The truly open source alternative to GateD is Zebra. It is still a long way from the stability of GateD, though.
I don't like GateD's license. It is absolutely on the verge of being totally unusable. It is well known that the GateD consortium is pretty liberal on its definition of "research" work, so it would not actually be unusable in my case.
The kind of Open Source license that I see as being acceptable is the Netscape Public License. It retains ownership, without limiting what I do with the stuff for my own devious uses, and in that sense has no strings attached.
I feel it is important that companies have a safe license to use to release stuff without relinquishing control. I'll pick the software with the least restrictive license when I have a choice, but in some cases the best software isn't as free. I'm overjoyed I can get the quality in exchange for relinquishing some of the options (like being able to publish a derivative work), if that's what it take them to release the software at all. A lot of company executives have cold feet and would like to retain control. That's fine by me as long as my ass is covered.
GateD is evil, because if you ever get in a conflict with them, it'll be hard to assert your research use in court.
call your favourite OEM. Dell [...] they don't hire psychics you know.
This is an excellent suggestion, 'cept that a dozen people I know called Dell and got a blunt reaction, without any hint that they might do something with the feedback.
When I called them, I put the screws on them: "I don't want Windows'98". Ah, monsieur is a connaisseur! I'll tick Windows NT for you then. No, I don't want Windows. I want to install UNIX on it, and I don't want to pay for Windows. I'm sorry sir, we're not allowed to ship a Dell without an Operating System. Okay, fair enough: throw a copy of Linux in. No, I'm really sorry sir, but that is impossible. I can ship you a machine with DOS 6.2 if you want. It's.... wait a minute while I look it up... No, that's actually more expensive than shipping with '98. So, I'll include '98 with your order. Thanks, but no thanks.
This from the company that pre-installed *ANY* OS you threw at them in their early days...
My guess is Dell got guaranteed supplies in exchange for agreeing not to open up to AMD
To lock up for AMD is the more appropriate term. Replace the processor and your Dell won't boot anymore. If you want to upgrade your Dell to an AMD processor, you have to scrounge the netnews to find out which Intel motherboard is in there, use the Intel BIOS recovery disk to reflash the motherboard with Intel firmware, and then replace the CPU.
It always struck me as weird that the Intel BIOS takes away the restriction against AMD that Dell built in:-)
Even though I rarely use such graphic language, I share the sentiment about the organisation of the download. Even Microsoft has caught up to the idea that restartability and cacheability is a good idea. I was startled to see Microsoft start to make a good effort to work on that -- probably because they're in the caching proxy server business now though:-)
I'm maintaining a firewall, and the biggest bandwidth wasters today are Sun and (at a short distance) Apple. With wastage defined as content that never reaches the end user because the download process dies halfway through the gazillion byte download.
Porting stuff to the Mac from Windows or Linux is decidedly non-trivial. For example, unless the designers had a tremendous amount of foresight, adding stuff like file types and proper path name handling is going to make sushi of the code.
This is why so many ported apps fail the simpler of the "is this good Mac code" tests. For example, most ported apps will not behave right if you move files around. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and Mac users have learned to live with it, but back when I programmed the Mac those were cardinal sins and Mac users would vote with their wallet (unless, of course, it happened to be a game and to be very good:-)
I'm wondering what's keeping them... I'm getting tired of the wait. I can run the bleeding thing as-is, but if it goes belly up, I'm as stuck as I would be with MS-Word, only difference being that the crash would be called a SIGSEGV rather than a DrWatson.
This is also why I hate it that Mozilla ditched the Classic Mozilla so soon. A number of fixes I made for problems that the commercial version had, never made it into Classic Mozilla because of its untimely death, and their corresponding bugs live on to this day in Netscape Communicator 4.72 for BSD/OS and FreeBSD.
When a tool dies on me, I want to be able to perform an autopsy. Period.
Awww, bogus. Eric Raymonds paper "Homesteading the noosphere" expands on the unwritten protocol for taking over a software project when the original author fades out. The license (provided it allows redistribution in modified form) is entirely immaterial.
What is important is that (a) the software is useful to somebody, (b) that somebody wants to go the extra mile to wrest control from the original author, and (c) that this somebody thinks it should be used by a wider audience.
