The source code for "GNUtella" will only be released when the authors go from simply making hollow threats to release the software under the GPL, to actually following through with it.
GNUtella isn't free software, and it won't be free until they Show Us The Source. And does anyone here think AOL will really let the Nullsoft people do that without sending a platoon of lawyers to stand on their throats?
How come the GNU project people aren't pitching a fit over their trademark here?
There are distributed application frameworks that meet your needs, they just make some assumptions about the sort of applications you want to develop.
For example, HTTP is a pretty ubiquitous protocol, and there are programmer libraries for working with it in a whole lot of languages-- including all of the ones you mentioned.
There's a whole slew of other protocols with the same basic feature: widely deployed on multiple platforms and within multiple programming languages. I'm thinking SMTP, NNTP, etc.
The main disadvantage to these protocols for building distributed applications out of them is that they don't lend themselves well to applications that have certain characteristics which tend to drive design choices affecting scalability and performance.
Even then, you will usually find that parts of your application will depend on making use of those protocols.
More than likely, you have an application specific need for a particular kind of framework, and you should just bite the bullet on a middleware solution and live within its weird limitations.
Consider this, though: you can probably wall off the part of your distributed application that has the scary performance and scalability requirements by writing Perl/Python glue and Java servlets in the interface to your web server and other parts of your application that don't need the middleware.
There's also the minor problem that it continues to propagate the horrific notion that each and every end-to-end flow on the public Internet ought to flow across a dozen different addressing realms just because that's the only way we can keep our router tables from mushrooming to the size of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.
My oldest friend on the planet is a news reporter. We used to go around and around on this one. I finally gave up and told him he wins. And he does. The word 'hacker' has been well and truly pejoratized.
When I got the chance to order my business card at a startup company that hadn't standardized its job titles yet, I convinced the CEO to let me have the cute title "coder". He wouldn't approve most of the more imaginative ones other people tried to get, but he let mine through because he thought it was an accurate description.
Of course, I can hear all the spooks out there groaning at my suggestion-- but I say, screw them. They knew the job was full of random indignities when they took it.
The IETF has a working group that worries about this problem in IPv4.
You can check out its charter at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/nat-charter.html and you should read all the drafts if this is an issue that pushes your buttons. In particular, read the "terminologies and considerations" paper and the draft on "implications" of network address translators.
There is a real problem with IPv4 addressing that is fixed in the IPv6 architecture. Large organizations hate renumbering every host on their network, and the way they prevent external conditions from forcing them into that kind of flag day is to use an RFC 1918 private network and an address translator. IPv6 uses such a large address space not because the architects are worried about eventually running out of addresses, but because it makes for a more scalable address assignment system than the one we currently have.
Just so everyone here knows, the reason to adopt IPv6 has nothing to do with a perceived shortage of IPv4 addresses and everything to do with the protocol complications caused by the loss of end-to-end addressing in the network caused by the widespread deployment of network address translators.
I'm not talking about the illness that drove those mutants in Littleton to go on a killing spree. I'm talking about the illness that makes predominantly white, middle-class, suburban American high schools into one of the most psychologically brutal experiences outside a combat zone.
The excerpts Jon reprinted in this article reminded me of my life in high school during Ronald Reagan's first term as U.S. President. The only thing different in these stories is that my modem and my personal computer weren't signs of Devil Worship back then.
I'm 33 years old now. I'm getting married this year, and I plan to buy a house in the City and start a family sometime after next year. It kills me that the very things that helped me survive the nightmarish experience of learning civil conduct in high school-- computers, role-playing games, science-fiction, geek culture-- are the very things that will make my child fit a profile for a mass murderer.
The profile is simply wrong. And the fact that so many people seem to be rushing to apply it to their own children is further evidence to me that we, as a people, are in a collective state of denial about What Went Awry In Littleton.
Rupert Murdoch, repeat after me: Prevent the pathology, not the symptoms.
There Is No Mystery Here
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
I rant about media issues from time to time. I have a friend who is a news reporter, and he usually has to put up with my wild speculations about the real causes of mysterious current events. I've had to say to him over and over again, "It's not a conspiracy. For it to be a conspiracy, it would all have to be done in secret."
