Microsoft offers a little known Word 2000 viewer [...] gratis
But that supposedly gratis viewer requires a non-gratis OS to run, so many of us would still have to pay money to view the document.
(But then you did say, "half true", and anyway, my objection is only half true because it probably runs under Wine. Though I'm not sure that helps people running Solaris/AIX/LinuxPPC/LinuxARM/LinuxPS2/etc.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that PDF is freer than Word because PDF is an open standard, and multiple implementations exist (some gratis, some FOSS) while Word is a closed, proprietary format subject to change without notice.
As a Debian Developer, allow me to strongly disagree. There is a lot of software in Debian! It's as reliable and trustworthy as we can make it, but a lot of stuff doesn't get banged on very heavily (some of it is downright obscure), and the best we can really say is, "we haven't found any obvious problems". Which is a whole world apart from "Generally Recognized As Safe."
Now, anything that's FOSS and GRAS is probably in Debian, but being in Debian stable is only evidence of being FOSS and NPU (Not Proven Unsafe).
I think that the idea of having an external list of FOSS/GRAS software is an excellent one. Moreover, I doubt if Debian wants to accept responsibility for maintaining such a list.
Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or....[?]
Well, as a recent aptitude convert, I can give a partial answer to this. Aptitude keeps track of which packages have been installed purely as dependencies. Any "auto-installed" packages (marked with "A" in the display) will be automatically removed if you remove the package(s) that depend on them. (And you can set/unset the "auto-installed" flag manually if you want or need.)
Furthermore, you don't actually need to use the fancy aptitude interface -- you can treat it as (essentially) a replacement for apt-get, i.e. you can say, "aptitude install foo", and it'll install foo, plus its dependencies. However (and this is where it gets good), you can later say, "aptitude purge foo", and it will remove foo and its dependencies[1]. No "pain" involved for an experienced apt-get user, except learning to type "aptitude" where you used to type "apt-get".
Plus, unlike apt-get, aptitude will take notice of suggestions and recommendations. You can configure how it treats these. I find life much happier with aptitude treating "Recommends:" as a dependency and ignoring "Suggests:". This is much less annoying than apt-get's habit of simply ignoring everything except actual dependencies. (And, if you're the install-everything-just-for-luck type, you can have it auto-install all of the suggestions too.)
[1] except those dependencies in use by other things, of course.
If they want less-than-ubergeeks to use it then they whole thing should be reworked.
Yes, and it is being reworked. Not so much because we think it needs to be "dumbed down" as because the existing system is fragile, and takes too much work to tune for each new release. Tweaking and banging on the old system has added months to each of the last couple of releases.
The new system (d-i, or debian-installer) is in heavy development, but wasn't ready in time for Woody.
Hrm, my Windows experience lasted a little longer than 2 hours, but still not very long (especially given how little I used it). I started out dual-booting (keeping Windows for games), but within a year, I'd had to reinstall Windows twice, and when it completely fell apart for the third time, I gave up on it, and reformatted the Windows partition to/usr/local. OTOH, my Linux desktop has been running flawlessly since 1997. I use Debian, and the only time I've ever reinstalled was when I replaced the entire computer!:)
I don't love Windows, I wouldn't use it on a bet as a firewall/webserver/devbox, and my god, the desktop experience stinks!:)
The world has started to turn into a scary place. It used to be the government that was most likely to take away people's rights.
And before that (pre-1940s), it was the corporations, and before that it was the government, and before that it was the corporations (think Dickens), and before that...well, it was mostly church vs. state, there were no corporations to speak of (think pre-industrial revolution). There's nothing new here, even if the ultra-libertarians prefer to ignore the lessons of history.
Ironically, it was Robert Heinlein (much beloved by the libertarians) who made me see the fatal flaw in the libertarian "deregulate everything and let the market take care of itself" view. Engineers don't build devices that use unregulated positive feedback, because positive feedback makes devices run out of control and tear themselves apart. Yet the "free market" is based on positive feedback.
I mean, if version numbers are the only issue, then surely DOS 6.0 must still be the best system out there? (No, not Win2000, internally, that's Windows 5.0.2195, obviously still inferior to DOS6.)
Of course, by this logic, the greatest OS of all time may be HPUX 11.x.:)
isn't giving away a product for below the price you'd normally charge (except in special circumstances) market dumping, and as such illegal?
