It is *not* a cheapo knockoff. For starters, Postscript is a specification and Ghostscript is an implementation of that specification. It is by all accounts a very well written and *compliant* implementation of the specification. I have heard rumours that Ghostscript is licensed for use in several high-end printers.
The GPL is simply a means for a copyright holder to grant others the right to copy under certain circumstances. It can't "force" anyone to do anything.
Correct. The GPL can't force anybody to do anything. But if SCO doesn't agree to the GPL then they have no rights to distribute Linux at all. This includes all the drivers that SCO didn't write. The filesystems. The USB stack. Anything that is provably not SCO's. Even if SCO is right and some parts of the kernel are owned by SCO, this does not extend to *all* of Linux. For example, I have contributed to the kernel (just a handful of lines). If SCO doesn't agree to the GPL then I won't grant them the right to distribute my code. They are guilty of copyright infringement.
Multiply this by 10s of 1000s of developers and SCO is cruising for a lawsuit the likes of which God has never seen.
Your experiences simply don't match mine. Not anymore.
Web browsing.. so I've installed a nice linux system with Debian, and added what I think is enough packages to get X11 and Gnome up and going.. whaaa.. where's the web browser? Oh right, I need to install that too, should I use Phoenix, Galeon, Netscape, Mozilla, or Joe-tcltk-webrowser.. I think I'll go Mozilla. Everyone seems to be using that now. Hang on, why do the fonts look screwed up? Oops, it looks like I needed to install fonts as well.. I'm sure it comes with some good ones.. there we go. Anti-aliasing? Oh, easy.. xft.. wait, it doesn't see the fonts now.. need to rebuild the fonts.dir file. Screw it..
I typed "apt-get install mozilla". Clicked the mozilla icon in the foot menu. Anti-aliased fonts worked first go.
Playing DVDs, yep, Linux can do that.. all I need is mplayer or vlc or xiph.. and then I just need to install the dvd libraries and it plays! VIDEO_01.TS.. where is my damn menu?!@#.. umm, but then I need sound. So then I just need to choose between ALSA and OSS. And then find a sound card which works with those libraries. Oh, and then pass a funky kernel parameter to grub, editing a config file, so it can do duplex sound, and hey presto, I have DVDs playing, with sound... but I'm only getting 10fps on my Athlon2ghz.. oh, oops, I'm not using the nvidia kernel and xfree86 extensions for hardware acceleration! Silly me, how could I forget!
I typed "apt-get install xine". Clicked the xine icon in the foot menu. Clicked the DVD button in xine. Worked first go. Fullscreen, too.
Ahh, I think I'll just listen to my MP3s with xmms.. hang on, why is it dying with signal 11 every few minutes? ooh, oops, I used the version of it that came on my OS install CDs, and that had an off-by-one bug somewhere.. ahh well, just need to download it again and install.
I just clicked the MP3 icon in the file browser. Worked first go.
Now if you want to hear about my latest experience with Windows that required installing 3in1 drivers, Detonator drivers, PowerDVD software, service packs, Audigy drivers, and after about 6 CDs and 15 reboots I had a system that could finally play a DVD... well do I *really* need to explain my frustration here?
There is actually a reason everyone qualifies their legal expertise. That is because it is actually illegal to give legal advice unless you are a member of the bar, and people get prosecuted for it all the time.
If it's illegal then non-lawyers should not be giving legal advice even with the disclaimer "IANAL". However, consider this case:
One prominent area of the site advertises "Free Legal Advice." That portion of the site states in the preamble: "We are all led to believe that whenever we are faced with some legal matter that we automatically are required to employ an attorney. There are many matters of a legal nature that we can and should resolve on our own without incurring unnecessary expenses of an attorney. Although I am not an attorney, I can assure you that it is not necessary to be a lawyer in order to provide some guidance and/or advice on how to deal with your legal problems."
He was giving legal advice while admitting to not being a lawyer. He was accused of practising the law without a license. The judgement from the Board ruled in his favour.
Thus, according to the Board, "the publication of legal advice on Palmer's web-site, good or bad, is not of itself the unauthorized practice of the law."
