary only distributions. Just because the company doesn't distribute the source doesn't mean that a bright person can't reverse engineer the software anyway. So that means the requirement that the source be distributed is superfluous and unnecessary by your definition.
I'm not particularly concerned with the maximum possible freedom that an inordinately clever person can extract. I'm interested in the freedom the average everyday human being has on a day-to-day basis. It is clear to me that Tivo-ization severely restricts this in ways that are incompatible with the free software definition. And the link between the free software definition and living in a free society in general is fairly strong, especially as software is becoming an ever larger part of our society.
The fact that Linus doesn't care about this either tells me that he doesn't care about living in a free society or that he doesn't really understand the full implications of Tivo-ization. Which do you think it is?
No, if you read the stuff he says, it's clear that he does get it, he just disagrees.
He doesn't think people should have some god-given right to roll their own kernels on Tivos, for example, and he doesn't want to be the one to dictate that right to the people producing the Tivos, either.
Then it seems to me that Linus is not particularly interested in living in a free society and he would prefer to live in one in which nobody was allowed to do anything with their own stuff that wasn't approved by the appropriate authorities. Because a world in which you can't dispose of your property in any manner you see fit is just such a world.
If, in fact, he claims he does enjoy living in a free society, then it seems to me that he doesn't get it because he seems incapable of spotting the contradiction. If a society is to remain free, certain freedoms must be protected, and the freedom to make their Tivo run whatever software they want is one of those freedoms.
I just don't see how courts would ever prosecute people for spawning shells on their household appliances. It sounds too much like the movie Brazil. (Damn, but that movie is prescient...)
But it happens, witness the way Microsoft is going after people who make mod chips for the X-Box or who own a mod chip for their X-Box.
Well, I wouldn't say that exactly. But he doesn't seem to really understand the philosophy behind free software. Of course, he would agree with me and be rather proud of the fact. Philosophy isn't very pragmatic and Linus prides himself on his pragmatism.
But IMHO, it leads him to make some pretty stupid decisions and be blind to the implications of vendor lock-in and restrictive licenses. I also think it's the reason why I could care less what he thinks of the GPLv3 or the various patent issues surrounding Linux. He just doesn't seem to get it.
*laugh* Any more rabid and I'm sure Zonk would be foaming at the mouth right now, or at least contemplating a few days worth of long needles to the stomach.
And isn't prioritization the province of the scheduler? Isn't it supposed to figure it which process really deserves to be running at any given instant based on some heuristics?
I agree that many twitch games will likely have a loop that causes them to check and process user input at least once for every frame. But, what if they don't? Maybe that loop is running in a different thread that pokes a physics engine thread which is updating the game state which is being rendered by a rendering thread? Then a scheduler which made a mistake and created latency in the wrong places could be creating a huge interactivity problem even though the framerate is quite high.
It's also good if the delay is of a consistent length. You can adapt to a fixed delay if it's small, but it's really hard to adapt to a delay that's jumping all over the place even if on average it's pretty small. Additionally an inconsistent delay length leads to things looking choppy even when the delays are all fairly small.
If you moved a window across a screen and at a particular speed and its position was updated at a fairly consistent once every 2 pixels it would still look pretty darn smooth, but if it sometimes updated every pixel and sometimes every 3 or 4 it would look pretty choppy even if on average it only moved 2 pixels per update.
Having the delay be inconsistent also messes with the feedback between what you see on the screen and how fast you move your mouse.
In short measures like throughput or even just average latency are pretty poor. What you want is a measure of real feedback latency and look at both the average, standard distribution and outliers in various load situations. I suspect what you want a very tight cluster around an average latency and as load goes up you want that average to degrade gracefully while the cluster remains relatively tight.
FPS is a poor measure of the feel of a game. I know it's what all the graphics card benchmarks use, and it does do a good job of measuring the total processor and video card throughput, but that's not the most important thing.
The most important thing is the time between you pressing a key and the changed game state being reflected on your screen and how consistent that delay is.
One of the arguments that CK has made about kernel development is that kernel developers have become obsessed with throughput to the exclusion of all else and that this leads to very poor desktop performance because throughput is a poor measure of 'interactivity'. Someone posting 3D game framerates as evidence of one scheduler being better than another is exhibiting exactly this bias.
IMHO latency is a better measure, but still not perfect and it can be hard to measure in some cases.
I don't know enough about the scheduler to know which one is better or which one exhibits particular properties. But I can see that the throughput bias is evidenced in force in the thread the article points to.
