I strongly suggest to the OSI that they consider making a distinction in the Open Source Definition between revokable and irrevocable licenses (open versus free), so developers know clearly where these corporate licenses are.
This sounds like it would be a win for everybody. It respects the valid interests of free software developers and the valid interests of companies like Apple and IBM. Everybody knows where s/he stands and there's very little to fight over. I dig it.
If we're going to accept a license with termination at all, it makes sense to be very careful about the conditions in which termination is allowed. Apple seems to feel there is room for tightening this up and making it unambiguous, I look forward to their next license version.
This is in line with your other statements about this issue: Careful, reasonable, open to discussion, etc.
But that's all beside the point. The depressing truth is that all the yelling here is about Perens vs. Raymond, which is (or I sincerely hope it is) total crap. Of course, maybe it's just Slashdot, and the "conflict" is just a lot of smoke around an imaginary fire.
-j
It's not just one person's socks here.
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
As long as the community is represented by the typical/.'er then I'm glad we weren't asked...
Well, you've got a point, but there are fora with better signal/noise ratios than Slashdot. There are also a lot of rational people running around loose in this "community" -- some of whom do post on Slashdot, I'm sure -- whose input would be worth hearing.
What bothers me is the implied attitude from Raymond. To overstate it a bit: "Butt out, I'm in charge here. Who asked you?" If Raymond had accepted Perens' dissent a bit more gracefully, I wouldn't be bothered by that.
Realistically, if Apple wants to work with the community, they'll address all valid concerns, not just those that Raymond agrees with. They don't stand to gain by pissing people off unnecessarily.
Nonsense. They have shareholders. They're doing this because they think they'll make a buck out of it -- that being their legal and moral responsibility to their shareholders. The free software community gave them the BSD that they're using as the core of MaxOS X. Now they're asking for some more help, and they're offering some quid pro quo for it in the form of showing us their source. It's not a gift. They're asking for help, and they're offering us something in return. It's a trade. We've got a perfect right to negotiate, just as they do.
This community, in the aggregate, produced the Linux kernel, GCC, Apache, perl, etc. "Take, take, take", my ass. What has Apple contributed yet? I'd like to find out, but I won't be kissing any asses without due cause.
-j
Why do I feel better all of a sudden?
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
(Score:-1)? Why?
Why do I feel better all of a sudden? (Score:-1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18, @03:34PM EST
I think they're trying to find out what the next lowest form of life is after lawyers and estate agents...
So did you talk to Eric before you made the public statement?
Is the APSL a private agreement between Apple and Bruce, or Eric? Realistically, no. It's more of an agreement between Apple and the community. Where is the harm in public debate? Bruce clearly bent over backwards in his letter in an effort to start a public discussion, not a flamewar. My opinion of Perens went up several notches on that. Unfortunately (unless I badly misread the tone of Raymond's third-person statement) Raymond seems to perceive it as a challenge to his "authority" -- which doesn't exist anyway, as he himself has never (to my knowledge) denied. If people want to throw around the word "open", they should be willing to do it in public, with public input.
Hey, if Raymond speaks for the community, then I can't imagine why he wouldn't be willing to listen to input from the community. What kind of sense would that make?
-j
This is encouraging, but . . . HNiC? :)
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
Well, it sounds like Perens' concerns have been addressed. I'm glad to see that, just as glad as I was to see Perens address them. Still, I could do without Raymond's apparent desire to make the whole thing look like a confrontation:
". . . alleging that the Open Source Initiative acted incorrectly . .."
"It is OSI's position that the claims in this open letter are entirely mistaken"
Jeez, Perens' letter was laid back and non-confrontational. This pompous, pseudo-legalistic attitude-copping is ridiculous. It's hostile and defensive. Why? I'm curious.
The OSI Board requested -- and got -- substantial changes from Apple before the APSL was made public.
Am I the only with left with a bad taste in my mouth by this part? Quick, what does the 'O' in "OSI" stand for? "Oblong"? "Orthogonal"? "Ophidian"? If it's "Open", as rumor has it, I'm depressed by the fact that they offer their endorsements on behalf of the "community", without consulting or even informing the community until after the decision's been made -- and then turn hostile if anybody dares to question them.