So at the very least in this specific case in this particular jurisdiction it was fine to offer legal advice without a license. The Board would have ruled differently if he had crossed the line and started to practise the law.
Still, it was "troubling" to the Board that Palmer offered to respond to "any questions about your rights" and to "provide you with guidance and/or advice." The Board concluded that "if Palmer actually gave legal advice in specific response to a question from one of his readers, he would have engaged in the unauthorized practice of the law."
But fortunately nobody on Slashdot ever gives specific responses because the questions lack any specific details.
Either way, the IANAL is redundant. Either it is legal to give advice in which case you don't need the IANAL. Or it is illegal to give advice no matter how many disclaimers you insert.
Because it's not illegal to give programming advice without a license.
It's not illegal to give legal advice without a license. It's only illegal to practise law without a license. There's a fairly significant distinction between the two.
The interesting cases are when somebody misrepresent themselves. For example if you ring up a lawyer's firm and get free advice from the secretary, because you mistakenly believed that she was licensed, then the secretary is in the shit.
But if you free advice from Captain Kangarooski on Slashdot then there's not much chance of you winning a claim in court for receiving bad advice. The judge might laugh a little when you try to explain that you thought Captain Kangarooski was licensed to practise law but that's about it.
Please, no more IANAL bullshit. Unless you start being consistent and prefacing all opinions on technology with IANAE. Because I'm pretty sure most of the Slashdot posters are NOT engineers.
Read this part very carefully: This is NOT legal advice. I am NOT a lawyer, much less a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.
Look, I simply don't get this, and it's pissing me off. Cpt Kangarooski, I'm not pissed off at you, but I'm going to use you as a launching board for my rant. So please don't take any of this personally, especially seeing as your comment was genuinely helpful.
When there's an article about ANYTHING then everybody is a self-proclaimed expert. Physics? Experts. Astronomy? Experts. Computers? Experts coming out the fucking woodwork. Everybody has an opinion about EVERYTHING on Slashdot and everybody is a freaking expert.
Yet I don't see disclaimers stating "lack of professional experience" about anything except legal questions. I never see "I'm not a Java developer, so don't rely on this, and for god's sake seek professional help from Bill Joy before acting on these words, but... ". No, what you normally get is a self-proclaimed expert acting as if they were standing alongside Bill Joy and helping him nut out the hard bits. Similarly, if there is a question about evolution or religion (or even worse... evolution *and* religion) then suddenly everybody is both a Nobel Prize winner for biology and the Pope's right hand man. Nobody ever sticks a disclaimer at the start saying "my only experience with biology was in 9th grade HS and I don't even know what an ordainment means".
So why the double standard for legal advice? Why is that 90% of the comments to this Ask-/. started with "IANAL" or something similar? Nobody is stupid enough to think that you are a lawyer, and even if they are that stupid that's their own damn problem. You're not going to be held liable for bad legal advice given under a PSEUDONYM on a PUBLIC BULLETIN BOARD when NO MONEY HAS EXCHANGED HANDS. Please, no more redundant "IANAL" disclaimers, unless you're going to start saying "IANA CEO OF MICROSOFT" and "IANA PERSON WHO HAS ANY CLUE ABOUT BIOLOGY" as well.
I don't think he wanted to debate individual points with you. I think his overall point was that there are probably several explanations for why evolution has chosen large brains for us and not selected against it (yet). There's probably a fifth explanation that makes even more sense. So don't jump to the conclusion that we "think" with all of our brain simply because natural selection should otherwise have selected for smaller brains; there may be other uses for a large brain that we aren't yet aware of.
Selecting raw data certainly is part of statistics. It is not, however, one of the mathematically precise areas of statistics.
Tough. Measuring raw data for a physics experiment isn't precise, either. You're supposed to know and account for that. Errors during measurement DO NOT invalidate the rigorous mathematical nature of statistics.
It is a fact that people very often select data to prove whatever point they are trying to make. Professional statisticians are not immune to this tendency.