A lot of code ends up unmaintained because people don't dare climb up a soapbox and shout: "hey, I want to take over maintenance".
Case in point: there's PERL code to access DBaseIII files. I'm sitting on a patch to make it work with Clipper.DBT files. The original author disappeared off the face of the earth. Back when I discovered this, I did not want to invest a whole lot of time in figuring out the protocol to "own" that thing (in ESR's terms). So, it sits gathering dust.
I really hope we can get some US patent reform. Does anyone know of a decent movement to let our US representatives know how silly this has all become?
That may be a lost battle. There are bunches of people out there that say that spammers, patent holders for obvious things and other lower life forms are good businessmen, as long as they operate within the confines of the law (i.e., they don't get caught). Nerds like me tend to underestimate the power of the "any money is good money" doctrine that many people subscribe to. Morality is a closed book to them (and if they had their way, a burnt and buried book).
As in the Microsoft case, we need to make it clear to lawmakers that stifling innovation eventually hurts the consumer. That is not an easy case to make when law makers see dancing paperclips as innovation enough to let Microsoft get away with claiming the Internet wouldn't have blossomed if it weren't for IE.
Hmm, I didn't see the obvious self-question mentioned: what do you expect from a colo in the first place? All of them will tell you they offer anything, but some will try to sell you a fully managed solution, and others will try to sell you floor space and an Ethernet hookup.
Listen carefully. If you're comfortable managing your servers, a vendor that is not trying to push you to use their servers may be your best bet. Also listen for the bullshit between the lines. If they are offering uptime guarantees for any server you put there, alarm bells should go off. Likewise, if they have a big installed base of FooBar OS on Baz hardware, be weary of their offer to support your Blurfle machines.
For a non-bull colo in Amsterdam, I can recommend Level3. Talk to colleagues in your region to find out what the colo's there offer.
Well, there are a couple of books on the GIMP. A quick search on Amazon turns up three. I learned most of the GIMP by scrounging the gallery however; there is some really neat artwork with pretty detailed descriptions of how it's done. The most awe inspiring trick I saw was to start out with a scanned-in pencil drawing -- I never made the mental connection that painting with a pencil is easier than painting with a mouse.
It's got a very steep learning curve, but that is no different than Photoshop. Most of what you don't know (well, what I didn't know) was what operations I wanted to apply, in other words: what I wanted to achieve in the first place. It is hard to wrap my mind around graphics design.
I would also expect that setting up a course in using the GIMP would be difficult because of this. Then again, I'm no course designer, so...
Okay, so I should have said advanced home user.:-)
The only thing that comes close to being useful for, say, laying out your new bathroom on Linux/BSD is qcad. It suffers from a flakey DXF import/export facility, and as such would greatly benefit from the OpenDWG stuff.
Not to start another license flamewar, but a cursory glance at the OpenDWG website seems to tell me that source code to their library is not available. This makes the relevance of OpenDWG to the Linux/BSD community doubtful.
From the tone of the website, I think they'd be willing to work this out on favorable terms, but it does not seem to bring us closer to having a decent CAD package for the home user in the short run.
Think about it: what if you could run down to your local 7-11 store and pick up a copy of Windows 2000 at the check-out line for $14.99? Or maybe just $4.99?
Actually, make that around 18 bucks, which is reportedly what Dell pays for them. Of course, these licenses would not come with the legendary Microsoft end-user support:-)
Re:I wrote that code - I'll tell you what it does
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 1
we went to great lengths to only try to talk to the server if...
This, of course, is the nub of the matter. When you write the code, you know sooner or later your clever hacks will go awry, and a small (but invariably growing over time) percentage of your customers will be screwed over. In this case, telephone costs, in others, Blue Screens and possibly loss of data.
I feel for you plight, Mozes, and I'm very happy you spoke up about it. I'm all to aware of how the technically competent lose out against the managerial types ("we pay you for it, so stop complaining and fscking write it").
On the other hand, are we helping anyone but the pseudo-oss'ers by fixing their bugs for free, and getting next to nothing out of it?
Back in the Good Ole Days of VMS, Digital made the source available on Microfiche. It cost something like USD$1000 on top of your right to use license, but at least it was available.
It taught me two important lessons.
First, source code availability is important. I found a number of bugs reading the microfiche, and that helped me find ways around the problems without touching the distributed code.
