A lot of newbie users who have some desire/need to do UNIX software development (for example, a good deal of MUD "coders") could benefit from this a lot. Most suffer through the hell of trying to get Cygwin to compile and run their apps.
That's probably because they're not writing posix apps, they're writing Linux apps. Keep in mind that Cygwin is a posix environment for Windows, not a Linux emulator. I suspect they'd have the same problems porting their applications to run under Solaris, BSD, or any other posix system that doesn't happen to be Linux.
There are a surprisingly large number of applications that compile for Cygwin out of the box -./configure, make, make install and you're done. In my experience, the ease of compiling most command-line apps for Cygwin is pretty closely related to the number of platforms it already compiles on. The most annoying case is when you find code that is explicitly referencing Linux-specific headers, instead of using a posix header that defines the same functionality.
Note that I'm just talking about compiling here - once your code is building, you may run into Cygwin-specific issues that require changes in the code to work around... nothing more surprising than what you might expect when writing code intended to run on multiple platforms.
Your "computer chips" might not even have been developed without the Air Force and NASA, since who else would have paid Fairchild, etc. to make them? A simple logic gate once cost over a hundred pre-inflation dollars...
Right... but the point he was making, I think, is that the government funding in those fields eventually reduced the risk to the point where commercial entities were willing to enter the field and drive further development. NASA and other space agencies have, in some sense, accomplished that goal - they've made those huge initial investments, helped identify and delineate the known risks, and gotten things to the point where non-governmental organizations are looking at privatized space travel. That won't happen in the US, though, so long as government regulations make it virtually impossible for anyone except NASA to put anything into space.
What this gets you is some fairly large stretches of undeveloped area and small towns not more than 20 miles outside of the city limits.
Pittsburgh has a similar situation... my wife and I live on a 56-acre farm that's only 30 minutes from downtown. Privacy, back to nature, and 10 minutes away from a Borders bookstore:-) The local tech economy is starting to come back into swing, and there's quite a bit of work outside of the pure tech field... Alcoa, USX, Mellon Bank, etc. Not to mention CMU, Pitt, and a host of other universities.
Speaking of the farm... something else to remember is that your cost of living will amost certainly drop if you move to a more rural area. So you will almost certainly be able to take a cut in salary and still end up living more comfortably than you were in the city.
So you can't distribute the GPLed MySQL with Solaris or Windows without GPLing the entire system.
Bzzt. You can't distribute the GPLed MySQL with Solaris or Windows without violating the license. (Never mind that as other posters pointer out, the GPL specifically allows linking with standard OS libraries, etc.)
One possible way to resolve a GPL license violation is to place your code under the GPL as well, but it's not the only possible resolution. In some cases (for example, MySQL) the same version of the code my be under an enitrely different license that the author(s) will allow you to use instead. In other cases, the violator might decide to not release their source code, but instead stop shipping their product and pay any damages that might be awarded for the license violation.
Putting the code under the GPL is a possible solution; but it's not the only solution. Unless you take the issue to court, the ultimate resolution remains a matter of negotation and agreement netween the authors of the GPL code and those who violated their license.
But the sport idea is very good. It doesn't have to be team-based in order to be social.
For me, it was track in high school. I ended up running the 100/300 hurdles, mostly becuase nobody else wanted to:-) Racked up my knees something fierce, but I did OK. The way that track events get scored, there's no one "winner" or "looser" - you're all picking up points towards your final total; so while there's pressure to perform as well as you can, it (usually) isn't as intense as you find in other sports. There's a lot more going on, too, so where I would have been a 3rd string bench warmer in any other sport, I was actually able to get out and compete every time we had an event.
As for socialization, I think track is the best you can find. Unless you're a uber-performer, there are long stretches in between each individual competition to chat and socialize. You have long-distance beanpoles, weight lifters doing things like shot and javelin, and a wide spectrum of other types filling in on the various other event types, so you get to interact with and know a wide variety of people as well. Plus, with so many different physical types on the team, someone who's outside the norms w/regard to physique doesn't stand out quite so much.
