You will need someone who can operate in that environment.
Bulshit is, unfortunatly, something those of us who run things have to deal with. If I were hireing an administrator, I would want someone who could deal with bullshit. If I was hireing someone to actually do productive work, I'd want someone who would recognise and report bullshit.
I can see no use for someone who would put up with bullshit. That would just breed even more bullshit.
But the equipment needed to make the desktop case dimensionally trancendental is ridiculously expensive.
In any case, what you're paying for is convinience. I bought a made-up ethernet cable the other day, dispite the fact we have a reel of cable and some plugs. Sometimes, life is too short.
If they find a price point at which people think `ok, may as well just get one pre-set up', they deserve their profit.
They demonstrate you've put up with the bullshit long enough to accomplish something.
I don't want to hire anyone who would put up with bullshit.
Why should I hire a professinal admin who never took the time to get a certification?
Perhaps he was doing his job while the dilettantes were off playing paper-chase. Every hour spent chasing paper is one not spent learning something new, or developing new skills.
To invert your question, why should I hire someone who couldn't think of anything better to do with their time and money (or that of a previous employer) than getting a piece of paper to say what should be said more thoroughly and more convincingly by their references?
But downgrading a manual build install can be a real pain.
Isn't that what tar is for? One of the reasons I hate the way apache gets installed by packages and ports is that it is scattered all over the system. I always build it so that everything (binaries, libraries, config etc) lives under ~www. Then the whole state can be easily backed up and restored. I don't know if that would work for php, maybe that installs stuff into the perl lib areas.
Another backup for the sanely paranoid is to always keep the previous build so a quick make install may be a fix.
And a manual build lets you install two apaches side by side, which would allow for real testing without a spare server.
To my knowlegde Gentoo is the only distro that allows this kind of easy downgrading.
Of course, you have to be in the habbit of working in a way which copes with the least common denominator system you may end up having to cope with. (Bloody **d *a*!!!:-))
Re:At last, Iain M Banks gets a bit of recognition
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
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· Score: 1
No, I simply pointed out that it was irrelevent, and indeed, just a restatement of something I said.
Yes, the GPL is intended to create more freedom for more people further down the line. But that is not what was being discussed. From the POV of what can happen to one specific piece of software, say a version of a file in the linux kernel, all that can happen by giving everyone the choice of another licence is that everyone has more freedom WRT that file.
This may or may not be bad for the FSF's political aims of there being more free software, but for this piece of code, nothing can happen which makes it less free.
[congress could undermine the GPL]
Since that would result in a fundamental change in the way copyright works[...]
Er, no, it wouldn't affect copyright at all. This is about the licence, not copyright. Imagine, for instance, a law putting a large insurance or auditing burdon on use of copyleft software. No, it wouldn't make sense, but we are talking about politicians here, the kind of people who pass laws outlawing cheese.
The USA should legalize kidnapping! It gives the citzens more options, hence it is a more free country.
This is only true if you believe freedom from legal constraints is an overriding good.
GPL software is more free because the software itself is always guarranteed to remain free,
The software is guaranteed to remain free by having a copyright notice and a licence which says you can use it for whatever you like.
The GPL is intended to make it more likely that future software will be free, specifically derived works. The freedom of this bit of software is secure.
Eg, I have here a copy of the Apache source. I have quite wide rights to do things with it. There is bugger all you can do to `enslave' that software and reduce my rights. Well, without buying some congressbots.
I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps.
Surely, if you want to run an `unstable' system, you are going to have to expect things to constantly change.
On the apache front, for real systems (as opposed to random desktops I happen to want a web server on to run SWAT or something), I build apache myself. That way FreeBSD and RedHat servers have everything working the same way. Apache is so easy to build, and so portable, that the ports/packages/rpms/whatever of each specific system don't buy you much. A trivial shell script contianing the call to configure you decide on is effectively a cross-platform package.
Irony - when something happens that is the opposite of what is expected.
No, that is `a supprise'.
Irony is a rhetorical technique. Basicly dead-pan sarcasm. It has gained a metaphorical meaning applied to the real world, rather than communication, when the world seems to be acting as if it were an intelligent agent being ironic.
That means that contradiction of expectations usually has to be there, but in addition there has to be some aspect of the events that could be seen as a comment by the universe on the situation.
