Nineteen different semi-clever plays on "embrace and extend".
"You need to get laid"
"Red Hat is turning into Microsoft"
"FUD" applied to anything that isn't.
So you see, there is actually a lot more diversity of opinion and originality of thought on Slashdot than you're willing to admit. Obviously you're a Microsoft employee paid to infiltrate Slashdot and sap our will to resist by talking about all the free sodas you get. (By the way, for all of you out there feeling demoralized by those vile saboteurs -- I work for a little startup in Boston and not only do we get free sodas, but we also get free Pepperoni Hot Pockets, popsicles, popcorn, hot pretzels, and real good coffee -- so don't lose heart! Man, there is no way the Borg can compete with Pepperoni Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets, like, rule. They just rule, man, that's all I can say.)
Sadly, I haven't spotted any libertarians in this one. No Slashdot feeding frenzy is complete without a few glassy-eyed free-mouse^H^H^H^Harketeers . . . Especially when MS is involved.
With my brain held in a vicelike grip by enthusiasm for the "New Slashdot With Up to 50% More!! Preferences" recently announced, I set my threshold to -9 and I look down there at the bottom of the page and it still says zero. Bummer.
We need not just a minimum score kinda threshold, but a maximum! Sort of an alternate-universe W.A.S.T.E. Slashdot, where Benny the Bulb runs free . . . all the maniacs and malcontents howling along under the surface, where nobody ever sees them . . .
It would like, rule. I only read Slashdot for the flames anyway.
They're already in trouble with web servers. As long as they don't control the protocols and whatnot of the web, they don't have total dominance. To do that they need the server as well as the client, and as long as people are using Linux and Apache they haven't got the server. The Apache people have carried a lot of water for MS by supporting IIS crap, but that's not the whole ballgame.
Office is a relatively minor issue. IE and IIS are what counts.
-j
Is this Australian sarcasm? Just asking.
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"WE (and I say we as in the true Australians who fought and died to make this country what it is, as opposed to the new arrivals who merely complain and criticise) understand that true AUSTRALIAN CULTURE was inherent in our people long before policies of multiculturalism became fashionable, and it will outlive this fashion as it outlived the Turkish in the Dardenelles, the Germans in the Somme, the Japanese in Borneo and Kanchanaburi, and you and your complainants. TRUE Australians will never be downtrodden and disenfranchised by the new psuedo-Australians . . . LONG LIVE PAULINE AND THE TRUE AUSTRALIAN NATION."
Err . . . was that "Australian", or just, uhh . . . "Austrian"?
To use an unrelated Point B in order to "reinforce" a Point A is jejeune and sophomoric.
Hey, I never denied that. You're absolutely right. But if the point is unrelated, either ignore it or address it separately. The fact that Poster A above used an unrelated Point B has no effect on the validity of his Point A. Point A may very well be moronic and indefensible, but by addressing an entirely unrelated issue you've done nothing to demonstrate that.
Attempting to taint someone's ideas by bringing up an unrelated subject which some may find distasteful is a sure way of announcing that you cannot win the debate on the facts of the matter.
But, in a sense, isn't that what you're doing? You're "refuting" A by addressing B, just as the original poster "proved" A by addressing B -- but B just ain't relevant either way.
Your citations regarding firearms are fairly commonplace. I won't even attempt to refute them, because I don't find it to be particularly relevant to the issue at hand -- which is whether or not ESR has a point in his essay.
So I drifted off topic . . .:)
Look at the amount of mindshare that Sun has, the amount that MS has, that HP and Apple and everyone else has. How much of this goes to redundancy, to reinventing the wheel? How much of it is lost to corporate left-hand right-hand? The open-source/free software movement manages to avoid most of those problems (through some arcane means which I don't think anyone fully understands).
Ummm, yeah. To a large extent that's true, though there are exceptions like the ongoing KDE/GNOME gotterdammerung. On the other hand, free software has unique problems of its own. I worry a lot about the notion that free software tends more towards reimplementation than breaking new ground. Of course, nobody at MS or ZDNet who mutters about that stuff ever seems to notice that ~99% of proprietary software is just pointless wheel-reinvention, too. There's also the fact that by distributing the source, the reimplementers are adding a hell of a lot of value right there, even if they introduce no new features at all. It may be wheel-reinvention, but it's not pointless. On the whole, I'm optimistic, but not blissful.
If you cannot make your point on technical merits without having to resort to the bugaboo of the Second Amendment, which is in absolutely no way related to the topic at hand, then your point fails, prima facie.