Remember, SCO claimed that they couldn't provide any evidence of copyright infringement without access to the AIX code. Now, they are either going to have to do one of the following:
Show up in court with evidence they had on hand when they made the above claim. Lying to the court is not generally a good case-winning move.
Show up in court with evidence they claimed they dug up in the past 45 days. Again, lying to the court - regardless of what they discover in IBM's AIX code, they knowingly filed a spurious lawsuit.
Show up in court with nothing, get charged with contempt, and have their case dismissed.
None of these alternatives favors SCO in the least. IBM's responsibility to make the AIX source "available" to SCO, IMHO, only shows that the judge has a somewhat morbid sense of humor, in that she seems interested in finding out exactly how tight SCO is willing to draw the noose around their own neck...
Yes, they do. You can even buy uncut sheets of them from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Steve Wozniak has an interesting story about how he uses sheets of $2 bills on his site. I got a kick out of reading this a few weeks ago:
You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.
I take the sheets of 4 bills and have a printer, located through friends, gum them into pads, like stationery pads. The printer then perforates them between the bills, so that I can tear a bill or two away.
He ended up raising the suspicions of a casion manager in Las Vegas, who called in the Secret Service because he thought the bills were counterfeit...
(To avoid the inevetable off-topic moderation: this is a story about a young musical prodigy who is raised completely separated from any outside influences, so he can create "pure" music.)
Then there will be enough libre programmers to make decent libre IDEs etc, and the proprietary Java will wither away (and Sun with it).
In case you're not aware of it, there's a pretty good libre IDE named Eclipse available. So... can you explain to me exactly why a libre implementation of Java would require development of an entirely new IDE?
Now, changes in the Java specification might require changes in an IDE - but that would apply to both proprietary and libre IDEs equally. Just changing the license that the Java source code is under won't immediately invalidate the value and existance of the current crop of Java IDEs.
Taking a look at a couple of your other comments, I think you're specifically referring to how arch does business - if that's the case here, then maybe my above argument doesn't make sense:-/ I was tallking about supporting custom keyword expansion in subversion, not arch.
2. Support for (user-supplied) keywords. The general consensus on the Arch list is that it's a bad idea for any revision control system to support this "feature" at all, and that there are better ways to do anything one could want them for.
Out of curiosity, could you repeat some of the reasons for opposing this? In this particular case, it seems that it's viewed as a fairly significant stumbling block by a large and influential potential adopter (FreeBSD).
I've never worked in an environment where we specifically needed this capability, but my general experience is that it's a poor choice to sacrifice flexibility unless there's a strong technical reason for doing so.
BTW I'm here in Pgh too. Nice weather for a change.
Of course, in keeping with typical Pittsburgh weather patterns, you wrote this while it was sunny and 60 degrees out... less than a day later, I get to read it with a snowstorm swirling around outside my windows:-/
To keep things on topic: I actually though of recommending that he see about hiring some folks from around here... while it's not Silicon Valley, there are plenty of good people, and plenty of experienced and mature people - IMHO, exactly the kind of folks you want as the core of a new compnay. IMHO, that plus cost of living/cost of doing business in the Pittsburgh area makes it more attractive for a new company than SV, Boston, or any of the other places that are "known" for their technology companies.
Why would you want to (essentially) outsource development of your idea? You may not be the greatest coder in the world, but you should be able to put together something by yourself. If it's a large enough project that it might take 2-3 additional people plus you a number of months to complete, then start your company, find those people, sell them on the idea, and get them to come work for you in a startup capacity - reduced or no salary, stock or option grants, etc. in return for shared responsibility in creating the company.
Face it - a consultant or contractor is only obligated to give you what you've contracted for, and is probably going to be more than happy to eat up your cash reserves by working extra hours to fix bugs, meet demo deadlines, etc. His/her reward is relatively small, and effort is commensurate. Someone sharing responsibility with you for putting out the product will be a lot more motivated (by a greater reward, and a greater risk) to provide whatever effort is needed to get the product out and get money rolling in ASAP - presumably your desire as well.