Second, without a good customer feedback scheme in place, having access to full source code and being able to recompile isn't worth diddly squat. I sent them a number of bug fixes, and not a single one was ever resolved in a distributed update. Thus, the whole "many eyes on the code" argument disappears in a puff of greasy smoke.
As an administrator of umpteen machines with umpteen/3 administrators, I want patches to be rolled back in the project -- whether that project is open source or not. If, for example, Squid doesn't implement a fix I suggest, I'm as bad off as when a commercial vendor doesn't fix a problem. Either way, I'm running with a workaround that may break after installing an upgrade to the code, possibly after I've left the company.
The bottom line is that it's not whether or not something is open source, but how they deal with fixes that counts.
The Squid thing was just an example, btw: my fixes to Squid suck:-)
I was very fed up with CNN reporting on this up and coming thing of errrr... shops without a web presence.
If there's no news, everything is news.
We now return you to your scheduled program, after this breaking news. Today, Larry King will talk with Mahatma Gandhi on Larry Kind Live, only on CNN.
Everyone knows a Certified Windows person who has 0 clue about Windows and how to do proper administraton.
Snicker... My boss offered me access to our corporate MCSE tract in the firm believe I would decline. However, I was so tired of having to hear "yeah, but you're a UNIX sysadmin, what do you know about Windows?", that I went for it. Oh, and the stock options were also somewhat of an attraction.
I know PhD's in computer science that I wouldn't let near a keyboard. Heck, I'd take their notepads away if I believed they might be writing specs.
Anyway, I hold three MCP certificates (three to go), and I dare anyone to call me clueless about Windows or system administration.:-)
Someone purporting to me wrote "Next stop: Open Source, so I can build them to run natively!".
If I spent all of my waking day reading Slashdot rather than, well, other possibly fruitful tasks, I would've been spared the humily of having to point out that way down, under the heading Re:Infocom, you'll find a gazillion of links to interpreters that run the.DAT files of the old Infocom games, and by golly: they work!
I'll go hide under a rock now (playing Zork I at native Pentium 450 speed).
But unlike most games mentioned in the NYT article, Zork is still for sale. I picked up something like 20 text adventures from Activision at CompUSA for USD 19,95, put on one CD for the express purpose of making the old stuff available to the connaisseur. I still saw the thing on the shelves last fall.
Next stop: Open Source, so I can build them to run natively!
in windows, you can allways find the answer on your own if you dig long enough. Its in some check box SOMEWHERE. Linux is not like that right now.
Even though I do not disagree with this statement, I'd like to point out the proliferation on Checkmark Online Help. I'm positively sick and tired of online help explaining just what's on the screen anyway (like hitting F1 and getting helpful information like "File: Save: save the file. File: Frobnicate (flurble): Frobnicate the file, using the flurble method"
I find myself using debuggers on Windows apps just to figure out what the dickens is going on. This is sick. Besides, usually the analysis turn up the fact that behind the unhelpful help lies the reality that what I'm looking for just ain't there.
Few hackers have the end user in mind when developing apps, even in the design phase. I'm very happy to see Andy shed his bright light on the development of software for the free Unices!
HOLD IT! [pointing out why in it's time, the price may have been right]
The Athena->DECwindows->Motif heritage was probably the first catalyst for my thinking about access to source. For my favorite OS at the time, VMS, I had source code on microfiche. I intensively debugged the Athena widgets to get clues on which part of the microfiches to zoom into (literally!) in order to find out why things didn't behave according to the docs. The Athena source was really helpful on a number of occasions, and being able to read the microfiches enabled me to find solid workarounds that would be unlikely to become a future liability later on.
With the advent of Motif came the demise of access to the source code. A number of bugs (mostly memory leaks) made its way all the way from Athena into Motif, but by then Digital cared even less about fixing them then in the DECwindows era.
Ever since this nasty learning curve, I've been a devout believer in access to source code. I don't even mind paying for it, but if it comes out of my pocket it had better be affordable.
Employers are not always convinced of the necessity to plunk down hard dollars to answer questions that they (rightfully!) expect to be answered by the vendor, so the Motif licensing would definitely have saved my bacon if it only were available ten years earlier (or should I say, it would've saved Motif's bacon? I've stuck to Athena and later GTK for personal stuff because of the horrors of Motif)
I will not mourn Motif's eventual demise, because I think it is the ugliest toolkit ever invented.
