[BSD] probably [has] a limited lifespan (I can't imagine all of them being around 3 or 4 years down the road).
I've been hearing that for close to twenty years now....
cjs
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
I am looking at the larger picture. The GPL does inhibit the way I can use software, yes. That, in fact, is the whole point of the GPL! I cannot do certain things with this software. (I don't find that so bad; what really annoys me personally about it is that it insists that I must put this license on my software, too--Stallman is literally attacking those parts of the free software world that don't agree with his philosophies.)
I don't know where postmodernism comes into this, nor do I see anyone talking about `complete' freedom in the sense of trampling the rights of others. That's just a straw man. As for political correctness and rightousness, I'd say the GPL fanatics demonstrate that far more than the others.
As for the result of `more free licenses' producing `less free' software, that's just bogus. There has been no indication I've ever seen that this is the case. There was a lot of free, source-code-included software out there before Stallman started up GNU, and there has continued to be a lot, under active development, since.
He doesn't like CVS because it has obvious limitations which haven't been addressed in years:
no file name tracking
no change sets, grouping of changes across files
no support for disconnected operation
Sure, I'm well aware of these limitations too. However, Linus' `solution' of using tarballs rather than a revision control system doesn't exactly address any of this, does it? It just removes all other revision control features as well. That's why I can't respect Linus' decision as a technical decision; technically, it's bad.
CVS may not be the best that could be, but it's the best out there right now, and it's certainly a heck of a lot better than nothing. NetBSD has a half gig of code in the CVS repository with more than a hundred developers accessing it. Life without CVS would be very, very painful.
I disagree with the idea that nobody would use RAID 0. It's quite common in many shops that need high reliability, because you don't use software RAID or internal RAID controller cards in such systems. You use external RAID boxes. If you have a number of these, and want a large volume, you use disk striping to turn the external boxes into a huge disk.
Why do you BSD posters commonly act holier than thou?
Think about how you feel when Windows NT is `in the limelight' in some area even though Linux is a technically better solution.
Ok, now you know how the BSD folks feel when Linux gets the limelight even in circumstances where a BSD is the technically better solution.
There's no real reason that Linux should be in the front of everybody's minds, and BSD hardly heard of at all. It's just marketing; Linux folks are a lot louder than BSD folks.
cjs
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
What better frees a slave? To buy him away from his enslavement, or to abolish slavery?
This is a specious argument here; we're not talking about people, we're talking about software.
What the GPL does is place a restriction on the freedom of anyone who choses to change a piece of GPL'd software: you may not give away your changes unless you give away the source. To say that placing this restriction on a person gives him greater freedom is simply Orwellian.
Maybe their tactics take choice away from people. But so does proprietary software....
Sure, but nobody's arguing about that. All Tom is pointing out is that the GNU folks are placing restrictions on people who use their software, and then bandying the world `free' about a little to liberally.
CVS certainly isn't a wonderful tool to use, but I find it highly, well, odd (to be polite), that Linus would think that it's `not the right tool.' He's currently using RCS, right? How on earth can he believe that RCS is better than CVS for what he's doing?
I'd love to use something better than CVS for NetBSD, but that's the best free system that's out there at the moment, so that's what we use. And the FreeBSD, Apache, and many other folks seem to agree.
If you're interested in doing research on raid, you might want to have a look at RAIDframe, which is a system for prototyping disk arrays. It was added to NetBSD last November. It includes a simulator as well as a device driver for doing RAID on real disks, and supports levels 0, 1, 4, 5, hot spares, and more. The base code for level 6 and parity logging is also in there, though I don't know how well it's working.
There's a web page with current notes on RAIDframe on NetBSD here.
Yes, but only at the price that my function is then taken away from me, and I no longer have the freedom to do what I want with it.
cjs
Re:Promulgating Code vs. Promulgating Standards
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, releasing under the LGPL will not be helpful in many cases, becuase the code can't be linked in as a library but must be integrated (and often changed in the integration) with the rest of the code. A network stack, if it's efficient, will be tightly linked into the rest of the operating system, and so an LGPL version wouldn't be useful to most people. So no, it's not the best of both worlds.