Turns out, however, that the cygwin libraries are GPL'ed (not even LGPL'd, mind you) which means that you are prohibited from distributing non-GPL binaries.
Not true. The Cygwin distribution contains a number of non-GPL licenses: X11, Apache, LGPL, BSD, and others. Take a look at the Cygwin licensing terms:
In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a without libcygwin.a itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.
This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of libcygwin.a linked into it. Note that this does not apply to the cygwin DLL itself. If you distribute a (possibly modified) version of the DLL you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, i.e. you must provide sources for the cygwin DLL.
Didn't address the other point... yes, whoever did this would be breaking the law, and unless they were able to do this completely anonymously, they would have to face the consequences. Since it would amount to an act of civil disobedience, though, I suspect that anyone who would go through with this would want to make the effort to ensure that they were not anonymous, so that their actions would have a greater impact. Breaking the law is not the end goal, but just an event that could be used to demonstrate the flaws in the existing language of the DMCA, with the hope that such a demonstration would lead to a change in the law.
*You* would be the law-breaker, not the recipient. They didn't request the material.
The law - at least, the snippet quoted - doesn't apparently differentiate between requested and unrequested material; just receipt. If that's the case, then every person in the USA routinely violates the DMCA. I want to believe that this is a misunderstanding of the law, but there's a cynical part of me that finds it easy to believe that our lawmakers simply just don't care about the actual contents of the laws they pass.
The DMCA, of all laws, changed the definition of "commercial gain" to include "the receipt, or expectation of receipt" of copyrighted material.
Hmmm. "...receipt, or expectation of receipt", eh?
Sounds good to me... just write an article on the issue of the DMCA and copyright law. Duly register it with the Library of Congress, or whoever it is that you need to go to in order to formally register a copyright.
Then mail a copy to each and every member of congress, and each and every high-level executive of the RIAA and MPAA.
Finally, haul them all into court for violating the DMCA, as they are in receipt of your copyrighted work.
If there's a problem here because it's your copyrighted work (i.e., you have permission to distribute copies of it), then perhaps you could make use of some other copyrighted work. It should be a short bit of work to find something that has a registered copyright, but where the actual owner of the copyright can't be located.
If that won't work (say, becuase only the copyright holder can press charges under the DMCA), then perhaps you could use a copyrighted work that was created by someone morally opposed to the DMCA - RMS, for example. Let him know that you're violating his copyright, and point out that under the DMCA, not only you but everyone you sent a copy to can be taken to court and fined up to $150,000 each.
Someone smarter than I will point out exactly why this wouldn't work, I'm sure. But I like the idea of turning the legal system back upon itself, like the worm Ouroboros...
where do I find a cut-rate DBA if I only have 25 employees? 10 employees? 5 employees?
Do you do your own fillings too, instead of going to the dentist?
You hire me (a profrssional database programmer) to write a database for you.
Sorry, no - I wouldn't hire you. I'd hire someone who knows the difference between a DBA (Database Administrator) and a programmer, or at least is willing to admit when they've made a mistake.
Before you whine about this, you recomendded hiring "a DBA per hundred employees". You obviously knew what you were talking about, and are backpedaling. There's a huge difference between hiring a programmer to do some contract work and hiring a DBA.
3. Hire a DBA per hundred employees, right out of college.
Sure thing. Now... where do I find a cut-rate DBA if I only have 25 employees? 10 employees? 5 employees? What if I have 100 employees, all of whom earn close to minimum wage, and hiring a DBA would be enough of an expense that it might make the difference between staying in business and closing up shop? What if I don't have any employees, because I'm putting together a DB for personal use (logging scores for the bowling team, keeping track of info about my gardening efforts, etc.)
There's a reason that Access exists, and a reason that it serves a decent niche market. It lets someone aside from a professional DBA put together a database, and have a good chance of it working. There are a lot of little apps out there that are based on access, require some bit of knowledge and/or experience to set up, and simply don't require the type of maintenance that calls for a DBA.