I'm reminded of this now because my take on this latest school-shooting tragedy, is that There Is No Mystery Here. The reasons this event sequence is becoming so familiar to us are right before us, yet recognizing them for what they are would move a seemingly impossible problem to the very front of our minds. American culture is in a collective state of denial about what is so obviously wrong.
The popular wisdom about how to prevent these sorts of tragedies is utter hogwash. The heavy proliferation of small firearms and other weapon systems among the population is not the cause-- it's a symptom. Likewise, the popularity of violent imagery and scenarios in films, books, music, games and other media is not the cause-- it's a symptom. So many of us are stretching to explain away the increasing frequency of these heinous shooting events with illogical theories that don't bear up under analysis because we are in denial of the truth.
The truth is that the structure of American life, particularly in the middle-class, predominantly white, suburbs is corrupt, and this corruption is most keenly felt by young people, who lack the empowerment to do anything about it.
Every facet of life in the American suburbs is constructed for the convenience of middle-class working adults. The transportation infrastructure is devoted entirely to commuters in private automobiles. Land use is completely controlled by community planners whose vision of comfortable living is square mile after square mile of nothing but great big houses on tiny little plots.
The necessities of life, i.e. food, clothing, sundries are provided by megalithic, publicly-traded distribution companies-- you could land an airplane in their parking lots. All manner of retail services are automated to the point were business can be conducted with even once interacting with another human being.
Outside of their experiences at school, children in this environment get practically no opportunity to socialize and learn civil conduct. And the schools are massive structures, that serve thousands of children in a single location, and do so in a manner more suited toward training another generation of factory line assembly workers than to the teaching of arts, science, literacy, culture and history.
Need I remind us again about the extent to which American culture values the notion of public investment in an education infrastructure next to how much it thinks it should spend on the projection of military power around the world?
No there is no mystery here, unless it is this one: why is it so difficult for us, as a people, to recognize what is wrong and take steps to redesign the structure of life in America?
The word 'civility' is an important one, and I'm glad to see it arise in this discussion thread. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the primary definition of its adjective form:
civ.il \'siv-*l\ aj [ME, fr. MF, fr. L civilis, fr civis] 1a: of or relating to citizens {~ liberties} 1b: of or relating to the state or its citizenry 2a: CIVILIZED {~ society} 2b: COURTEOUS, URBANE [...]
Of course civility makes things run more smoothly-- humanity discovered that thousands of years ago. The open question for us to debate is "is our culture broken?"
Is the fractious, heated cacophany of voices you're seeing in discussion forums like this one a sign of strength in cultural diversity, or is it an indication of weakness related to division and prejudice? Does this question sound like I'm talking about just us hackers, or am I really asking about the larger society? (Answer: just us hackers, for now...)
I have an opinion. Here it is. We're not really any more or less broken than that other culture-- you know, the one that is represented by folks like the Software Publishers Association-- but we're in a much better position to make self-appraisals and work for change within. This is our strength.
ESR, while perhaps not providing the best example in making his point, is right to bring this to our attention at this juncture: our biggest weakness is that our system of civil discourse is a little primitive.
I'll trot out my favorite example to make my case. Compare the level of civility you see in the IETF working group discussions with the levels you see in the discussions we've been seeing in public about open source licensing issues. Big difference. There shouldn't be.
It's my opinion that this ongoing debate about "open source" vs. "free software" is pointless. (Yeah, that'll draw flames-- but I can take it.)
Hear me out. The issue is, and always has been, the question of what rights the owner of a packet of software should be recognized to have. The GPL and other OSD licenses are all about protecting the rights of the owners of the software they cover-- they are not about protecting the software itself. The APSL is no exception.
We have this nomenclature that promotes a certain kind of muddle-headed thinking about what makes the GPL and its ilk into a special class of software license. We're using terms like "open source" and "free software" to describe the effect of the license on the software. We should instead be using terminology that describes the effect the license has on the owners and the users.
What are these licenses designed to do? They're trying to ensure that the users of the software are also basically the owners. To do that, they have to play crazy games with copyright and software licensing law that were designed for the completely opposite purpose. For example... I use emacs, the copyright for which is asserted by the Free Software Foundation. Do I have a claim of ownership? Or does the license merely extend to me all the privileges as a user that I might want out of ownership? The latter, I think.
