It is just not even close to true. Changes FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL USE do not come close to the issues related to copyright violation.
You know, pounding on the table does rather little to settle questions of law. Let's review this, shall we? The USA Copyright Act (17 USC 117, if memory serves) states that right to modify a covered work is a right reserved to the copyright owner. Prof. Bernstein's softwarelaw.html page claims that, however, the related legislative history (redacted into the CONTU Final Report) makes clear that such rights are nonetheless intended to be included, and that a court would thus apply the law.
John Cowan, in a post to license-discuss@opensource.org, said he'd looked into the language Bernstein quoted from the CONTU Final Report, and found it to be distortively selective. He furnished a more-complete quotation, arguing that it, with the full wording included, contradicts Bernstein's assertion.
Now, if you wish to argue with Cowan and his more-complete quotation of the legislative history, feel free to do so. I'd love to see you do that on license-discuss. But repetitive denials to Slashdot in all capital letters really don't qualify.
I DO prefer code open source code that can also be forked. But I do not think that is necessary for something to be FREE (as in GNU free)....
Well, the FSF doesn't agree with you, and never has. Read Stallman's "four freedoms" essay more attentively, and he specifically states there (in the FSF's standard definition, if you can call it that, of "free software") that free software must be freely redistributable in either source or binary form.
More to the immediate point than appeal to yet another authority figure, it seems perfectly obvious to me that the right to fork is an inherent quality of what anyone would logically mean by the term free (or open-source) software: Without it, the project effectively ceases to be maintainable, the moment its owner hangs up his hat. Free? Open source? I really don't think so. If open source is to mean anything at all, it can't encompass software that automatically becomes effectively a dead project the moment its copyright owner retired, dies, or switches to a different hobby.
"P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas"
Not really.
You could have been offended by the numerous examples detailed there of intellectually dishonest arguments typically put forward by (many, not all) DJBware fans -- which, curiously enough, have shown up in today's discussion, too. But if you aren't, then great.
The line was actually a running gag from my old long-vanished dial-up bulletin-board system, whose sign-off screen said "If you didn't enjoy this BBS, you'll probably be equally offended by any of these others", followed by a list of other recommended systems.
Let's see default rights. You buy a book. You scribble in it. Is that legal?
If I read John Cowan's analysis of the legal history correctly, he's saying the CONTU Report's language suggests that modification of a copyrighted work could be considered technical copyright violation, if it were ever adjudicated -- but, of course, in your example, the publisher isn't going to give a rat's ass, so the issue is never going to come up in court.
Now, was there some particular part of your need to take up any disagreements with John Cowan (after reading the legislative history) rather than me that you failed to understand the first time?
Also, your writing style and punctuation suggests that you're the same anonymous coward who posted that earlier handwave about my essay being "wrong on several counts" and then suddenly unwilling to provide details after I showed up. Cat got your tongue?
Also, default rights are FAR FAR different from rights typically associated with proprietary software.
Proprietary licensing lies along a spectrum: Typical DJBware licensing is at the liberal end of that spectrum (and is quite generous), but is still quite obviously proprietary, lacking as it does the key right to fork the project, with the sad long-term consequences for continued development always inherent in that limitation.
But you already knew that. You just prefer not to address it.
Simply calling that a ``DoS attack'' is stretching the truth.
I'm sorry, but what do you think a DoS attack is? The attack mode described would be a classic example, in fact. Whereas, calling it a "security hole" is actively misleading, by omission.
Besides, as you are perfectly well aware, I did not"simply" call it a DoS attack: I stated precisely and concisely what occurred.
The point was to call attention to yet another example of the polemics characteristic of the DJBware camp, and their tendency to shade the truth. In light of which, you have quite a bit of nerve selectively ignoring parts of my accurate characterisation in order to label it "stretching the truth".
I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
First there was sendmail. Then qmail. Then, a long time later, other options.
Noted. But I'm talking about how DJB groupies tend to behave today. See for yourself: Look on the various Qmail pages. Read the Qmail HOWTO.
That might have been a reasonable excuse years ago. Today, it looks a whole lot like intellectual dishonesty: Beating up on monolithic Sendmail, especially in the usual fashion that fails to credit it for the major improvement of dropping privilege according to role, is a whole lot more facile rhetoric than comparing it against the similarly-designed Postfix (ne Vmailer) codebase.
First, there was BIND. Then, djbdns. And now, VERY recently, other replacements.
Actually, some (such as Dents) have been around for quite a long time. Most people were not aware of them until after I expanded my essay to include open-source alternatives to all the proprietary DJB packages. Which in turn I was motivated to do out of annoyance at Prof. Bernstein sending me belligerent e-mails essentially making legal threats (talking about my essay being "against the law" and containing "libel"). Funny how these things work out, isn't it?
I don't think proprietary is appropriate.
That's too bad, because that's what the word means. One key element whose absence makes us consider a package proprietary is not having the right to fork. Not having that possibility as a safety valve means that the package is at risk of becoming effectively unmaintainable if its copyright holder stops issuing new versions (and doesn't grant additional rights to fix the problem).
Prof. Bernstein is certainly under no obligation to grant such rights, and he's quite generous in granting those he does -- but the only fitting term for the result is "proprietary code".
DJB software provides the user ALL of the GNU freedoms.
That, sir, is simply wrong. Hmm, I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to Stallman's "four freedoms" essay, since it's a bit too vague to be useful. I prefer the DFSG and OSD, generally.
However [rummaging through the FSF propaganda], Prof. Bernstein doesn't choose to meaningfully grant FSF freedom #4. To quote that essay: "The freedom to redistribute copies must include binary or executable forms of the program, as well as source code, for both modified and unmodified versions. (Distributing programs in runnable form is necessary for conveniently installable free operating systems.) It is ok if there is no way to produce a binary or executable form for a certain program (since some languages don't support that feature), but you must have the freedom to redistribute such forms should you find or develop a way to make them."
His software works dern well, and is free enough for anyone whose concern is getting their work done.
Until the day Prof. Bernstein hangs up his hat, at which point the projects basically become unmaintainable. (Maintaining a codebase solely through source patches against a legacy final-version source tarball wouldn't really be feasible for long.) And that is of course the prospect that hangs over users of all such software.