And CK is also right that big iron shops care more about overall throughput than any measure of 'interactivity'. IMHO there ought to be some kind of pluggable scheduler system that allows you to completely change the algorithm to reflect the preferred behavior of the computer you're using.
Your experience is not typical. You have an unusual configuration, and while you are right to complain that it isn't supported and ask that it be fixed, your experience doesn't mirror that of the several people I've converted to using a Linux desktop.
Well, it seems to me that's a nice niche for a distribution to fill. Why not contact all the various companies that provide codecs and ask them if they will let you distribute their codecs legally in the US packaged so as to run on a Linux box for a fee. Then you can sell all that non-free stuff as a separate little add-on that people who really care can use. It sounds like a great business idea if what you say is true.
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason that Stallman wants this is that he early on correctly perceived that Linus is totally ideology agnostic, and so he wanted to put the idea of GNU/Linux out there so people would talk about the ideology. I don't think this is bad or anything. I think the ideology needs to be heard more widely.
It could also be argued that without the GNU project, Linus wouldn't have had a license ready to use for Linux, and I think that contribution by the GNU project weighs at least as much as all the userspace tools which someone would likely have eventually written anyway.
I agree pretty strongly with you on this. From what I've read massive vehicles aren't any safer for the people riding in them, and a lot more dangerous for everybody else. Not only that, but a lot of people who drive them drive them because they think they're safer, then drive like idiots because they think they can't get hurt. Also, many people who get them are just generally really insecure about their ability to drive which will make them bad drivers even if they don't feel invulnerable.
As far as I know, all algorithms based on factorization or the discrete logarithm problem are in danger. The includes Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal, and RSA. All of the elliptic curve algorithms are also affected as these algorithms are mathematical transforms of existing problems.
I don't know of any other algorithms that are currently used for public key encryption or signing. If all the algorithms that can be used to implement the basic idea are broken by quantum computing, the basic idea itself is effectively broken.
As a somewhat unlreated aside... I see a lot of really stupid and misinformed people always commenting on the cryptography stuff. And few people know enough for the right information to float to the top. I think maybe Slashdot needs to post an article linking to a cryptography FAQ or primer or something so people at least have the basic ideas right.
For example, many people I know think that all cryptography is just a contest between the code makers and the code breakers and that all encryption algorithms are fundamentally flawed and the idea is unworkable. And that's not really true at all. It's quite likely that there exists a strong symmetric encryption algorithm that's nearly as hard to break as it is to brute force the key. In fact, as far as anybody knows today, AES is just such an algorithm.
And that's just one example. There are so many people who think they understand this field and so few people who actually do. It's scary. I think that fact is the biggest source of security risks in modern cryptography.
Unfortunately, no sane discussion of ODFs limitations and problems can exist while OOXML exists. It doesn't matter what about OOXML might be better or worse. The fact is, it's a booby-trapped standard and everybody knows it. Any standard would be better than that one. Additionally, it truly does contain many undocumented highly Microsoft specific tags and fields. A tag to use Word97 formatting while not even describing exactly what that is? Come on!
IMHO, the requirements for a standardization process should include there being at least one Open Source implementation that fully handles the standard and is not encumbered by patents. And there should also likely be at least two implementations of the standard from independent parties that inter-operate.
The first requirement is because no standards document is complete. The only complete standards document is code. The second requirement is just plain common sense. Any standard that doesn't have two inter-operating implementations just doesn't deserve the name. OOXML completely fails to meet either requirement. ODF at least partially meets them both.
Though I am a white person myself, if I were to see a group disparaging white people I would assume it would target self-absorbed suburbanites with their cookie-cutter consumer culture and fleet of SUVs.
Just as there are light colored people who participate in black inner-city youth culture, I'm sure there are dark colored people who participate in the bland suburbanite culture I describe. But I still associate it with white people.
I think what you describe as 'white privilege' might be better described as an inferiority complex on the part of people who use that term. Note that having an inferiority complex in no way implies any actual inferiority.
I agree. One of the worst thing about all these advertising driven social networking sites is the potential for advertisers to use threats to suppress free speech.
These groups are seemingly well meaning but basically horribly evil. This one wants to suppress F**k Islam. One on LiveJournal (which LJ partially caved in to) wanted LJ to clear out any accounts that listed pedophilia as an interest. It is most distressing to me, and quite telling how one of the first things they try to go for is the advertisers.