Do we need that?
We should all chip in to buy Raymond a nameplate for his desk: "Eric Raymond: Head Nerd in Charge."
-j
Oh, calm down. A clue won't hurt either.
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
Software was free before the FSF,
That's true, but no attempt had been made to implement legal safeguards for that freedom, and nobody had clearly defined what that freedom meant, or why it was worth keeping.
The guys who wrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence didn't invent a single one of the ideas in it. So by your logic, it's completely irrelevant . . .
and remains so despite their efforts.
In plain english, you're a paranoid idiot. What you mean by "freedom" is probably something like this: "freedom for proprietary developers to screw users". Stallman is talking about freedom for the users, and for the code itself. If you can't grasp that, don't bother trying to comment on it. Of course, you may have no clear idea at all of what you mean by "free". You may just be a yapping cretin with a yawning void between his ears.
Wasn't there some back-and-forth'ing on all of those? There is precedent for this.
Perens isn't declaring war here, he's saying that there are some issues which concern him -- and which also concern some others, as well. He's taken a very non-confrontational, "let's sit down and talk" tone with this, and rightly so.
Look, it's not in Apple's interest to release code under a license that people don't trust. They want people to work with them on this; why else bother? If they've got any sense at all (which with Apple is at times debatable:), then they'll be willing to thrash this out. It's a contract, people. Contracts get modified and argued over. That's normal. And if Apple is willing to address everybody's concerns, then they can always wrap themselves in the due-diligence/good-neighbor flag if problems crop up somewhere down the road: "Hey, we bent over backwards to work with the community on this, didn't we? Cut us some slack." If it's sincere, all the better.
-j
So? "Eric Raymond" != "open source community"
on
Response to the APSL
·
· Score: 1
. . . much less the "free software community". I'm not about to accept his word as law, which is what you seem to be suggesting. Why should I?
Eric Raymond . . . stated that Apple's license strictly conforms to the standards put forth by the open source community.
Raymond often seems to get his own opinions mixed up with the "standards of the community". If his OSD doesn't take termination clauses into account, then many members of the "community" might suggest that it's time to rewrite the OSD. Hopefully Raymond will give that some thought and act accordingly, or at the very least explain why termination clauses don't bother him (or else why they do bother him, but aren't worth fighting against).
-j
We must HEED this moron. Listen, I'm serious!
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
Look, hardly anybody calls Linux "GNU/Linux" -- and why not? Because there's no non-GNU Linux to distinguish it from. Right? Right.
But if this twit creates a Linux with all the GNU stuff replaced by BSD stuff, then there will be a need to distinguish the two. So, we'll have "BSD/Linux" and "GNU/Linux". The two will have the same kernel, but they'll be differentiated by the shell, etc. ("sufficient unto the shell are the utilities thereof":) Just like BSD was just "BSD" when there was only one BSD. The name became a namespace when the thing forked.
I don't give too much of a shit, personally, but the only way that the term "GNU/Linux" will ever be generally used is if Christiansen gets his way with this little tantrum of his -- and I, for one, get off on the irony enough to put up with the extra syllables.
Go, Tom! Throw that tantrum! Wave those statistics! You're on a roll, don't stop now!
The primary goal here is to pursue a personal grudge against Stallman, right? And the secondary goal is to port BSDish fragmentation, forking, and petty personal bullshit to Linux.
So what would Christiansen accomplish by quietly going and using another OS? Nothing. The port-everything-to-perl gambit seems not to have attracted much support, so he's trying another tack. I applaud this. Christiansen apparently has nothing to offer the community but his grudges and his rage, so he's doing everything in his power to bring us the benefit of those qualities as often as he is able.