And that is a failing of the person, not of the statistics. People can abuse any science for their own agenda (look at eugenics) but that's a mistake a person makes, not the science. Think of Pons and Fleischmann if you want an example of another field selecting data to "prove whatever point they are trying to make". Their actions didn't cause an outcry "physics can prove whatever you want!" because most people realised the fault lay with Pons and Fleischmann, not with physics.
I disagree. A closed-source StarOffice would have had no chance in the market and its development would have stalled. Furthermore, Sun wouldn't have benefitted from keeping StarOffice proprietary and closed source.
You can't expect me to be convinced by nothing more than your opinion. Neither you nor I know how StarOffice would have held up in the market if it was kept closed source. What we can look at it is that the product was doing well as a closed source product from StarDivision before Sun got involved. We can look at the millions of dollars that Sun paid for the code. We can look at the very generous open-source license for OO. We can consider the money that Sun is pouring into the OO project while still making most improvements free to the community.
I see all these things and think "this is very generous of Sun". I'm aware that there are other motives; the most obvious being that Sun would like nothing better than for office suites to become "free" and so deprive Microsoft of their biggest cash-cow. I hardly think those ulterior motives matter. The action itself is benevolent. The gift is good. Sun as a company gains credit from me for doing something that benefits MANY companies and MANY users, not just themselves. I think they deserve praise for this. I think it's horrible that you don't.
So has IBM. No company is angelic in this business.
Oh, care to give examples? I think IBM has been very well-behaved relative to open source since they adopted Linux as a major part of their strategy.
You didn't mention Linux or open-source. You said "My point is that Sun has demonstrated both the ability and willingness to be pricks". My comment is that IBM has shown the same ability and the same willingness in the past. If you choose to distrust Sun then you should equally distrust IBM.
If a person gave me a gift valued at several million dollars, I wouldn't be grateful either...
Then we are simply too different as people to communicate. You actively look for the bad in another's actions. You distrust the motive behind a gift. You can't even be grateful when somebody gives you a free office suite; no strings and no obligations. It must be a dark and horrible world you live in.
Open sourcing StarOffice was a strategic decision by Sun. Yes, it benefitted open source, but it also was essential for Sun.
No. Offering a cost-free binary-only version would have been strategic. Open sourcing SO is an additional step that is purely benevolent. Sun contributes the most in terms of developer time to SO and could have kept it closed. Don't try and taint their gift by insinuating that it was entirely in their own self-interest. If you did that to a person, instead of a company, you'd hopefully be ashamed of yourself.
My point is that Sun has demonstrated both the ability and willingness to be "pricks".
So has IBM. No company is angelic in this business.
Altogether, I'm not surprised at this action by Sun. What continually surprises me is that people view Sun as some kind of friend to open source software.
Uhh, OpenOffice? Ok, there seems to be some chaos within Sun. Sometimes they are benevolent to free software and sometimes (like now with the "ditch AIX and use Solaris" campaign) they are just pricks. But OpenOffice was a GIGANTIC contribution. It cost them a lot of money. It's fully free. It's a substantial piece of the puzzle in putting Linux onto desktops. Do you think Munich would be considering 14000 Linux desktops with KWord or Abiword? Think again. It's all about OpenOffice.
Re:Media is taking SCO's claim toooo seriously
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1
I'm just hoping that the sleeping lion will soon stand up and smash the obnoxious fly into ditch. then I will applaud.
If SCO is right (and I say "if" with the greatest reservation) then I'd hope they win. I'd hate to think that you're supporting the notion that "the bigger guy should win" for no better reason than the bigger guy is on your side. I'd like to believe the antiquated notion that courts are supposed to mete out justice.
As with all statistics, you can make them say whatever you want...
This is false. An urban myth. Something that people like to say to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than they really are. The reality is that statistics is a mathematical field and it is as rigorous as any other mathematical field.
The real problem is that people think they understand statistics when they do not. They will claim "statistics say blah" when the statistics say nothing of the sort. The non-mathematical audience blames the statistics instead of their own ignorance.
I don't know if you'll read this Nathan as it's a pretty old thread now but I do agree with you somewhat. There are certainly plenty of people he gets advice from (Al Viro springs to mind) when problems become really tough.