It seems to me that the merits of his other arguments are closely tied to their own merits, which is to say, the merits that they have. In other words, the merits of A are generally the merits of A, and relate in a purely arbitrary way to the merits of C, W, theta, and thorn. To ascribe the merits (or lack of merits, in this case) of A to B you need a better excuse than mere proximity. Take for example the following two statements:
A. Ronald Wilson Reagan was the President of the United States;
B. That guy in Louisiana who just murdered several people in a church is a shining example of why we need more handguns in private hands, because if he'd been better armed he could have finished them all off and made a better news story.
Well, gee. As for Reagan, a lot of people who lived through that depressing time can vouch for that, but, oh, boy -- B is a crock of shit! By your logic, if B is false, then A must also be false. Is that reasonable? The two are -- as you say of your own example -- completely unrelated.
What if the statement about the second amendment had appeared in an adjacent post? Imagine for a moment if Rob Malda, in a fit of post-Linux World despondency, had added that line to the post without the author's knowledge or consent? YES I KNOW Rob wouldn't do that; the point is that you're attacking your perception of the poster's thought processes rather than the arguments in post itself. It's ad-hominem, and it's crap.
He owns firearms to defend himself and his family with,
Against what? His own insecurities? People who own guns are far more likely to be shot than people who don't. The majority of people in the U.S. who are killed with handguns are killed by family or by close friends -- by people they trust. The above-mentioned incident in Louisiana does not support this claim because one incident is not statistically significant; it's anecdotal and good for sound bites, but it tells us nothing about trends. Still, these things are very well documented, so unless you're going to go right off the deep end and claim that Kofi Annan has ordered the U.S. government to skew the statistics as part of a New World Order plan, you'll have to come to terms with the fact that the Constitution is one thing, and practical reality is another thing entirely. It may very well be that all the killings are worth it; it may very well be that the principle of the second amendment is valuable enough to be worth some hassles. But don't give me any of those tired old lies about self-defense. If the Second Amendment is worth keeping, it's worth keeping at the cost of the safety of our homes, not in defense of it.
as a whole, the free software/open-source movement has the largest amount of mindshare, likely by an order of magnitude or more.
Largest among whom, and compared to what? In my apartment, it's got a good solid 100% (not counting my cats:), but out there in the darkness i'm not so sure. I'd love to see it grow, of course, but even among developers it's not yet dominant.
This incredible intellectual base is nothing without leadership, though, preferably leaders with differing styles and opinions so as to make the overall experience all the richer and more dynamic. RMS, Linus, ESR, Alan Cox, Daryll Strauss, etc. -- they all are important figures in our movement.
You know, by chance, here I am sitting and listening the the first Velvet Underground album, and I decided to have a look at Slashdot . . .
Over the past thirty-three years, how many bands have come and gone who wanted to sound like the Velvets, but "better", more "reasonable", more "accessible"? And now, after all these years, which record am I listening to?
Just a thought.
Oops, the record ended. Stooges time! (Gee, a lot of bands have "improved on" them, too . . .:)
Notice that RMS said "Business and making money are not bad" - only restricting others' freedoms.
"Radical socialism" my ass. If you want somebody who's done great work but who's a divisive, arrogant knucklehead when he opens his mouth, you can start with Tim O'Reilly as well as with Stallman.
(Yeah, I've got a shelf full of O'Reilly books too, just like everybody who flames Stallman has a bin directory full of GNU programs and a GPL'd Linux kernel. Deal.)
I seriously doubt that perl's regexp code is derived from GNU. After all, with perl you have your choice of licenses -- GNU or Artistic. If you choose Artistic, you can keep things as proprietary as you wish.
Really? Well, yeah, then I guess they're not using much GNU code there. Odd. Hey, what the hell, it's their own code. More power to 'em.
-j
Implementing Awk in Perl? Why not vice versa?
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And then back again! Write Awk in perl, then perl in that awk, then awk again in your new perl . . . Ultimately, you could waste literally DECADES of time that could -- in a less ideal world -- have actually been spent doing something useful, interesting, or productive.
Way to go, guys!
I like the idea of implementing all this stuff in a portable language, but why must it be such a horribly UGLY one?! Why, why . . . Yeah, sure, it does regular expressions -- but GNU has a perfectly good C library for that, right? What's the damn difference between writing in C with GNU's library, or writing in perl which probably uses the same damn GNU library anyway?!
Anyhow, as has been said above, all this guy's complaints (buffer length etc.) were addressed years ago -- in the GNU tools that they're using as examples. Uh, duh.
