> It is odd that without the rants and people with agendas, this would have never been worked out.
Yes, it is odd because it is most likely wrong. Nothing wrong with people with agendas (don't we all have some agenda?). But the rants are only good for digging trenches, making it harder for both side to agree on a solution to the benefit of all.
The FSF requires assignment of ownership for "core" components such a GCC. There are two reasons for this:
1) It is (legally) easier defend the license if ownership is clearly defined (and before you comment: The law is rarely Boolean).
2) To make it possible to re-release under different licenses.
The GPL2 to GPL3 is a poor example of #2 as they usually add a "any later version" for their GPL'ed source. But ownership gives them the right to give permission for other free software projects to use FSF code in projects that use other licenses, they are quite pragmatic with regard to such licenses.
Both should paply to Sun as well, plus the added ability to make proprietary versions (like StarOffice) which may link to other peoples non-LGPL compatible code.
Basically, with any new interesting technology people try out many different approaches, and as the technology matures, a few of them will survive as the de-facto standards.
> First, "the world" did not "gaze at the heavens in awe and apprehension" as Sputnik > orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often > need reminding, America is not the entire world.
My parents have told me they "gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension", and they are not Americans.
> And this, ladies and gentleman, is why all Linux users are perceived as elitist, arrogant bastards.
You are right. The way free software works is that if you want something done, you either do it yourself, or you pay somebody to do it for you.
Somehow, this has become at odds with mainstream society. People have come to expect that if you want something done, you whine about it for long enough, and someone else will do it for you.
That is not true. Patriotism akin to racism. There is nothing wrong with loving your country as long as you don't start believing that its citizens are somehow superior to everyone else....
Really, it is like geek vs. nerd. Some people try to assign all the good attributes to one of the words, and all the bad attributes to the other one. But it doesn't work, and not just because people disagree about which word should be the good one. The real reason is that the good and the bad attributes are connected in the real world.
with regard to internal affairs, even if the situation in USA is getting worse, and the situation in China is getting better, they are still far from being in the same league.
With regard to foreign affairs though, US is providing life support to far more dictatorial regimes than China is. US gives lip service to democracy and freedom, but not when the local dictators are seen as allied against communism (old days) or terrorists (modern days).
US is also typically allied with conservative Muslim countries in international organizations for social issues such as birth control, although that is a development new with the current administration.
Linux refers to two thing, a kernel, and a family of operating systems sometimes known as GNU/Linux.
The leadership of "Linux the kernel" has not that much interaction with what we normally think of as end-users, but that is OK, as the kernel has little direct interaction with end users. The kernel is mostly a layer between the runtime libraries (especially libc) and the hardware, so the "users" of the kernel is the runtime library authors, as well as the hardware and device driver people. And the leadership of "Linux the kernel" has plenty of interaction with those.
Then there is the family of operating systems. They are the distributions from places like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, and SUSE. Some of these are in good touch with their particular user segment, some are not. Those that are not tend to wither and die. New ones in better touch with a user segment come to take their place. This is called a "market economy" and is exactly what MS Windows does not offer, which leads to disasters like Vista. If Red Hat had tried to pull a Vista on its users, Red Hat would simple have become irrelevant. But with Vista, there is really no other distributor of NT based technology to go to. So the users are screwed.
I'm convinced that if you ask the following question to free software developers:
"If you take some free software, make some minor modification, and redistribute it as part of your own project, is is then considered good style to contribute the modification back to the original project, under the original license?"
almost everybody will answer yes, no matter what the original license is, and what free software license they themselves prefer.
But, on the other hand, if you accuse someone from doing something illegal by not contributing back, most people will act defensively.
The "keep free" boundary is a bit different (file vs. library), but it is not that difficult to go from one to another. The Mozilla people actually called the MPL a "fixed" version of the LGPL.
Re:What the hell is wrong with these people?
on
When Not to Use chroot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I see it mostly from the other side, a few users who ask for something that makes no sense, and when you explain that it makes no sense they get extremely rude. It sounds like you are a MMORPG player, and judging from the fora for those they are among the absolutely worst users. They seem to be convinced that the whole world (virtual and real) revolves around them, and that every aspect of the game should satisfy their immediate desires.