It would be more accurate to say that djbdns has the default licence that implicitly attaches to creative works by default application of copyright law -- in the absence of an explicit licence grant. The terms of that default licence, described by Prof. Bernstein mostly accurately (other than, according to John Cowan, those concerning modifications) at the URL you posted, are those of proprietary software, rather than open source. (Thus, any software instance issued without an explicit licence is proprietary by default.)
BIND 9 has had security holes.
Tell the whole truth, please: A BIND9 version was subject to one type of DoS attack. Sending a specific DNS packet to the daemon triggered that instance going into some sort of test mode where it performed an internal consistency check, effectively shutting it down.
Has Bernstein put permission to redistribute any patches against djbdns in writing? If so, then the license becomes roughly equivalent to the Trolltech QPL.
As Prof. Bernstein himself has pointed out, as a matter of copyright law, patches are considered analogous to commentary on the original work, and not as derivative works. Thus, the author of the original work has no claim upon them.
So, with a source-available proprietary software package like djbdns, you can end up with a quasi-free software ecology based around distribution of patches and compile-time modification. Inevitably, those patches end up being very seldom regression-tested against one another. Also, if the base package ever ceases to be maintained, continuing development via patch-distribution alone isn't really very practical. It would rapidly become such a hassle that I'm pretty sure the project would effectively die, at that point.
The fix for that problem is of course licensing that includes a right to fork. But that's possible only if the copyright holder is willing to grant that right, which Prof. Bernstein (for most of his project) is not.
That is not intended as a criticism of Prof. Bernstein (whom I admire for his dogged defence of crypto rights), nor of his software (even though I don't like or use the latter). It's just the facts of copyright law and licensing as I understand them.
Buggy? At least the vulnerability mentioned in the article does not affect most recent version of BIND 9.x.
Indeed. One of the most distressing aspects of Prof. Bernstein's flying squadron of groupies is their characteristic shading of the truth on well-known key issues. One of those issues is the vital distinction between BIND8 and BIND9, which by and large they're fully aware are distinct codebases following a from-scratch rewrite specifically to jettison the inherent unmaintainability of the legacy BIND8 codebase -- but they find it convenient to slur the new codebase with the old one's faults. Another is their characteristic refusal to compare the Qmail MTA against anything other than Sendmail -- when the obvious comparisons are Qmail/Postfix/Courier (all modular designs) and Sendmail/Exim (both monolithic designs where process instances drop privilege according to role). A third is their curious inability to ever say the words "proprietary" or "not open source", instead making excuses, changing the subject, and talking around that point.
(I'll hasten to add that Prof. Bernstein clearly isn't responsible for his acolytes' conduct.)
The linuxmafia article is also wrong on several counts.
Please let me know, and I'll fix them.
If you own a piece of copyrighted work, you can alter it for your own use legally.
John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed. The essay on my site links to a mirror of his analysis, so you're welcome to evaluate its merits for yourself. My only comment was that Cowan "convincingly disputed" Prof. Bernstein's assertion to the contrary. But whether you'll be similarly convinced is entirely between you, Cowan, and the legislative record.
You claim that there my essay is "wrong on several counts", but only cite only one particular on which you seem to disagree (without clearly stating why, other than that handwave about newspapers) -- not with me, but rather John Cowan. Are there other points, that you accidentally neglected to include? Please do detail them, when you have a chance.
As far as the other stuff, well, a large patch community is built around qmail and tinydns, and DJB is quite supportive. You get the source, and the ability to change it for personal use. And the ability to distribute patches to the source. Isn't that enough?
It's very generous, and commendable of Prof. Bernstein to grant that to the user community. In fact, it's about as generous as it's possible to be with proprietary software. Anyone who's content to become dependent on proprietary software might be very pleased with djbdns, qmail, tcpserver, publicfile, daemontools, and other similar proprietary-licensed offerings -- if they like the design (which I happen not to).
Funny how proponents of DJBware just seem completely unable to utter the word "proprietary". I wonder why that is?
Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked in order to prevent the project from dying when its creator dies or loses interest -- will continue to prefer MaraDNS, BIND9, Posadis, CustomDNS, Yaku-NS, etc.
Think what you like, but it was behind. If I remember right one of the packages that was behind was Mozilla. At the time Debian testing had 0.9.6 while 0.9.9 was out.
I do remember getting impatient for Mozilla 0.9.9 and the matching version of Galeon to clear package quarantine, and so just grabbed the.debs out of the "unstable" tree. Doing that was obvious, wasn't difficult, and wasn't a big deal. More to the immediate point, that was soon after the "testing" branch's launch, and there was only a crude quarantine heuristic of two weeks in "unstable" without replacement plus auto-building without error on all platforms. More recently, refinements to those heuristics have tightened up the unstable-to-testing quarantine propagation delay to typically 1-2 days.
Additionally, if you don't want to wait for quarantining and are feeling lucky, the new-ish (late '01?) apt "pinning" feature now lets one selectively grab packages from a more-current branch entirely within apt, without needing to download packages and "dpkg -i" them.
That is what I did and it barfed during the installer.
Now, you're being both vague and incoherent. Obviously, you don't mean an installer for "unstable", since you say you used an installer-of-your-choice and then adjusted sources.list to track "unstable". But you don't identify which installer -- an experimental prerelease one for 3.0/woody, or what, just that "it" (whatever "it" is) "barfed" (whatever "barfed" means).
Enough of that. All sorts of Debian installers, with X11-based front-ends (e.g., PGI), with ncurses-based droolproofing (Libranet) with Reiser/XFS/JFS/software-RAID/kernel-2.4.x/etc., are documented in my Debian tips collection. Use one in the future, and don't ignorantly complain there isn't one that works for your hardware (if the latter is minimally functional), since that strains credulity past its elasticity limit.
I have tried the testing branch and I found it too behind.
That's absurd. The testing branch is newly introduced packages in the "unstable" branch that have passed automated package quarantining. It's as close as you can get to the bleeding edge without figuratively dying of blood loss.
Then I tried the unstable since many people said it worked for them. It wouldn't even install.
That's even more absurd: If you'd paid any attention whatsoever to the preceding conversation or to basically any Debian documentation at all, or so much as looked at DebianPlanet or asked a Debian user, you'd have known that you get onto the "unstable" branch by using any Debian-compatible installer of your choice, adjusting/etc/apt/sources.list to pull packages from "unstable", and then resynchronise to "unstable" using apt-get.
One of these days I may give the testing branch another try.
Before you do, read some elementary Debian documentation, or browse my collection of Debian tips: http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips. (Note that it's grown in chronological order, so more-current material is closer to the bottom.)