IANAL either, but no, giving something away is not illegal in general, although it can be under specific circumstances. Donations to schools are, I believe, generally covered under "charity", and far from being illegal, probably even qualify for a tax write-off.
From what I recall, it wasn't the integration of IE with Windows that landed Microsoft in court originally, it was their practice of giving it away for free in order to get an advantage over Netscape.
MS was violating the terms of their earlier consent decree, where they had agreed not to try to put potential competitors out of business by bundling new stuff with the OS. Remember, the rules are different for a monopoly, and even more different for a monopoly that repeatedly violates anti-trust laws.
I'm no fan of Apple, I wouldn't switch on a bet, and if you gave me a Mac, I'd wipe off that OS/X junk and install Debian in a heartbeat, but Apple is clearly doing nothing wrong here.
And why the hell you'd want to install some wonky assembler when binutils already includes a perfectly decent one, I don't know. The Debian nasm package says "Size: 1344826". I thought the goal here was to REDUCE bloat, not increase it!:)
People who are too lazy to learn the STANDARD assembly syntax for their system should stick to C (or BASIC), imo.:)
I'm not aware of exactly what NSA stuff you are speaking of.
I suspect he's referring to SELinux, the NSA's "Security Enhanced Linux", which is basically a set of patches (libre) to add ACL support to a Linux kernel and a few select utilities. SELinux is basically just evidence that the NSA has its share of geeks excited by all this free/libre/open-source stuff too.
From the FAQ:
20. Are there any export controls on it?
There are no additional export controls for Security-enhanced Linux over any other version of Linux.
In answer to the original question, I think that the main difference is that SELinux is building the access controls into various syscalls, while this new OpenBSD feature is putting a wrapper around syscalls in general. The overall effect should be fairly similar, but there may be tradeoffs on either side. But don't quote me on that.
Enron cooking their books and ripping off California power customers for a few hundred million. So what does Judge Jackson find important? Free browsers.
Damn straight. When my cousin stole a car, got caught, and was brought before a judge, that judge should have ignored his crimes, because there are murderers and serial killers out there, so his crime wasn't important!
Softee was dumb not to settle this thing from the beginning, but the DOJ was certainly going after the wrong company in terms of "harm to the consumer."
My cousin was dumb to steal the car, but the police were certainly going after the wrong person in terms of "harm to citizens".
(Note for those slow on the uptake: my response above is an example of what is technically known as sarcasm.)
Other way around (remember, free software came first). It wasn't until the invention of proprietary software that software started being used as a tool to remove people's freedoms.
KDE, emacs, and parts of GNOME can also be installed on Windows, so by that logic, they'd all be != Linux.
Exactly! None of those are Linux. Emacs, in particular, predates Linux by years. (In a loose sense, it predates Unix.) And GNOME is supported by Sun because they're making it part of Solaris.
As far as Sendmail goes, it's not even the default MTA on the (very popular) distro I use. However, it's been the default MTA on every commercial Unix I've used since long before Linux appeared. So, given that Sendmail is not (necessarily) the default MTA on Linux, but is on Sun, it would make more sense to call Sendmail bashing "Sun bashing" than "Linux bashing". (Although it's still just Sendmail bashing.)
It was mentioned briefly in passing in a couple of other posts, but it bears re-emphasizing as a point in itself. TiVo is a verb! And not just in geek-speak -- it's in wide usage! You see it on talk-shows. Guests on Leno talk about "tivoing" their favorite shows. You can't buy that kind of publicity!
Nobody ever talked about "amigaing" that document (or video clip). Nobody ever said, "let me newton that appointment".
Of course, this doesn't mean that Tivo is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean that they're going to have to seriously stumble in order to fail. Their success or failure, long term, depends on themselves, which is a pretty nice spot for a startup to be sitting in.
But my editor will make it obvious when I misplace a }, as the indenting will automatically change. That is one thing I definitely miss when working with python -- the feedback I get from my editor is missing, which means I have to manually verify all of the indentation, and make sure it does what I want/mean.
In practice, this proves to be a smaller problem than I originally expected (especially with good python bindings for my editor), and python is a beautiful language despite this minor wart, but I still consider it a problem with the language.
So, lets get this right...you're trying to blame a UNIX machine for a Mac/Windoze virus???