Anyone writing free software for that community have my sympathy.
[ The MMORPG companies hire community contacts who are incredible patient and polite, no matter the amount of insane insults and demands the players spit out. Which I find worrisome, as they are teaching a generation that they can get by in with the social skills of a 1 year old. I fear the time when they grow old enough to use my software. ]
> Incidentally (and I'm guessing this is where you're coming from) being a "homosexual > offender" (1 Corinthians 6:9) means doing something sexual to someone of the same sex. If > you refuse to follow the stimulus then no "sin" is committed (YMMV). Just as if you're > tempted to steal but don't you are not a thief, etc..
It is not really relevant, as the accusation of being homosexual in this context refers to being attracted to your own gender.
> The you-hate-it-means-you-are-one argument is quite an intriguing one (I hate bananas!).
If you really emotionally hate bananas, rather than just disliking the taste of them, I'd believe some interesting psychological artifact must lie behind. Could it be that they a vaguely phallic, and thus remind you of sides of your own sexuality that makes you uncomfortable?
> It's logically flawed, of course, but is a "stronger" argument for those lacking any > factual basis than a simple ad-hominem attack as it's hard to refute against a weak > minded opposition....
In general yes, like many generalizations, but for a specific case, no.
I came independently to the conclusion in my youth because a (at the time) common "rational" argument for suppressing homosexual practice was that if everyone were allowed to practice homosexual sex, there would be no children, and the human race would go extinct. That argument makes only sense for someone who is attracted to his or her own gender.
> Of course the reason you hate theists is because you realise the truth about your > relationship with god but don't want to admit it.:0)>
I believe people who hate theist have some deep emotional problems, typically dating back to their childhood, growing up in a suppressive theist environment. Atheism is, by nature, not something the "believers" tend to feel strong about. There really isn't anything there to feel strong about. All the fanatical atheists I have meet have been reformed theists. Their hate is part of their liberation process. Similar to how the most fanatical anti-smokers and anti-drinking people are former addicts.
> But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use > it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?
When the Netscape codes was released (as Mozilla), they claimed that "the stupidity tax" would prevent this. The stupidity tax is the extra effort you have to take to re-port your proprietary additions to each new release of the base code.
Isolated, I believe the stupidity tax is enough to make it worthwhile to contribute your additions back, at least if the base project has a strong following.
However, the reason a copyleft license like nonetheless GPL is generally preferred by businesses is friendly than a "almost-pd" license like BSDL, is concern about what the competitors do. Will they take your additions in their product, but never release their own additions?
With BSDL (or similar) companies will pay the stupidity tax in fear of giving the competition an unfair advantage. Which will hurt all the users of the base code. With the GPL, that unfair advantage is not an option, so business will be far more willing to share their improvements for the benefit of both themselves and other users.
> I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you > did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry > in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your > audience.
I work in agricultural science, not exactly a new field.
"I'm currently working on a physically based model of how pesticides can move with water through the soil and reach the drain pipes. The idea behind this research is that once we have this model, we can use measurements taken from the drain pipes to help estimate how many pesticides might reach the depths where we extract our drinking water."
That's not a lie, and can be used as a basis to fill on details in the unlikely case the listener is interested.
Not all scientists work on number theory or quantum physics, most of us work on stuff that is quite more down to earth.
I'd be able to hire another contractor to work for me, if the first one wouldn't prolong. With proprietary software, you don't have that option. You are artificially limited by whatever CEO "vision" governs the providers business plan at the moment.
Using proprietary software for any mission critical part of your business is reckless.
The FSF has resolved a lot of similar cases without going to court. After the situation is explained to them, all the companies up until now has accepted to either withdraw the infringing code, or release it under the terms of the GPL.
Either Monsoon Multimedia is more stubborn than most, or the BusyBox developers lack the finesse of the FSF.
Real programmers can code memory leaks in any programming language.
(I'm not kidding, it is very easy to accidentally use a strong pointer, where a weak pointer should have been used. Especially in languages that doesn't support the later concept:-)
Neither can you if you hire people to implement it on your own company.
And if you do it yourself, you can be sure that the security will not be higher than your own skill set.