Here's a point that illustrates Christiansen's wisdom as a leader, and his commitment to good software: In a discussion on the perl mailing list about the port-everything-to-perl idea, it was repeatedly stated that the point of this was to make the full set of common unix shell utilities easily available on all platforms. So at some point, somebody pointed out that the unix versions of these things all expect globbing to be handled by the shell, while not all shells in other OS's do that. Well, Christiansen got a bit pissed off about that, and slapped this guy down. You see, globbing is a "shell issue", and therefore Christiansen has a good excuse for blowing it off. Apparently, it's "anti-unix" to write "portable" code that works wherever it runs. The solution to the problem is to deny responsibility: "We're porting this so you can use it everywhere, but if you can't use it somewhere, that's not our problem". Fine, it's his code and he can do as he likes.
But you know what?
When I build and run gawk in dos (where the shell does not glob), gawk globs. My scripts behave predictably, on Lignux or dos or BeOS. I just can't see why Christiansen would bother writing code that doesn't work -- except, maybe, that the porting thing is an excuse, and the real reason is his little grudge against Stallman. If you "don't feel like" writing the code that needs to be written for the program to do what it was designed to do, that's fine -- but don't pretend that you're a programmer.
Stallman has ideological motivations, which often prompt him to do things which may not be necessary. Christiansen has ideological excuses, which he invokes to blow off things that are necessary, or else to give rein to his petty personal animosities. There's a very big difference there.
-j
BSD chaos: This feature can be yours, too!
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
BTW, is there a good moving BSD linux project yet? I like BSD, but am getting really tired of the splits in the BSD groups.
What, you'd like those same problems better if Christiansen succeeded in porting them to Lignux?
Hmm . . . Maybe that came off a bit too sarcastic.
-j
Stallman has hair enough for all of us
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
. . . and that's why he's so important to this movement.
That goes to show you just how mentally secure a lot of the Slashdot readers are. And don't bother flaming, or calling me a troll, you'll just further prove my point.
"You're all 'mentally insecure', and if you call me a troll, that proves me right!"
You're assuming that anybody will accept your bizarre "logic". Well, I don't. You're a troll. You've got a perfect right to be a troll, of course, but that is indeed what you are.
By the way, if people called you an idiot for suggesting this, and now they call Christiansen an idiot for suggesting the same thing, I'd say they're just being consistent.
While I agree that GNU/Linux is a crappy name, I have real problems with this methodology of proving it.
You're missing the point. Here's an explaination:
A) "GNU/Linux" is a bad name, RMS is a bad person, and the FSF is a bad organization. These things are so obvious as not to require proof. In fact, your desire for proof indicates a dangerous lack of faith. I'm not at all sure that there's a place for you in Christiansen's free soft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hopen source movement.
B) Since we know the conclusion already, any evidence or logic which tends to support that conclusion is, ex post facto, valid.
Therefore, your objection is fallacious and deceptive and you should be ashamed of yourself.
When he learns to piss people off the way Katz does, I'll reconsider, but right now I don't see him engendering enough mindless animosity to justify his presence.
. . . but I'm not sure that Slashdot ought to be in the business of allocating cosmic resources like space and time. There could be, like, billions and billions of problems.
"Spray-paint walls! Trash the halls!" -- Jon Spencer
Y'know Spencer's dad teaches at UVM or someplace up there? Creepy.
Notwithstanding Mr. Spencer and/or Prof. Spencer (Spencer père), I agree with your post enthusiastically and in detail. We all need to stick together here and keep our eye on the ball.
Who am I trying to kid? None of you exist anyway. Slashdot is just a bunch of nondeterministic gibberish spewed out by a maladjusted AI with a sick sense of humor. I'm the only human left alive. Worse yet, even though I set my threshold to -9 in the Preferences, I still get pages defaulting to a dull, boring zero.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! PEOPLE!
-j
Oh, go ahead, be gullible. Life is short.
on
MS Office for Linux
·
· Score: 1
You don't want to wake up when you're 80 and realize you tucked in your butt-cheeks all your life. Cut loose, have fun, drink a few beers and don't worry so much.
Aw, hell, what am I saying, you're all robots anyway . . . what do you care about beer? I'm the only human left alive . . .
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! PEOPLE!