I still have memories of the days when my beautifully crafted DECwindows applications had to be ported to Motif, with its horribly unclear user interface, made even uglier by DEC's choice of default color. "Let's see, the light gray line below the triangle is slightly darker than the light gray line above it. Guess that means in. Oops, it was out and I just blew up a chemical plant. Game Over".
The good news, of course, is that I can now, ten years after DECwindows, finally plug the memory leaks I reported to Digital at first, then to OSF.:-)
For years, I've been thinking about patenting something really stupid, just to see if it would pass. Does anyone have an idea what a US patent application costs?
I would try to stay out of the legal morass and get your employer to support it. They are not likely to make money out of it, other than the gains of using it internally, and neither is it likely to be a competetive gain. So why not propose them to co-own the copyright and insert a note in the README saying "development was in part funded by a gracious FooBar, Inc."
See it as free advertising for them. "What? The Rob Kaper is on your payroll?
Obviously, I'm not a Microsoft employee, and I've never met or even heard of konstant, so I'm not qualified to respond to this one. But the most important thing that konstant shows us is one that is worth repeating.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence
All of the people at Microsoft I know share a sentiment common to all hackers: that incompetent lawyers, marketers, managers and coders should be kicked out. Feet first if necessary.
Especially in Microsoft, which has been under siege ever since reaching market dominance, it is very frustrating to contribute good work, only to see it being burned into a jumble of cinders by the above mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like GateD's license. It is absolutely on the verge of being totally unusable. It is well known that the GateD consortium is pretty liberal on its definition of "research" work, so it would not actually be unusable in my case.
The kind of Open Source license that I see as being acceptable is the Netscape Public License. It retains ownership, without limiting what I do with the stuff for my own devious uses, and in that sense has no strings attached.
I feel it is important that companies have a safe license to use to release stuff without relinquishing control. I'll pick the software with the least restrictive license when I have a choice, but in some cases the best software isn't as free. I'm overjoyed I can get the quality in exchange for relinquishing some of the options (like being able to publish a derivative work), if that's what it take them to release the software at all. A lot of company executives have cold feet and would like to retain control. That's fine by me as long as my ass is covered.
GateD is evil, because if you ever get in a conflict with them, it'll be hard to assert your research use in court.
This is an excellent suggestion, 'cept that a dozen people I know called Dell and got a blunt reaction, without any hint that they might do something with the feedback.
When I called them, I put the screws on them: "I don't want Windows'98". Ah, monsieur is a connaisseur! I'll tick Windows NT for you then. No, I don't want Windows. I want to install UNIX on it, and I don't want to pay for Windows. I'm sorry sir, we're not allowed to ship a Dell without an Operating System. Okay, fair enough: throw a copy of Linux in. No, I'm really sorry sir, but that is impossible. I can ship you a machine with DOS 6.2 if you want. It's.... wait a minute while I look it up... No, that's actually more expensive than shipping with '98. So, I'll include '98 with your order. Thanks, but no thanks.
This from the company that pre-installed *ANY* OS you threw at them in their early days...
To lock up for AMD is the more appropriate term. Replace the processor and your Dell won't boot anymore. If you want to upgrade your Dell to an AMD processor, you have to scrounge the netnews to find out which Intel motherboard is in there, use the Intel BIOS recovery disk to reflash the motherboard with Intel firmware, and then replace the CPU.
It always struck me as weird that the Intel BIOS takes away the restriction against AMD that Dell built in :-)
I'm maintaining a firewall, and the biggest bandwidth wasters today are Sun and (at a short distance) Apple. With wastage defined as content that never reaches the end user because the download process dies halfway through the gazillion byte download.
This is why so many ported apps fail the simpler of the "is this good Mac code" tests. For example, most ported apps will not behave right if you move files around. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and Mac users have learned to live with it, but back when I programmed the Mac those were cardinal sins and Mac users would vote with their wallet (unless, of course, it happened to be a game and to be very good :-)
I'm wondering what's keeping them... I'm getting tired of the wait. I can run the bleeding thing as-is, but if it goes belly up, I'm as stuck as I would be with MS-Word, only difference being that the crash would be called a SIGSEGV rather than a DrWatson.
