Normally you don't create derivative works from the kernel but you use it to run your program, which does not make it a derivative work.
"Normally" people don't write code at all. So your statements, while maybe technically correct in their exceedingly narrow scope, are the intellectually dishonest ones.
One word: Modules. Second word: Android
The same thing could also be said about BSD (or any other license apart from the code being public domain). If you want to use the code without attribution, you will also have to renegotiate which might prove as difficult as renegotiating the Linux kernel license.
No, because "attribution" is an absolutely trivial requirement. Throwing in a one-line attribution won't make a software company go out of business.
As far as I can tell, you can't argue with my original statement, and do understand and agree that open source projects with "onerous" copyleft licenses are a big problem for companies. The only takeaway I got from this thread appears to be that you more or less just don't want me to SAY IT out loud.
poor windows admins need to reboot just to start the GUI?? Why on earth can't MS come up with the equivalent of "xinit" to kick off the GUI??
Bad news for you... Linux is going BACKWARDS in this regard, and actively throwing away this "1980s level functionality". With kernel mode setting (KMS) either you boot-up with a non-text frame-buffer (that won't work over serial-port redirection, ipmi sol, etc.), or you can't start X. Boo hoo for you.
With RHEL6 and up, to use Intel or Nouveau drivers, you have to use KMS. No idea of the status of ATI. Thankfully, NVidia's binary-only drivers keeps them off the cutting edge, and away from this horrible and unnecessary mis-feature.
Just because the server doesn't locally have a GUI doesn't mean it wont allow RDP connections
You clearly don't get it. NOBODY said anything about the GUI not starting at startup... It's all about the GUI being NOT INSTALLED AT ALL. You can't RDP in and run something that ISN'T THERE.
Yes, running mmc locally and connecting to a remote server over the network will probably be the preferred way to manage Windows 8 servers. I guess that means they've finally caught up to, say, Novell Netware, circa 1985...
I assume the main impetus for this change is the out of band management provided by IPMI... specifically SOL. You get a text console with that, not a GUI. So a Windows admin needs to know how to get the system fixed and reachable over the network, with nothing but a CLI. With IPMI built-in to nearly every x86 server you can buy today, even going back several years, it has clearly become the standard for OoBM.
I'm guessing that the reason for using a Windows server is to support some very Windows specific application(s) otherwise why bother?
How about MS SQL server? I have a gag reflex whenever I hear it, and I particularly like Postgres, but some people are serious MS SQL fans, perhaps because it can import from all other major DBs. You can have an isolated Windows box serving it up, while all the clients can be Linux or whatever else.
For almost any purpose Linux is better/cheaper/faster/more secure!
I agree. Hey Windows admins, you've got some major learning to do. Why not just make a slightly larger one-time leap to the Unix world? There's no registry to deal with. Everything is componentized and can be easily debugged. Things don't change every couple years. And the pay is considerably better.
Of course not. But when a protocol is just starting out, it's much, much easier to port some code, than to completely rewrite it for your platform. Microsoft certainly had the money to write their own implementation, yet they just dropped-in the whole BSD TCP/IP stack. Everyone loves free code, and free code is how protocols get their feet in the door.
Go ahead... PROVE ME WRONG. Name a protocol that's now very popular, that was based on some GPL'd software. Things like rsync might have gotten far more traction (directly replacing FTP perhaps?) if only they'd had a freer license. Of course we'll never know, but I have yet to hear a solid counter example.
This means there is NO difference whether you use GPL code without adhering to the terms or whether you use someone else's proprietary code.
I explained, in detail, why this statement is utterly incorrect. You chose not to read it. Could it be the world isn't so much filled with "FUD" as it is the facts don't happen to agree with your dogma, EVERYONE ELSE MUST BE WRONG?
How do you explain the fact that *BSD is a niche OS most users have never heard of, while usage of Linux skyrocketed and it became something that most Joe Sixpacks have at least heard of if not something they actually use as a Windows alternative?
Most experts explain it as being because of the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit. Until that was decided, FreeBSD was in murky waters few were willing to go along with. And it happened at exactly the wrong time, when i386 systems were growing in popularity, and people wanted some Unix-like OS to run on it, and really wanted it for free.