Debian 3.0 with PGI would be nice if Debian 3.0 was as up to date with software as others.
The Debian "testing" branch is exactly the right distance from the bleeding edge for my taste, much more so than the "stable" branch (currently 3.0/woody). Of course, the point of using the PGI installer for x86 Debian is not to mindlessly remain with exactly what remains at the conclusion of the installer, but rather to start tracking one of the Debian branches using apt-get.
Only someone stubbornly ignorant about how Debian works would not ignore the testing branch to promote the obsolete misconception you've cited.
With Xandros I don't see where you can freely download anything. Their ftp site again doesn't accept anonymous ftp. How are they following GPL?
(1) Why are you asking me? Presumably, they follow the GPL by providing access to matching source via one of the mechanisms specified in clauses 3a or 3b to those who have lawfully received GPL-covered binaries Xandros redistributed. (2) Does your question mean that you're one of those tiresome people who wave the GPL around without actually reading it?
Libranet has serious issues with me in that they charge for the second cd which has all the real differences between Debian and Libranet on it. Their ftp site doesn't accept anonymous ftp. Are they even following GPL?
(1) You're entitled to have all the "serious issues" you want. Doesn't change the fact that they've made their installer available gratis. (2) Why are you asking me? Presumably, they follow the GPL by providing access to matching source via one of the mechanisms specified in clauses 3a or 3b to those who have lawfully received GPL-covered binaries Libra Computer Systems Ltd. redistributed. (3) Does your question mean that you're one of those tiresome people who wave the GPL around without actually reading it?
The only new thing as far as I can tell is support for resizing NTFS partitions. But now that Linux supports NTFS surely even that could be done. I'm surprised SuSE didn't write their own application... perhaps they were just in a hurry to get something out.
Mounting NTFS and resizing it are distinct problems. Since you mention it, there is a new-ish NTFS filesystem driver for Linux kernels, and it's reportedly more reliable than the old one, but you still have to watch out carefully for corruption problems after using it in read-write mode.
On the resizing front, though, there are more options than most people realise, and I've recently published the results of my research into that subject.
You mention "other distributions" with the features I want, but I gave a list of distributions I had tried and didn't suit me. You have any actual names to give?
Presumably, Libranet, Xandros Desktop, and the PGI installer image for Debian 3.0. All of those are drool-proof ways to get onto Debian 3.0 i386, providing preconfigured access to many of the desired "desktop" tchotchkes. The first two even prepackage the most-requested proprietary stuff (Acrocrap, Macromedia Flash, MS Core TrueType fonts, etc.).
What would happen if MS bought VA and "shut down" Sourceforge and Slashdot?
Well, VA management wouldn't get any smarter, but at least they'd get to wear those spiffy jackboots.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Claim of first NTFS resizer in a distro is false
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Xandros 1.0
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· Score: 2
"bfree" wrote:
Non-destructive (will you backup?) NTFS partition resizing is in as part of the install, and that I must say is a great innovation!
But it's not an innovation: ASPLinux had it long before Xandros did.
To benefit the Linux community generally, and especially the open-source Linux community, I've started documenting ways to deal with the NTFS problem, here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ntfs
Your point is mostly well taken, but, since you asked:
Red Hat is also Free. Try to find any non OSS software in the downloadable version.
pine-4.44-13.i386.rpm
...but that's the only one I was able to spot, on a run through the package list. xv, acroread, Netscape Communicator/Navigator, Sun Java stuff, Realplayer, are all gone, replaced by open-source codebases developed, in some cases, through Red Hat Software's sponsorship. I'm impressed.
If netscape needs information to sell/share to it's partners so it can get more revenue and keep producing great products, that's fine. You don't have to use their browser. A more interesting question is that did you agree to it in the EULA?
I'm glad you asked that question. No, he did not.
I happen to maintain an archive of licence agreements for common proprietary Linux software, including the one for Netscape 6.1. It includes a clause that the "he Product may automatically send information relating to the download and install process to Netscape", but nothing about post-installation spying.
The workaround is easy : change your user-agent to MSIE.
Not necessary. Just change it to something other than the competition Microsoft is trying to squash at the moment. For example, the MSN site doesn't try to fast-talk people out of using their Squid proxies (that identify themselves as such).
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Re:Is RH including proprietary sw these days?
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Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 2
LoveMe2Times wrote:
Is any of this proprietary, or has RH managed to stay comeletely OS?
Red Hat has never been completely open source, but has been a leader in attempting to move in that direction, while still providing the functionality people want. For example, I believe Red Hat actually commissioned the creation of a graphics-manipulation utility good enough that they could drop the excellent "shareware" proprietary package xv without too much pain.
I see, at a brief glance, the following proprietary packages in 7.2's core two-CD set:
Netscape Navigator/Communicator
pine/pico
And that's it, I think. (I believe some of the boxed sets have proprietary supersets of the base set, e.g., adding Star Office 5.2.)
It would be a bit painful for some of Red Hat's customer base to drop either of those packages, at this point: Although one could substitute nano for pico, there's nothing but pine to make dedicated pine-lovers happy. And, although Mozilla is getting awfully good, in a few areas such as (ew!) Java support, it's not quite up with Navigator/Commuicator.
t's a pity they still use Bind instead of djbdns [cr.yp.to], which is a lot safer.
I believe you misspelled "It's commendable that they finally migrated from the hopelessly buggy BIND 8.x series to the rewriten-from-scratch BIND 9.x one -- and perfectly understandable that they shunned djbdns and other proprietary Bernstein packages. It's just a shame they're still defaulting to wu-ftpd rather than, say, vs-ftpd."
I strongly suspect that Russ Mitchell's whiney apologia for failure wouldn't have had a prayer of seeing print if he weren't -- let's see, isn't it brother-in-law of the managing editor?
Anyhow: Mitchell was one of the lightweights brought aboard as part of the short-lived San Francisco Web operation. I suspect he was with Atomic Vision, the Web design house, when Red Hat acquired it and then tried and failed to get them to produce useful work: Wide Open News started out fairly pathetic, and never got better. And for that botched job, Mitchell got a hunk of San Francisco real estate? Hmmpf.
Speedie needed to use Microsoft Word because the Linux word processors at her disposal were saddled with spellcheckers so abysmal they caused more problems than they solved, skipping over misspelled words and offering bizarre alternatives for words spelled correctly.