Just the opposite -- he's saying that there can't be any viruses on the MS CDs because MS uses Unix, not Windows, to press their CDs. And of course, that's silly, but the quote from the MS site is (or was) real -- it made the rounds of many Unix/Linux mailing lists, and I went to the site and saw it myself. They've probably removed the quote (and maybe even switched OSes for their pressing machines) after all the publicity it got, but it was definitely there at one time.
(MS's point was that there can't be any viruses introduced during the pressing process because their Unix machines were immune to viruses. Of course, this is irrelevant and it doesn't help with pre-existing viruses on the images, but MS was trying to reassure their customers, not confuse them with facts.)
Instead, he told Larry what a dirty rotten no-goodnik
Can you prove that claim? Larry gets a lot of flak from free software fanatics. It's highly probable that he interprets any MENTION of the non-freeness of BK as a claim of his dirty-rotten-no-goodnikness at this point. But it seems out of character for Ben to have actually insulted Larry without mitigating circumstances.
Note that if Ben were the usual sort of raving free-software loon you frequently get on/., he wouldn't have ever installed BK in the first place. As a former leader of the Debian project, there is ZERO chance that he was unaware of BK's non-libre status. So even if you don't know Ben as well as I do (not well, but well enough), it should be pretty obvious that there must either be more to the story or the story (that Ben gratuitously insulted Larry out of the blue) is just plain wrong.
Now, he wants Larry to grant him a favor.
No, he doesn't. He asked if the his license was still valid, Larry said, no, Ben said OK and deleted BK. No problem.
McVoy didn't take action specifically against Collins in the EULA; rather, Collins had the chutzpah to tell McVoy what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was and then ask for a favor.
That is not what happened! Keep in mind that Ben Collins is a former leader of the Debian Project, a non-profit free software development and integration org. Larry works for a for-profit company that makes non-free software. Larry asked Ben to donate hardware! Such a donation to a company that only produces non-free software would have been entirely inappropriate for the Debian Project Leader. And pointing out that BK's license fails to meet the (long established) Debian Free Software Guidelines hardly constitutes calling Larry a "dirty rotten no-goodnik".
Of course, Larry tends to fly into a tizzy whenever anyone suggests that his contributions to the free software community might be less than those who actually produce free software!
Would it sit well with you as a kernel developer if, for instance, microsoft was using linux as their development platform for their next OS?
Bad analogy. This is more like saying that anyone who works for Microsoft or Sun or Apple is forbidden from using Linux. Even if they work in the applications division, or as a secretary or administrator. Or even someone who doesn't work for MS/Sun/Apple, but who happens to helped one of those companies track down a bug in one of their OSes. Or, for that matter, anyone who has worked on, helped with, or who works for a company that has worked on or helped with BSD! (That evil BSD is just too darned free!)
In any case, I assure you that if MS were to consider using Linux as the base for their nextgen OS, most (probably all) kernel developers would sit up and cheer! (As long as MS followed the license terms.)
For a better analogy, imagine if KDE (which used to be non-free on a technicality) became truly non-free by forbidding anyone who has worked on (or who works for a company which has worked on) any competing desktop systems from using the system (note: using, not just redistributing, which is all the GPL ever addresses).
Now my understanding is that FreeBSD is a better server platform(or at least it once was) than Linux.
It once was (c. 1995, maybe). That was a long time ago. At this point, it's mostly a matter of taste, and which set of quirks you'd rather deal with.
1. Linux has hype
That's almost certainly a factor.
2. Unix folks like using Linux as a desktop
Some do, some don't; this certainly could be a factor.
3. FreeBSD it hard to use?
"Hard" is probably the wrong word, but the BSD's do do some things differently. (There's the Linux way, the Unix way, and the BSD way, and never the three shall meet.) Speaking for myself, with a background in commercial Unix systems, I found Linux easier to pick up than BSD. Not a lot easier, though, but enough that I still grumble when dealing with a BSD system. But I understand that someone with a background in BSD (or derivatives) might well find BSD more comfortable than Linux. So, again, it's a matter of taste.
Other factors you left out:
4. Better third party support. Someone mentioned Real. But I know it's not just Real -- there's a lot of software written by people whose only Unix experience is with Linux. This may be in part because of the greater hype behind Linux, but it's still a real factor at this point.
5. Wider choice of vendor support. Again, probably in part because of Linux hype, but again, it's a real factor.
But the bottom line is that, in an absence of any compelling reason to pick one over the other, it becomes a matter of taste, and you should no more be shocked that someone picks Linux than that someone picks BSD.