I've got one FoxPro app I put together over 10 years ago that's still in use, handling a few dozen additions/edits a month. There's not a whole lot of flash and glitter, but it does the job. This is the target market for Access and related applications, simple DB-based application generation. I suspect that there are far more Access-based applications quietly working in the background than people want to admit.
...and many more companies that support OSS. There was a point in time where OSS was largely written and maintained by people in their spare time; these days, there are people who have jobs that revolve around developing, maintaining and improving OSS.
There's still crud out there, of course. Remember Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for both commercial and open source software. You should evaluate OSS the same way you evaluate commercial software: who wrote it, what's their reputation, does it have the features we need, how stable is it, etc.
You wouldn't judge Microsoft's capabilities based on the kind of software that Sun produced, would you? Then why would derive your opinion of Apache, Sendmail, Bind, Linux, XFree86, BSD, KDevelop, Gnome and the like based on the fact that some other, completely seperate OSS project isn't worth dreck?
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably because they're not writing posix apps, they're writing Linux apps. Keep in mind that Cygwin is a posix environment for Windows, not a Linux emulator. I suspect they'd have the same problems porting their applications to run under Solaris, BSD, or any other posix system that doesn't happen to be Linux.
There are a surprisingly large number of applications that compile for Cygwin out of the box -Note that I'm just talking about compiling here - once your code is building, you may run into Cygwin-specific issues that require changes in the code to work around... nothing more surprising than what you might expect when writing code intended to run on multiple platforms.
Right... but the point he was making, I think, is that the government funding in those fields eventually reduced the risk to the point where commercial entities were willing to enter the field and drive further development. NASA and other space agencies have, in some sense, accomplished that goal - they've made those huge initial investments, helped identify and delineate the known risks, and gotten things to the point where non-governmental organizations are looking at privatized space travel. That won't happen in the US, though, so long as government regulations make it virtually impossible for anyone except NASA to put anything into space.
Pittsburgh has a similar situation... my wife and I live on a 56-acre farm that's only 30 minutes from downtown. Privacy, back to nature, and 10 minutes away from a Borders bookstore :-) The local tech economy is starting to come back into swing, and there's quite a bit of work outside of the pure tech field... Alcoa, USX, Mellon Bank, etc. Not to mention CMU, Pitt, and a host of other universities.
Speaking of the farm... something else to remember is that your cost of living will amost certainly drop if you move to a more rural area. So you will almost certainly be able to take a cut in salary and still end up living more comfortably than you were in the city.
Which is, of course, doubleplus ungood. He obviosuly needs re-educated so he can develop the wholesome, natural and proper EUsian anti-US mentality.
Fantasy Guy and SF Guy drinking at a bar...
Heh. Phil and Dixie... good stuff.
Bzzt. You can't distribute the GPLed MySQL with Solaris or Windows without violating the license. (Never mind that as other posters pointer out, the GPL specifically allows linking with standard OS libraries, etc.)
One possible way to resolve a GPL license violation is to place your code under the GPL as well, but it's not the only possible resolution. In some cases (for example, MySQL) the same version of the code my be under an enitrely different license that the author(s) will allow you to use instead. In other cases, the violator might decide to not release their source code, but instead stop shipping their product and pay any damages that might be awarded for the license violation.
Putting the code under the GPL is a possible solution; but it's not the only solution. Unless you take the issue to court, the ultimate resolution remains a matter of negotation and agreement netween the authors of the GPL code and those who violated their license.
For me, it was track in high school. I ended up running the 100/300 hurdles, mostly becuase nobody else wanted to :-) Racked up my knees something fierce, but I did OK. The way that track events get scored, there's no one "winner" or "looser" - you're all picking up points towards your final total; so while there's pressure to perform as well as you can, it (usually) isn't as intense as you find in other sports. There's a lot more going on, too, so where I would have been a 3rd string bench warmer in any other sport, I was actually able to get out and compete every time we had an event.