Slashdot notifies me of replies with an email, so it doesn't matter how old the thread is.
However I have been suprised by Linus' broad range of abilities inside and outside of Kernel coding. For instance, most of the time he has an uncanny ability to know when to keep his mouth shut and when to speak, an issue a lot of us have real problems with. Perhaps it's just his moderate personality shining through there but to me it shows a very strong competance.
I'm also impressed by his political skills. A great number of luminaries in computer science seem to have all the social graces of a bad fart. Linux, on the other hand, seems to get respect from nearly everyone. This is a skill in and of itself. I think it's not so much his moderate personality - he can be damn abrasive when he wants to be - as much as his strong emphasis on quality and his perceived fairness when making difficult decisions. Those are admirable qualities in a project leader.
Also designing stuff for Transmeta wouldn't have been a walk in the park;) You'd need to be a pretty darn competant programmer.
I don't know exactly what he did for Transmeta but even to odds it wasn't chip design! It's more likely he worked on the code-morphing engine or had a role in testing x86 compatibility.
Perhaps we're splitting hairs. I just didn't think that calling him simply "above average" was accurate: he's *well* above average in my opinion;)
Well, as I said, I didn't mean to *insult* his intelligence. He's definitely smarter than the average bear. What I was getting at is that Linus isn't "smart" in the same way that Sutherland is smart or Thompson is smart. There's a special kind of genius required to think up new ideas or forge new paths in computer science. Linus "merely" built a POSIX compatible kernel; now admittedly that's quite an achievement but you might be surprised how many people can do that.
If you want me to be more blunt; I don't think you'll find Linus is remembered in the same way that Djikstra is remembered. Linus will have his place in the history books because he was a fair leader, a great coder, a focal point for free software development, but not because he was a brainiac.
Shouldn't they be spent on something where the user is completely free to modify - either licensed BSD, or public domain?
The user is already completely free to modify GPL code. They just have to supply the source code to the modifiations when they redistribute the binaries. If they don't redistribute binaries then there's no difference to BSD or PD code.
Anyway, the real problem here isn't users. The real problem is rich companies who will take BSD or PD code, profit from it, and not return changes to the community. If you think this doesn't happen then you are fooling yourself (eg, BSDI, AT&T).
There is a huge difference between that kind of behavior and Metallica "asking" their fans not to share their music.
I didn't say they asked their fans. Nor did I say they asked nicely. Could you even imagine James or Lars saying "pretty please, don't copy our music without asking, there's a nice chap". I thought Metallica did the right thing back then and I said so at the time. The inevitable indignant protests from the "music thieves" then and now have not changed my opinion.
I might actually check out St. Anger to get at the concert recordings, IF Metallica first apologizes for all the crap they pulled over Napster a few years ago.
Crap? Metallica asked that people not share their studio-recorded albums over Napster. Metallica has a policy of allowing fans to record and share bootlegs of live concerts, but this policy has never extended to studio-recorded albums.
Otherwise, this is pure hypocracy,
The Royal Family of Syringes will buy you a dictionary if you promise to stop mangling the English language.
That isn't leveling the field for open source, it's tilting the field unfairly in favor of open source. If the technology can't compete on its own merits, why throw good money after bad to support it?
Because it's not about technology, it's about standards. If the standard is open then there is no 10% fine. If the standard is closed then there is a 10% fine. The fine acts as a deterrent of closed standards.
Tanj! I feel like I've suddenly been teleported into a different universe... here's a proposal that would simultaneously support Open Source and hurt Microsoft, while pushing the idea of Open Standards... and the whole idea gets ripped apart by the Slashdot Crowd??? Am I on the wrong website? In a parallel universe? Or are Slashdot readers capable of Unbiased Thinking after all?
Slashdot stopped being a "Free Software" crowd a very long time ago. It's been an "ex-Windows Users Group" for about 3 years now. The quality of the posts is about the same (ie, awful) but there is much more pro-Microsoft and anti-Linux sentiment. The amount of RMS-bashing is proof positive that Slashdot is no longer about Free software.