I guess, like the bonsai kitty protesters of years past, they don't really understand free speech or the full ramifications of their actions. I do not want to live with a whitewashed Internet, and I don't think most members of the various groups in question do either. But they become blinded by hatred and intolerance towards one particular idea that they feel doesn't deserve to be heard and they take the steps to make it so eventually no controversial idea will be heard.
And even worse, though it seems that the commenters here recognize this attempt at censorship for what it is, it doesn't seem like the people who write the article blurbs do.
Not enough people do. Not many people even fully realize what's going on or what's really at stake.
IMHO, that violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the GPLv3. It's still evil, but it's not that kind of evil. I also strongly suspect that it will be much more subject to being hacked than something that disallows any software changes at a hardware level.
I would be disappointed if the GPL tried to address this issue in a future version because I do not believe that it's within the scope of things it ought to address.
I disagree with Linus in that I think the GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause really does address an issue that should be in the scope of a free software license. There's no sense in allowing you to create modified versions of software if you can't actually run them on the hardware they're intended for.
I would say that Artifakt's post is extremely relevant as it illustrates the point. The post would never have been made had the word 'god' not appeared in the post it was replying to.
The first of those two is self-explanatory. High-quality, high-performance Free 3D drivers for good hardware.
The second...
I want some (not all) kernel developers to stop using throughput based metrics to measure performance, and instead use a metric based on interactive performance. I have a suggestion for such a metric...
The time between user input and the user input having a noticeable affect on an output device like a display. And I don't think this time should be as short as possible, though that's a good goal. The time should be as consistent as possible while remaining short. I propose a metric that measures this latency and plots the standard deviation of the latency and uses that as the main metric with that average latency being a secondary metric.
It certainly seems like that conflict resolution mechanism might more frequently lead to desirable results. That is, of course, presupposing that the winner is largely selected by random chance, which is a pretty big assumption I'll admit.
I think that you are correct, mostly. It's a matter of perception and how arguments are presented. If the Artistic License is successfully bundled in a category of licenses that include the GNU license in a legal argument, then it's possible this ruling could have an effect.
The law is as influenced by politics and perception as are the more wild and woolly arenas of the legislative and executive branches. It's just that the influence is a lot more obtuse and subtle. The kind of perception shift involved in bundling all these licenses together and treating them similarly from a legal perspective is just the sort of politics I would expect from the judicial branch.
This seems like a nice idea, but there are too many dimensions of variability for a simple one-dimensional line like you're talking about.
Perhaps a tick-mark table like one of those market-speak product feature comparisons might work better. It would be good to have licenses categorized in some way.
I think it is a very reasonable thing to require that any Open Source license submitted by Microsoft allow the code they release under it to be distributed in conjunction with GPL code. Microsoft should not be permitted to divide the community with a license, even if it does meet the Open Source definition.
Now that Microsoft has begun their divide and conquer strategy, I would make this requirement of most of the other industry players as well. History has show that there is a good chance that Microsoft would get puppets to do their work for them if their license was refused because it was from Microsoft. Microsoft's overall strategy and history are well known so I think it is perfectly reasonable to ensure that they are forced to play nice in this way.
Does this mean now that our computers may have yet another thing that can go wrong? They might break wind.
You have the freedom to make your Tivo do whatever you'd like. Don't confuse the Tivo-imposed difficulty in doing so with the lack of a right to do it.
I have two responses to this. First, you're wrong. It is illegal to modify your Tivo in this fashion. One of the purposes of the GPL in general is to work around broken copyright law by using it against itself. So I think it's perfectly reasonable for the GPLv3 to work around the DMCA by essentially stating that if you design your hardware in such a way as to be able to invoke it when people modify it then you may not use software covered by the GPLv3.
My second response is that you can say much the same thing about binary only distributions. Just because the company doesn't distribute the source doesn't mean that a bright person can't reverse engineer the software anyway. So that means the requirement that the source be distributed is superfluous and unnecessary by your definition.
I'm not particularly concerned with the maximum possible freedom that an inordinately clever person can extract. I'm interested in the freedom the average everyday human being has on a day-to-day basis. It is clear to me that Tivo-ization severely restricts this in ways that are incompatible with the free software definition. And the link between the free software definition and living in a free society in general is fairly strong, especially as software is becoming an ever larger part of our society.
The fact that Linus doesn't care about this either tells me that he doesn't care about living in a free society or that he doesn't really understand the full implications of Tivo-ization. Which do you think it is?
No, if you read the stuff he says, it's clear that he does get it, he just disagrees.
