I had given the URL for Gentle Spirit Magazine incorrectly. Hehe--I guess that goes with the earlier discussion of the misuse of the COM and ORG domains.
I haven't seen this site in a while. I haven't seen a victimisation of HTML like this in a long time! The web server is also weird: Netscape wants me to retreive a plugin for text/html...
Cheers as always, Joshua.
The Marketplace: the new God of the new religion.
on
Miscellaneous GNU News
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· Score: 1
Humans are already trafficked, it's just not normally described so bluntly.
This is defintely true. Serious--as in slavery in the style of the 1860's American--is in full swing in the Northern Sudan. Villages in the south or routinely rounded up, the resistant ones killed, the women raped, and the children taken to marketplaces in the north. There are few other places where it is this blatant, but it is certainly happening. Most people just don't know about it.
Trafficking in underpaid labor is also a lesser form of slavery. Take a look at your regular consumer goods and see how much was made in China, which is a terrible place to live in terms of human rights or property rights. But every U.S. company wants to do business with China because there's so much cheap labor there! (Interestingly enough, no-one wins except the oligarchs in this sitatuation--the American consumer gets inferior goods, the American and multinational corporation really does not make more money, and the Chinese laborer gets to make junk for terrible wages for 16 hours a day.)
I'm not so sure about my name and address being sold as trafficking in human souls--there are simply things so much more serious than that taking place that need to be addressed and aren't.
The marketplace is properly an integral part of society, and as such contributes much to society. The problem is that some people have sought to separate it from society, putting it above society, andworshipping it as some sort of god. Societies which pursue this fanatical view are destined to fail in the long run, just as the attempt to removethe market from society in the Soviet Union ended in tears. Those who take the sensible middle road, seeking neither to deify nor to destroy the market, will triumph in the long run. The marketplace is properly an integral part of society, and as such contributes much to society. The problem is that some people have sought to separate it from society, putting it above society, andworshipping it as some sort of god.
Societies which pursue this fanatical view are destined to fail in the long run, just as the attempt to removethe market from society in the Soviet Union ended in tears. Those who take the sensible middle road, seeking neither to deify nor to destroy the market, will triumph in the long run.
I agree. The marketplace is somewhat like how we humans are born, the way we eat food, or going to the toilet--these are all very important things, and without them we'd be doomed (unable to last beyond 80 years, unable to go without starving for three weeks, and filled with toxins and overhydrated), but they aren't something wonderful, either. No-one wants to celebrate eating or going to toilet, although some, such as the editors of Gentle Spirit Magazine, want to glorify childbirth.
The marketplace is a fact of our survival but is not some wonderful deity and is neither a magic solution for the ills that ail humanity.
But what the heck could an INDIVIDUAL have on a tape that needs to be that secret? Wait, umm. I don't want to know.
There was recently a discussion on alt.activism.children on this very topic. That should give you some idea. Of course, if I were a poster to that newsgroup who was, ahh, one of the ones advocating that ``the insane rules of society be removed'' (I'll let you guess which ones), I would certainly move my computer next to my oven, keep it at 300 C all day, and be prepared to stick my fixed disk and tapes in it as soon as the dark vans park in front.
Please do not intepret my comments as belittiling to those who suffer from the various paraphilias; I am simply making a statement based on personal observation of many different people's fixed disks which we filled to the brim with files with interesting filenames--the great thing about encrypted Zip files is that you can see the filenames.
Cheers, Joshua.
The Marketplace: the new God of the new religion.
on
Miscellaneous GNU News
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· Score: 4
Why do people so obsess over the marketplace? It's as though they feel it embodies everything--reality, morality, existance. It serves to disempower people. When someone believes that something is right not because it is profitable, but because it is right, they are dismissed by the idea of the marketplace. When a people try to decide what they want from their society and economy (often through the government) they are said to hinder the marketplace, as though it has some higher moral standing.