Plan9 not Open Source/Free/Libre/Whatever
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Paul Murphy (the LW author of the article) seems to have been fooled by the Plan9 folk's self-proclaimed status as "Open Source". However, neither the OSI nor the FSF agrees. The FSF has even posted a detailed analysis of the problems with the Plan9 license.
Now, depending on your own philosophy (or lack thereof), you may or may not care personally whether this code is truly free/OSS/whatever, but in practical terms, what it means is that neither Red Hat nor Debian is going to buy into this solution, which pretty much means that it's probably dead in the water. Oh, I suppose it might be accepted by the UnitedLinux folks, but I'm not holding my breath on that.
There is no way the Supreme Court will award this one to the plaintiff (Eldred). The Constitution implies a sort of limit on copyright, but unfortunately it is totally ambiguous.
Did you read the article? That isn't the basis for this case.
From the article:
"But how would he frame it? The obvious way was to say that with its most recent extension, Congress had finally gone beyond any reasonable interpretation of what the framers could have meant by "limited." That approach hadn't worked in the past, so Lessig constructed a different argument. In Article 1, Section 8, the founding fathers not only instructed Congress what to do regarding copyright -- secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" -- but also stated why they should do it ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts"). Of course, Lessig's complaint includes the idea that Congress' continual extensions make a mockery of the word "limited" (one professor called it perpetual ownership "on the installment plan"). But the main thrust of Lessig's argument rests on the fact that, as with previous extensions, the Copyright Term Extension Act not only grants new copyright holders a longer term of exclusivity, it grandfathers in previous works. A retroactive extension of copyright clearly violates the Constitution."
(Emphasis mine.)
If the argument were as doomed as you say, then I think it's unlikely the Supremes would have even agreed to hear the case in the first place. I agree that it still doesn't seem too likely to win, but I think it's a tad more plausible than you suggest. As it says, your approach has failed in the past, but that's why they're not using your approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft offers a little known Word 2000 viewer [...] gratis
But that supposedly gratis viewer requires a non-gratis OS to run, so many of us would still have to pay money to view the document.
(But then you did say, "half true", and anyway, my objection is only half true because it probably runs under Wine. Though I'm not sure that helps people running Solaris/AIX/LinuxPPC/LinuxARM/LinuxPS2/etc.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that PDF is freer than Word because PDF is an open standard, and multiple implementations exist (some gratis, some FOSS) while Word is a closed, proprietary format subject to change without notice.
As a Debian Developer, allow me to strongly disagree. There is a lot of software in Debian! It's as reliable and trustworthy as we can make it, but a lot of stuff doesn't get banged on very heavily (some of it is downright obscure), and the best we can really say is, "we haven't found any obvious problems". Which is a whole world apart from "Generally Recognized As Safe."
Now, anything that's FOSS and GRAS is probably in Debian, but being in Debian stable is only evidence of being FOSS and NPU (Not Proven Unsafe).
I think that the idea of having an external list of FOSS/GRAS software is an excellent one. Moreover, I doubt if Debian wants to accept responsibility for maintaining such a list.
Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or ....[?]
Well, as a recent aptitude convert, I can give a partial answer to this. Aptitude keeps track of which packages have been installed purely as dependencies. Any "auto-installed" packages (marked with "A" in the display) will be automatically removed if you remove the package(s) that depend on them. (And you can set/unset the "auto-installed" flag manually if you want or need.)
Furthermore, you don't actually need to use the fancy aptitude interface -- you can treat it as (essentially) a replacement for apt-get, i.e. you can say, "aptitude install foo", and it'll install foo, plus its dependencies. However (and this is where it gets good), you can later say, "aptitude purge foo", and it will remove foo and its dependencies[1]. No "pain" involved for an experienced apt-get user, except learning to type "aptitude" where you used to type "apt-get".
Plus, unlike apt-get, aptitude will take notice of suggestions and recommendations. You can configure how it treats these. I find life much happier with aptitude treating "Recommends:" as a dependency and ignoring "Suggests:". This is much less annoying than apt-get's habit of simply ignoring everything except actual dependencies. (And, if you're the install-everything-just-for-luck type, you can have it auto-install all of the suggestions too.)
[1] except those dependencies in use by other things, of course.
If they want less-than-ubergeeks to use it then they whole thing should be reworked.