-j
Slashdot Longhairs: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!
on
MS Office for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Well, what the hell. I just realized that I'm the only human left alive, and all of you are just the products of a disordered AI. I look out the window, and there's nobody out there. I can see a fence and some cars but no people. You're all robots. So hey, what does it matter?
Slashdot Mirror
drop the f*cking acronyms.
Yeah!
-j
I strongly suggest to the OSI that they consider making a distinction in the Open Source Definition between revokable and irrevocable licenses (open versus free), so developers know clearly where these corporate licenses are.
This sounds like it would be a win for everybody. It respects the valid interests of free software developers and the valid interests of companies like Apple and IBM. Everybody knows where s/he stands and there's very little to fight over. I dig it.
-j
If we're going to accept a license with termination at all, it makes sense to be very careful about the conditions in which termination is allowed. Apple seems to feel there is room for tightening this up and making it unambiguous, I look forward to their next license version.
This is in line with your other statements about this issue: Careful, reasonable, open to discussion, etc.
But that's all beside the point. The depressing truth is that all the yelling here is about Perens vs. Raymond, which is (or I sincerely hope it is) total crap. Of course, maybe it's just Slashdot, and the "conflict" is just a lot of smoke around an imaginary fire.
-j
Y'know?
-j
As long as the community is represented by the typical
Well, you've got a point, but there are fora with better signal/noise ratios than Slashdot. There are also a lot of rational people running around loose in this "community" -- some of whom do post on Slashdot, I'm sure -- whose input would be worth hearing.
What bothers me is the implied attitude from Raymond. To overstate it a bit: "Butt out, I'm in charge here. Who asked you?" If Raymond had accepted Perens' dissent a bit more gracefully, I wouldn't be bothered by that.
Realistically, if Apple wants to work with the community, they'll address all valid concerns, not just those that Raymond agrees with. They don't stand to gain by pissing people off unnecessarily.
-j
You think Apple is doing this out of generosity?
Nonsense. They have shareholders. They're doing this because they think they'll make a buck out of it -- that being their legal and moral responsibility to their shareholders. The free software community gave them the BSD that they're using as the core of MaxOS X. Now they're asking for some more help, and they're offering some quid pro quo for it in the form of showing us their source. It's not a gift. They're asking for help, and they're offering us something in return. It's a trade. We've got a perfect right to negotiate, just as they do.
This community, in the aggregate, produced the Linux kernel, GCC, Apache, perl, etc. "Take, take, take", my ass. What has Apple contributed yet? I'd like to find out, but I won't be kissing any asses without due cause.
-j
(Score:-1)? Why?
Why do I feel better all of a sudden? (Score:-1)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 18, @03:34PM EST
I think they're trying to find out what the next lowest form of life is after lawyers and estate agents...
Open Source gurus...
-j
So did you talk to Eric before you made the public statement?
Is the APSL a private agreement between Apple and Bruce, or Eric? Realistically, no. It's more of an agreement between Apple and the community. Where is the harm in public debate? Bruce clearly bent over backwards in his letter in an effort to start a public discussion, not a flamewar. My opinion of Perens went up several notches on that. Unfortunately (unless I badly misread the tone of Raymond's third-person statement) Raymond seems to perceive it as a challenge to his "authority" -- which doesn't exist anyway, as he himself has never (to my knowledge) denied. If people want to throw around the word "open", they should be willing to do it in public, with public input.
Hey, if Raymond speaks for the community, then I can't imagine why he wouldn't be willing to listen to input from the community. What kind of sense would that make?
-j
Well, it sounds like Perens' concerns have been addressed. I'm glad to see that, just as glad as I was to see Perens address them. Still, I could do without Raymond's apparent desire to make the whole thing look like a confrontation:
". . . alleging that the Open Source Initiative acted incorrectly . .
"It is OSI's position that the claims in this open letter are entirely mistaken"
Jeez, Perens' letter was laid back and non-confrontational. This pompous, pseudo-legalistic attitude-copping is ridiculous. It's hostile and defensive. Why? I'm curious.