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things--often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
I cannot agree more. People have made a god out of the supposed invisible hand of the marketplace. What does opensource have to do with the marketplace? If anything, the marketplace wants GNU copylefted software, not licences that leave you and your code splayed open for anyone to come and take a piece of your software for their own purposes without giving anything back in return. There is much more GPL'd software than MIT-style (or BSD-style, &c.) licenced software.
The marketplace has spoken. Bow down and do as it speaks. You shall GPL your software. You shall not use BSD licences. The Marketplace Has Spoken.
If anything, I see a trend away from competitive marketplaces: every large corporation seems to love a lack of competition--witness the recent surge in mergers even though 3 out of 4 mergers by one analyst's analysis are bad for stockholders, the corporation, their employees, and their customers (see recent article in the Journal).
In a true ``marketplace'', humans should be trafficked like anything else: children bought and sold and slaves available on the open market. After all, that's what people want! Cheap labor is important!
I do almost all of what I do because I believe it is right--not because I believe it will let me make lots of money or because I believe it will give me an advantage to gain earthly benefit.
Probably the largest financial transfer in the world--that of parents to their children--takes place outside of the marketplace and is governed only by the law of love. After all, there's no compelling financial interest to feed children, provide them a safe home, spend lots of time with the, give them a good education. &c. Why bother? Think about how much more money we could make if we all stopped reproducing!
I am simply glad there are people like Stallman who realise money is not all there is, and is not even related to happiness.
Firstly, I'm going to keep an eye on brave GNU world--it looks like another excellent component of GNU's website. gnu.org is now even more a favorite site of mine that it was before.
Secondly, many thanks to Rob Malda (fear the taco) and Hemos for their recent decision regarding adding moderators. I am pleased I can do something to prevent the USENET effect on/. Once we got over the initial flood of ``gee, I seem to be getting the first post, where is everybody'' the amount of intelligent conversation really seems to have improved (and I'm someone who has my threshold at -99).
On to the O'Reilly article.
Some Open Source licenses, such as the Berkeley-style license used by FreeBSD, Apache, the X Window System, and much of the Internet infrastructure software--is truly free. You can do anything you like with it--including building a proprietary derivative that is not free--as long as you acknowledge the copyright of the creator.
The UC Berkeley licence has a serious problem: it dictates to your marketing strategy. If you intend to follow the licence, you must have a plug to Berkeley in every commercial. Of course, I don't think very many people do; when was the last time you saw it in a Sun commercial? However, I find the BSD licence disturbing because I believe in doing everything as morally and as ethically as possible, and the BSD licence makes that difficult.
Why do people like O'Reilly like licences such as the MIT licence (or the BSD/Apache/FreeType/&c. licence) which allow you to take formerly open code and turn it into something proprietary and closed? Because it lets you profit from other people's work. Sun Microsystems had a free operating system written for them by UC's bright and young students when they coopted 4BSD for SunOS 2. What did we get back from it? Nothing. In effect, companies, including O'Reilly's organisation, get something for nothing with such licences.
The GPL prevents this sort of abuse. You're free to take the code, compile it, and sell binaries, but you may not restrict other people's freedom to use what is my code! Likewise, I won't tell you what to do: you don't have to submit patches to me, and you don't even have to follow my dictums for advertising strategy.
There is also a pragmatic reason (which appears to be O'Reilly's modus operandi for making decisions) for using GNU style licences: it prevents the kind of code forking that's happend with BSD software. Compare SunOS 4.1 and NetBSD: they're quite different and incompatible. The only code fork of which I can think of that has happened to GPLd software is the emacs and xemacs split, which was more due to the different needs of a true X11-based editor and a grid-based text editor.
Be wary of those who want you to give them something for nothing but who do not give anything back in return. Licence your code with the GPL and rest assured no-one can steal your work or limit your freedom.
I've got to take off my hat to this one (well, I don't wear a hat, so I'll take off my figurative hat): even if it is a closed-source program, it's among the best I've seen. It also runs on decent platforms--and it DOESN'T run on Windows! Yippee!