He doesn't think people should have some god-given right to roll their own kernels on Tivos, for example, and he doesn't want to be the one to dictate that right to the people producing the Tivos, either.
Then it seems to me that Linus is not particularly interested in living in a free society and he would prefer to live in one in which nobody was allowed to do anything with their own stuff that wasn't approved by the appropriate authorities. Because a world in which you can't dispose of your property in any manner you see fit is just such a world.
If, in fact, he claims he does enjoy living in a free society, then it seems to me that he doesn't get it because he seems incapable of spotting the contradiction. If a society is to remain free, certain freedoms must be protected, and the freedom to make their Tivo run whatever software they want is one of those freedoms.
I just don't see how courts would ever prosecute people for spawning shells on their household appliances. It sounds too much like the movie Brazil. (Damn, but that movie is prescient...)
But it happens, witness the way Microsoft is going after people who make mod chips for the X-Box or who own a mod chip for their X-Box.
Well, I wouldn't say that exactly. But he doesn't seem to really understand the philosophy behind free software. Of course, he would agree with me and be rather proud of the fact. Philosophy isn't very pragmatic and Linus prides himself on his pragmatism.
But IMHO, it leads him to make some pretty stupid decisions and be blind to the implications of vendor lock-in and restrictive licenses. I also think it's the reason why I could care less what he thinks of the GPLv3 or the various patent issues surrounding Linux. He just doesn't seem to get it.
*laugh* Any more rabid and I'm sure Zonk would be foaming at the mouth right now, or at least contemplating a few days worth of long needles to the stomach.
The title does not accurately reflect the summary or the real state of affairs. It is sensationalist in the extreme.
And isn't prioritization the province of the scheduler? Isn't it supposed to figure it which process really deserves to be running at any given instant based on some heuristics?
I agree that many twitch games will likely have a loop that causes them to check and process user input at least once for every frame. But, what if they don't? Maybe that loop is running in a different thread that pokes a physics engine thread which is updating the game state which is being rendered by a rendering thread? Then a scheduler which made a mistake and created latency in the wrong places could be creating a huge interactivity problem even though the framerate is quite high.
It's also good if the delay is of a consistent length. You can adapt to a fixed delay if it's small, but it's really hard to adapt to a delay that's jumping all over the place even if on average it's pretty small. Additionally an inconsistent delay length leads to things looking choppy even when the delays are all fairly small.
If you moved a window across a screen and at a particular speed and its position was updated at a fairly consistent once every 2 pixels it would still look pretty darn smooth, but if it sometimes updated every pixel and sometimes every 3 or 4 it would look pretty choppy even if on average it only moved 2 pixels per update.
Having the delay be inconsistent also messes with the feedback between what you see on the screen and how fast you move your mouse.
In short measures like throughput or even just average latency are pretty poor. What you want is a measure of real feedback latency and look at both the average, standard distribution and outliers in various load situations. I suspect what you want a very tight cluster around an average latency and as load goes up you want that average to degrade gracefully while the cluster remains relatively tight.
FPS is a poor measure of the feel of a game. I know it's what all the graphics card benchmarks use, and it does do a good job of measuring the total processor and video card throughput, but that's not the most important thing.
The most important thing is the time between you pressing a key and the changed game state being reflected on your screen and how consistent that delay is.
One of the arguments that CK has made about kernel development is that kernel developers have become obsessed with throughput to the exclusion of all else and that this leads to very poor desktop performance because throughput is a poor measure of 'interactivity'. Someone posting 3D game framerates as evidence of one scheduler being better than another is exhibiting exactly this bias.
IMHO latency is a better measure, but still not perfect and it can be hard to measure in some cases.
I don't know enough about the scheduler to know which one is better or which one exhibits particular properties. But I can see that the throughput bias is evidenced in force in the thread the article points to.
And CK is also right that big iron shops care more about overall throughput than any measure of 'interactivity'. IMHO there ought to be some kind of pluggable scheduler system that allows you to completely change the algorithm to reflect the preferred behavior of the computer you're using.
Your experience is not typical. You have an unusual configuration, and while you are right to complain that it isn't supported and ask that it be fixed, your experience doesn't mirror that of the several people I've converted to using a Linux desktop.
Well, it seems to me that's a nice niche for a distribution to fill. Why not contact all the various companies that provide codecs and ask them if they will let you distribute their codecs legally in the US packaged so as to run on a Linux box for a fee. Then you can sell all that non-free stuff as a separate little add-on that people who really care can use. It sounds like a great business idea if what you say is true.