Seriously! (I'm the moron who posted about the First Amendment vs. spam above, and I now think I was probably wrong, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate and agree with myself anyway:)
Sooner or later, the courts will have to decide in a case that's right on the border. What then? Bear in mind that the "border" is miles wide, because the courts don't know shit about software. For all we know, a really sharp DA (sharp as a *lawyer*, I mean; morally he'd be a moron) could indeed demonstrate to the satisfaction of a judge and/or jury that sendmail's primary purpose is falsifying routing information. How many small-town judges are there in this country who "don't hold with that there innernet"? It's not a good thought.
And then when the aliens gobble up Rob Young they'll move on to SuSE, and then Debian, and then the little grocery store on the corner, and then the FSF, and finally when there's nothing left they'll run around in circles biting each others' ankles howling about ZOG or whatever.
They'll think of something, trust me. William Jennings Bryan is not dead, just sleeping.
Please relax, Mr. Policeman. Who the hell taught you to take yourself so damn seriously?
we all know that PR workers from Microsoft do in fact read Slashdot, and try to put a pro-MS spin on things (and anti-ESR sour grapes)
Sour grapes my ass. There are a lot of valid criticisms to be made of Raymond's behavior and ethics. I am no damned fan of Microsoft, much less an employee -- but I am even less a fan of their tactics and mentality than I am of them as a specific corporate entity. Microsoft is just one part of the problem. You, for example, are another (much smaller) part of the same problem.
Your quasi-Stalinist crap is disgusting and contemptible (and entirely of a piece with the Manichean anti-Microsoft hysteria that I hear out of Raymond). If someone should dare question Raymond, you blindly and dogmatically refuse to listen -- god forbid someone should try to make you think for yourself! Oh, heavens, no! You just write 'em off as a Microsoft flack. Well, screw you, buddy.
Nobody is above criticism. Not you, not Eric Raymond, not anybody. Raymond's beliefs are at odds with those of a large portion of the free software community. We have a right to speak about this. Deal with it. Free and open debate is not a crime, however much you might wish it were.
Hmm, interesting. Many of my European friends say that the cops here are nicer than their European counterparts (especially the Swiss!!).
Yeah, but then there's the upstate NY state trooper who damn near ripped off my door handle and put me through endless drunk-tests, waving my arms around two feet from traffic when he caught me going maybe 15 mph over the limit . . . And searched my car . . . I was cold sober and very polite (I'm always polite w/ those guys; there's a well-known moving violation called "Failure of the Attitude Test" . . .:)
ALL cops can be pricks, but we're only pissed off at the ones who've been pricks to us -- which tend to be the ones at home, 'cause they've had more opportunity. Brendan Behan hated Irish cops intensely ("The harp of Ireland will never want for strings as long as there's a gut in a peeler!"), but he thought the cops in Paris were grand guys. He was even easier on ENGLISH cops than on Irish cops.
Socialism is a style of economics, not a style of government. . .
There has been a longstanding tradition of the Republican Party in the U.S. trying to paint these with the same brush, as if totalitarianism is somehow the inevitable result of Socialism. By responding to the word 'Socialist' as if it were an insult, you are helping them make their flawed point.
Uh, yeah, what he said!
I wuz gonna post something to that effect but I got like totally off the subject.
By the way, though, the Democrats have often been guilty of the same crap as the Republicans.
Maybe it's because the cult of wealth is less rampant than in the U.S.
. . .
Current trends that put infrastructure-building into the hands of short-term-thinkers are quite frightening to them.
. . .
Association of a price with a value is not mandatory here.
. . .
Europe's communitarian reflexes may well play as a strength, while U.S. commercial prejudices and predispositions may cause America to take a back-seat . . .
My favorite irony is the fact that American "rugged individualists" are the most compulsive groupthinkers on earth, while more communitarian societies tend to be a great deal more intellectually pluralistic and open. This (among other, darker desires) drives us to play to the least common denominator in all things. Americans have a weird belief that any motivation other than short term gain is somehow vaguely immoral, or at best disreputable. Well, we've ruined every major industry in the U.S. but one (computers) with that crap; shall we go for a clean sweep? Yay team! Rah rah rah!
A greater communitarian bent isn't just a good idea now; it always was and it always will be. Most of what the U.S. has gained by its "rugged individualism" was never worth having. Not all, but most. On balance, I'd say we've screwed ourselves. The bottom line is that a culture IS a community, and if people within that culture pretend that it isn't, they're ignoring reality and they're going to break things.
You do not expect true art from an advertising/design company.
Speak for yourself . . .
. . . Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Jugenstil, Maxfield Parrish, probably a dozen others.
Software is in no way analagous to "fine art"; it's very, very close to "commercial art". Most of the points raised in the essay seem valid to me, but let's not go overboard and over-generalize ourselves to death.
M$ is not alone in pushing their current product line rather than developing a competitive product, because they are more profitable in the short term that way.
I think you hit it right on the head: These people don't really give a flying fuck about software. They'd be equally happy selling rocks or laundry detergent, just as long as they got to squash competitors and thereby make themselves feel manly (or whatever it is that motivates suits -- i guess money is probably a big part of it, but then again, after a certain point the numbers become meaningless).
I'm thinking, "gee, if I had pockets that deep and a lot of influence in the software industry, what cool things would I do with it?", while they're thinking, "how do we take what we've got and squeeze more dollars out of people this quarter than we did last quarter". They have very different goals and values than I have. (If I sound arrogant, well, fuck it -- they think their mindless animalistic greed and lack of imagination, ethics, and self-respect makes them superior to people like me, so I'm equally (un?)justified in feeling superior to them!:)
I have worked at other companies that actively suppressed technologically superior products by any means necessary. This includes tactics such as buying the company that developed the new technology just to keep the new product off the market. I have seen this first hand.
Well, sure, they're gonna whack competitors. That's unpleasant, but at least it makes some kind of sense.
The sad thing is that those idiots have the influence and the cash reserves to hire a bunch of smart people (not too many), shield them from the marketing robots, and have 'em develop an operating system that's genuinely GOOD -- I mean something as new and interesting as BeOS or whatever. They could make the application support happen, they could make the OEM support happen, they could pay off the trade press to kiss the new beast's ass until it developed its own momentum, they could astroturf it to the high heavens.
It's maddening; they're in a position where they could do something really worthwhile, instead of all this bullshit that they keep churning out year after year. Why don't they? There must be absolutely nobody there with any authority at all who has even a trace of integrity or simple decency. They sit on top of an enormous potential to create, and they choose instead to destroy. I'm tempted to start using loaded words like "monstrous", "degraded", "immoral", and whatnot . . . slingin' mud proves nothing, of course, but by my own (admittedly off-center) standards, there's something badly wrong between an awful lot of ears over there in Redmond.
Are they really dumb enough to think they're NOT ripping people off? Now *that* is scary.
. . . And the poor loser wasn't even done with the first mile yet! Well, i sure flamed his ass good and proper! He simply had no business being there at all until he'd been there long enough to get to mile 20 or so. I mean, nobody should ever start anything until they've finished at least half of it already. That kind of willingness to work on something, and worse yet, to learn -- especially at katz' age, when he should know better -- really pisses me off. i hate to say it, but i have a grim suspcion that katz may actually be doing this for its own sake, just because it's cool. what a creep. there's nothing more degrading to the hacker spirit than curiosity and the joy of discovery.
Remember: When they say that "quitters never win", what that really means is that anybody who hasn't won yet, should be forced to quit.
:)
(honestly, though, and quite seriously, until today i was beginning to question katz' commitment here; he didn't even seem to be all that serious about starting. well, i was dead wrong: he was serious, and he did start, and i'm cutting him the slack he deserves again. after all, regardless of all the code i barf out, there are an awful lot of things i've wanted to write [in english] for a long time, and never quite gotten around to . . . but will katz now flame me for "not being a real writer"? i doubt it.)
. . . because they want to be able to sneer at those who haven't.
others learn it because it's useful; still others, because it's cool. IMHO, the last group are the only ones who may ever have any right to call themselves "geeks" in the positive sense . . .
though it annoys me when katz gushes about being a "geek", i do remember the days when i was the same way. time passes, and i'm a little calmer now. i expect the same thing to happen with katz. with that in mind, i really don't have much of a problem saying that katz has far more of a right to call himself a "geek" than any of the halfwits who are flaming him.
You've raised a good point. I'm involved with a non-profit foundation called Screw Tibet Now!, and we're working to see that those whining bastards get what they deserve. There's a very bright future ahead for that region, once we get all the undesirables out of the way. We're presently arbitrating talks between Disney and the Chinese government about the establishment of a LamaLand theme park, which will hopefully extend into Nepal as soon as that nation has been secured as well.
Slashdot Mirror
definately
Oh, yes. Very nice. It's the details that count.
Still, you missed a few viewpoints:
"All commercial software will fail."
Nineteen different semi-clever plays on "embrace and extend".
"You need to get laid"
"Red Hat is turning into Microsoft"
"FUD" applied to anything that isn't.