It's free as in beer, but not free as in speech. But, it is some pretty good technology, and I can understand the author's fears. While I personally am not into 3D, I am going to buy my brother a nice birthday present. =) He's been loving playing around with the Gimp, and this will give him some serious power toys.
Hmm. Maybe I should get in touch with him and start work on an OS/2 port?
I've been thinking of implementing this. If anyone would like to mail me to talk about this, feel free to do so. I have half a T1 of upstream bandwidth, so I can't run some immense newsserver, but I can probably work out some beta solution. If anyone could donate a newsserver on a fast link to this...
Actually, adfu.blockstackers.com is fine. I know that for a fact because I often use Junkbuster and Netscape still pauses for several seconds on adfu.blockstackers.com.
The problem is that the MozillaClassic layout engine renders tables rather inefficiently. Since adfu is the last thing to be loaded, it just appears that that site is slow. It's actually not the case. NGLayout fixes this problem. =)
I want to add that for those of you who don't know how to write code, you can still help the freed software community in a very real way--indeed, in a way that is probably more valuable than writing code. You can help other newbies learn how to use freed software like GNU/Linux and you can tell your friends about it. In other words, you can help build the community. ``We supply the bricks; you put them together.''
On a completely unrelated note, has anyone besides me noticed how articles that are not from anonymous cowards instantly get a Score of 1?
At least I won't run out and buy that book now . Seriously, while I don't disagree with anything Katz said, isn't this a bit of preaching to the choir? I myself have gotten tired of all the vitriol directed towards Microsoft; instead of complaining about them, let's go write our own freed software. Posting comments to/. about the evils of Microsoft doesn't help anything. Writing freed software does.
I thought the OSI validated MacOS X as Open Source
on
Response to the APSL
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· Score: 1
Yes, but is it freed software?
I'm just too disappointed from working OS/2 to ever do anything with proprietary, closed software again. Some recent examples that come to mind are Win32-OS/2 and almost anything from Netl@bs (thank God they have to keep Gimp/2 free)).
In any case, it doesn't matter, because I'm slowly becoming unglued from my OS/2 systems and migrating to GNU. I've already got OS/2 on my X desktop so I don't even need to sit at my OS/2 box anymore.
Caldera much of the IPX support and, if I recall correctly, they wrote the Netware client. They even have a Netware server available for Linux (but it's not opensource or freed software, which I guess makes sense since it's licenced from Novell).
While I agree the Caldera is a moneygrubbing company, let's not dismiss them as having contributed nothing at all to GNU/Linux.
No, no, no, it goes like this: Do you pray to Saint IGNUcius every night? Do you thank Erica S. Raymond for food? Do you go to the nearest chapter of the Church of Emacs (xemacs is fine) on Wednesday nights? If you want religion, you need to head on over to the Church of the Subgenius. Cheers, Joshua (not yet a YC30)
This is good. I've always wonder how much of OS X was derived from NetBSD. I'll take bets: is it 90% or 80%?
Bah. From what I understood, OS X was supposed to contain the orgasmic microkernel-based technology... careful now, I'm getting shaky... from Mach... yipes, this is bad... but wasn't Mach already opensource?
Apple is basically saying, ``We want to get lots of good press for opensourcing stuff we stole from the NetBSD people and the Mach people, but we don't want to actually give anything back to the community, like our user interface, which is the only decent thing about our software.''
Apple is another also-ran in the proprietary PC operating system software managle, along with DESQview, VisiON, AmigaOS/AmigaDOS, and OS/2. If I want proprietary, I'll go with Microsoft: at least then I get lots of device support.
Apple is more proprietary and anti-open than Microsoft.
Why must yet another wanna-be/. write misuse the term ``hacker''? This is Slashdot, and it was one of the few places where I could use the term hacker with freedom.
Until this guy gets a clue, please don't post anymore of his articles.