Network effects kicked-in at that point. Linux got more developers because it was getting more press (and a lone student writing an OS is a better story than Berkley's largess), and it got more press because it was getting more developers, and it got more press because it got more press.
And the definitive counter-point to GPL supporters, is network services... Anyone can name a million and one network services that became defacto standards. BIND *is* DNS. Sendmail *is* SMTP. The BSD TCP/IP stack *is* the internet protocol, and it's bugs and limitations have become the standard.
The most recent example is OpenSSH. It wasn't FreSSH that gained 98% market share in a few years... Nope. And until OpenSSH, crypto was massively overdue, yet none of the alternatives caught-on... Licensing had a hell of a lot to do with that... always does.
NFS was in the same boat... Sun released NFS with an open license (not GPL'd), and it became the standard. NFSv3 was massively crufty and overdue for replacement, yet the dozens of GPL'd network file systems with modern features ever caught on... NFSv4 finally came out, with the main implementation under a free license, that finally made progress.
The problem is really with GPLv3, which has absolutely onerous restrictions, trying to prevent Tivoization of GPL'd code, or rather remake the world into RMS' dystopian fantasy land. But don't take my word for it... Read Linus' opinion on GPLv3
In a broader context, most companies hate GPL and other copyleft licenses in general (LGPL is usually minimally okay), because it's like a worm... Someone can bring it in without you knowing about it, and all of a sudden, you're subject to terms which may make you go out of business all-together (if one large piece of software is your main product). No such problem with freer licenses. And interestingly enough, there is much less of a problem with proprietary code.
You see, with proprietary code, perhaps you already have a license for if. Perhaps you need to re-negotiate the license to include this new usage. Or perhaps it was completely illegal, and now you have to either go to company X with hat in-hand and negotiate a license for your former illegal use, and continued use going forward, or perhaps you'll continue to use it, and hope you don't get caught.
In any of those (proprietary code) cases, it's just a question of money. Maybe it'll be a lot, maybe it'll be a little, but the company wants your money, and will probably work something out with you, unless you're direct competitors...
With GPL'd code, this doesn't work. If it's a small, one-man project, you can try negotiating a license, and probably get one. But if that one-man is an RMS-esque extremist, or if it's the work of multiple people, too many to possibly track down... No amount of money is enough to allow you to keep your copyright on your own code, likely with many millions of dollars invested in it...
THAT is why the GPL scares companies. Remember Windows' source code leaking out onto the internet years ago? Open source developers were afraid it was done intentionally, so Microsoft could make the case that other projects stole their publicly available source code, used it without permission, and demand exorbitant, insane license fees. These two situations really are surprisingly similar from a software companies' perspective.
Last week, I downloaded Fedora Core 16 and found that, for the first time, I was not able to update Linux on my Inspiron 8200. Because it has 512 megs of RAM and that install required more. Not sure why an installer requires 768 megabytes. So anyway, maybe that's a sign I should look at BSD.
I have a Compaq 33MHz 486 laptop with a 140MB HDD. Came with 4MB RAM, IIRC, but I upgraded it with a 16MB module.
Smaller than a netbook, has DB-9 and parallel ports built-in. And much, much more importantly, it has a trackball on the right-hand side, making it an artifact of some supreme alien intelligence... from the future... which all other earthbound devices are inferior to.
Even old Linux distros take a long, long time to boot-up, and OpenBSD is slightly worse, taking a long time to get out of the kernel. But on FreeBSD, it flies. Boots-up quickly. OpenSSH runs just fine, but when things are scrolling quickly, you'll remember you're on a 486.
Oracle can't kill off java. What they can do is stop improving it, as competitors eventually fly past it.
What will replace it? The one in the strongest position seems to by Python. It suffers from not having some default UI toolkit built-in as Java does, and no built-in browser support (though most browsers supporting arbitrary add-ons could change this dynamic significantly), but it has gotten impressive support in the industry.