Of course, the new Slashdot crowd use phrases like "Unbiased Thinking" to imply that pro-Microsoft is "Unbiased" and pro-Freedom is evil hippie communism. Never mind that Microsoft has been investigated for unfair business practises by every major judicial body in the world. There's no problem with the system! Everything is already fair! We have always been friends with Microsoft!
Slashdot Mirror
It is *not* a cheapo knockoff. For starters, Postscript is a specification and Ghostscript is an implementation of that specification. It is by all accounts a very well written and *compliant* implementation of the specification. I have heard rumours that Ghostscript is licensed for use in several high-end printers.
Correct. The GPL can't force anybody to do anything. But if SCO doesn't agree to the GPL then they have no rights to distribute Linux at all. This includes all the drivers that SCO didn't write. The filesystems. The USB stack. Anything that is provably not SCO's. Even if SCO is right and some parts of the kernel are owned by SCO, this does not extend to *all* of Linux. For example, I have contributed to the kernel (just a handful of lines). If SCO doesn't agree to the GPL then I won't grant them the right to distribute my code. They are guilty of copyright infringement.
Multiply this by 10s of 1000s of developers and SCO is cruising for a lawsuit the likes of which God has never seen.
Your experiences simply don't match mine. Not anymore.
I typed "apt-get install mozilla". Clicked the mozilla icon in the foot menu. Anti-aliased fonts worked first go.
I typed "apt-get install xine". Clicked the xine icon in the foot menu. Clicked the DVD button in xine. Worked first go. Fullscreen, too.
I just clicked the MP3 icon in the file browser. Worked first go.
Now if you want to hear about my latest experience with Windows that required installing 3in1 drivers, Detonator drivers, PowerDVD software, service packs, Audigy drivers, and after about 6 CDs and 15 reboots I had a system that could finally play a DVD... well do I *really* need to explain my frustration here?
If it's illegal then non-lawyers should not be giving legal advice even with the disclaimer "IANAL". However, consider this case:
He was giving legal advice while admitting to not being a lawyer. He was accused of practising the law without a license. The judgement from the Board ruled in his favour.
So at the very least in this specific case in this particular jurisdiction it was fine to offer legal advice without a license. The Board would have ruled differently if he had crossed the line and started to practise the law.
But fortunately nobody on Slashdot ever gives specific responses because the questions lack any specific details.
Either way, the IANAL is redundant. Either it is legal to give advice in which case you don't need the IANAL. Or it is illegal to give advice no matter how many disclaimers you insert.
It's not illegal to give legal advice without a license. It's only illegal to practise law without a license. There's a fairly significant distinction between the two.
The interesting cases are when somebody misrepresent themselves. For example if you ring up a lawyer's firm and get free advice from the secretary, because you mistakenly believed that she was licensed, then the secretary is in the shit.
But if you free advice from Captain Kangarooski on Slashdot then there's not much chance of you winning a claim in court for receiving bad advice. The judge might laugh a little when you try to explain that you thought Captain Kangarooski was licensed to practise law but that's about it.
Please, no more IANAL bullshit. Unless you start being consistent and prefacing all opinions on technology with IANAE. Because I'm pretty sure most of the Slashdot posters are NOT engineers.
Look, I simply don't get this, and it's pissing me off. Cpt Kangarooski, I'm not pissed off at you, but I'm going to use you as a launching board for my rant. So please don't take any of this personally, especially seeing as your comment was genuinely helpful.
When there's an article about ANYTHING then everybody is a self-proclaimed expert. Physics? Experts. Astronomy? Experts. Computers? Experts coming out the fucking woodwork. Everybody has an opinion about EVERYTHING on Slashdot and everybody is a freaking expert.
Yet I don't see disclaimers stating "lack of professional experience" about anything except legal questions. I never see "I'm not a Java developer, so don't rely on this, and for god's sake seek professional help from Bill Joy before acting on these words, but... ". No, what you normally get is a self-proclaimed expert acting as if they were standing alongside Bill Joy and helping him nut out the hard bits. Similarly, if there is a question about evolution or religion (or even worse... evolution *and* religion) then suddenly everybody is both a Nobel Prize winner for biology and the Pope's right hand man. Nobody ever sticks a disclaimer at the start saying "my only experience with biology was in 9th grade HS and I don't even know what an ordainment means".