So you see, there is actually a lot more diversity of opinion and originality of thought on Slashdot than you're willing to admit. Obviously you're a Microsoft employee paid to infiltrate Slashdot and sap our will to resist by talking about all the free sodas you get. (By the way, for all of you out there feeling demoralized by those vile saboteurs -- I work for a little startup in Boston and not only do we get free sodas, but we also get free Pepperoni Hot Pockets, popsicles, popcorn, hot pretzels, and real good coffee -- so don't lose heart! Man, there is no way the Borg can compete with Pepperoni Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets, like, rule. They just rule, man, that's all I can say.)
Sadly, I haven't spotted any libertarians in this one. No Slashdot feeding frenzy is complete without a few glassy-eyed free-mouse^H^H^H^Harketeers . . . Especially when MS is involved.
-j
With my brain held in a vicelike grip by enthusiasm for the "New Slashdot With Up to 50% More!! Preferences" recently announced, I set my threshold to -9 and I look down there at the bottom of the page and it still says zero. Bummer.
We need not just a minimum score kinda threshold, but a maximum! Sort of an alternate-universe W.A.S.T.E. Slashdot, where Benny the Bulb runs free . . . all the maniacs and malcontents howling along under the surface, where nobody ever sees them . . .
It would like, rule. I only read Slashdot for the flames anyway.
-j
They're already in trouble with web servers. As long as they don't control the protocols and whatnot of the web, they don't have total dominance. To do that they need the server as well as the client, and as long as people are using Linux and Apache they haven't got the server. The Apache people have carried a lot of water for MS by supporting IIS crap, but that's not the whole ballgame.
Office is a relatively minor issue. IE and IIS are what counts.
-j
A Shining Example of Australian Sarcasm and Irony
"WE (and I say we as in the true Australians who fought and died to make this country what it is, as opposed to the new arrivals who merely complain and criticise) understand that true AUSTRALIAN CULTURE was inherent in our people long before policies of multiculturalism became fashionable, and it will outlive this fashion as it outlived the Turkish in the Dardenelles, the Germans in the Somme, the Japanese in Borneo and Kanchanaburi, and you and your complainants. TRUE Australians will never be downtrodden and disenfranchised by the new psuedo-Australians . . . LONG LIVE PAULINE AND THE TRUE AUSTRALIAN NATION."
Err . . . was that "Australian", or just, uhh . . . "Austrian"?
:)
-j
To use an unrelated Point B in order to "reinforce" a Point A is jejeune and sophomoric.
:)
Hey, I never denied that. You're absolutely right. But if the point is unrelated, either ignore it or address it separately. The fact that Poster A above used an unrelated Point B has no effect on the validity of his Point A. Point A may very well be moronic and indefensible, but by addressing an entirely unrelated issue you've done nothing to demonstrate that.
Attempting to taint someone's ideas by bringing up an unrelated subject which some may find distasteful is a sure way of announcing that you cannot win the debate on the facts of the matter.
But, in a sense, isn't that what you're doing? You're "refuting" A by addressing B, just as the original poster "proved" A by addressing B -- but B just ain't relevant either way.
Your citations regarding firearms are fairly commonplace. I won't even attempt to refute them, because I don't find it to be particularly relevant to the issue at hand -- which is whether or not ESR has a point in his essay.
So I drifted off topic . . .
Look at the amount of mindshare that Sun has, the amount that MS has, that HP and Apple and everyone else has. How much of this goes to redundancy, to reinventing the wheel? How much of it is lost to corporate left-hand right-hand? The open-source/free software movement manages to avoid most of those problems (through some arcane means which I don't think anyone fully understands).
Ummm, yeah. To a large extent that's true, though there are exceptions like the ongoing KDE/GNOME gotterdammerung. On the other hand, free software has unique problems of its own. I worry a lot about the notion that free software tends more towards reimplementation than breaking new ground. Of course, nobody at MS or ZDNet who mutters about that stuff ever seems to notice that ~99% of proprietary software is just pointless wheel-reinvention, too. There's also the fact that by distributing the source, the reimplementers are adding a hell of a lot of value right there, even if they introduce no new features at all. It may be wheel-reinvention, but it's not pointless. On the whole, I'm optimistic, but not blissful.
-j
:)
-j
If you cannot make your point on technical merits without having to resort to the bugaboo of the Second Amendment, which is in absolutely no way related to the topic at hand, then your point fails, prima facie.