Once you upgrade to an android phone with a keyboard, you'll find they make surprisingly good thin clients, and still have plenty of decent local apps.
The problem is that a very large amount of people don't do what you would consider "real work"--they only want to check email, browse YouTube, and visit Facebook,
That's not everything most people do. That's 95% of what most people do, and all they think of, but losing the other 5% becomes a real killer. Manipulating photos, video, having terabytes of storage, printing out coupons, printing out most anything, audio capture/editing, etc., etc. I've yet to meet someone who doesn't have one major niche purpose for their computers.
but I have to tell you, having a portable computer that you don't have to spend hours of maintenance on every week is really, really nice,
What the hell kind of maintenance are you doing for hours every week? If you're talking about security updates, well you're in for a big surprise when worms for iOS / Android start spreading. If you're talking about disk cleanup, well having a piddly amount of storage is a huge negative, not a positive that you can't do it anymore. Other than that, I can't think of what "maintenance" you need to do all the time.
Satellite owners get cranky when you splatter across 2 or 3 birds because of a dish that is out of tolerance for what it is being used for. Plus there's the potential problem of overload
Valid points. I was really just trying to make the point that Ku isn't inherently unworkable with heavy rains. The same probably can't be said about Ka.
Desktop's will never die, not as long as they have the capability of being 10 times more powerful than their portable brethren.
Mainframes have always been more than 10X as powerful as PCs, but they still lost their dominance, and are struggling to stay relevant.
Tablets don't need to compete with PCs on raw power by any means. Even now, "the cloud" provides a viable alternative. My phone can't do the video encoding I want to do, but it can keep me always connected to an unlimited number of servers, which are (collectively) infinitely faster than any PC I've ever owned.
No, but they all become massively impractical, and only a tiny few CHOOSE to use them, for nostalgia or recreation, or whatnot.
How many horse & buggies do you see going down the street?
There's movies and television, but stage plays still exist. There's television and MP3 players, but radio still exists.
Plays are practically dead. Some people choose to attend them for various reasons, but they are a negligible fraction of the entertainment business. Got a good play? Film it.
OTA broadcast radio is on its last leg. Clearchannel helped it along, but wasn't the only cause. It's hanging on, but once the baby boomers die off, and we're all internet connected all the time, I expect there will be no profit left in it, and you'll just have some hobbyists playing junk.
There's internet streaming, but radio and television still exist. There's e-readers, but print books still exist.
Internet streaming looks like it'll kill off cable / satellite, but it'll take several more years. Print books are doing well because e-books haven't been practical for long (DRM issues), so it's just a matter of time before they see a sharp decline. Books are pretty low cost, and have a few practical advantages, so they might stay strong in a few niches, but they'll be largely marginalized in time.
PCs are already rock-bottom pricing with tiny margins. Visio isn't going to be able to do anything significant. Maybe their first units will be loss-leaders to try and get into the market, but that's about it.
Visio is already in the business, remember? Their Android tablet is pretty expensive, at $320 USD on Amazon right now.
The only unique and cost-cutting thing they could do would be to introduce PCs with ARM (or MIPS) CPUs, instead of x86. I doubt it, but if so, good luck to them. That still won't bring prices down significantly.
If you want rain-fade-free-reliability, C-Band is the only way to go.
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications. Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
Don't force the burger flippers to learn about tech... do YOU want to flip your own burgers?
I don't want ANYBODY to flip my burgers. I would like fast food prep to be fully automated so that I get a consistent product every time, price can be driven down, and fewer fast food locations can serve far more people much more quickly.
Then what do the burger flippers do?
Oh, and to be accurate, there are very few burger flippers these days. McDonalds, at least, has been using an industrial-duty George Foreman grill for decades, to grill both sides of the frozen patties simultaneously. People are burger conveyers, not flippers.
The original OLPC made lots of sense, even if they botched the execution... I'll point to the massive success of the EEEPC as proof that they were only slightly off the mark. Personally, I thought going with a dirt cheap B&W LCD screen to start would have solved most of their problems, but I digress.