So why the double standard for legal advice? Why is that 90% of the comments to this Ask-/. started with "IANAL" or something similar? Nobody is stupid enough to think that you are a lawyer, and even if they are that stupid that's their own damn problem. You're not going to be held liable for bad legal advice given under a PSEUDONYM on a PUBLIC BULLETIN BOARD when NO MONEY HAS EXCHANGED HANDS. Please, no more redundant "IANAL" disclaimers, unless you're going to start saying "IANA CEO OF MICROSOFT" and "IANA PERSON WHO HAS ANY CLUE ABOUT BIOLOGY" as well.
I don't think he wanted to debate individual points with you. I think his overall point was that there are probably several explanations for why evolution has chosen large brains for us and not selected against it (yet). There's probably a fifth explanation that makes even more sense. So don't jump to the conclusion that we "think" with all of our brain simply because natural selection should otherwise have selected for smaller brains; there may be other uses for a large brain that we aren't yet aware of.
Tough. Measuring raw data for a physics experiment isn't precise, either. You're supposed to know and account for that. Errors during measurement DO NOT invalidate the rigorous mathematical nature of statistics.
And that is a failing of the person, not of the statistics. People can abuse any science for their own agenda (look at eugenics) but that's a mistake a person makes, not the science. Think of Pons and Fleischmann if you want an example of another field selecting data to "prove whatever point they are trying to make". Their actions didn't cause an outcry "physics can prove whatever you want!" because most people realised the fault lay with Pons and Fleischmann, not with physics.
Selecting raw data is part of statistics. Your sarcasm is unwarranted.
Ha ha. Well, if we're going to descend so quickly into schoolyard insults... TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE!
You can't expect me to be convinced by nothing more than your opinion. Neither you nor I know how StarOffice would have held up in the market if it was kept closed source. What we can look at it is that the product was doing well as a closed source product from StarDivision before Sun got involved. We can look at the millions of dollars that Sun paid for the code. We can look at the very generous open-source license for OO. We can consider the money that Sun is pouring into the OO project while still making most improvements free to the community.
I see all these things and think "this is very generous of Sun". I'm aware that there are other motives; the most obvious being that Sun would like nothing better than for office suites to become "free" and so deprive Microsoft of their biggest cash-cow. I hardly think those ulterior motives matter. The action itself is benevolent. The gift is good. Sun as a company gains credit from me for doing something that benefits MANY companies and MANY users, not just themselves. I think they deserve praise for this. I think it's horrible that you don't.
You didn't mention Linux or open-source. You said "My point is that Sun has demonstrated both the ability and willingness to be pricks". My comment is that IBM has shown the same ability and the same willingness in the past. If you choose to distrust Sun then you should equally distrust IBM.
Then we are simply too different as people to communicate. You actively look for the bad in another's actions. You distrust the motive behind a gift. You can't even be grateful when somebody gives you a free office suite; no strings and no obligations. It must be a dark and horrible world you live in.
No. Offering a cost-free binary-only version would have been strategic. Open sourcing SO is an additional step that is purely benevolent. Sun contributes the most in terms of developer time to SO and could have kept it closed. Don't try and taint their gift by insinuating that it was entirely in their own self-interest. If you did that to a person, instead of a company, you'd hopefully be ashamed of yourself.
So has IBM. No company is angelic in this business.
Uhh, OpenOffice? Ok, there seems to be some chaos within Sun. Sometimes they are benevolent to free software and sometimes (like now with the "ditch AIX and use Solaris" campaign) they are just pricks. But OpenOffice was a GIGANTIC contribution. It cost them a lot of money. It's fully free. It's a substantial piece of the puzzle in putting Linux onto desktops. Do you think Munich would be considering 14000 Linux desktops with KWord or Abiword? Think again. It's all about OpenOffice.