This is also why I hate it that Mozilla ditched the Classic Mozilla so soon. A number of fixes I made for problems that the commercial version had, never made it into Classic Mozilla because of its untimely death, and their corresponding bugs live on to this day in Netscape Communicator 4.72 for BSD/OS and FreeBSD.
When a tool dies on me, I want to be able to perform an autopsy. Period.
What is important is that (a) the software is useful to somebody, (b) that somebody wants to go the extra mile to wrest control from the original author, and (c) that this somebody thinks it should be used by a wider audience.
A lot of code ends up unmaintained because people don't dare climb up a soapbox and shout: "hey, I want to take over maintenance".
Case in point: there's PERL code to access DBaseIII files. I'm sitting on a patch to make it work with Clipper .DBT files. The original author disappeared off the face of the earth. Back when I discovered this, I did not want to invest a whole lot of time in figuring out the protocol to "own" that thing (in ESR's terms). So, it sits gathering dust.
That may be a lost battle. There are bunches of people out there that say that spammers, patent holders for obvious things and other lower life forms are good businessmen, as long as they operate within the confines of the law (i.e., they don't get caught). Nerds like me tend to underestimate the power of the "any money is good money" doctrine that many people subscribe to. Morality is a closed book to them (and if they had their way, a burnt and buried book).
As in the Microsoft case, we need to make it clear to lawmakers that stifling innovation eventually hurts the consumer. That is not an easy case to make when law makers see dancing paperclips as innovation enough to let Microsoft get away with claiming the Internet wouldn't have blossomed if it weren't for IE.
Sorry for the cheap Douglas Adams quote.
Listen carefully. If you're comfortable managing your servers, a vendor that is not trying to push you to use their servers may be your best bet. Also listen for the bullshit between the lines. If they are offering uptime guarantees for any server you put there, alarm bells should go off. Likewise, if they have a big installed base of FooBar OS on Baz hardware, be weary of their offer to support your Blurfle machines.
For a non-bull colo in Amsterdam, I can recommend Level3. Talk to colleagues in your region to find out what the colo's there offer.
It's got a very steep learning curve, but that is no different than Photoshop. Most of what you don't know (well, what I didn't know) was what operations I wanted to apply, in other words: what I wanted to achieve in the first place. It is hard to wrap my mind around graphics design.
I would also expect that setting up a course in using the GIMP would be difficult because of this. Then again, I'm no course designer, so...
The only thing that comes close to being useful for, say, laying out your new bathroom on Linux/BSD is qcad. It suffers from a flakey DXF import/export facility, and as such would greatly benefit from the OpenDWG stuff.
From the tone of the website, I think they'd be willing to work this out on favorable terms, but it does not seem to bring us closer to having a decent CAD package for the home user in the short run.
Actually, make that around 18 bucks, which is reportedly what Dell pays for them. Of course, these licenses would not come with the legendary Microsoft end-user support :-)
This, of course, is the nub of the matter. When you write the code, you know sooner or later your clever hacks will go awry, and a small (but invariably growing over time) percentage of your customers will be screwed over. In this case, telephone costs, in others, Blue Screens and possibly loss of data.
I feel for you plight, Mozes, and I'm very happy you spoke up about it. I'm all to aware of how the technically competent lose out against the managerial types ("we pay you for it, so stop complaining and fscking write it").
Back in the Good Ole Days of VMS, Digital made the source available on Microfiche. It cost something like USD$1000 on top of your right to use license, but at least it was available.
It taught me two important lessons.
First, source code availability is important. I found a number of bugs reading the microfiche, and that helped me find ways around the problems without touching the distributed code.
Second, without a good customer feedback scheme in place, having access to full source code and being able to recompile isn't worth diddly squat. I sent them a number of bug fixes, and not a single one was ever resolved in a distributed update. Thus, the whole "many eyes on the code" argument disappears in a puff of greasy smoke.
As an administrator of umpteen machines with umpteen/3 administrators, I want patches to be rolled back in the project -- whether that project is open source or not. If, for example, Squid doesn't implement a fix I suggest, I'm as bad off as when a commercial vendor doesn't fix a problem. Either way, I'm running with a workaround that may break after installing an upgrade to the code, possibly after I've left the company.