As for socialization, I think track is the best you can find. Unless you're a uber-performer, there are long stretches in between each individual competition to chat and socialize. You have long-distance beanpoles, weight lifters doing things like shot and javelin, and a wide spectrum of other types filling in on the various other event types, so you get to interact with and know a wide variety of people as well. Plus, with so many different physical types on the team, someone who's outside the norms w/regard to physique doesn't stand out quite so much.
Remember, SCO claimed that they couldn't provide any evidence of copyright infringement without access to the AIX code. Now, they are either going to have to do one of the following:
None of these alternatives favors SCO in the least. IBM's responsibility to make the AIX source "available" to SCO, IMHO, only shows that the judge has a somewhat morbid sense of humor, in that she seems interested in finding out exactly how tight SCO is willing to draw the noose around their own neck...
You're confusing the NASA announcement with the SCO announcement.
Then again, maybe that's what's going on... SCO will announce a partnership with NASA, by which means they intend to:
Actually, that sounds a whole lot more plausible than what SCO's done so far...
Steve Wozniak has an interesting story about how he uses sheets of $2 bills on his site. I got a kick out of reading this a few weeks ago:
He ended up raising the suspicions of a casion manager in Las Vegas, who called in the Secret Service because he thought the bills were counterfeit...
Unacompanied Sonata
(To avoid the inevetable off-topic moderation: this is a story about a young musical prodigy who is raised completely separated from any outside influences, so he can create "pure" music.)
In case you're not aware of it, there's a pretty good libre IDE named Eclipse available. So... can you explain to me exactly why a libre implementation of Java would require development of an entirely new IDE?
Now, changes in the Java specification might require changes in an IDE - but that would apply to both proprietary and libre IDEs equally. Just changing the license that the Java source code is under won't immediately invalidate the value and existance of the current crop of Java IDEs.
Taking a look at a couple of your other comments, I think you're specifically referring to how arch does business - if that's the case here, then maybe my above argument doesn't make sense :-/ I was tallking about supporting custom keyword expansion in subversion, not arch.
Hmm. No, I don't think so. If all that are affected are performance and space optimizations, I'd:
Out of curiosity, could you repeat some of the reasons for opposing this? In this particular case, it seems that it's viewed as a fairly significant stumbling block by a large and influential potential adopter (FreeBSD).
I've never worked in an environment where we specifically needed this capability, but my general experience is that it's a poor choice to sacrifice flexibility unless there's a strong technical reason for doing so.
Of course, in keeping with typical Pittsburgh weather patterns, you wrote this while it was sunny and 60 degrees out... less than a day later, I get to read it with a snowstorm swirling around outside my windows :-/
To keep things on topic: I actually though of recommending that he see about hiring some folks from around here... while it's not Silicon Valley, there are plenty of good people, and plenty of experienced and mature people - IMHO, exactly the kind of folks you want as the core of a new compnay. IMHO, that plus cost of living/cost of doing business in the Pittsburgh area makes it more attractive for a new company than SV, Boston, or any of the other places that are "known" for their technology companies.
Why would you want to (essentially) outsource development of your idea? You may not be the greatest coder in the world, but you should be able to put together something by yourself. If it's a large enough project that it might take 2-3 additional people plus you a number of months to complete, then start your company, find those people, sell them on the idea, and get them to come work for you in a startup capacity - reduced or no salary, stock or option grants, etc. in return for shared responsibility in creating the company.
Face it - a consultant or contractor is only obligated to give you what you've contracted for, and is probably going to be more than happy to eat up your cash reserves by working extra hours to fix bugs, meet demo deadlines, etc. His/her reward is relatively small, and effort is commensurate. Someone sharing responsibility with you for putting out the product will be a lot more motivated (by a greater reward, and a greater risk) to provide whatever effort is needed to get the product out and get money rolling in ASAP - presumably your desire as well.
Not true. The Cygwin distribution contains a number of non-GPL licenses: X11, Apache, LGPL, BSD, and others. Take a look at the Cygwin licensing terms:
Didn't address the other point... yes, whoever did this would be breaking the law, and unless they were able to do this completely anonymously, they would have to face the consequences. Since it would amount to an act of civil disobedience, though, I suspect that anyone who would go through with this would want to make the effort to ensure that they were not anonymous, so that their actions would have a greater impact. Breaking the law is not the end goal, but just an event that could be used to demonstrate the flaws in the existing language of the DMCA, with the hope that such a demonstration would lead to a change in the law.