VMWare might want to consider installing a real OS
on
VMWare Beta Release
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· Score: 1
I'm amused at the ODBC errors I keep getting over at the signup page. Such hypocrites.
Ah well, I didn't really have any NT software to run (other than Rational Visual Test;p). I love the virginal feel of a system with two partitions: one e2fs and one swap.
That's why it's better to work with free software rather than closed, proprietary software. If you work for a large company with lots of money to burn, then go with expensive software. Otherwise, stay away from it.
IBM can't do anything about that licence because Silicon Graphics charges lots of money for the OpenGL licence. It's interesting to note that there is ``free'' Glide source code in IBM's OpenGL DDK.
OS/2 is not a platform where 3D hardware acceleration means anything anyway.
I consider it much better to work with people like MesaGL where you can actually see the sources without being independently wealthy.
Is Be in the same situation with regard to SGI and the OpenGL licence?
<whimper> The more I deal with closed software, the more I come a freed software radical.
I just moved from twm on all my machines to icewm last week. And I was really getting to like the Gnomeish and bluePlastic themes!
I like eye candy sometimes, and I like minimalism sometimes. I've been known to use no window manager at all at times.
I need to get uwm and compile it for my systems. icewm is excellent for battered-spouse OS/2 users like myself who can't kick the click-to-focus habit.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen this site in a while. I haven't seen a victimisation of HTML like this in a long time! The web server is also weird: Netscape wants me to retreive a plugin for text/html...
Cheers as always,
Joshua.
Humans are already trafficked, it's just not normally described so bluntly.
This is defintely true. Serious--as in slavery in the style of the 1860's American--is in full swing in the Northern Sudan. Villages in the south or routinely rounded up, the resistant ones killed, the women raped, and the children taken to marketplaces in the north. There are few other places where it is this blatant, but it is certainly happening. Most people just don't know about it.
Trafficking in underpaid labor is also a lesser form of slavery. Take a look at your regular consumer goods and see how much was made in China, which is a terrible place to live in terms of human rights or property rights. But every U.S. company wants to do business with China because there's so much cheap labor there! (Interestingly enough, no-one wins except the oligarchs in this sitatuation--the American consumer gets inferior goods, the American and multinational corporation really does not make more money, and the Chinese laborer gets to make junk for terrible wages for 16 hours a day.)
I'm not so sure about my name and address being sold as trafficking in human souls--there are simply things so much more serious than that taking place that need to be addressed and aren't.
Cheers (or no, as the case may be),
Joshua.
Societies which pursue this fanatical view are destined to fail in the long run, just as the attempt to removethe market from society in the Soviet Union ended in tears. Those who take the sensible middle road, seeking neither to deify nor to destroy the market, will triumph in the long run.
I agree. The marketplace is somewhat like how we humans are born, the way we eat food, or going to the toilet--these are all very important things, and without them we'd be doomed (unable to last beyond 80 years, unable to go without starving for three weeks, and filled with toxins and overhydrated), but they aren't something wonderful, either. No-one wants to celebrate eating or going to toilet, although some, such as the editors of Gentle Spirit Magazine, want to glorify childbirth.
The marketplace is a fact of our survival but is not some wonderful deity and is neither a magic solution for the ills that ail humanity.
Cheers,
Joshua.
But what the heck could an INDIVIDUAL have on a tape that needs to be that secret? Wait, umm. I don't want to know.
There was recently a discussion on alt.activism.children on this very topic. That should give you some idea. Of course, if I were a poster to that newsgroup who was, ahh, one of the ones advocating that ``the insane rules of society be removed'' (I'll let you guess which ones), I would certainly move my computer next to my oven, keep it at 300 C all day, and be prepared to stick my fixed disk and tapes in it as soon as the dark vans park in front.
Please do not intepret my comments as belittiling to those who suffer from the various paraphilias; I am simply making a statement based on personal observation of many different people's fixed disks which we filled to the brim with files with interesting filenames--the great thing about encrypted Zip files is that you can see the filenames.