Yes, and it is being reworked. Not so much because we think it needs to be "dumbed down" as because the existing system is fragile, and takes too much work to tune for each new release. Tweaking and banging on the old system has added months to each of the last couple of releases.
The new system (d-i, or debian-installer) is in heavy development, but wasn't ready in time for Woody.
Hrm, my Windows experience lasted a little longer than 2 hours, but still not very long (especially given how little I used it). I started out dual-booting (keeping Windows for games), but within a year, I'd had to reinstall Windows twice, and when it completely fell apart for the third time, I gave up on it, and reformatted the Windows partition to /usr/local. OTOH, my Linux desktop has been running flawlessly since 1997. I use Debian, and the only time I've ever reinstalled was when I replaced the entire computer! :)
:)
I don't love Windows, I wouldn't use it on a bet as a firewall/webserver/devbox, and my god, the desktop experience stinks!
The world has started to turn into a scary place. It used to be the government that was most likely to take away people's rights.
And before that (pre-1940s), it was the corporations, and before that it was the government, and before that it was the corporations (think Dickens), and before that...well, it was mostly church vs. state, there were no corporations to speak of (think pre-industrial revolution). There's nothing new here, even if the ultra-libertarians prefer to ignore the lessons of history.
Ironically, it was Robert Heinlein (much beloved by the libertarians) who made me see the fatal flaw in the libertarian "deregulate everything and let the market take care of itself" view. Engineers don't build devices that use unregulated positive feedback, because positive feedback makes devices run out of control and tear themselves apart. Yet the "free market" is based on positive feedback.
I mean, if version numbers are the only issue, then surely DOS 6.0 must still be the best system out there? (No, not Win2000, internally, that's Windows 5.0.2195, obviously still inferior to DOS6.)
:)
Of course, by this logic, the greatest OS of all time may be HPUX 11.x.
isn't giving away a product for below the price you'd normally charge (except in special circumstances) market dumping, and as such illegal?
IANAL either, but no, giving something away is not illegal in general, although it can be under specific circumstances. Donations to schools are, I believe, generally covered under "charity", and far from being illegal, probably even qualify for a tax write-off.
From what I recall, it wasn't the integration of IE with Windows that landed Microsoft in court originally, it was their practice of giving it away for free in order to get an advantage over Netscape.
MS was violating the terms of their earlier consent decree, where they had agreed not to try to put potential competitors out of business by bundling new stuff with the OS. Remember, the rules are different for a monopoly, and even more different for a monopoly that repeatedly violates anti-trust laws.
I'm no fan of Apple, I wouldn't switch on a bet, and if you gave me a Mac, I'd wipe off that OS/X junk and install Debian in a heartbeat, but Apple is clearly doing nothing wrong here.
And why the hell you'd want to install some wonky assembler when binutils already includes a perfectly decent one, I don't know. The Debian nasm package says "Size: 1344826". I thought the goal here was to REDUCE bloat, not increase it! :)
:)
People who are too lazy to learn the STANDARD assembly syntax for their system should stick to C (or BASIC), imo.
I'm not aware of exactly what NSA stuff you are speaking of.
I suspect he's referring to SELinux, the NSA's "Security Enhanced Linux", which is basically a set of patches (libre) to add ACL support to a Linux kernel and a few select utilities. SELinux is basically just evidence that the NSA has its share of geeks excited by all this free/libre/open-source stuff too.
From the FAQ:
20. Are there any export controls on it?
There are no additional export controls for Security-enhanced Linux over any other version of Linux.
In answer to the original question, I think that the main difference is that SELinux is building the access controls into various syscalls, while this new OpenBSD feature is putting a wrapper around syscalls in general. The overall effect should be fairly similar, but there may be tradeoffs on either side. But don't quote me on that.
Enron cooking their books and ripping off California power customers for a few hundred million. So what does Judge Jackson find important? Free browsers.
Damn straight. When my cousin stole a car, got caught, and was brought before a judge, that judge should have ignored his crimes, because there are murderers and serial killers out there, so his crime wasn't important!
Softee was dumb not to settle this thing from the beginning, but the DOJ was certainly going after the wrong company in terms of "harm to the consumer."
My cousin was dumb to steal the car, but the police were certainly going after the wrong person in terms of "harm to citizens".
(Note for those slow on the uptake: my response above is an example of what is technically known as sarcasm.)