There has been a lot of noise from various sources about termination clauses, especially in the APSL-- though it should be noted again that the GPL has a [different] termination clause of its own. Why do these licenses have termination clauses? Because the owners of the software are trying to protect their rights and limit their liabilities in the face of patent dispute.
You'd think we'd all recognize that for the prudence it is. Some of us are radical enough to cast suspicion on the patent process itself as the source of this problem-- but there's a thorny issue there. The legal tradition of patent protection for software is a long and well-established one, i.e. it goes back hundreds of years.
Attacking it is almost like attacking the notion of private real estate. Here is a sharp stick. Go poke Mr. Cyclops in the eye and call him "One Eye"-- I will wait for you here.
We have to muddle through this problem the best we can, but it would help if we all tried to remember whose rights we're trying to protect with these nifty licenses-- including the APSL: users.
If Apple wasn't at all interested in using its ownership of some of the code in Darwin to help protect the rights of users to read and modify the code they are using, then I submit you would have seen a very different license agreement for acquiring the source code.
And we wouldn't see leading lights in the "open source" movement taking any notice of it whatsoever, let alone quibbling in public over whether the termination clause grants too much control to an allegedly capricious and malevolent profit-driven enterprise.
listen. there is one important aspect to consider when comparing dual-CPU to single-CPU. your O/S might actually be modern enough to support thread isolation within the kernel, in which case all your device drivers better be thread safe or they might be annoyingly unreliable on your SMP box.
having written a device driver or two for Solaris, i can assure you there is buggy software that will run fine on a single-CPU Solaris machine that loses horribly on a n-CPU Solaris machine.
of course, Linux and NT are old-school enough that they still only allow one CPU at a time to be running in the kernel and handling interrupts-- or have i been misinformed?
Do you have any idea what the traditional margins are with Compact PCI single-board computers?
They make Apple look like they're living on the edge of a razor blade. You'll probably spend more on the chassis for this thing than you will on a new Powermac G3.
Slashdot Mirror
The source code for "GNUtella" will only be released when the authors go from simply making hollow threats to release the software under the GPL, to actually following through with it.
GNUtella isn't free software, and it won't be free until they Show Us The Source. And does anyone here think AOL will really let the Nullsoft people do that without sending a platoon of lawyers to stand on their throats?
How come the GNU project people aren't pitching a fit over their trademark here?
There are distributed application frameworks that meet your needs, they just make some assumptions about the sort of applications you want to develop.
For example, HTTP is a pretty ubiquitous protocol, and there are programmer libraries for working with it in a whole lot of languages-- including all of the ones you mentioned.
There's a whole slew of other protocols with the same basic feature: widely deployed on multiple platforms and within multiple programming languages. I'm thinking SMTP, NNTP, etc.
The main disadvantage to these protocols for building distributed applications out of them is that they don't lend themselves well to applications that have certain characteristics which tend to drive design choices affecting scalability and performance.
Even then, you will usually find that parts of your application will depend on making use of those protocols.
More than likely, you have an application specific need for a particular kind of framework, and you should just bite the bullet on a middleware solution and live within its weird limitations.
Consider this, though: you can probably wall off the part of your distributed application that has the scary performance and scalability requirements by writing Perl/Python glue and Java servlets in the interface to your web server and other parts of your application that don't need the middleware.
Oh, let's not stop there.
There's also the minor problem that it continues to propagate the horrific notion that each and every end-to-end flow on the public Internet ought to flow across a dozen different addressing realms just because that's the only way we can keep our router tables from mushrooming to the size of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.
Gack. Slashdot has been trolled by the IETF.
My oldest friend on the planet is a news reporter. We used to go around and around on this one. I finally gave up and told him he wins. And he does. The word 'hacker' has been well and truly pejoratized.
When I got the chance to order my business card at a startup company that hadn't standardized its job titles yet, I convinced the CEO to let me have the cute title "coder". He wouldn't approve most of the more imaginative ones other people tried to get, but he let mine through because he thought it was an accurate description.
Of course, I can hear all the spooks out there groaning at my suggestion-- but I say, screw them. They knew the job was full of random indignities when they took it.