To use the whiney one's non-example: Rain on a wedding isn't ironic. Rain on a wedding in death valley isn't ironic. Rain on the wedding of the owner of a chronically unsucessful cloud seeding company might be.
I dispute that the BSDL is more free than the GPL.
It gives the licencee more options, hence it is a more free licence.
and thus the code quickly becomes less free.
No, the code is always there licenced under the original terms, and so as free as it ever was. The worst that can happen is that someone else decides not to open up their work.
The point of the GPL is to sacrifice a little freedom in order to encourage the creation of further open source software.
The relevant point is that later licences can not restrict anyone's options, only open up more options. This means that all that is being `risked' is that encouragement to the creation of further open source derivatives, and that only if the FSF fundamentally changes it's nature.
On the other hand, congrtess could pass a bill, or a judge make a decision, tomorrow which changed the impact of the GPL, say making the linux kernel unusable in commercial shops. Wouldn't that give Bill a stiffie. Who do you think Bill would be more likely to manage to buy off, the FSF or some congresscritters?
The existance of a mechanism to patch a system is a security issue. The lack of any ability to do so is a limit to the useful lifetime of the system in a changing world.
Once he is gone who is to say corporate interests won't take over and made a version 4 license that allows unlimited modification and distribution without making any source public.
A sane response to the above paranoia would be to add `or any later version approved by me'.
The important word is `or'. It's not a swap it's an alternative. There is nothing the FSF can do in GPLv3 to reduce what I can currently do to the Emacs code. They could give me more rights under GPLv3, but if they tried to give me fewer, I'd just say `personally, I have chosen to take my copy of this code under GPLv2' and have the same freedoms I do now.
Perhaps you shouldn't have given them a blank-check
But it's nota blank cheque, the only thing which can be done is to make the code more free. Given that RMS and the FSF are obsessive about not having the code be more free, that is hardly a great risk.
By not giving that possibility you are opening yourself to every politician and judge making the code significantly less free, and they certainly don't have the same dedication to openess that RMS has to enforced cooperation.
But by putting the "or later" clause in, you are opening yourself up to BOTH possibilities, for no good reason.
No, you open the possibility of RMS suddenly BSDing your code as the price of allowing retrospective fixes should the GPL not turn out to allow what we all presume it allows.
Remember that the people drawing up the GPL has the normal problem that no one knows what the legal meaning of a contract really is until it hits the courts. There is no fundamental problem if the courts later found the GPL to be more free than they intended (they'd be itrritated, but at least the code would still be out there and usable by all the people who had assumed it was), but if the courts found that the GPL was more restrictive than expected, then lots of people could be in lots of trouble and the FSF would be on everyone's shitlist. The or-later is a reassurance that if that happens then the problem can be fixed.
But again if a hole were found, v2 code would have that hole, so fixing it with a v3 could only reduce the amount of leeway had by other parties.
How? You have certain options under v2. V3 may give you more or fewer options, but you still have the options you had under v2.
If v2 turned out to have a missplaced comma, meaning you could only use code from Emacs if you have red hair, then you never had the rights we all thought you had, so still v3 will give you mode rights.
There is no scenario where giving you the option of using the code under another licence, if you so desire, can reduce your options.
The only thing I can think of which could have motivated Linus to delete the or-later is a worry that the FSF might decide to give you more rights to use the linux kernel at some point in the future than he wants -- eg the FSF becomeing BSD converts (right after the Pope converts to Islam) -- but the sensible fix for that is to say `any version of the GPL >=2 approved by Linus Tovalds' or to create a new sequence of licences exactly the same as the GPLs except in name, and use those.
Perhaps the fact that he comes from a country with a civil law system made Linus underestimate the value of the or-later clause.
He thought v2 was good enough and wanted to make it completely impossible that linux could ever become propriety.
No, the `or later' clause can only loosen the conditions of use, so that can't be the reason.
The problem with tying it to a particular version comes if a bug is found in the licence.
Imagine if the US courts decided that some clause in the GPL v2 meant that commercial use was not allowed -- and they can if they want, common law system -- the linux kernel would be hobbyist only in the US, whereas emacs, having the or-later clause, could be `patched' to get commercial use back.
The clause of "future versions" makes me worry about someone placing "for non-comercial use only" or somethign simular into the GPLv.20 and having it auto-enacted.