If SCO is right (and I say "if" with the greatest reservation) then I'd hope they win. I'd hate to think that you're supporting the notion that "the bigger guy should win" for no better reason than the bigger guy is on your side. I'd like to believe the antiquated notion that courts are supposed to mete out justice.
This is false. An urban myth. Something that people like to say to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than they really are. The reality is that statistics is a mathematical field and it is as rigorous as any other mathematical field.
The real problem is that people think they understand statistics when they do not. They will claim "statistics say blah" when the statistics say nothing of the sort. The non-mathematical audience blames the statistics instead of their own ignorance.
Slashdot notifies me of replies with an email, so it doesn't matter how old the thread is.
I'm also impressed by his political skills. A great number of luminaries in computer science seem to have all the social graces of a bad fart. Linux, on the other hand, seems to get respect from nearly everyone. This is a skill in and of itself. I think it's not so much his moderate personality - he can be damn abrasive when he wants to be - as much as his strong emphasis on quality and his perceived fairness when making difficult decisions. Those are admirable qualities in a project leader.
I don't know exactly what he did for Transmeta but even to odds it wasn't chip design! It's more likely he worked on the code-morphing engine or had a role in testing x86 compatibility.
Well, as I said, I didn't mean to *insult* his intelligence. He's definitely smarter than the average bear. What I was getting at is that Linus isn't "smart" in the same way that Sutherland is smart or Thompson is smart. There's a special kind of genius required to think up new ideas or forge new paths in computer science. Linus "merely" built a POSIX compatible kernel; now admittedly that's quite an achievement but you might be surprised how many people can do that.
If you want me to be more blunt; I don't think you'll find Linus is remembered in the same way that Djikstra is remembered. Linus will have his place in the history books because he was a fair leader, a great coder, a focal point for free software development, but not because he was a brainiac.
Which part of "completely free to modify" did you have trouble with. Pay attention, idiot.
It's not just you, but people like me don't agree. You might be a good driver but I'm well aware that most people are not. Too often I see:
If these people are driven around by computers then the roads will be a lot safer. I can't wait for technologies like Honda's to become standard.
Yay. Slashdot bashing is trendy now. Isn't it neat that you can be an "individual" by doing exactly what all the other trendy people do.
The user is already completely free to modify GPL code. They just have to supply the source code to the modifiations when they redistribute the binaries. If they don't redistribute binaries then there's no difference to BSD or PD code.
Anyway, the real problem here isn't users. The real problem is rich companies who will take BSD or PD code, profit from it, and not return changes to the community. If you think this doesn't happen then you are fooling yourself (eg, BSDI, AT&T).
Your keyboard, seems to have, a problem with, the comma key.
I didn't say they asked their fans. Nor did I say they asked nicely. Could you even imagine James or Lars saying "pretty please, don't copy our music without asking, there's a nice chap". I thought Metallica did the right thing back then and I said so at the time. The inevitable indignant protests from the "music thieves" then and now have not changed my opinion.
Crap? Metallica asked that people not share their studio-recorded albums over Napster. Metallica has a policy of allowing fans to record and share bootlegs of live concerts, but this policy has never extended to studio-recorded albums.
The Royal Family of Syringes will buy you a dictionary if you promise to stop mangling the English language.
Because it's not about technology, it's about standards. If the standard is open then there is no 10% fine. If the standard is closed then there is a 10% fine. The fine acts as a deterrent of closed standards.
Slashdot stopped being a "Free Software" crowd a very long time ago. It's been an "ex-Windows Users Group" for about 3 years now. The quality of the posts is about the same (ie, awful) but there is much more pro-Microsoft and anti-Linux sentiment. The amount of RMS-bashing is proof positive that Slashdot is no longer about Free software.
Of course, the new Slashdot crowd use phrases like "Unbiased Thinking" to imply that pro-Microsoft is "Unbiased" and pro-Freedom is evil hippie communism. Never mind that Microsoft has been investigated for unfair business practises by every major judicial body in the world. There's no problem with the system! Everything is already fair! We have always been friends with Microsoft!
Blah.