Other way around (remember, free software came first). It wasn't until the invention of proprietary software that software started being used as a tool to remove people's freedoms.
KDE, emacs, and parts of GNOME can also be installed on Windows, so by that logic, they'd all be != Linux.
Exactly! None of those are Linux. Emacs, in particular, predates Linux by years. (In a loose sense, it predates Unix.) And GNOME is supported by Sun because they're making it part of Solaris.
As far as Sendmail goes, it's not even the default MTA on the (very popular) distro I use. However, it's been the default MTA on every commercial Unix I've used since long before Linux appeared. So, given that Sendmail is not (necessarily) the default MTA on Linux, but is on Sun, it would make more sense to call Sendmail bashing "Sun bashing" than "Linux bashing". (Although it's still just Sendmail bashing.)
"2*(2^10)"
:)
Or as it's known in less silly parts of the world: 2^11.
It was mentioned briefly in passing in a couple of other posts, but it bears re-emphasizing as a point in itself. TiVo is a verb! And not just in geek-speak -- it's in wide usage! You see it on talk-shows. Guests on Leno talk about "tivoing" their favorite shows. You can't buy that kind of publicity!
Nobody ever talked about "amigaing" that document (or video clip). Nobody ever said, "let me newton that appointment".
Of course, this doesn't mean that Tivo is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean that they're going to have to seriously stumble in order to fail. Their success or failure, long term, depends on themselves, which is a pretty nice spot for a startup to be sitting in.
But my editor will make it obvious when I misplace a }, as the indenting will automatically change. That is one thing I definitely miss when working with python -- the feedback I get from my editor is missing, which means I have to manually verify all of the indentation, and make sure it does what I want/mean.
In practice, this proves to be a smaller problem than I originally expected (especially with good python bindings for my editor), and python is a beautiful language despite this minor wart, but I still consider it a problem with the language.
So, lets get this right...you're trying to blame a UNIX machine for a Mac/Windoze virus???
Just the opposite -- he's saying that there can't be any viruses on the MS CDs because MS uses Unix, not Windows, to press their CDs. And of course, that's silly, but the quote from the MS site is (or was) real -- it made the rounds of many Unix/Linux mailing lists, and I went to the site and saw it myself. They've probably removed the quote (and maybe even switched OSes for their pressing machines) after all the publicity it got, but it was definitely there at one time.
(MS's point was that there can't be any viruses introduced during the pressing process because their Unix machines were immune to viruses. Of course, this is irrelevant and it doesn't help with pre-existing viruses on the images, but MS was trying to reassure their customers, not confuse them with facts.)
Instead, he told Larry what a dirty rotten no-goodnik
/., he wouldn't have ever installed BK in the first place. As a former leader of the Debian project, there is ZERO chance that he was unaware of BK's non-libre status. So even if you don't know Ben as well as I do (not well, but well enough), it should be pretty obvious that there must either be more to the story or the story (that Ben gratuitously insulted Larry out of the blue) is just plain wrong.
Can you prove that claim? Larry gets a lot of flak from free software fanatics. It's highly probable that he interprets any MENTION of the non-freeness of BK as a claim of his dirty-rotten-no-goodnikness at this point. But it seems out of character for Ben to have actually insulted Larry without mitigating circumstances.
Note that if Ben were the usual sort of raving free-software loon you frequently get on
Now, he wants Larry to grant him a favor.
No, he doesn't. He asked if the his license was still valid, Larry said, no, Ben said OK and deleted BK. No problem.
McVoy didn't take action specifically against Collins in the EULA; rather, Collins had the chutzpah to tell McVoy what a dirty rotten no-goodnik he was and then ask for a favor.
That is not what happened! Keep in mind that Ben Collins is a former leader of the Debian Project, a non-profit free software development and integration org. Larry works for a for-profit company that makes non-free software. Larry asked Ben to donate hardware! Such a donation to a company that only produces non-free software would have been entirely inappropriate for the Debian Project Leader. And pointing out that BK's license fails to meet the (long established) Debian Free Software Guidelines hardly constitutes calling Larry a "dirty rotten no-goodnik".
Of course, Larry tends to fly into a tizzy whenever anyone suggests that his contributions to the free software community might be less than those who actually produce free software!
Would it sit well with you as a kernel developer if, for instance, microsoft was using linux as their development platform for their next OS?