And I object to this phrasing, `keep the source free.' The point of the GPL is not to keep the source free (it's already free when it's out there under any public license), but to force people to make their changes free code as well. Not that this isn't noble ambition in some ways, but let's not confuse that with giving people the freedom to do what they want with the source.
As for people changing the code and releasing it in closed form, sure they can do that. But they could just use closed software anyway; so there's really no difference here. Either way, they're non-standard protocols. I don't think any company has enough market share and clout to kill a broadly distributed open standard that has code available under the BSD license, though; if MS can't do it, who can?
cjs
Promulgating Code vs. Promulgating Standards
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
·
· Score: 4
Well, as usual, most folks appear to have missed one of the key points that makes the BSD license do so much good for the world. The BSD license, by allowing people to use its code in commerical products, promotes commercial products following open standards.
The classic example is TCP/IP. There are a lot of commercial products out there using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, and one of the big reasons for that is that it's cheaper than developing their own protocol stack or even buying one. The value we see from this is the network effect; that a device communicates using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack rather than Novell's IPX stack or Microsoft's networking stack benefits all of us, because we can much more easily communicate with it (even, perhaps, in ways that the author did not intend).
Open standards are even more important to freedom for computer users than open source. (Having source code is nice, but it's not much good if it doesn't permit you to interoperate with other platforms out there. Linux is popular because it talks to other computers.) Therefore, I'd say that the Berkeley license has done more than any other licence to bring us to the state today where we have a lot of freedom in our computing choices.
No, it's not Xeon that's being threatened by the Alpha; that chip, or at least its architecture, being Pentium-compatable, has a long and successful life ahead of it. However, Intel should well be worried about the Merced. Even if the Merced does keep up with the speed of the Alpha, Alpha systems are bound to be much more stable and less buggy simply because the Alpha's had more than half a decade of real-world use under NT and Unix. The main incentive for going with Intel at the moment is that you stay compatable; if you're going to take the hit of moving to a new processor, that advantage is lost.
When I was running an ISP I managed to get fairly close to the idea with PC hardware running NetBSD. NetBSD has had for a long time the ability for both the kernel and the bootloader to use a serial port for the console. I still had a switch box to get video and keyboard access to deal with the BIOS, but this wasn't that frequently needed, so I saved a lot of trips to the server room.
We did have a couple of SPARCs running NetBSD as well, which of course Just Work when it comes to serial consoles.
I understand that some Intel server motherboards have a BIOS that will also talk to the serial port. Given this, you'd be set.
Another idea that a friend of mine was looking at was to build a little ISA card with a serial port on it that looked to the computer as if it was an MGA and keyboard. It would have to have logic to generate appropriate VT100 sequences to get the screen updated correctly for those things that assume the screen is fully addressable, but that shouldn't be a big deal. And, of course, it would have access to the reset line on the ISA bus (or it could plug into the reset button header on the motherboard itself). It would basically be a little console computer, much like the sort you used to have on minicomputers.
Once you've got some sort of serial console working, I suggest using Paul Vixie's rtty program to monitor the machine. I bought a couple of eight-port BOCA serial boards and dropped them in an old 486 to make a console server.
The XFree86, Apache, FreeBSD, Perl, and probably the KDE people still seem to have their heads screwed on straight, but I'm getting very cynical about anything associated with Linux...
Sure, I've felt that way for a long time too. That's why I hack on projects that aren't so self-promoting and self-aggrandizing, like NetBSD.
On the other hand, you have to ask yourself if, even though you personally may disklike the heavy marketing thing that many of the Linux folks do, it's not a good thing overall. After all, look where Linux is now compared to NetBSD. (It's not as if these two systems have such different capabilities.) And look where the whole idea of Open Source is because of Linux.
I don't really understand why people claim that GNU software is `free' as in `free speech,' rather than `free beer.' To me it seems quite the opposite.
Let's say I acquire a GPL'd program and add a function to it. If I had the powers of free speech, I could utter this function in any way I wanted, source or binary, to anyone. But I can't; I must not give someone else a compiled copy of that function along with source and binaries for the rest of the GNU software. Thus, my free speech is compromised in that I cannot say some things I've written in the way I want to say them.