Can't happen. Since you have the right to pick the version of the GPL you licence the code under, you must always have at least the rights in the named GPL version. All a later one can do is give you more rights. Eg, if v6 GPL had a no commercial use clause, you could continue to use it commercially under the v5 GPL.
The reason for the `or later' clause, AIUI, is that it is always possible that the current GPL will be found too restrictive for it's intended effect (eg in some jurisdiction no one considered when drawing it up, or because of some legal decision in the US or EU). If that happens the FSF can release a new version, and everyone now has the choice to take emacs under those terms instead of the broken original ones.
It is unlikely yet possible [that a later version of the GPL would be substantially more free].
I think the possibility of the FSF giving up politics is far, far smaller than the possibility of some problem being found with a specific version of the GPL.
Is all that information up to date for everyone who has been a developer?
Is every contribution from a non-developer (eg emailed in pateches) legally signed over to one of the developers?
Lets just hope we learn from this
The normal way of licencing under the GPL would be `versionN or later', so any project caught by this now either has a reason, and so will be in the same position next time, or was at some point headed up by an idiot, and we can't avoid that happening again.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license
Does anyone know why Linus made this, at first glance, boneheaded decision?
What rights did he think the FSF were likely to give away in later versions of the GPL that he had to hold on to? It's hardly likely that RMS would have a deathbed convertion and make v20 of the GPL a BSD style licence.
Yes , but i dont see where the pains will come from.
Every compyright holder must agree to a change in licence, no matter how compatable the licences.
Do you want the job of goiong back through a the history of a major open source project and identifying everyone who made a non trivial contribution to the code, then finding them (all you have is an email address from 10 years ago), confirming it is the right person, getting in touch, getting them to sign a bit of paper, chasing them when they have better things to do, dealing with the heirs of the ones who have died... and doing that under many different legal systems.
Yes, there will come a point where the remainig small contributions can be deleted and reimplemented, but they you have to do all the testing required to reassure everyone that the new function is at least as stable and secure as the previous one.
On the Simpsons thing, I was missidentifying what you were referring to. I will excuse myself with the observation that the case of the documentary guy and the simpsons was not a bad reflection on copyright at all, everyone (except, officially, Fox of course) agreed that he had the right to use the clip free and clear. Copyright law was on his side.
The problem was that the US civil court system is seriously fucked up, so that anyone with deep pockets (which can include large groups putting in small amounts) can use any civil law to beat the crap out of anyone with less money. That the law chosen was copyright in this case is not significant.
Think of the lard arses beating on the fast food industry for letting them kill themselves with extra fries -- the law which allows you to sue someone who sells you a dangerous product is not he problem, it is the system which allows that law to be missapplied.
I'm sure I remember a fuss about someone wanting to use a clip of the simpsons in the background of a song, which is what I thought you referred to.
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Bulshit is, unfortunatly, something those of us who run things have to deal with. If I were hireing an administrator, I would want someone who could deal with bullshit. If I was hireing someone to actually do productive work, I'd want someone who would recognise and report bullshit.
I can see no use for someone who would put up with bullshit. That would just breed even more bullshit.
Cygwin is your friend.
But the equipment needed to make the desktop case dimensionally trancendental is ridiculously expensive.
In any case, what you're paying for is convinience. I bought a made-up ethernet cable the other day, dispite the fact we have a reel of cable and some plugs. Sometimes, life is too short.
If they find a price point at which people think `ok, may as well just get one pre-set up', they deserve their profit.
I don't want to hire anyone who would put up with bullshit.
Why should I hire a professinal admin who never took the time to get a certification?
Perhaps he was doing his job while the dilettantes were off playing paper-chase. Every hour spent chasing paper is one not spent learning something new, or developing new skills.
To invert your question, why should I hire someone who couldn't think of anything better to do with their time and money (or that of a previous employer) than getting a piece of paper to say what should be said more thoroughly and more convincingly by their references?
Isn't that what tar is for? One of the reasons I hate the way apache gets installed by packages and ports is that it is scattered all over the system. I always build it so that everything (binaries, libraries, config etc) lives under ~www. Then the whole state can be easily backed up and restored. I don't know if that would work for php, maybe that installs stuff into the perl lib areas.
Another backup for the sanely paranoid is to always keep the previous build so a quick make install may be a fix.
And a manual build lets you install two apaches side by side, which would allow for real testing without a spare server.