Such drivel. Even the system's built-in ispell utility provides excellent spelling checking.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000.
This is of course the time-honoured pastime of playing games with numbers. He's almost certainly quoting some uncredited source (if any) on preload sales, which tells you nothing at all about the amount of Linux actually in use on desktops.
PC makers are concluding that consumer Linux is too small a market to mess with: Dell Computer recently dropped Linux from its desktops and notebooks.
Actually, Dell never did support Linux in any meaningful way: You even had to pay a sizeable premium to get a Red Hat preload, compared to getting the much cheaper bundle with Win32 crud and then loading the Linux distribution of your choice. Smart people did the latter. All that's changed is that Dell dropped a basically worthless configuration option, and simplified the conversation scripts that their telephone support people are allowed to follow. And guess what? The number of Dells with Linux on them, despite vendor neglect, continues to climb.
...anti-Microsoft ranting...
The charge is obligatory in this genre of article, but, honestly, the place you hear the overwhelming share of anti-Microsoft ranting is from that company's captive user base, not from those who've eluded its grasp.
A decade later, Linux is lauded as a technical success. But as a business, it's a flop.
Notice how, here, he completely changes the subject of conversation. The article was purportedly about why Linux cannot "win the desktop" (tra la), but now he's talking about the fortunes of companies. Not the same discussion at all. (Probably, the unstated assumption is that development of worthwhile software requires well-funded companies devoted to them. Which is not obviously the case.)
What if all the effort that's gone into writing desktop drivers that peripheral outfits don't care to support were redirected toward drivers for corporate environments?
There are no such thing as "desktop drivers". This passage is gibberish -- but it's obvious that Mitchell is entirely clueless about the technology.
Linux has been on the industry's radar screen since the mid-'90s, yet the vast majority of applications available for Windows and Mac don't exist for Linux.
The trick when you're making a non-sequitur argument like this is to carefully avoid stating it explicitly, but instead only imply it. Then, people probably won't notice that you've just pulled a fast one.
To wit: Mitchell is implying that the only way productive and useful software comes into existence for Linux desktops is to be ported from Win32 or MacOS. Which is, of course, completely false. But he's preaching to the choir of people who've never heard of any other software, and who refuse to believe that such software exists unless they see it shrink-wrapped on the shelf at CompUSA.
I would wager good money that, in the year that Mitchell impliedly attempted to use Linux, that he made no effort at all to truly attempt to acclimate himself to the thousands of packages that Red Hat's IS Dept. undoubtedly handed to him on a platter. Instead, I'll bet he sat back and whined about how much he wanted back his MS-Outlook, MSIE, and so on, not caring about the security exposure to his company or really anything else.
[Michell has a passage where he complains about alleged lack of hardware support.]
You'll note that Mitchell's idea of where to look for hardware support is, invariably, to visit the manufacturer's Web site. Consider: A full year of working for a Linux company, and it never dawns on him to start with the Linux Documentation Project or with Google. Simply amazing.
Nontechnical users continue to have a hard time installing Linux.
Guess what? Non-technical users continue to have a difficult time installing Microsoft operating systems, too. But I'll bet that Mitchell has never actually installed any OS in his life. He probably thinks he has, harking back to the day that he put his name and S/N into a preloaded Microsoft "welcome" screen, and then (of course) rebooted.
Matthew Butterick, a former member of Red Hat management who ran Web operations from the company's 35-member San Francisco office, disagrees.
Right: The Atomic Vision Web weenies are clearly expert on OS technology and strategy. {cough}
Frankly, KDE 2.2.x strikes me as a good bit easier for naive desktop users to learn and become productive with, than are Microsoft Corporation's messy and inconsistent desktop offerings. But Mitchell and Butterick's yardstick is, predictably, people like themselves who will settle for nothing other than exactly what they're already useful, and will whine until they get it.
Serious technical issues must be resolved, the biggest of which is scaling.
Yet another subject in which Mitchell is clearly out of his depth. Scaling can occur in any of several ways, not just the SMP approach Mitchell discusses briefly. In the latter area, with the 2.4.x kernel's ability to scale well to around eight CPUs on a motherboard, Linux has surpassed all but a couple of OSes, without the sluggishness on uniprocessor systems typical of, say, Solaris. But one can also scale by switching to faster CPU architectures, or through one of a couple of different varieties of clustering. And guess what? Linux is a leader in both areas.
Gartner's Weiss understands Linux's appeal to IBM.
It's not surprising that Mitchell digs up quotations from Microsoft Corporation's chief shills in the IT industry, Gartner Group. (It's usually analyst George Weiss, these days. It's unclear where the formerly ubiquitous Rob Enderle has gotten off to.)
So: You won't learn anything about Linux from this article, but Red Hat's early closure of its San Francisco Web office becomes suddenly much clearer.
Just mulling over Russ Mitchell's anecdote about his former employee, Anne Speedie. That description of her files being deliberately clobbered by a smarmy, scrawny, black-t-shirted Linux technician has such a conveniently mythic quality about it, doesn't it? We have the stereotyped Linux geek. We have the unrepentant and gleeful callousness. We have the outraged but helpless everyday office workers, persecuted by the former.
Seems tailor-made for Mitchell, doesn't it?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the story has, to quote Tolkien, "grown in the telling". Or, more specifically, that crucial parts of the story have been strategically omitted.
For instance: Mitchell (then Speedie's boss) says he confronted the scrawny, black-t-shirted technician about the deliberate mass-deletion when he was just supposed to "get some dial-up software installed", and the latter just stared back and smiled. And...? At that point, Mitchell and Speedie just dropped it? Why on earth would they do that? Wouldn't the logical next step be to escalate up the IS Dept. organisational foodchain? The account as written more than strains credulity; it leaves credulity in a body-cast.
Could it be that Mitchell's assertion about "getting some dial-up software installed" is a fabrication, and that Red Hat's IS Dept. has a firm, well-publicised policy that company-issued laptops will be reloaded with the supported Red Hat Linux load, when sent in for service, unless the user makes specific arrangements to the contrary? Could it be that Mitchell knew that Speedie had no cause for complaint, but is just incensed that his former employer didn't let him override software policy on company-owned machines?
Could it be that Speedie ignored company directives about data-file backups, or that her files were in fact backed up for safekeeping, but she and Mitchell are just steamed about losing her unauthorised and possibly bootlegged modifications?