It seems to me that the merits of his other arguments are closely tied to their own merits, which is to say, the merits that they have. In other words, the merits of A are generally the merits of A, and relate in a purely arbitrary way to the merits of C, W, theta, and thorn. To ascribe the merits (or lack of merits, in this case) of A to B you need a better excuse than mere proximity. Take for example the following two statements:
A. Ronald Wilson Reagan was the President of the United States;
B. That guy in Louisiana who just murdered several people in a church is a shining example of why we need more handguns in private hands, because if he'd been better armed he could have finished them all off and made a better news story.
Well, gee. As for Reagan, a lot of people who lived through that depressing time can vouch for that, but, oh, boy -- B is a crock of shit! By your logic, if B is false, then A must also be false. Is that reasonable? The two are -- as you say of your own example -- completely unrelated.
What if the statement about the second amendment had appeared in an adjacent post? Imagine for a moment if Rob Malda, in a fit of post-Linux World despondency, had added that line to the post without the author's knowledge or consent? YES I KNOW Rob wouldn't do that; the point is that you're attacking your perception of the poster's thought processes rather than the arguments in post itself. It's ad-hominem, and it's crap.
He owns firearms to defend himself and his family with,
Against what? His own insecurities? People who own guns are far more likely to be shot than people who don't. The majority of people in the U.S. who are killed with handguns are killed by family or by close friends -- by people they trust. The above-mentioned incident in Louisiana does not support this claim because one incident is not statistically significant; it's anecdotal and good for sound bites, but it tells us nothing about trends. Still, these things are very well documented, so unless you're going to go right off the deep end and claim that Kofi Annan has ordered the U.S. government to skew the statistics as part of a New World Order plan, you'll have to come to terms with the fact that the Constitution is one thing, and practical reality is another thing entirely. It may very well be that all the killings are worth it; it may very well be that the principle of the second amendment is valuable enough to be worth some hassles. But don't give me any of those tired old lies about self-defense. If the Second Amendment is worth keeping, it's worth keeping at the cost of the safety of our homes, not in defense of it.
as a whole, the free software/open-source movement has the largest amount of mindshare, likely by an order of magnitude or more.
Largest among whom, and compared to what? In my apartment, it's got a good solid 100% (not counting my cats
This incredible intellectual base is nothing without leadership, though, preferably leaders with differing styles and opinions so as to make the overall experience all the richer and more dynamic. RMS, Linus, ESR, Alan Cox, Daryll Strauss, etc. -- they all are important figures in our movement.
I dig it, baby. Sing it loud!
-j
You know, by chance, here I am sitting and listening the the first Velvet Underground album, and I decided to have a look at Slashdot . . .
Over the past thirty-three years, how many bands have come and gone who wanted to sound like the Velvets, but "better", more "reasonable", more "accessible"? And now, after all these years, which record am I listening to?
Just a thought.
Oops, the record ended. Stooges time! (Gee, a lot of bands have "improved on" them, too . . .
-j
Not that he'd listen.
Notice that RMS said "Business and making money are not bad" - only restricting others' freedoms.
"Radical socialism" my ass. If you want somebody who's done great work but who's a divisive, arrogant knucklehead when he opens his mouth, you can start with Tim O'Reilly as well as with Stallman.
(Yeah, I've got a shelf full of O'Reilly books too, just like everybody who flames Stallman has a bin directory full of GNU programs and a GPL'd Linux kernel. Deal.)
-j
I seriously doubt that perl's regexp code is derived from GNU. After all, with perl you have your choice of licenses -- GNU or Artistic. If you choose Artistic, you can keep things as proprietary as you wish.
Really? Well, yeah, then I guess they're not using much GNU code there. Odd. Hey, what the hell, it's their own code. More power to 'em.
-j
And then back again! Write Awk in perl, then perl in that awk, then awk again in your new perl . . . Ultimately, you could waste literally DECADES of time that could -- in a less ideal world -- have actually been spent doing something useful, interesting, or productive.
Way to go, guys!
I like the idea of implementing all this stuff in a portable language, but why must it be such a horribly UGLY one?! Why, why . . . Yeah, sure, it does regular expressions -- but GNU has a perfectly good C library for that, right? What's the damn difference between writing in C with GNU's library, or writing in perl which probably uses the same damn GNU library anyway?!
Anyhow, as has been said above, all this guy's complaints (buffer length etc.) were addressed years ago -- in the GNU tools that they're using as examples. Uh, duh.
-j
I dunno, but what about anonymous remailers?
Then you're into "proving intent" and that's a mare's nest if ever I saw one. I'm not a lawyer, of course; I just play with myself in front of the TV.