The OSI Board requested -- and got -- substantial changes from Apple before the APSL was made public.
Am I the only with left with a bad taste in my mouth by this part? Quick, what does the 'O' in "OSI" stand for? "Oblong"? "Orthogonal"? "Ophidian"? If it's "Open", as rumor has it, I'm depressed by the fact that they offer their endorsements on behalf of the "community", without consulting or even informing the community until after the decision's been made -- and then turn hostile if anybody dares to question them.
Do we need that?
We should all chip in to buy Raymond a nameplate for his desk:
"Eric Raymond: Head Nerd in Charge."
-j
Software was free before the FSF,
That's true, but no attempt had been made to implement legal safeguards for that freedom, and nobody had clearly defined what that freedom meant, or why it was worth keeping.
The guys who wrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence didn't invent a single one of the ideas in it. So by your logic, it's completely irrelevant . . .
and remains so despite their efforts.
In plain english, you're a paranoid idiot. What you mean by "freedom" is probably something like this: "freedom for proprietary developers to screw users". Stallman is talking about freedom for the users, and for the code itself. If you can't grasp that, don't bother trying to comment on it. Of course, you may have no clear idea at all of what you mean by "free". You may just be a yapping cretin with a yawning void between his ears.
-j
it seems clear that most of it is done. . . Where did you read otherwise?
I just assumed that if he now wants to use BSD utilities, then the perl thing must have dried up and blown away.
It seems as if that was a bad assumption.
-j
Wasn't there some back-and-forth'ing on all of those? There is precedent for this.
Perens isn't declaring war here, he's saying that there are some issues which concern him -- and which also concern some others, as well. He's taken a very non-confrontational, "let's sit down and talk" tone with this, and rightly so.
Look, it's not in Apple's interest to release code under a license that people don't trust. They want people to work with them on this; why else bother? If they've got any sense at all (which with Apple is at times debatable
-j
. . . much less the "free software community". I'm not about to accept his word as law, which is what you seem to be suggesting. Why should I?
Eric Raymond . . . stated that Apple's license strictly conforms to the standards put forth by the open source community.
Raymond often seems to get his own opinions mixed up with the "standards of the community". If his OSD doesn't take termination clauses into account, then many members of the "community" might suggest that it's time to rewrite the OSD. Hopefully Raymond will give that some thought and act accordingly, or at the very least explain why termination clauses don't bother him (or else why they do bother him, but aren't worth fighting against).
-j
Look, hardly anybody calls Linux "GNU/Linux" -- and why not? Because there's no non-GNU Linux to distinguish it from. Right? Right.
But if this twit creates a Linux with all the GNU stuff replaced by BSD stuff, then there will be a need to distinguish the two. So, we'll have "BSD/Linux" and "GNU/Linux". The two will have the same kernel, but they'll be differentiated by the shell, etc. ("sufficient unto the shell are the utilities thereof"
I don't give too much of a shit, personally, but the only way that the term "GNU/Linux" will ever be generally used is if Christiansen gets his way with this little tantrum of his -- and I, for one, get off on the irony enough to put up with the extra syllables.
Go, Tom! Throw that tantrum! Wave those statistics! You're on a roll, don't stop now!
:)
-j
The primary goal here is to pursue a personal grudge against Stallman, right? And the secondary goal is to port BSDish fragmentation, forking, and petty personal bullshit to Linux.
So what would Christiansen accomplish by quietly going and using another OS? Nothing. The port-everything-to-perl gambit seems not to have attracted much support, so he's trying another tack. I applaud this. Christiansen apparently has nothing to offer the community but his grudges and his rage, so he's doing everything in his power to bring us the benefit of those qualities as often as he is able.
Here's a point that illustrates Christiansen's wisdom as a leader, and his commitment to good software: In a discussion on the perl mailing list about the port-everything-to-perl idea, it was repeatedly stated that the point of this was to make the full set of common unix shell utilities easily available on all platforms. So at some point, somebody pointed out that the unix versions of these things all expect globbing to be handled by the shell, while not all shells in other OS's do that. Well, Christiansen got a bit pissed off about that, and slapped this guy down. You see, globbing is a "shell issue", and therefore Christiansen has a good excuse for blowing it off. Apparently, it's "anti-unix" to write "portable" code that works wherever it runs. The solution to the problem is to deny responsibility: "We're porting this so you can use it everywhere, but if you can't use it somewhere, that's not our problem". Fine, it's his code and he can do as he likes.