We don't know any of this, because telling the latter half of the story doesn't help Mitchell's polemical stance. But it's not difficult to guess what he doesn't want to tell us.
Slashdot Mirror
It is just not even close to true. Changes FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL USE do not come close to the issues related to copyright violation.
You know, pounding on the table does rather little to settle questions of law. Let's review this, shall we? The USA Copyright Act (17 USC 117, if memory serves) states that right to modify a covered work is a right reserved to the copyright owner. Prof. Bernstein's softwarelaw.html page claims that, however, the related legislative history (redacted into the CONTU Final Report) makes clear that such rights are nonetheless intended to be included, and that a court would thus apply the law.John Cowan, in a post to license-discuss@opensource.org, said he'd looked into the language Bernstein quoted from the CONTU Final Report, and found it to be distortively selective. He furnished a more-complete quotation, arguing that it, with the full wording included, contradicts Bernstein's assertion.
Now, if you wish to argue with Cowan and his more-complete quotation of the legislative history, feel free to do so. I'd love to see you do that on license-discuss. But repetitive denials to Slashdot in all capital letters really don't qualify.
I DO prefer code open source code that can also be forked. But I do not think that is necessary for something to be FREE (as in GNU free)....
Well, the FSF doesn't agree with you, and never has. Read Stallman's "four freedoms" essay more attentively, and he specifically states there (in the FSF's standard definition, if you can call it that, of "free software") that free software must be freely redistributable in either source or binary form.
More to the immediate point than appeal to yet another authority figure, it seems perfectly obvious to me that the right to fork is an inherent quality of what anyone would logically mean by the term free (or open-source) software: Without it, the project effectively ceases to be maintainable, the moment its owner hangs up his hat. Free? Open source? I really don't think so. If open source is to mean anything at all, it can't encompass software that automatically becomes effectively a dead project the moment its copyright owner retired, dies, or switches to a different hobby.
"P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas"
Not really.
You could have been offended by the numerous examples detailed there of intellectually dishonest arguments typically put forward by (many, not all) DJBware fans -- which, curiously enough, have shown up in today's discussion, too. But if you aren't, then great.
The line was actually a running gag from my old long-vanished dial-up bulletin-board system, whose sign-off screen said "If you didn't enjoy this BBS, you'll probably be equally offended by any of these others", followed by a list of other recommended systems.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Let's see default rights. You buy a book. You scribble in it. Is that legal?
If I read John Cowan's analysis of the legal history correctly, he's saying the CONTU Report's language suggests that modification of a copyrighted work could be considered technical copyright violation, if it were ever adjudicated -- but, of course, in your example, the publisher isn't going to give a rat's ass, so the issue is never going to come up in court.
Now, was there some particular part of your need to take up any disagreements with John Cowan (after reading the legislative history) rather than me that you failed to understand the first time?
Also, your writing style and punctuation suggests that you're the same anonymous coward who posted that earlier handwave about my essay being "wrong on several counts" and then suddenly unwilling to provide details after I showed up. Cat got your tongue?
Also, default rights are FAR FAR different from rights typically associated with proprietary software.
Proprietary licensing lies along a spectrum: Typical DJBware licensing is at the liberal end of that spectrum (and is quite generous), but is still quite obviously proprietary, lacking as it does the key right to fork the project, with the sad long-term consequences for continued development always inherent in that limitation.
But you already knew that. You just prefer not to address it.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Simply calling that a ``DoS attack'' is stretching the truth.
I'm sorry, but what do you think a DoS attack is? The attack mode described would be a classic example, in fact. Whereas, calling it a "security hole" is actively misleading, by omission.
Besides, as you are perfectly well aware, I did not "simply" call it a DoS attack: I stated precisely and concisely what occurred.
The point was to call attention to yet another example of the polemics characteristic of the DJBware camp, and their tendency to shade the truth. In light of which, you have quite a bit of nerve selectively ignoring parts of my accurate characterisation in order to label it "stretching the truth". I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
First there was sendmail. Then qmail. Then, a long time later, other options.
Noted. But I'm talking about how DJB groupies tend to behave today. See for yourself: Look on the various Qmail pages. Read the Qmail HOWTO.
That might have been a reasonable excuse years ago. Today, it looks a whole lot like intellectual dishonesty: Beating up on monolithic Sendmail, especially in the usual fashion that fails to credit it for the major improvement of dropping privilege according to role, is a whole lot more facile rhetoric than comparing it against the similarly-designed Postfix (ne Vmailer) codebase.
First, there was BIND. Then, djbdns. And now, VERY recently, other replacements.
Actually, some (such as Dents) have been around for quite a long time. Most people were not aware of them until after I expanded my essay to include open-source alternatives to all the proprietary DJB packages. Which in turn I was motivated to do out of annoyance at Prof. Bernstein sending me belligerent e-mails essentially making legal threats (talking about my essay being "against the law" and containing "libel"). Funny how these things work out, isn't it?
I don't think proprietary is appropriate.
That's too bad, because that's what the word means. One key element whose absence makes us consider a package proprietary is not having the right to fork. Not having that possibility as a safety valve means that the package is at risk of becoming effectively unmaintainable if its copyright holder stops issuing new versions (and doesn't grant additional rights to fix the problem).
Prof. Bernstein is certainly under no obligation to grant such rights, and he's quite generous in granting those he does -- but the only fitting term for the result is "proprietary code".
DJB software provides the user ALL of the GNU freedoms.
That, sir, is simply wrong. Hmm, I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to Stallman's "four freedoms" essay, since it's a bit too vague to be useful. I prefer the DFSG and OSD, generally.
However [rummaging through the FSF propaganda], Prof. Bernstein doesn't choose to meaningfully grant FSF freedom #4. To quote that essay: "The freedom to redistribute copies must include binary or executable forms of the program, as well as source code, for both modified and unmodified versions. (Distributing programs in runnable form is necessary for conveniently installable free operating systems.) It is ok if there is no way to produce a binary or executable form for a certain program (since some languages don't support that feature), but you must have the freedom to redistribute such forms should you find or develop a way to make them."
His software works dern well, and is free enough for anyone whose concern is getting their work done.