The law - at least, the snippet quoted - doesn't apparently differentiate between requested and unrequested material; just receipt. If that's the case, then every person in the USA routinely violates the DMCA. I want to believe that this is a misunderstanding of the law, but there's a cynical part of me that finds it easy to believe that our lawmakers simply just don't care about the actual contents of the laws they pass.
Hmmm. "...receipt, or expectation of receipt", eh?
Sounds good to me... just write an article on the issue of the DMCA and copyright law. Duly register it with the Library of Congress, or whoever it is that you need to go to in order to formally register a copyright.
Then mail a copy to each and every member of congress, and each and every high-level executive of the RIAA and MPAA.
Finally, haul them all into court for violating the DMCA, as they are in receipt of your copyrighted work.
If there's a problem here because it's your copyrighted work (i.e., you have permission to distribute copies of it), then perhaps you could make use of some other copyrighted work. It should be a short bit of work to find something that has a registered copyright, but where the actual owner of the copyright can't be located.
If that won't work (say, becuase only the copyright holder can press charges under the DMCA), then perhaps you could use a copyrighted work that was created by someone morally opposed to the DMCA - RMS, for example. Let him know that you're violating his copyright, and point out that under the DMCA, not only you but everyone you sent a copy to can be taken to court and fined up to $150,000 each.
Someone smarter than I will point out exactly why this wouldn't work, I'm sure. But I like the idea of turning the legal system back upon itself, like the worm Ouroboros...
Sorry, no - I wouldn't hire you. I'd hire someone who knows the difference between a DBA (Database Administrator) and a programmer, or at least is willing to admit when they've made a mistake.
Before you whine about this, you recomendded hiring "a DBA per hundred employees". You obviously knew what you were talking about, and are backpedaling. There's a huge difference between hiring a programmer to do some contract work and hiring a DBA.
Sure thing. Now... where do I find a cut-rate DBA if I only have 25 employees? 10 employees? 5 employees? What if I have 100 employees, all of whom earn close to minimum wage, and hiring a DBA would be enough of an expense that it might make the difference between staying in business and closing up shop? What if I don't have any employees, because I'm putting together a DB for personal use (logging scores for the bowling team, keeping track of info about my gardening efforts, etc.)
There's a reason that Access exists, and a reason that it serves a decent niche market. It lets someone aside from a professional DBA put together a database, and have a good chance of it working. There are a lot of little apps out there that are based on access, require some bit of knowledge and/or experience to set up, and simply don't require the type of maintenance that calls for a DBA.
I've got one FoxPro app I put together over 10 years ago that's still in use, handling a few dozen additions/edits a month. There's not a whole lot of flash and glitter, but it does the job. This is the target market for Access and related applications, simple DB-based application generation. I suspect that there are far more Access-based applications quietly working in the background than people want to admit.
No... your security, and your job, relies on what people do on their jobs. People who work for:
IBM
Sun
HP
RedHat
Mandrake
SuSE
Sendmail, Inc.
...and many more companies that support OSS. There was a point in time where OSS was largely written and maintained by people in their spare time; these days, there are people who have jobs that revolve around developing, maintaining and improving OSS.
There's still crud out there, of course. Remember Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for both commercial and open source software. You should evaluate OSS the same way you evaluate commercial software: who wrote it, what's their reputation, does it have the features we need, how stable is it, etc.
You wouldn't judge Microsoft's capabilities based on the kind of software that Sun produced, would you? Then why would derive your opinion of Apache, Sendmail, Bind, Linux, XFree86, BSD, KDevelop, Gnome and the like based on the fact that some other, completely seperate OSS project isn't worth dreck?
Actually, given the amount of acrimony being directed at SCO, I think it will end up more like this.
Heh. Lawbot 0.92 - so you know it has to be an Open Source project.