But this tablet makes no sense. The Aakash / UbiSlate tablets cost half as much (for real, in production) and is designed to serve exactly the same purpose as OLPC. In addition, Android smartphones (with qwerty keyboard, making them vastly more useful) retail for $100 here on the shelves in the US (no contract, not subsidized, not on sale). We're talking about full-featured mobile devices, much like what I use for 90% of my computing purposes, and am typing on right now...
OLPC's main reason to exist last time around was extreme power savings, due to the great expense of electricity in the third world. But now, normal mass market mobile devices now rival OLPC's energy targets, as well as having more than sufficient durability designed-in.
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"Normally" people don't write code at all. So your statements, while maybe technically correct in their exceedingly narrow scope, are the intellectually dishonest ones.
One word: Modules.
Second word: Android
No, because "attribution" is an absolutely trivial requirement. Throwing in a one-line attribution won't make a software company go out of business.
As far as I can tell, you can't argue with my original statement, and do understand and agree that open source projects with "onerous" copyleft licenses are a big problem for companies. The only takeaway I got from this thread appears to be that you more or less just don't want me to SAY IT out loud.
Bad news for you... Linux is going BACKWARDS in this regard, and actively throwing away this "1980s level functionality". With kernel mode setting (KMS) either you boot-up with a non-text frame-buffer (that won't work over serial-port redirection, ipmi sol, etc.), or you can't start X. Boo hoo for you.
With RHEL6 and up, to use Intel or Nouveau drivers, you have to use KMS. No idea of the status of ATI. Thankfully, NVidia's binary-only drivers keeps them off the cutting edge, and away from this horrible and unnecessary mis-feature.
You clearly don't get it. NOBODY said anything about the GUI not starting at startup... It's all about the GUI being NOT INSTALLED AT ALL. You can't RDP in and run something that ISN'T THERE.
Yes, running mmc locally and connecting to a remote server over the network will probably be the preferred way to manage Windows 8 servers. I guess that means they've finally caught up to, say, Novell Netware, circa 1985...
I assume the main impetus for this change is the out of band management provided by IPMI... specifically SOL. You get a text console with that, not a GUI. So a Windows admin needs to know how to get the system fixed and reachable over the network, with nothing but a CLI. With IPMI built-in to nearly every x86 server you can buy today, even going back several years, it has clearly become the standard for OoBM.
"the year of Linux..."?
Well this is server-only, so it's not Linux on the Desktop.
If you want to call this "the year of Linux on the Server", well, I've got news for you... you missed it by a bit.
How about MS SQL server? I have a gag reflex whenever I hear it, and I particularly like Postgres, but some people are serious MS SQL fans, perhaps because it can import from all other major DBs. You can have an isolated Windows box serving it up, while all the clients can be Linux or whatever else.
I agree. Hey Windows admins, you've got some major learning to do. Why not just make a slightly larger one-time leap to the Unix world? There's no registry to deal with. Everything is componentized and can be easily debugged. Things don't change every couple years. And the pay is considerably better.
Of course not. But when a protocol is just starting out, it's much, much easier to port some code, than to completely rewrite it for your platform. Microsoft certainly had the money to write their own implementation, yet they just dropped-in the whole BSD TCP/IP stack. Everyone loves free code, and free code is how protocols get their feet in the door.
Go ahead... PROVE ME WRONG. Name a protocol that's now very popular, that was based on some GPL'd software. Things like rsync might have gotten far more traction (directly replacing FTP perhaps?) if only they'd had a freer license. Of course we'll never know, but I have yet to hear a solid counter example.
As I said: "re-negotiate the license"
Explain to me how I would go about negotiating a license to continue selling my proprietary product, which relies heavily on, say, the Linux kernel.
I explained, in detail, why this statement is utterly incorrect. You chose not to read it. Could it be the world isn't so much filled with "FUD" as it is the facts don't happen to agree with your dogma, EVERYONE ELSE MUST BE WRONG?
Most experts explain it as being because of the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit. Until that was decided, FreeBSD was in murky waters few were willing to go along with. And it happened at exactly the wrong time, when i386 systems were growing in popularity, and people wanted some Unix-like OS to run on it, and really wanted it for free.