Until the day Prof. Bernstein hangs up his hat, at which point the projects basically become unmaintainable. (Maintaining a codebase solely through source patches against a legacy final-version source tarball wouldn't really be feasible for long.) And that is of course the prospect that hangs over users of all such software.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
He doesn't need to. djbdns doesn't have a license and doesn't need one: http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
It would be more accurate to say that djbdns has the default licence that implicitly attaches to creative works by default application of copyright law -- in the absence of an explicit licence grant. The terms of that default licence, described by Prof. Bernstein mostly accurately (other than, according to John Cowan, those concerning modifications) at the URL you posted, are those of proprietary software, rather than open source. (Thus, any software instance issued without an explicit licence is proprietary by default.)
BIND 9 has had security holes.
Tell the whole truth, please: A BIND9 version was subject to one type of DoS attack. Sending a specific DNS packet to the daemon triggered that instance going into some sort of test mode where it performed an internal consistency check, effectively shutting it down.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Has Bernstein put permission to redistribute any patches against djbdns in writing? If so, then the license becomes roughly equivalent to the Trolltech QPL.
As Prof. Bernstein himself has pointed out, as a matter of copyright law, patches are considered analogous to commentary on the original work, and not as derivative works. Thus, the author of the original work has no claim upon them.
So, with a source-available proprietary software package like djbdns, you can end up with a quasi-free software ecology based around distribution of patches and compile-time modification. Inevitably, those patches end up being very seldom regression-tested against one another. Also, if the base package ever ceases to be maintained, continuing development via patch-distribution alone isn't really very practical. It would rapidly become such a hassle that I'm pretty sure the project would effectively die, at that point.
The fix for that problem is of course licensing that includes a right to fork. But that's possible only if the copyright holder is willing to grant that right, which Prof. Bernstein (for most of his project) is not.
That is not intended as a criticism of Prof. Bernstein (whom I admire for his dogged defence of crypto rights), nor of his software (even though I don't like or use the latter). It's just the facts of copyright law and licensing as I understand them.
Buggy? At least the vulnerability mentioned in the article does not affect most recent version of BIND 9.x.
Indeed. One of the most distressing aspects of Prof. Bernstein's flying squadron of groupies is their characteristic shading of the truth on well-known key issues. One of those issues is the vital distinction between BIND8 and BIND9, which by and large they're fully aware are distinct codebases following a from-scratch rewrite specifically to jettison the inherent unmaintainability of the legacy BIND8 codebase -- but they find it convenient to slur the new codebase with the old one's faults. Another is their characteristic refusal to compare the Qmail MTA against anything other than Sendmail -- when the obvious comparisons are Qmail/Postfix/Courier (all modular designs) and Sendmail/Exim (both monolithic designs where process instances drop privilege according to role). A third is their curious inability to ever say the words "proprietary" or "not open source", instead making excuses, changing the subject, and talking around that point.
(I'll hasten to add that Prof. Bernstein clearly isn't responsible for his acolytes' conduct.)
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
The linuxmafia article is also wrong on several counts.
Please let me know, and I'll fix them.
If you own a piece of copyrighted work, you can alter it for your own use legally.
John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed. The essay on my site links to a mirror of his analysis, so you're welcome to evaluate its merits for yourself. My only comment was that Cowan "convincingly disputed" Prof. Bernstein's assertion to the contrary. But whether you'll be similarly convinced is entirely between you, Cowan, and the legislative record.
You claim that there my essay is "wrong on several counts", but only cite only one particular on which you seem to disagree (without clearly stating why, other than that handwave about newspapers) -- not with me, but rather John Cowan. Are there other points, that you accidentally neglected to include? Please do detail them, when you have a chance.
As far as the other stuff, well, a large patch community is built around qmail and tinydns, and DJB is quite supportive. You get the source, and the ability to change it for personal use. And the ability to distribute patches to the source. Isn't that enough?
It's very generous, and commendable of Prof. Bernstein to grant that to the user community. In fact, it's about as generous as it's possible to be with proprietary software. Anyone who's content to become dependent on proprietary software might be very pleased with djbdns, qmail, tcpserver, publicfile, daemontools, and other similar proprietary-licensed offerings -- if they like the design (which I happen not to).
Funny how proponents of DJBware just seem completely unable to utter the word "proprietary". I wonder why that is?
Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked in order to prevent the project from dying when its creator dies or loses interest -- will continue to prefer MaraDNS, BIND9, Posadis, CustomDNS, Yaku-NS, etc.
P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas. Enjoy!
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Think what you like, but it was behind. If I remember right one of the packages that was behind was Mozilla. At the time Debian testing had 0.9.6 while 0.9.9 was out.
I do remember getting impatient for Mozilla 0.9.9 and the matching version of Galeon to clear package quarantine, and so just grabbed the .debs out of the "unstable" tree. Doing that was obvious, wasn't difficult, and wasn't a big deal. More to the immediate point, that was soon after the "testing" branch's launch, and there was only a crude quarantine heuristic of two weeks in "unstable" without replacement plus auto-building without error on all platforms. More recently, refinements to those heuristics have tightened up the unstable-to-testing quarantine propagation delay to typically 1-2 days.
Additionally, if you don't want to wait for quarantining and are feeling lucky, the new-ish (late '01?) apt "pinning" feature now lets one selectively grab packages from a more-current branch entirely within apt, without needing to download packages and "dpkg -i" them.
That is what I did and it barfed during the installer.
Now, you're being both vague and incoherent. Obviously, you don't mean an installer for "unstable", since you say you used an installer-of-your-choice and then adjusted sources.list to track "unstable". But you don't identify which installer -- an experimental prerelease one for 3.0/woody, or what, just that "it" (whatever "it" is) "barfed" (whatever "barfed" means).
Enough of that. All sorts of Debian installers, with X11-based front-ends (e.g., PGI), with ncurses-based droolproofing (Libranet) with Reiser/XFS/JFS/software-RAID/kernel-2.4.x/etc., are documented in my Debian tips collection. Use one in the future, and don't ignorantly complain there isn't one that works for your hardware (if the latter is minimally functional), since that strains credulity past its elasticity limit.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmaifa.com
I have tried the testing branch and I found it too behind.
That's absurd. The testing branch is newly introduced packages in the "unstable" branch that have passed automated package quarantining. It's as close as you can get to the bleeding edge without figuratively dying of blood loss.
Then I tried the unstable since many people said it worked for them. It wouldn't even install.
That's even more absurd: If you'd paid any attention whatsoever to the preceding conversation or to basically any Debian documentation at all, or so much as looked at DebianPlanet or asked a Debian user, you'd have known that you get onto the "unstable" branch by using any Debian-compatible installer of your choice, adjusting /etc/apt/sources.list to pull packages from "unstable", and then resynchronise to "unstable" using apt-get.