To my knowlegde Gentoo is the only distro that allows this kind of easy downgrading.
Of course, you have to be in the habbit of working in a way which copes with the least common denominator system you may end up having to cope with. (Bloody **d *a*!!! :-))
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
No, I simply pointed out that it was irrelevent, and indeed, just a restatement of something I said.
Yes, the GPL is intended to create more freedom for more people further down the line. But that is not what was being discussed. From the POV of what can happen to one specific piece of software, say a version of a file in the linux kernel, all that can happen by giving everyone the choice of another licence is that everyone has more freedom WRT that file.
This may or may not be bad for the FSF's political aims of there being more free software, but for this piece of code, nothing can happen which makes it less free.
[congress could undermine the GPL]
Since that would result in a fundamental change in the way copyright works[...]
Er, no, it wouldn't affect copyright at all. This is about the licence, not copyright. Imagine, for instance, a law putting a large insurance or auditing burdon on use of copyleft software. No, it wouldn't make sense, but we are talking about politicians here, the kind of people who pass laws outlawing cheese.
This is only true if you believe freedom from legal constraints is an overriding good.
GPL software is more free because the software itself is always guarranteed to remain free,
The software is guaranteed to remain free by having a copyright notice and a licence which says you can use it for whatever you like.
The GPL is intended to make it more likely that future software will be free, specifically derived works. The freedom of this bit of software is secure.
Eg, I have here a copy of the Apache source. I have quite wide rights to do things with it. There is bugger all you can do to `enslave' that software and reduce my rights. Well, without buying some congressbots.
Surely, if you want to run an `unstable' system, you are going to have to expect things to constantly change.
On the apache front, for real systems (as opposed to random desktops I happen to want a web server on to run SWAT or something), I build apache myself. That way FreeBSD and RedHat servers have everything working the same way. Apache is so easy to build, and so portable, that the ports/packages/rpms/whatever of each specific system don't buy you much. A trivial shell script contianing the call to configure you decide on is effectively a cross-platform package.
No, that is `a supprise'.
Irony is a rhetorical technique. Basicly dead-pan sarcasm. It has gained a metaphorical meaning applied to the real world, rather than communication, when the world seems to be acting as if it were an intelligent agent being ironic.
That means that contradiction of expectations usually has to be there, but in addition there has to be some aspect of the events that could be seen as a comment by the universe on the situation.
To use the whiney one's non-example: Rain on a wedding isn't ironic. Rain on a wedding in death valley isn't ironic. Rain on the wedding of the owner of a chronically unsucessful cloud seeding company might be.
It gives the licencee more options, hence it is a more free licence.
and thus the code quickly becomes less free.
No, the code is always there licenced under the original terms, and so as free as it ever was. The worst that can happen is that someone else decides not to open up their work.
The point of the GPL is to sacrifice a little freedom in order to encourage the creation of further open source software.
The relevant point is that later licences can not restrict anyone's options, only open up more options. This means that all that is being `risked' is that encouragement to the creation of further open source derivatives, and that only if the FSF fundamentally changes it's nature.
On the other hand, congrtess could pass a bill, or a judge make a decision, tomorrow which changed the impact of the GPL, say making the linux kernel unusable in commercial shops. Wouldn't that give Bill a stiffie. Who do you think Bill would be more likely to manage to buy off, the FSF or some congresscritters?
The existance of a mechanism to patch a system is a security issue. The lack of any ability to do so is a limit to the useful lifetime of the system in a changing world.
A sane response to the above paranoia would be to add `or any later version approved by me'.
The important word is `or'. It's not a swap it's an alternative. There is nothing the FSF can do in GPLv3 to reduce what I can currently do to the Emacs code. They could give me more rights under GPLv3, but if they tried to give me fewer, I'd just say `personally, I have chosen to take my copy of this code under GPLv2' and have the same freedoms I do now.
Exactly, a more free licence, hence making the code more free, which is what I said was the only thing which could be done.
Have you considered reading what you reply to?
But it's nota blank cheque, the only thing which can be done is to make the code more free. Given that RMS and the FSF are obsessive about not having the code be more free, that is hardly a great risk.
By not giving that possibility you are opening yourself to every politician and judge making the code significantly less free, and they certainly don't have the same dedication to openess that RMS has to enforced cooperation.