The bottom line is that it's not whether or not something is open source, but how they deal with fixes that counts.
The Squid thing was just an example, btw: my fixes to Squid suck :-)
I was very fed up with CNN reporting on this up and coming thing of errrr... shops without a web presence.
If there's no news, everything is news.
We now return you to your scheduled program, after this breaking news. Today, Larry King will talk with Mahatma Gandhi on Larry Kind Live, only on CNN.
Snicker... My boss offered me access to our corporate MCSE tract in the firm believe I would decline. However, I was so tired of having to hear "yeah, but you're a UNIX sysadmin, what do you know about Windows?", that I went for it. Oh, and the stock options were also somewhat of an attraction.
I know PhD's in computer science that I wouldn't let near a keyboard. Heck, I'd take their notepads away if I believed they might be writing specs.
Anyway, I hold three MCP certificates (three to go), and I dare anyone to call me clueless about Windows or system administration. :-)
If I spent all of my waking day reading Slashdot rather than, well, other possibly fruitful tasks, I would've been spared the humily of having to point out that way down, under the heading Re:Infocom, you'll find a gazillion of links to interpreters that run the .DAT files of the old Infocom games, and by golly: they work!
I'll go hide under a rock now (playing Zork I at native Pentium 450 speed).
But unlike most games mentioned in the NYT article, Zork is still for sale. I picked up something like 20 text adventures from Activision at CompUSA for USD 19,95, put on one CD for the express purpose of making the old stuff available to the connaisseur. I still saw the thing on the shelves last fall.
Next stop: Open Source, so I can build them to run natively!
Even though I do not disagree with this statement, I'd like to point out the proliferation on Checkmark Online Help. I'm positively sick and tired of online help explaining just what's on the screen anyway (like hitting F1 and getting helpful information like "File: Save: save the file. File: Frobnicate (flurble): Frobnicate the file, using the flurble method"
I find myself using debuggers on Windows apps just to figure out what the dickens is going on. This is sick. Besides, usually the analysis turn up the fact that behind the unhelpful help lies the reality that what I'm looking for just ain't there.
Few hackers have the end user in mind when developing apps, even in the design phase. I'm very happy to see Andy shed his bright light on the development of software for the free Unices!
The Athena->DECwindows->Motif heritage was probably the first catalyst for my thinking about access to source. For my favorite OS at the time, VMS, I had source code on microfiche. I intensively debugged the Athena widgets to get clues on which part of the microfiches to zoom into (literally!) in order to find out why things didn't behave according to the docs. The Athena source was really helpful on a number of occasions, and being able to read the microfiches enabled me to find solid workarounds that would be unlikely to become a future liability later on.
With the advent of Motif came the demise of access to the source code. A number of bugs (mostly memory leaks) made its way all the way from Athena into Motif, but by then Digital cared even less about fixing them then in the DECwindows era.
Ever since this nasty learning curve, I've been a devout believer in access to source code. I don't even mind paying for it, but if it comes out of my pocket it had better be affordable.
Employers are not always convinced of the necessity to plunk down hard dollars to answer questions that they (rightfully!) expect to be answered by the vendor, so the Motif licensing would definitely have saved my bacon if it only were available ten years earlier (or should I say, it would've saved Motif's bacon? I've stuck to Athena and later GTK for personal stuff because of the horrors of Motif)
I still have memories of the days when my beautifully crafted DECwindows applications had to be ported to Motif, with its horribly unclear user interface, made even uglier by DEC's choice of default color. "Let's see, the light gray line below the triangle is slightly darker than the light gray line above it. Guess that means in. Oops, it was out and I just blew up a chemical plant. Game Over".
The good news, of course, is that I can now, ten years after DECwindows, finally plug the memory leaks I reported to Digital at first, then to OSF. :-)
See it as free advertising for them. "What? The Rob Kaper is on your payroll?
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence
All of the people at Microsoft I know share a sentiment common to all hackers: that incompetent lawyers, marketers, managers and coders should be kicked out. Feet first if necessary.
Especially in Microsoft, which has been under siege ever since reaching market dominance, it is very frustrating to contribute good work, only to see it being burned into a jumble of cinders by the above mentioned.