One of these days I may give the testing branch another try.
Before you do, read some elementary Debian documentation, or browse my collection of Debian tips: http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips. (Note that it's grown in chronological order, so more-current material is closer to the bottom.)
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Debian 3.0 with PGI would be nice if Debian 3.0 was as up to date with software as others.
The Debian "testing" branch is exactly the right distance from the bleeding edge for my taste, much more so than the "stable" branch (currently 3.0/woody). Of course, the point of using the PGI installer for x86 Debian is not to mindlessly remain with exactly what remains at the conclusion of the installer, but rather to start tracking one of the Debian branches using apt-get.
Only someone stubbornly ignorant about how Debian works would not ignore the testing branch to promote the obsolete misconception you've cited.
With Xandros I don't see where you can freely download anything. Their ftp site again doesn't accept anonymous ftp. How are they following GPL?
(1) Why are you asking me? Presumably, they follow the GPL by providing access to matching source via one of the mechanisms specified in clauses 3a or 3b to those who have lawfully received GPL-covered binaries Xandros redistributed. (2) Does your question mean that you're one of those tiresome people who wave the GPL around without actually reading it?
Libranet has serious issues with me in that they charge for the second cd which has all the real differences between Debian and Libranet on it. Their ftp site doesn't accept anonymous ftp. Are they even following GPL?
(1) You're entitled to have all the "serious issues" you want. Doesn't change the fact that they've made their installer available gratis. (2) Why are you asking me? Presumably, they follow the GPL by providing access to matching source via one of the mechanisms specified in clauses 3a or 3b to those who have lawfully received GPL-covered binaries Libra Computer Systems Ltd. redistributed. (3) Does your question mean that you're one of those tiresome people who wave the GPL around without actually reading it?
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Mounting NTFS and resizing it are distinct problems. Since you mention it, there is a new-ish NTFS filesystem driver for Linux kernels, and it's reportedly more reliable than the old one, but you still have to watch out carefully for corruption problems after using it in read-write mode.
On the resizing front, though, there are more options than most people realise, and I've recently published the results of my research into that subject.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Presumably, Libranet, Xandros Desktop, and the PGI installer image for Debian 3.0. All of those are drool-proof ways to get onto Debian 3.0 i386, providing preconfigured access to many of the desired "desktop" tchotchkes. The first two even prepackage the most-requested proprietary stuff (Acrocrap, Macromedia Flash, MS Core TrueType fonts, etc.).
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Well, VA management wouldn't get any smarter, but at least they'd get to wear those spiffy jackboots.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Non-destructive (will you backup?) NTFS partition resizing is in as part of the install, and that I must say is a great innovation!
But it's not an innovation: ASPLinux had it long before Xandros did.
To benefit the Linux community generally, and especially the open-source Linux community, I've started documenting ways to deal with the NTFS problem, here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ntfs
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Red Hat is also Free. Try to find any non OSS software in the downloadable version.
pine-4.44-13.i386.rpm
...but that's the only one I was able to spot, on a run through the package list. xv, acroread, Netscape Communicator/Navigator, Sun Java stuff, Realplayer, are all gone, replaced by open-source codebases developed, in some cases, through Red Hat Software's sponsorship. I'm impressed.
Woody installation images with software RAID support:
http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/woody_xfs/
http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/
Why, is your copy of wget broken?
If netscape needs information to sell/share to it's partners so it can get more revenue and keep producing great products, that's fine. You don't have to use their browser. A more interesting question is that did you agree to it in the EULA?
I'm glad you asked that question. No, he did not.
I happen to maintain an archive of licence agreements for common proprietary Linux software, including the one for Netscape 6.1. It includes a clause that the "he Product may automatically send information relating to the download and install process to Netscape", but nothing about post-installation spying.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
5.2 already cost $40 for business use.
Nope.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Not necessary. Just change it to something other than the competition Microsoft is trying to squash at the moment. For example, the MSN site doesn't try to fast-talk people out of using their Squid proxies (that identify themselves as such).
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Is any of this proprietary, or has RH managed to stay comeletely OS?
Red Hat has never been completely open source, but has been a leader in attempting to move in that direction, while still providing the functionality people want. For example, I believe Red Hat actually commissioned the creation of a graphics-manipulation utility good enough that they could drop the excellent "shareware" proprietary package xv without too much pain.
I see, at a brief glance, the following proprietary packages in 7.2's core two-CD set:
And that's it, I think. (I believe some of the boxed sets have proprietary supersets of the base set, e.g., adding Star Office 5.2.)
It would be a bit painful for some of Red Hat's customer base to drop either of those packages, at this point: Although one could substitute nano for pico, there's nothing but pine to make dedicated pine-lovers happy. And, although Mozilla is getting awfully good, in a few areas such as (ew!) Java support, it's not quite up with Navigator/Commuicator.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
"basic70" wrote:
t's a pity they still use Bind instead of djbdns [cr.yp.to], which is a lot safer.
I believe you misspelled "It's commendable that they finally migrated from the hopelessly buggy BIND 8.x series to the rewriten-from-scratch BIND 9.x one -- and perfectly understandable that they shunned djbdns and other proprietary Bernstein packages. It's just a shame they're still defaulting to wu-ftpd rather than, say, vs-ftpd."
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
I strongly suspect that Russ Mitchell's whiney apologia for failure wouldn't have had a prayer of seeing print if he weren't -- let's see, isn't it brother-in-law of the managing editor?
Anyhow: Mitchell was one of the lightweights brought aboard as part of the short-lived San Francisco Web operation. I suspect he was with Atomic Vision, the Web design house, when Red Hat acquired it and then tried and failed to get them to produce useful work: Wide Open News started out fairly pathetic, and never got better. And for that botched job, Mitchell got a hunk of San Francisco real estate? Hmmpf.
Speedie needed to use Microsoft Word because the Linux word processors at her disposal were saddled with spellcheckers so abysmal they caused more problems than they solved, skipping over misspelled words and offering bizarre alternatives for words spelled correctly.
Such drivel. Even the system's built-in ispell utility provides excellent spelling checking.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000.
This is of course the time-honoured pastime of playing games with numbers. He's almost certainly quoting some uncredited source (if any) on preload sales, which tells you nothing at all about the amount of Linux actually in use on desktops.