The IETF has a working group that worries about this problem in IPv4.
l and you should read all the drafts if this is an issue that pushes your buttons. In particular, read the "terminologies and considerations" paper and the draft on "implications" of network address translators.
You can check out its charter at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/nat-charter.htm
There is a real problem with IPv4 addressing that is fixed in the IPv6 architecture. Large organizations hate renumbering every host on their network, and the way they prevent external conditions from forcing them into that kind of flag day is to use an RFC 1918 private network and an address translator. IPv6 uses such a large address space not because the architects are worried about eventually running out of addresses, but because it makes for a more scalable address assignment system than the one we currently have.
Just so everyone here knows, the reason to adopt IPv6 has nothing to do with a perceived shortage of IPv4 addresses and everything to do with the protocol complications caused by the loss of end-to-end addressing in the network caused by the widespread deployment of network address translators.
The pathology is glaring.
I'm not talking about the illness that drove those mutants in Littleton to go on a killing spree. I'm talking about the illness that makes predominantly white, middle-class, suburban American high schools into one of the most psychologically brutal experiences outside a combat zone.
The excerpts Jon reprinted in this article reminded me of my life in high school during Ronald Reagan's first term as U.S. President. The only thing different in these stories is that my modem and my personal computer weren't signs of Devil Worship back then.
I'm 33 years old now. I'm getting married this year, and I plan to buy a house in the City and start a family sometime after next year. It kills me that the very things that helped me survive the nightmarish experience of learning civil conduct in high school-- computers, role-playing games, science-fiction, geek culture-- are the very things that will make my child fit a profile for a mass murderer.
The profile is simply wrong. And the fact that so many people seem to be rushing to apply it to their own children is further evidence to me that we, as a people, are in a collective state of denial about What Went Awry In Littleton.
Rupert Murdoch, repeat after me: Prevent the pathology, not the symptoms.
I rant about media issues from time to time. I have a friend who is a news reporter, and he usually has to put up with my wild speculations about the real causes of mysterious current events. I've had to say to him over and over again, "It's not a conspiracy. For it to be a conspiracy, it would all have to be done in secret."
I'm reminded of this now because my take on this latest school-shooting tragedy, is that There Is No Mystery Here. The reasons this event sequence is becoming so familiar to us are right before us, yet recognizing them for what they are would move a seemingly impossible problem to the very front of our minds. American culture is in a collective state of denial about what is so obviously wrong.
The popular wisdom about how to prevent these sorts of tragedies is utter hogwash. The heavy proliferation of small firearms and other weapon systems among the population is not the cause-- it's a symptom. Likewise, the popularity of violent imagery and scenarios in films, books, music, games and other media is not the cause-- it's a symptom. So many of us are stretching to explain away the increasing frequency of these heinous shooting events with illogical theories that don't bear up under analysis because we are in denial of the truth.
The truth is that the structure of American life, particularly in the middle-class, predominantly white, suburbs is corrupt, and this corruption is most keenly felt by young people, who lack the empowerment to do anything about it.
Every facet of life in the American suburbs is constructed for the convenience of middle-class working adults. The transportation infrastructure is devoted entirely to commuters in private automobiles. Land use is completely controlled by community planners whose vision of comfortable living is square mile after square mile of nothing but great big houses on tiny little plots.
The necessities of life, i.e. food, clothing, sundries are provided by megalithic, publicly-traded distribution companies-- you could land an airplane in their parking lots. All manner of retail services are automated to the point were business can be conducted with even once interacting with another human being.
Outside of their experiences at school, children in this environment get practically no opportunity to socialize and learn civil conduct. And the schools are massive structures, that serve thousands of children in a single location, and do so in a manner more suited toward training another generation of factory line assembly workers than to the teaching of arts, science, literacy, culture and history.
Need I remind us again about the extent to which American culture values the notion of public investment in an education infrastructure next to how much it thinks it should spend on the projection of military power around the world?
No there is no mystery here, unless it is this one: why is it so difficult for us, as a people, to recognize what is wrong and take steps to redesign the structure of life in America?
The word 'civility' is an important one, and I'm glad to see it arise in this discussion thread. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the primary definition of its adjective form:
Of course civility makes things run more smoothly-- humanity discovered that thousands of years ago. The open question for us to debate is "is our culture broken?"