Cheers,
Joshua.
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things--often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
I cannot agree more. People have made a god out of the supposed invisible hand of the marketplace. What does opensource have to do with the marketplace? If anything, the marketplace wants GNU copylefted software, not licences that leave you and your code splayed open for anyone to come and take a piece of your software for their own purposes without giving anything back in return. There is much more GPL'd software than MIT-style (or BSD-style, &c.) licenced software.
The marketplace has spoken. Bow down and do as it speaks. You shall GPL your software. You shall not use BSD licences. The Marketplace Has Spoken.
If anything, I see a trend away from competitive marketplaces: every large corporation seems to love a lack of competition--witness the recent surge in mergers even though 3 out of 4 mergers by one analyst's analysis are bad for stockholders, the corporation, their employees, and their customers (see recent article in the Journal).
In a true ``marketplace'', humans should be trafficked like anything else: children bought and sold and slaves available on the open market. After all, that's what people want! Cheap labor is important!
I do almost all of what I do because I believe it is right--not because I believe it will let me make lots of money or because I believe it will give me an advantage to gain earthly benefit.
Probably the largest financial transfer in the world--that of parents to their children--takes place outside of the marketplace and is governed only by the law of love. After all, there's no compelling financial interest to feed children, provide them a safe home, spend lots of time with the, give them a good education. &c. Why bother? Think about how much more money we could make if we all stopped reproducing!
I am simply glad there are people like Stallman who realise money is not all there is, and is not even related to happiness.
Cheers,
Joshua.
Secondly, many thanks to Rob Malda (fear the taco) and Hemos for their recent decision regarding adding moderators. I am pleased I can do something to prevent the USENET effect on /. Once we got over the initial flood of ``gee, I seem to be getting the first post, where is everybody'' the amount of intelligent conversation really seems to have improved (and I'm someone who has my threshold at -99).
On to the O'Reilly article.
Some Open Source licenses, such as the Berkeley-style license used by FreeBSD, Apache, the X Window System, and much of the Internet infrastructure software--is truly free. You can do anything you like with it--including building a proprietary derivative that is not free--as long as you acknowledge the copyright of the creator.
The UC Berkeley licence has a serious problem: it dictates to your marketing strategy. If you intend to follow the licence, you must have a plug to Berkeley in every commercial. Of course, I don't think very many people do; when was the last time you saw it in a Sun commercial? However, I find the BSD licence disturbing because I believe in doing everything as morally and as ethically as possible, and the BSD licence makes that difficult.
Why do people like O'Reilly like licences such as the MIT licence (or the BSD/Apache/FreeType/&c. licence) which allow you to take formerly open code and turn it into something proprietary and closed? Because it lets you profit from other people's work. Sun Microsystems had a free operating system written for them by UC's bright and young students when they coopted 4BSD for SunOS 2. What did we get back from it? Nothing. In effect, companies, including O'Reilly's organisation, get something for nothing with such licences.
The GPL prevents this sort of abuse. You're free to take the code, compile it, and sell binaries, but you may not restrict other people's freedom to use what is my code! Likewise, I won't tell you what to do: you don't have to submit patches to me, and you don't even have to follow my dictums for advertising strategy.
There is also a pragmatic reason (which appears to be O'Reilly's modus operandi for making decisions) for using GNU style licences: it prevents the kind of code forking that's happend with BSD software. Compare SunOS 4.1 and NetBSD: they're quite different and incompatible. The only code fork of which I can think of that has happened to GPLd software is the emacs and xemacs split, which was more due to the different needs of a true X11-based editor and a grid-based text editor.
Be wary of those who want you to give them something for nothing but who do not give anything back in return. Licence your code with the GPL and rest assured no-one can steal your work or limit your freedom.
Cheers,
Joshua.
It's free as in beer, but not free as in speech. But, it is some pretty good technology, and I can understand the author's fears. While I personally am not into 3D, I am going to buy my brother a nice birthday present. =) He's been loving playing around with the Gimp, and this will give him some serious power toys.