PC makers are concluding that consumer Linux is too small a market to mess with: Dell Computer recently dropped Linux from its desktops and notebooks.
Actually, Dell never did support Linux in any meaningful way: You even had to pay a sizeable premium to get a Red Hat preload, compared to getting the much cheaper bundle with Win32 crud and then loading the Linux distribution of your choice. Smart people did the latter. All that's changed is that Dell dropped a basically worthless configuration option, and simplified the conversation scripts that their telephone support people are allowed to follow. And guess what? The number of Dells with Linux on them, despite vendor neglect, continues to climb.
The charge is obligatory in this genre of article, but, honestly, the place you hear the overwhelming share of anti-Microsoft ranting is from that company's captive user base, not from those who've eluded its grasp.
A decade later, Linux is lauded as a technical success. But as a business, it's a flop.
Notice how, here, he completely changes the subject of conversation. The article was purportedly about why Linux cannot "win the desktop" (tra la), but now he's talking about the fortunes of companies. Not the same discussion at all. (Probably, the unstated assumption is that development of worthwhile software requires well-funded companies devoted to them. Which is not obviously the case.)
What if all the effort that's gone into writing desktop drivers that peripheral outfits don't care to support were redirected toward drivers for corporate environments?
There are no such thing as "desktop drivers". This passage is gibberish -- but it's obvious that Mitchell is entirely clueless about the technology.
Linux has been on the industry's radar screen since the mid-'90s, yet the vast majority of applications available for Windows and Mac don't exist for Linux.
The trick when you're making a non-sequitur argument like this is to carefully avoid stating it explicitly, but instead only imply it. Then, people probably won't notice that you've just pulled a fast one.
To wit: Mitchell is implying that the only way productive and useful software comes into existence for Linux desktops is to be ported from Win32 or MacOS. Which is, of course, completely false. But he's preaching to the choir of people who've never heard of any other software, and who refuse to believe that such software exists unless they see it shrink-wrapped on the shelf at CompUSA.
I would wager good money that, in the year that Mitchell impliedly attempted to use Linux, that he made no effort at all to truly attempt to acclimate himself to the thousands of packages that Red Hat's IS Dept. undoubtedly handed to him on a platter. Instead, I'll bet he sat back and whined about how much he wanted back his MS-Outlook, MSIE, and so on, not caring about the security exposure to his company or really anything else.
[Michell has a passage where he complains about alleged lack of hardware support.]
You'll note that Mitchell's idea of where to look for hardware support is, invariably, to visit the manufacturer's Web site. Consider: A full year of working for a Linux company, and it never dawns on him to start with the Linux Documentation Project or with Google. Simply amazing.
Nontechnical users continue to have a hard time installing Linux.
Guess what? Non-technical users continue to have a difficult time installing Microsoft operating systems, too. But I'll bet that Mitchell has never actually installed any OS in his life. He probably thinks he has, harking back to the day that he put his name and S/N into a preloaded Microsoft "welcome" screen, and then (of course) rebooted.
Matthew Butterick, a former member of Red Hat management who ran Web operations from the company's 35-member San Francisco office, disagrees.
Right: The Atomic Vision Web weenies are clearly expert on OS technology and strategy. {cough}
Frankly, KDE 2.2.x strikes me as a good bit easier for naive desktop users to learn and become productive with, than are Microsoft Corporation's messy and inconsistent desktop offerings. But Mitchell and Butterick's yardstick is, predictably, people like themselves who will settle for nothing other than exactly what they're already useful, and will whine until they get it.
Serious technical issues must be resolved, the biggest of which is scaling.
Yet another subject in which Mitchell is clearly out of his depth. Scaling can occur in any of several ways, not just the SMP approach Mitchell discusses briefly. In the latter area, with the 2.4.x kernel's ability to scale well to around eight CPUs on a motherboard, Linux has surpassed all but a couple of OSes, without the sluggishness on uniprocessor systems typical of, say, Solaris. But one can also scale by switching to faster CPU architectures, or through one of a couple of different varieties of clustering. And guess what? Linux is a leader in both areas.
Gartner's Weiss understands Linux's appeal to IBM.
It's not surprising that Mitchell digs up quotations from Microsoft Corporation's chief shills in the IT industry, Gartner Group. (It's usually analyst George Weiss, these days. It's unclear where the formerly ubiquitous Rob Enderle has gotten off to.)
So: You won't learn anything about Linux from this article, but Red Hat's early closure of its San Francisco Web office becomes suddenly much clearer.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
[Cross-post from the LinuxToday thread:]
Just mulling over Russ Mitchell's anecdote about his former employee, Anne Speedie. That description of her files being deliberately clobbered by a smarmy, scrawny, black-t-shirted Linux technician has such a conveniently mythic quality about it, doesn't it? We have the stereotyped Linux geek. We have the unrepentant and gleeful callousness. We have the outraged but helpless everyday office workers, persecuted by the former.
Seems tailor-made for Mitchell, doesn't it?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the story has, to quote Tolkien, "grown in the telling". Or, more specifically, that crucial parts of the story have been strategically omitted.
For instance: Mitchell (then Speedie's boss) says he confronted the scrawny, black-t-shirted technician about the deliberate mass-deletion when he was just supposed to "get some dial-up software installed", and the latter just stared back and smiled. And...? At that point, Mitchell and Speedie just dropped it? Why on earth would they do that? Wouldn't the logical next step be to escalate up the IS Dept. organisational foodchain? The account as written more than strains credulity; it leaves credulity in a body-cast.
Could it be that Mitchell's assertion about "getting some dial-up software installed" is a fabrication, and that Red Hat's IS Dept. has a firm, well-publicised policy that company-issued laptops will be reloaded with the supported Red Hat Linux load, when sent in for service, unless the user makes specific arrangements to the contrary? Could it be that Mitchell knew that Speedie had no cause for complaint, but is just incensed that his former employer didn't let him override software policy on company-owned machines?
Could it be that Speedie ignored company directives about data-file backups, or that her files were in fact backed up for safekeeping, but she and Mitchell are just steamed about losing her unauthorised and possibly bootlegged modifications?
We don't know any of this, because telling the latter half of the story doesn't help Mitchell's polemical stance. But it's not difficult to guess what he doesn't want to tell us.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
The rendition at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/style/0013.h tml professes to be the "unabridged version". Sadly, it isn't: It's considerably edited down from the full article, which can be viewed at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux -box/.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com