Is the fractious, heated cacophany of voices you're seeing in discussion forums like this one a sign of strength in cultural diversity, or is it an indication of weakness related to division and prejudice? Does this question sound like I'm talking about just us hackers, or am I really asking about the larger society? (Answer: just us hackers, for now...)
I have an opinion. Here it is. We're not really any more or less broken than that other culture-- you know, the one that is represented by folks like the Software Publishers Association-- but we're in a much better position to make self-appraisals and work for change within. This is our strength.
ESR, while perhaps not providing the best example in making his point, is right to bring this to our attention at this juncture: our biggest weakness is that our system of civil discourse is a little primitive.
I'll trot out my favorite example to make my case. Compare the level of civility you see in the IETF working group discussions with the levels you see in the discussions we've been seeing in public about open source licensing issues. Big difference. There shouldn't be.
It's my opinion that this ongoing debate about "open source" vs. "free software" is pointless. (Yeah, that'll draw flames-- but I can take it.)
Hear me out. The issue is, and always has been, the question of what rights the owner of a packet of software should be recognized to have. The GPL and other OSD licenses are all about protecting the rights of the owners of the software they cover-- they are not about protecting the software itself. The APSL is no exception.
We have this nomenclature that promotes a certain kind of muddle-headed thinking about what makes the GPL and its ilk into a special class of software license. We're using terms like "open source" and "free software" to describe the effect of the license on the software. We should instead be using terminology that describes the effect the license has on the owners and the users.
What are these licenses designed to do? They're trying to ensure that the users of the software are also basically the owners. To do that, they have to play crazy games with copyright and software licensing law that were designed for the completely opposite purpose. For example... I use emacs, the copyright for which is asserted by the Free Software Foundation. Do I have a claim of ownership? Or does the license merely extend to me all the privileges as a user that I might want out of ownership? The latter, I think.
There has been a lot of noise from various sources about termination clauses, especially in the APSL-- though it should be noted again that the GPL has a [different] termination clause of its own. Why do these licenses have termination clauses? Because the owners of the software are trying to protect their rights and limit their liabilities in the face of patent dispute.
You'd think we'd all recognize that for the prudence it is. Some of us are radical enough to cast suspicion on the patent process itself as the source of this problem-- but there's a thorny issue there. The legal tradition of patent protection for software is a long and well-established one, i.e. it goes back hundreds of years.
Attacking it is almost like attacking the notion of private real estate. Here is a sharp stick. Go poke Mr. Cyclops in the eye and call him "One Eye"-- I will wait for you here.
We have to muddle through this problem the best we can, but it would help if we all tried to remember whose rights we're trying to protect with these nifty licenses-- including the APSL: users.
If Apple wasn't at all interested in using its ownership of some of the code in Darwin to help protect the rights of users to read and modify the code they are using, then I submit you would have seen a very different license agreement for acquiring the source code.
And we wouldn't see leading lights in the "open source" movement taking any notice of it whatsoever, let alone quibbling in public over whether the termination clause grants too much control to an allegedly capricious and malevolent profit-driven enterprise.
*sigh* ...and what's wrong with that?
What do you want? The entire desktop environment and all of your applications to be free source?
This is already available with GNOME and the FSF applications. And we all know how much better that software is than anything Apple sells.
Apple clearly thinks they have an opportunity to make a return from selling Mac OS X licenses. They might be right. They might be wrong.
You might not like it, but no one seriously disputes that they have a right to open only part of their source code.
operating system parochialism... how delightful.
listen. there is one important aspect to consider when comparing dual-CPU to single-CPU. your O/S might actually be modern enough to support thread isolation within the kernel, in which case all your device drivers better be thread safe or they might be annoyingly unreliable on your SMP box.
having written a device driver or two for Solaris, i can assure you there is buggy software that will run fine on a single-CPU Solaris machine that loses horribly on a n-CPU Solaris machine.
of course, Linux and NT are old-school enough that they still only allow one CPU at a time to be running in the kernel and handling interrupts-- or have i been misinformed?
Do you have any idea what the traditional margins are with Compact PCI single-board computers?
They make Apple look like they're living on the edge of a razor blade. You'll probably spend more on the chassis for this thing than you will on a new Powermac G3.