No, you open the possibility of RMS suddenly BSDing your code as the price of allowing retrospective fixes should the GPL not turn out to allow what we all presume it allows.
Remember that the people drawing up the GPL has the normal problem that no one knows what the legal meaning of a contract really is until it hits the courts. There is no fundamental problem if the courts later found the GPL to be more free than they intended (they'd be itrritated, but at least the code would still be out there and usable by all the people who had assumed it was), but if the courts found that the GPL was more restrictive than expected, then lots of people could be in lots of trouble and the FSF would be on everyone's shitlist. The or-later is a reassurance that if that happens then the problem can be fixed.
How? You have certain options under v2. V3 may give you more or fewer options, but you still have the options you had under v2.
If v2 turned out to have a missplaced comma, meaning you could only use code from Emacs if you have red hair, then you never had the rights we all thought you had, so still v3 will give you mode rights.
There is no scenario where giving you the option of using the code under another licence, if you so desire, can reduce your options.
The only thing I can think of which could have motivated Linus to delete the or-later is a worry that the FSF might decide to give you more rights to use the linux kernel at some point in the future than he wants -- eg the FSF becomeing BSD converts (right after the Pope converts to Islam) -- but the sensible fix for that is to say `any version of the GPL >=2 approved by Linus Tovalds' or to create a new sequence of licences exactly the same as the GPLs except in name, and use those.
Perhaps the fact that he comes from a country with a civil law system made Linus underestimate the value of the or-later clause.
No, the `or later' clause can only loosen the conditions of use, so that can't be the reason.
The problem with tying it to a particular version comes if a bug is found in the licence.
Imagine if the US courts decided that some clause in the GPL v2 meant that commercial use was not allowed -- and they can if they want, common law system -- the linux kernel would be hobbyist only in the US, whereas emacs, having the or-later clause, could be `patched' to get commercial use back.
Can't happen. Since you have the right to pick the version of the GPL you licence the code under, you must always have at least the rights in the named GPL version. All a later one can do is give you more rights. Eg, if v6 GPL had a no commercial use clause, you could continue to use it commercially under the v5 GPL.
The reason for the `or later' clause, AIUI, is that it is always possible that the current GPL will be found too restrictive for it's intended effect (eg in some jurisdiction no one considered when drawing it up, or because of some legal decision in the US or EU). If that happens the FSF can release a new version, and everyone now has the choice to take emacs under those terms instead of the broken original ones.
I think the possibility of the FSF giving up politics is far, far smaller than the possibility of some problem being found with a specific version of the GPL.
Is all that information up to date for everyone who has been a developer?
Is every contribution from a non-developer (eg emailed in pateches) legally signed over to one of the developers?
Lets just hope we learn from this
The normal way of licencing under the GPL would be `versionN or later', so any project caught by this now either has a reason, and so will be in the same position next time, or was at some point headed up by an idiot, and we can't avoid that happening again.
Does anyone know why Linus made this, at first glance, boneheaded decision?
What rights did he think the FSF were likely to give away in later versions of the GPL that he had to hold on to? It's hardly likely that RMS would have a deathbed convertion and make v20 of the GPL a BSD style licence.
Every compyright holder must agree to a change in licence, no matter how compatable the licences.
Do you want the job of goiong back through a the history of a major open source project and identifying everyone who made a non trivial contribution to the code, then finding them (all you have is an email address from 10 years ago), confirming it is the right person, getting in touch, getting them to sign a bit of paper, chasing them when they have better things to do, dealing with the heirs of the ones who have died... and doing that under many different legal systems.
Yes, there will come a point where the remainig small contributions can be deleted and reimplemented, but they you have to do all the testing required to reassure everyone that the new function is at least as stable and secure as the previous one.
No fun at all.
I believe the correct quote is ``where there's a will, there are a hundred schemeing relatives''
The problem was that the US civil court system is seriously fucked up, so that anyone with deep pockets (which can include large groups putting in small amounts) can use any civil law to beat the crap out of anyone with less money. That the law chosen was copyright in this case is not significant.
Think of the lard arses beating on the fast food industry for letting them kill themselves with extra fries -- the law which allows you to sue someone who sells you a dangerous product is not he problem, it is the system which allows that law to be missapplied.
I'm sure I remember a fuss about someone wanting to use a clip of the simpsons in the background of a song, which is what I thought you referred to.