On the other hand, the GPL does ensure that you can always get a copy of the source for a program, and any extensions, fixes or changes anybody wants to distribute, without paying any money for it (except perhaps a nominal sum to cover distribution costs). Thus, `free beer.'
I found this quote from the article to be particularly odd: One Perl user, who did not want to be named, said: "It doesn't stop a company with no interest or standing in the Perl community from exploiting years of hard work, donated by a cast of thousands, for its own gain." Indeed, it doesn't. The point is, there's nothing that's supposed to stop people from doing that! That's the whole point of the license!
If you want to place restrictions on the software you write, by all means go ahead. If you are serious about restricting other users from doing things you don't like, I suggest you go much further than even the GPL and simply license it under specific terms for specific uses to each user. That way you can pull the license any time you like if someone's doing something you don't want him to do.
BeOS may not use unix code, but it is mostly posix compliant....
I wouldn't get too exited about POSIX compliance. While it's certainly a good thing to have, keep in mind that Windows NT has been fully POSIX compliant for ages now.
cjs
Re:FreeBSD v.s. other *BSD variants
on
Slashdot Tweaks
·
· Score: 1
Oh no, not again! This is right up there with the `What's the difference between Red Hat, Debian and SUSI?' question.
I seem to recall the answer to this being in the BSD FAQ, which used to be at http://cynjut.neonramp.com/index.html, but that site seems to be down at the moment. I'm sure a web search on this topic would turn up something, though.
Here's my quick summary:
NetBSD is concerned with clean internal architecture and portability, and runs on a lot of platforms.
FreeBSD is concerned with optimal performance on the i386, though an Alpha port is in progress. It has the best VM system of the three.
OpenBSD split from NetBSD a few years ago, and started with NetBSD's code base. They've done a lot of security work on it, but not much other work, and stopped importing NetBSD's changes a couple of years ago, so they don't have a lot of the new NetBSD stuff (device driver structures, VM system, ports, etc.).
And if that's not enough, you can check out this link for another view of the differences.
Why bother with Linux, NT or Solaris when OS X Server is 7 times faster than NT and 3 times faster than Solaris?
I can hardly begin to enumerate the problems with this statement.
But let's have a look at a few of the assumptions. They compare Netscape's server on Solaris with Apache on OS X. Has the world changed in some sudden way that it's not possible to compile Apache on Solaris any more? Or is it just obvious to everyone but me that, despite using two completely different web servers, the speed problems are all the OS's fault? And have we decided to drop all server applications but web serving? And even drop all web-serving applications that might require, say, eight CPUs and a couple of gig of RAM? And we're no longer worried about things like hardware failover?
I think it's about time that the computing community woke up to the fact that the word hacker can and does have multiple meanings. There are plenty of words like this in the English language; bitch has two distinct meanings, one derrogatory and one not; why cannot hacker too? In fact, even in use within the community we deal with different meanings for variants: the hackers I admire are the ones that don't produce hacks, but produce good code instead.
Travan tapes are limited to several hundred backup-restore cycles, DLT/DAT are in the thousands.. which means that they produce less errors.
I don't know about DLT, but DAT tapes certainly will not give you thousands, or even hundreds, of passes. Keep in mind this is a rotating head medium, and a medium designed for audio at that.
Slashdot Mirror
cjs
I am looking at the larger picture. The GPL does inhibit the way I can use software, yes. That, in fact, is the whole point of the GPL! I cannot do certain things with this software. (I don't find that so bad; what really annoys me personally about it is that it insists that I must put this license on my software, too--Stallman is literally attacking those parts of the free software world that don't agree with his philosophies.)
I don't know where postmodernism comes into this, nor do I see anyone talking about `complete' freedom in the sense of trampling the rights of others. That's just a straw man. As for political correctness and rightousness, I'd say the GPL fanatics demonstrate that far more than the others.