Seriously! (I'm the moron who posted about the First Amendment vs. spam above, and I now think I was probably wrong, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate and agree with myself anyway
Sooner or later, the courts will have to decide in a case that's right on the border. What then? Bear in mind that the "border" is miles wide, because the courts don't know shit about software. For all we know, a really sharp DA (sharp as a *lawyer*, I mean; morally he'd be a moron) could indeed demonstrate to the satisfaction of a judge and/or jury that sendmail's primary purpose is falsifying routing information. How many small-town judges are there in this country who "don't hold with that there innernet"? It's not a good thought.
And then when the aliens gobble up Rob Young they'll move on to SuSE, and then Debian, and then the little grocery store on the corner, and then the FSF, and finally when there's nothing left they'll run around in circles biting each others' ankles howling about ZOG or whatever.
They'll think of something, trust me. William Jennings Bryan is not dead, just sleeping.
Please identify yourself
Please relax, Mr. Policeman. Who the hell taught you to take yourself so damn seriously?
we all know that PR workers from Microsoft do in fact read Slashdot, and try to put a pro-MS spin on things (and anti-ESR sour grapes)
Sour grapes my ass. There are a lot of valid criticisms to be made of Raymond's behavior and ethics. I am no damned fan of Microsoft, much less an employee -- but I am even less a fan of their tactics and mentality than I am of them as a specific corporate entity. Microsoft is just one part of the problem. You, for example, are another (much smaller) part of the same problem.
Your quasi-Stalinist crap is disgusting and contemptible (and entirely of a piece with the Manichean anti-Microsoft hysteria that I hear out of Raymond). If someone should dare question Raymond, you blindly and dogmatically refuse to listen -- god forbid someone should try to make you think for yourself! Oh, heavens, no! You just write 'em off as a Microsoft flack. Well, screw you, buddy.
Nobody is above criticism. Not you, not Eric Raymond, not anybody. Raymond's beliefs are at odds with those of a large portion of the free software community. We have a right to speak about this. Deal with it. Free and open debate is not a crime, however much you might wish it were.
Hmm, interesting. Many of my European friends say that the cops here are nicer than their European counterparts (especially the Swiss!!).
Yeah, but then there's the upstate NY state trooper who damn near ripped off my door handle and put me through endless drunk-tests, waving my arms around two feet from traffic when he caught me going maybe 15 mph over the limit . . . And searched my car . . . I was cold sober and very polite (I'm always polite w/ those guys; there's a well-known moving violation called "Failure of the Attitude Test" . . .
ALL cops can be pricks, but we're only pissed off at the ones who've been pricks to us -- which tend to be the ones at home, 'cause they've had more opportunity. Brendan Behan hated Irish cops intensely ("The harp of Ireland will never want for strings as long as there's a gut in a peeler!"), but he thought the cops in Paris were grand guys. He was even easier on ENGLISH cops than on Irish cops.
Socialism is a style of economics, not a style of government. . .
There has been a longstanding tradition of the Republican Party in the U.S. trying to paint these with the same brush, as if totalitarianism is somehow the inevitable result of Socialism. By responding to the word 'Socialist' as if it were an insult, you are helping them make their flawed point.
Uh, yeah, what he said!
I wuz gonna post something to that effect but I got like totally off the subject.
By the way, though, the Democrats have often been guilty of the same crap as the Republicans.
Maybe it's because the cult of wealth is less rampant than in the U.S.
. . .
Current trends that put infrastructure-building into the hands of short-term-thinkers are quite frightening to them.
. . .
Association of a price with a value is not mandatory here.
. . .
Europe's communitarian reflexes may well play as a strength, while U.S. commercial prejudices and predispositions may cause America to take a back-seat . . .
My favorite irony is the fact that American "rugged individualists" are the most compulsive groupthinkers on earth, while more communitarian societies tend to be a great deal more intellectually pluralistic and open. This (among other, darker desires) drives us to play to the least common denominator in all things. Americans have a weird belief that any motivation other than short term gain is somehow vaguely immoral, or at best disreputable. Well, we've ruined every major industry in the U.S. but one (computers) with that crap; shall we go for a clean sweep? Yay team! Rah rah rah!
A greater communitarian bent isn't just a good idea now; it always was and it always will be. Most of what the U.S. has gained by its "rugged individualism" was never worth having. Not all, but most. On balance, I'd say we've screwed ourselves. The bottom line is that a culture IS a community, and if people within that culture pretend that it isn't, they're ignoring reality and they're going to break things.
You do not expect true art from an advertising/design company.
Speak for yourself . . .
. . . Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Jugenstil, Maxfield Parrish, probably a dozen others.
Software is in no way analagous to "fine art"; it's very, very close to "commercial art". Most of the points raised in the essay seem valid to me, but let's not go overboard and over-generalize ourselves to death.
My two cents, anyway . . .
M$ is not alone in pushing their current product line rather than developing a competitive product, because they are more profitable in the short term that way.
:)
I think you hit it right on the head: These people don't really give a flying fuck about software. They'd be equally happy selling rocks or laundry detergent, just as long as they got to squash competitors and thereby make themselves feel manly (or whatever it is that motivates suits -- i guess money is probably a big part of it, but then again, after a certain point the numbers become meaningless).
I'm thinking, "gee, if I had pockets that deep and a lot of influence in the software industry, what cool things would I do with it?", while they're thinking, "how do we take what we've got and squeeze more dollars out of people this quarter than we did last quarter". They have very different goals and values than I have. (If I sound arrogant, well, fuck it -- they think their mindless animalistic greed and lack of imagination, ethics, and self-respect makes them superior to people like me, so I'm equally (un?)justified in feeling superior to them!
I have worked at other companies that actively suppressed technologically superior products by any means necessary. This includes tactics such as buying the company that developed the new technology just to keep the new product off the market. I have seen this first hand.
Well, sure, they're gonna whack competitors. That's unpleasant, but at least it makes some kind of sense.
The sad thing is that those idiots have the influence and the cash reserves to hire a bunch of smart people (not too many), shield them from the marketing robots, and have 'em develop an operating system that's genuinely GOOD -- I mean something as new and interesting as BeOS or whatever. They could make the application support happen, they could make the OEM support happen, they could pay off the trade press to kiss the new beast's ass until it developed its own momentum, they could astroturf it to the high heavens.
It's maddening; they're in a position where they could do something really worthwhile, instead of all this bullshit that they keep churning out year after year. Why don't they? There must be absolutely nobody there with any authority at all who has even a trace of integrity or simple decency. They sit on top of an enormous potential to create, and they choose instead to destroy. I'm tempted to start using loaded words like "monstrous", "degraded", "immoral", and whatnot . . . slingin' mud proves nothing, of course, but by my own (admittedly off-center) standards, there's something badly wrong between an awful lot of ears over there in Redmond.
Are they really dumb enough to think they're NOT ripping people off? Now *that* is scary.
. . . And the poor loser wasn't even done with the first mile yet! Well, i sure flamed his ass good and proper! He simply had no business being there at all until he'd been there long enough to get to mile 20 or so. I mean, nobody should ever start anything until they've finished at least half of it already. That kind of willingness to work on something, and worse yet, to learn -- especially at katz' age, when he should know better -- really pisses me off. i hate to say it, but i have a grim suspcion that katz may actually be doing this for its own sake, just because it's cool. what a creep. there's nothing more degrading to the hacker spirit than curiosity and the joy of discovery.
Remember: When they say that "quitters never win", what that really means is that anybody who hasn't won yet, should be forced to quit.
:)
(honestly, though, and quite seriously, until today i was beginning to question katz' commitment here; he didn't even seem to be all that serious about starting. well, i was dead wrong: he was serious, and he did start, and i'm cutting him the slack he deserves again. after all, regardless of all the code i barf out, there are an awful lot of things i've wanted to write [in english] for a long time, and never quite gotten around to . . . but will katz now flame me for "not being a real writer"? i doubt it.)
. . . because they want to be able to sneer at those who haven't.
others learn it because it's useful; still others, because it's cool. IMHO, the last group are the only ones who may ever have any right to call themselves "geeks" in the positive sense . . .
though it annoys me when katz gushes about being a "geek", i do remember the days when i was the same way. time passes, and i'm a little calmer now. i expect the same thing to happen with katz. with that in mind, i really don't have much of a problem saying that katz has far more of a right to call himself a "geek" than any of the halfwits who are flaming him.
Haven't the chinese killed those guys yet?
You've raised a good point. I'm involved with a non-profit foundation called Screw Tibet Now!, and we're working to see that those whining bastards get what they deserve. There's a very bright future ahead for that region, once we get all the undesirables out of the way. We're presently arbitrating talks between Disney and the Chinese government about the establishment of a LamaLand theme park, which will hopefully extend into Nepal as soon as that nation has been secured as well.
Courage! There is light at the end of the tunnel.
It's too bad www.linux.org has been taken hostage,
taken hostage? i seem to have missed a lot of plot exposition in the first chapter. whazza deal?