Network effects kicked-in at that point. Linux got more developers because it was getting more press (and a lone student writing an OS is a better story than Berkley's largess), and it got more press because it was getting more developers, and it got more press because it got more press.
And the definitive counter-point to GPL supporters, is network services... Anyone can name a million and one network services that became defacto standards. BIND *is* DNS. Sendmail *is* SMTP. The BSD TCP/IP stack *is* the internet protocol, and it's bugs and limitations have become the standard.
The most recent example is OpenSSH. It wasn't FreSSH that gained 98% market share in a few years... Nope. And until OpenSSH, crypto was massively overdue, yet none of the alternatives caught-on... Licensing had a hell of a lot to do with that... always does.
NFS was in the same boat... Sun released NFS with an open license (not GPL'd), and it became the standard. NFSv3 was massively crufty and overdue for replacement, yet the dozens of GPL'd network file systems with modern features ever caught on... NFSv4 finally came out, with the main implementation under a free license, that finally made progress.
The problem is really with GPLv3, which has absolutely onerous restrictions, trying to prevent Tivoization of GPL'd code, or rather remake the world into RMS' dystopian fantasy land. But don't take my word for it... Read Linus' opinion on GPLv3
In a broader context, most companies hate GPL and other copyleft licenses in general (LGPL is usually minimally okay), because it's like a worm... Someone can bring it in without you knowing about it, and all of a sudden, you're subject to terms which may make you go out of business all-together (if one large piece of software is your main product). No such problem with freer licenses. And interestingly enough, there is much less of a problem with proprietary code.
You see, with proprietary code, perhaps you already have a license for if. Perhaps you need to re-negotiate the license to include this new usage. Or perhaps it was completely illegal, and now you have to either go to company X with hat in-hand and negotiate a license for your former illegal use, and continued use going forward, or perhaps you'll continue to use it, and hope you don't get caught.
In any of those (proprietary code) cases, it's just a question of money. Maybe it'll be a lot, maybe it'll be a little, but the company wants your money, and will probably work something out with you, unless you're direct competitors...
With GPL'd code, this doesn't work. If it's a small, one-man project, you can try negotiating a license, and probably get one. But if that one-man is an RMS-esque extremist, or if it's the work of multiple people, too many to possibly track down... No amount of money is enough to allow you to keep your copyright on your own code, likely with many millions of dollars invested in it...
THAT is why the GPL scares companies.
Remember Windows' source code leaking out onto the internet years ago? Open source developers were afraid it was done intentionally, so Microsoft could make the case that other projects stole their publicly available source code, used it without permission, and demand exorbitant, insane license fees. These two situations really are surprisingly similar from a software companies' perspective.
They mostly contribute to the kernel, which is strictly GPLv2.
Point to a GPLv3 project they're contributing substantial amounts of code to, and you'll have a point, rather than feigned ignorance...
Welcome to the 1980s!
I have a Compaq 33MHz 486 laptop with a 140MB HDD. Came with 4MB RAM, IIRC, but I upgraded it with a 16MB module.
Smaller than a netbook, has DB-9 and parallel ports built-in. And much, much more importantly, it has a trackball on the right-hand side, making it an artifact of some supreme alien intelligence... from the future... which all other earthbound devices are inferior to.
Even old Linux distros take a long, long time to boot-up, and OpenBSD is slightly worse, taking a long time to get out of the kernel. But on FreeBSD, it flies. Boots-up quickly. OpenSSH runs just fine, but when things are scrolling quickly, you'll remember you're on a 486.
And how long did it take to rebuild Europe after?
And did you just suggest world-war levels of expenditure... so that you can get your shiny new train built faster?
Oracle can't kill off java. What they can do is stop improving it, as competitors eventually fly past it.
What will replace it? The one in the strongest position seems to by Python. It suffers from not having some default UI toolkit built-in as Java does, and no built-in browser support (though most browsers supporting arbitrary add-ons could change this dynamic significantly), but it has gotten impressive support in the industry.
Once you upgrade to an android phone with a keyboard, you'll find they make surprisingly good thin clients, and still have plenty of decent local apps.