As for the result of `more free licenses' producing `less free' software, that's just bogus. There has been no indication I've ever seen that this is the case. There was a lot of free, source-code-included software out there before Stallman started up GNU, and there has continued to be a lot, under active development, since.
cjs
CVS may not be the best that could be, but it's the best out there right now, and it's certainly a heck of a lot better than nothing. NetBSD has a half gig of code in the CVS repository with more than a hundred developers accessing it. Life without CVS would be very, very painful.
cjs
I disagree with the idea that nobody would use RAID 0. It's quite common in many shops that need high reliability, because you don't use software RAID or internal RAID controller cards in such systems. You use external RAID boxes. If you have a number of these, and want a large volume, you use disk striping to turn the external boxes into a huge disk.
cjs
Ok, now you know how the BSD folks feel when Linux gets the limelight even in circumstances where a BSD is the technically better solution.
There's no real reason that Linux should be in the front of everybody's minds, and BSD hardly heard of at all. It's just marketing; Linux folks are a lot louder than BSD folks.
cjs
What the GPL does is place a restriction on the freedom of anyone who choses to change a piece of GPL'd software: you may not give away your changes unless you give away the source. To say that placing this restriction on a person gives him greater freedom is simply Orwellian.
Sure, but nobody's arguing about that. All Tom is pointing out is that the GNU folks are placing restrictions on people who use their software, and then bandying the world `free' about a little to liberally.cjs
CVS certainly isn't a wonderful tool to use, but I find it highly, well, odd (to be polite), that Linus would think that it's `not the right tool.' He's currently using RCS, right? How on earth can he believe that RCS is better than CVS for what he's doing?
I'd love to use something better than CVS for NetBSD, but that's the best free system that's out there at the moment, so that's what we use. And the FreeBSD, Apache, and many other folks seem to agree.
cjs
cjs
If you're interested in doing research on raid, you might want to have a look at RAIDframe, which is a system for prototyping disk arrays. It was added to NetBSD last November. It includes a simulator as well as a device driver for doing RAID on real disks, and supports levels 0, 1, 4, 5, hot spares, and more. The base code for level 6 and parity logging is also in there, though I don't know how well it's working.
There's a web page with current notes on RAIDframe on NetBSD here.
cjs
Yes, it was.
cjs
cjs
Unfortunately, releasing under the LGPL will not be helpful in many cases, becuase the code can't be linked in as a library but must be integrated (and often changed in the integration) with the rest of the code. A network stack, if it's efficient, will be tightly linked into the rest of the operating system, and so an LGPL version wouldn't be useful to most people. So no, it's not the best of both worlds.
And I object to this phrasing, `keep the source free.' The point of the GPL is not to keep the source free (it's already free when it's out there under any public license), but to force people to make their changes free code as well. Not that this isn't noble ambition in some ways, but let's not confuse that with giving people the freedom to do what they want with the source.
As for people changing the code and releasing it in closed form, sure they can do that. But they could just use closed software anyway; so there's really no difference here. Either way, they're non-standard protocols. I don't think any company has enough market share and clout to kill a broadly distributed open standard that has code available under the BSD license, though; if MS can't do it, who can?
cjs
Well, as usual, most folks appear to have missed one of the key points that makes the BSD license do so much good for the world. The BSD license, by allowing people to use its code in commerical products, promotes commercial products following open standards.
The classic example is TCP/IP. There are a lot of commercial products out there using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, and one of the big reasons for that is that it's cheaper than developing their own protocol stack or even buying one. The value we see from this is the network effect; that a device communicates using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack rather than Novell's IPX stack or Microsoft's networking stack benefits all of us, because we can much more easily communicate with it (even, perhaps, in ways that the author did not intend).
Open standards are even more important to freedom for computer users than open source. (Having source code is nice, but it's not much good if it doesn't permit you to interoperate with other platforms out there. Linux is popular because it talks to other computers.) Therefore, I'd say that the Berkeley license has done more than any other licence to bring us to the state today where we have a lot of freedom in our computing choices.
cjs
No, it's not Xeon that's being threatened by the Alpha; that chip, or at least its architecture, being Pentium-compatable, has a long and successful life ahead of it. However, Intel should well be worried about the Merced. Even if the Merced does keep up with the speed of the Alpha, Alpha systems are bound to be much more stable and less buggy simply because the Alpha's had more than half a decade of real-world use under NT and Unix. The main incentive for going with Intel at the moment is that you stay compatable; if you're going to take the hit of moving to a new processor, that advantage is lost.
cjs
When I was running an ISP I managed to get fairly close to the idea with PC hardware running NetBSD. NetBSD has had for a long time the ability for both the kernel and the bootloader to use a serial port for the console. I still had a switch box to get video and keyboard access to deal with the BIOS, but this wasn't that frequently needed, so I saved a lot of trips to the server room.