But you know what?
When I build and run gawk in dos (where the shell does not glob), gawk globs. My scripts behave predictably, on Lignux or dos or BeOS. I just can't see why Christiansen would bother writing code that doesn't work -- except, maybe, that the porting thing is an excuse, and the real reason is his little grudge against Stallman. If you "don't feel like" writing the code that needs to be written for the program to do what it was designed to do, that's fine -- but don't pretend that you're a programmer.
Stallman has ideological motivations, which often prompt him to do things which may not be necessary. Christiansen has ideological excuses, which he invokes to blow off things that are necessary, or else to give rein to his petty personal animosities. There's a very big difference there.
-j
BTW, is there a good moving BSD linux project yet? I like BSD, but am getting really tired of the splits in the BSD groups.
What, you'd like those same problems better if Christiansen succeeded in porting them to Lignux?
Hmm . . . Maybe that came off a bit too sarcastic.
-j
. . . and that's why he's so important to this movement.
-j
That goes to show you just how mentally secure a lot of the Slashdot readers are. And don't bother flaming, or calling me a troll, you'll just further prove my point.
"You're all 'mentally insecure', and if you call me a troll, that proves me right!"
You're assuming that anybody will accept your bizarre "logic". Well, I don't. You're a troll. You've got a perfect right to be a troll, of course, but that is indeed what you are.
By the way, if people called you an idiot for suggesting this, and now they call Christiansen an idiot for suggesting the same thing, I'd say they're just being consistent.
-j
While I agree that GNU/Linux is a crappy name, I have real problems with this methodology of proving it.
You're missing the point. Here's an explaination:
A) "GNU/Linux" is a bad name, RMS is a bad person, and the FSF is a bad organization. These things are so obvious as not to require proof. In fact, your desire for proof indicates a dangerous lack of faith. I'm not at all sure that there's a place for you in Christiansen's free soft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hopen source movement.
B) Since we know the conclusion already, any evidence or logic which tends to support that conclusion is, ex post facto, valid.
Therefore, your objection is fallacious and deceptive and you should be ashamed of yourself.
-j
When he learns to piss people off the way Katz does, I'll reconsider, but right now I don't see him engendering enough mindless animosity to justify his presence.
With my threshold firmly at -9,
-j
. . . but I'm not sure that Slashdot ought to be in the business of allocating cosmic resources like space and time. There could be, like, billions and billions of problems.
-j
you want it? keep it, i don't want it . . .
:)
-j
"Spray-paint walls! Trash the halls!"
-- Jon Spencer
Y'know Spencer's dad teaches at UVM or someplace up there? Creepy.
Notwithstanding Mr. Spencer and/or Prof. Spencer (Spencer père), I agree with your post enthusiastically and in detail. We all need to stick together here and keep our eye on the ball.
Who am I trying to kid? None of you exist anyway. Slashdot is just a bunch of nondeterministic gibberish spewed out by a maladjusted AI with a sick sense of humor. I'm the only human left alive. Worse yet, even though I set my threshold to -9 in the Preferences, I still get pages defaulting to a dull, boring zero.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! PEOPLE!
-j
You don't want to wake up when you're 80 and realize you tucked in your butt-cheeks all your life. Cut loose, have fun, drink a few beers and don't worry so much.
Aw, hell, what am I saying, you're all robots anyway . . . what do you care about beer? I'm the only human left alive . . .
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! PEOPLE!
-j
Well, what the hell. I just realized that I'm the only human left alive, and all of you are just the products of a disordered AI. I look out the window, and there's nobody out there. I can see a fence and some cars but no people. You're all robots. So hey, what does it matter?
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! PEOPLE!
-j