Bad analogy. This is more like saying that anyone who works for Microsoft or Sun or Apple is forbidden from using Linux. Even if they work in the applications division, or as a secretary or administrator. Or even someone who doesn't work for MS/Sun/Apple, but who happens to helped one of those companies track down a bug in one of their OSes. Or, for that matter, anyone who has worked on, helped with, or who works for a company that has worked on or helped with BSD! (That evil BSD is just too darned free!)
In any case, I assure you that if MS were to consider using Linux as the base for their nextgen OS, most (probably all) kernel developers would sit up and cheer! (As long as MS followed the license terms.)
For a better analogy, imagine if KDE (which used to be non-free on a technicality) became truly non-free by forbidding anyone who has worked on (or who works for a company which has worked on) any competing desktop systems from using the system (note: using, not just redistributing, which is all the GPL ever addresses).
honestly, can someone please explain the difference between /. and a $0.50 supermarket tabloid?
:)
Sure. The tabloid has better pictures!
Now my understanding is that FreeBSD is a better server platform(or at least it once was) than Linux.
It once was (c. 1995, maybe). That was a long time ago. At this point, it's mostly a matter of taste, and which set of quirks you'd rather deal with.
1. Linux has hype
That's almost certainly a factor.
2. Unix folks like using Linux as a desktop
Some do, some don't; this certainly could be a factor.
3. FreeBSD it hard to use?
"Hard" is probably the wrong word, but the BSD's do do some things differently. (There's the Linux way, the Unix way, and the BSD way, and never the three shall meet.) Speaking for myself, with a background in commercial Unix systems, I found Linux easier to pick up than BSD. Not a lot easier, though, but enough that I still grumble when dealing with a BSD system. But I understand that someone with a background in BSD (or derivatives) might well find BSD more comfortable than Linux. So, again, it's a matter of taste.
Other factors you left out:
4. Better third party support. Someone mentioned Real. But I know it's not just Real -- there's a lot of software written by people whose only Unix experience is with Linux. This may be in part because of the greater hype behind Linux, but it's still a real factor at this point.
5. Wider choice of vendor support. Again, probably in part because of Linux hype, but again, it's a real factor.
But the bottom line is that, in an absence of any compelling reason to pick one over the other, it becomes a matter of taste, and you should no more be shocked that someone picks Linux than that someone picks BSD.
Paul Murphy (the LW author of the article) seems to have been fooled by the Plan9 folk's self-proclaimed status as "Open Source". However, neither the OSI nor the FSF agrees. The FSF has even posted a detailed analysis of the problems with the Plan9 license.
Now, depending on your own philosophy (or lack thereof), you may or may not care personally whether this code is truly free/OSS/whatever, but in practical terms, what it means is that neither Red Hat nor Debian is going to buy into this solution, which pretty much means that it's probably dead in the water. Oh, I suppose it might be accepted by the UnitedLinux folks, but I'm not holding my breath on that.
There is no way the Supreme Court will award this one to the plaintiff (Eldred). The Constitution implies a sort of limit on copyright, but unfortunately it is totally ambiguous.
Did you read the article? That isn't the basis for this case.
From the article:
"But how would he frame it? The obvious way was to say that with its most recent extension, Congress had finally gone beyond any reasonable interpretation of what the framers could have meant by "limited." That approach hadn't worked in the past, so Lessig constructed a different argument. In Article 1, Section 8, the founding fathers not only instructed Congress what to do regarding copyright -- secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" -- but also stated why they should do it ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts"). Of course, Lessig's complaint includes the idea that Congress' continual extensions make a mockery of the word "limited" (one professor called it perpetual ownership "on the installment plan"). But the main thrust of Lessig's argument rests on the fact that, as with previous extensions, the Copyright Term Extension Act not only grants new copyright holders a longer term of exclusivity, it grandfathers in previous works. A retroactive extension of copyright clearly violates the Constitution."
(Emphasis mine.)
If the argument were as doomed as you say, then I think it's unlikely the Supremes would have even agreed to hear the case in the first place. I agree that it still doesn't seem too likely to win, but I think it's a tad more plausible than you suggest. As it says, your approach has failed in the past, but that's why they're not using your approach.
Excusing my utter lack of knowledge of the porn industry -- isn't that something that gets a lot of cash flow coming in from consumers?
Since the fellow's sig said "Free porn. Period.", I assume that it's not referring to a site that gets its cash direct from consumers, no.