Hmm. Maybe I should get in touch with him and start work on an OS/2 port?
Cheers,
Joshua.
Anyway. Email me for details.
The problem is that the MozillaClassic layout engine renders tables rather inefficiently. Since adfu is the last thing to be loaded, it just appears that that site is slow. It's actually not the case. NGLayout fixes this problem. =)
/. is enhanced for WebTV, but you have to be running WebTV 2.2.3ac7 (anonymous coward 7) or later.
Well, vhosts.net will probably satisfy you. (Those of you have been reading /. for at least three weeks will understand why I'm saying this.)
On a completely unrelated note, has anyone besides me noticed how articles that are not from anonymous cowards instantly get a Score of 1?
At least I won't run out and buy that book now . Seriously, while I don't disagree with anything Katz said, isn't this a bit of preaching to the choir? I myself have gotten tired of all the vitriol directed towards Microsoft; instead of complaining about them, let's go write our own freed software. Posting comments to /. about the evils of Microsoft doesn't help anything. Writing freed software does.
I'm just too disappointed from working OS/2 to ever do anything with proprietary, closed software again. Some recent examples that come to mind are Win32-OS/2 and almost anything from Netl@bs (thank God they have to keep Gimp/2 free)).
In any case, it doesn't matter, because I'm slowly becoming unglued from my OS/2 systems and migrating to GNU. I've already got OS/2 on my X desktop so I don't even need to sit at my OS/2 box anymore.
While I agree the Caldera is a moneygrubbing company, let's not dismiss them as having contributed nothing at all to GNU/Linux.
Whoops. I mispelled ESR's name there. I was even using the Preview button! I really should mount /dev/brain more often.
No, no, no, it goes like this: Do you pray to Saint IGNUcius every night? Do you thank Erica S. Raymond for food? Do you go to the nearest chapter of the Church of Emacs (xemacs is fine) on Wednesday nights? If you want religion, you need to head on over to the Church of the Subgenius. Cheers, Joshua (not yet a YC30)
That's probably because NetBSD was ported to the i386. Heck, it's probably just from the standard 4.4BSD/386 code.
Whoops, wrong platform/technology. <blush>
Bah. From what I understood, OS X was supposed to contain the orgasmic microkernel-based technology... careful now, I'm getting shaky... from Mach... yipes, this is bad... but wasn't Mach already opensource?
Apple is basically saying, ``We want to get lots of good press for opensourcing stuff we stole from the NetBSD people and the Mach people, but we don't want to actually give anything back to the community, like our user interface, which is the only decent thing about our software.''
Apple is another also-ran in the proprietary PC operating system software managle, along with DESQview, VisiON, AmigaOS/AmigaDOS, and OS/2. If I want proprietary, I'll go with Microsoft: at least then I get lots of device support.
Apple is more proprietary and anti-open than Microsoft.
Until this guy gets a clue, please don't post anymore of his articles.
Ah well, I didn't really have any NT software to run (other than Rational Visual Test ;p). I love the virginal feel of a system with two partitions: one e2fs and one swap.
IBM can't do anything about that licence because Silicon Graphics charges lots of money for the OpenGL licence. It's interesting to note that there is ``free'' Glide source code in IBM's OpenGL DDK.
OS/2 is not a platform where 3D hardware acceleration means anything anyway.
I consider it much better to work with people like MesaGL where you can actually see the sources without being independently wealthy.
Is Be in the same situation with regard to SGI and the OpenGL licence?
<whimper> The more I deal with closed software, the more I come a freed software radical.
I like eye candy sometimes, and I like minimalism sometimes. I've been known to use no window manager at all at times.
I need to get uwm and compile it for my systems. icewm is excellent for battered-spouse OS/2 users like myself who can't kick the click-to-focus habit.
Ahh, the joys of OS/2. I must say that yes, perhaps Linux is only free if your time has no value, but where does that leave OS/2?