We did have a couple of SPARCs running NetBSD as well, which of course Just Work when it comes to serial consoles.
I understand that some Intel server motherboards have a BIOS that will also talk to the serial port. Given this, you'd be set.
Another idea that a friend of mine was looking at was to build a little ISA card with a serial port on it that looked to the computer as if it was an MGA and keyboard. It would have to have logic to generate appropriate VT100 sequences to get the screen updated correctly for those things that assume the screen is fully addressable, but that shouldn't be a big deal. And, of course, it would have access to the reset line on the ISA bus (or it could plug into the reset button header on the motherboard itself). It would basically be a little console computer, much like the sort you used to have on minicomputers.
Once you've got some sort of serial console working, I suggest using Paul Vixie's rtty program to monitor the machine. I bought a couple of eight-port BOCA serial boards and dropped them in an old 486 to make a console server.
cjs
On the other hand, you have to ask yourself if, even though you personally may disklike the heavy marketing thing that many of the Linux folks do, it's not a good thing overall. After all, look where Linux is now compared to NetBSD. (It's not as if these two systems have such different capabilities.) And look where the whole idea of Open Source is because of Linux.
cjs
I don't really understand why people claim that GNU software is `free' as in `free speech,' rather than `free beer.' To me it seems quite the opposite.
Let's say I acquire a GPL'd program and add a function to it. If I had the powers of free speech, I could utter this function in any way I wanted, source or binary, to anyone. But I can't; I must not give someone else a compiled copy of that function along with source and binaries for the rest of the GNU software. Thus, my free speech is compromised in that I cannot say some things I've written in the way I want to say them.
On the other hand, the GPL does ensure that you can always get a copy of the source for a program, and any extensions, fixes or changes anybody wants to distribute, without paying any money for it (except perhaps a nominal sum to cover distribution costs). Thus, `free beer.'
cjs
I found this quote from the article to be particularly odd: One Perl user, who did not want to be named, said: "It doesn't stop a company with no interest or standing in the Perl community from exploiting years of hard work, donated by a cast of thousands, for its own gain." Indeed, it doesn't. The point is, there's nothing that's supposed to stop people from doing that! That's the whole point of the license!
If you want to place restrictions on the software you write, by all means go ahead. If you are serious about restricting other users from doing things you don't like, I suggest you go much further than even the GPL and simply license it under specific terms for specific uses to each user. That way you can pull the license any time you like if someone's doing something you don't want him to do.
cjs
cjs
cjs
Oh no, not again! This is right up there with the `What's the difference between Red Hat, Debian and SUSI?' question.
I seem to recall the answer to this being in the BSD FAQ, which used to be at http://cynjut.neonramp.com/index.html, but that site seems to be down at the moment. I'm sure a web search on this topic would turn up something, though.
Here's my quick summary:
And if that's not enough, you can check out this link for another view of the differences.
cjs
cjs
But let's have a look at a few of the assumptions. They compare Netscape's server on Solaris with Apache on OS X. Has the world changed in some sudden way that it's not possible to compile Apache on Solaris any more? Or is it just obvious to everyone but me that, despite using two completely different web servers, the speed problems are all the OS's fault? And have we decided to drop all server applications but web serving? And even drop all web-serving applications that might require, say, eight CPUs and a couple of gig of RAM? And we're no longer worried about things like hardware failover?
cjs
I think it's about time that the computing community woke up to the fact that the word hacker can and does have multiple meanings. There are plenty of words like this in the English language; bitch has two distinct meanings, one derrogatory and one not; why cannot hacker too? In fact, even in use within the community we deal with different meanings for variants: the hackers I admire are the ones that don't produce hacks, but produce good code instead.
cjs
cjs