That's not everything most people do. That's 95% of what most people do, and all they think of, but losing the other 5% becomes a real killer. Manipulating photos, video, having terabytes of storage, printing out coupons, printing out most anything, audio capture/editing, etc., etc. I've yet to meet someone who doesn't have one major niche purpose for their computers.
What the hell kind of maintenance are you doing for hours every week? If you're talking about security updates, well you're in for a big surprise when worms for iOS / Android start spreading. If you're talking about disk cleanup, well having a piddly amount of storage is a huge negative, not a positive that you can't do it anymore. Other than that, I can't think of what "maintenance" you need to do all the time.
You mentioned Virgin Mobile USA in response to another comment, so obviously you know as well as I that "unlimited" data runs as little as $35/mo.
Valid points. I was really just trying to make the point that Ku isn't inherently unworkable with heavy rains. The same probably can't be said about Ka.
Mainframes have always been more than 10X as powerful as PCs, but they still lost their dominance, and are struggling to stay relevant.
Tablets don't need to compete with PCs on raw power by any means. Even now, "the cloud" provides a viable alternative. My phone can't do the video encoding I want to do, but it can keep me always connected to an unlimited number of servers, which are (collectively) infinitely faster than any PC I've ever owned.
No, but they all become massively impractical, and only a tiny few CHOOSE to use them, for nostalgia or recreation, or whatnot.
How many horse & buggies do you see going down the street?
Plays are practically dead. Some people choose to attend them for various reasons, but they are a negligible fraction of the entertainment business. Got a good play? Film it.
OTA broadcast radio is on its last leg. Clearchannel helped it along, but wasn't the only cause. It's hanging on, but once the baby boomers die off, and we're all internet connected all the time, I expect there will be no profit left in it, and you'll just have some hobbyists playing junk.
Internet streaming looks like it'll kill off cable / satellite, but it'll take several more years. Print books are doing well because e-books haven't been practical for long (DRM issues), so it's just a matter of time before they see a sharp decline. Books are pretty low cost, and have a few practical advantages, so they might stay strong in a few niches, but they'll be largely marginalized in time.
PCs are already rock-bottom pricing with tiny margins. Visio isn't going to be able to do anything significant. Maybe their first units will be loss-leaders to try and get into the market, but that's about it.
Visio is already in the business, remember? Their Android tablet is pretty expensive, at $320 USD on Amazon right now.
The only unique and cost-cutting thing they could do would be to introduce PCs with ARM (or MIPS) CPUs, instead of x86. I doubt it, but if so, good luck to them. That still won't bring prices down significantly.
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications. Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
I don't want ANYBODY to flip my burgers. I would like fast food prep to be fully automated so that I get a consistent product every time, price can be driven down, and fewer fast food locations can serve far more people much more quickly.
Then what do the burger flippers do?
Oh, and to be accurate, there are very few burger flippers these days. McDonalds, at least, has been using an industrial-duty George Foreman grill for decades, to grill both sides of the frozen patties simultaneously. People are burger conveyers, not flippers.
The original OLPC made lots of sense, even if they botched the execution... I'll point to the massive success of the EEEPC as proof that they were only slightly off the mark. Personally, I thought going with a dirt cheap B&W LCD screen to start would have solved most of their problems, but I digress.
But this tablet makes no sense. The Aakash / UbiSlate tablets cost half as much (for real, in production) and is designed to serve exactly the same purpose as OLPC. In addition, Android smartphones (with qwerty keyboard, making them vastly more useful) retail for $100 here on the shelves in the US (no contract, not subsidized, not on sale). We're talking about full-featured mobile devices, much like what I use for 90% of my computing purposes, and am typing on right now...
OLPC's main reason to exist last time around was extreme power savings, due to the great expense of electricity in the third world. But now, normal mass market mobile devices now rival OLPC's energy targets, as well as having more than sufficient durability designed-in.
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/samsung-intercept-phone.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aakash_tablet
I don't see any reason for OLPC to make custom hardware anymore, rather than just becoming a software company, possibly + logistical support.