If you want to trust nobody, you might as well retreat to am isolated island somewhere, as you will be unable to function in a society. The key to functioning in a society isn't distrust, but to to be able to judge who to trust and who not to. Which is quite annoyingly mostly a social rather than a technical skill.
----
I personally trust the people at Google more than I trust the people and products responsible for our internal mail solution (which is also available as web mail). Especially with regards to competence (as opposed to integrity). So I would love for us to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
> It is odd that without the rants and people with agendas, this would have never been worked out.
Yes, it is odd because it is most likely wrong. Nothing wrong with people with agendas (don't we all have some agenda?). But the rants are only good for digging trenches, making it harder for both side to agree on a solution to the benefit of all.
The FSF requires assignment of ownership for "core" components such a GCC. There are two reasons for this:
1) It is (legally) easier defend the license if ownership is clearly defined (and before you comment: The law is rarely Boolean).
2) To make it possible to re-release under different licenses.
The GPL2 to GPL3 is a poor example of #2 as they usually add a "any later version" for their GPL'ed source. But ownership gives them the right to give permission for other free software projects to use FSF code in projects that use other licenses, they are quite pragmatic with regard to such licenses.
Both should paply to Sun as well, plus the added ability to make proprietary versions (like StarOffice) which may link to other peoples non-LGPL compatible code.
Basically, with any new interesting technology people try out many different approaches, and as the technology matures, a few of them will survive as the de-facto standards.
Should you use text to italicize rather than em? <em> is for text you want to emphasize, rather than text you want to force a specific slant on.
> First, "the world" did not "gaze at the heavens in awe and apprehension" as Sputnik
> orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often
> need reminding, America is not the entire world.
My parents have told me they "gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension", and they are not Americans.
> And this, ladies and gentleman, is why all Linux users are perceived as elitist, arrogant bastards.
You are right. The way free software works is that if you want something done, you either do it yourself, or you pay somebody to do it for you.
Somehow, this has become at odds with mainstream society. People have come to expect that if you want something done, you whine about it for long enough, and someone else will do it for you.
It is a society of builders and whiners.
I know which side I'm on.
> Nationalism is akin to racism.
...
That is not true. Patriotism akin to racism. There is nothing wrong with loving your country as long as you don't start believing that its citizens are somehow superior to everyone else.
Really, it is like geek vs. nerd. Some people try to assign all the good attributes to one of the words, and all the bad attributes to the other one. But it doesn't work, and not just because people disagree about which word should be the good one. The real reason is that the good and the bad attributes are connected in the real world.
with regard to internal affairs, even if the situation in USA is getting worse, and the situation in China is getting better, they are still far from being in the same league.
With regard to foreign affairs though, US is providing life support to far more dictatorial regimes than China is. US gives lip service to democracy and freedom, but not when the local dictators are seen as allied against communism (old days) or terrorists (modern days).
US is also typically allied with conservative Muslim countries in international organizations for social issues such as birth control, although that is a development new with the current administration.
Linux refers to two thing, a kernel, and a family of operating systems sometimes known as GNU/Linux.
The leadership of "Linux the kernel" has not that much interaction with what we normally think of as end-users, but that is OK, as the kernel has little direct interaction with end users. The kernel is mostly a layer between the runtime libraries (especially libc) and the hardware, so the "users" of the kernel is the runtime library authors, as well as the hardware and device driver people. And the leadership of "Linux the kernel" has plenty of interaction with those.
Then there is the family of operating systems. They are the distributions from places like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, and SUSE. Some of these are in good touch with their particular user segment, some are not. Those that are not tend to wither and die. New ones in better touch with a user segment come to take their place. This is called a "market economy" and is exactly what MS Windows does not offer, which leads to disasters like Vista. If Red Hat had tried to pull a Vista on its users, Red Hat would simple have become irrelevant. But with Vista, there is really no other distributor of NT based technology to go to. So the users are screwed.
I'm convinced that if you ask the following question to free software developers:
"If you take some free software, make some minor modification, and redistribute it as part of your own project, is is then considered good style to contribute the modification back to the original project, under the original license?"
almost everybody will answer yes, no matter what the original license is, and what free software license they themselves prefer.
But, on the other hand, if you accuse someone from doing something illegal by not contributing back, most people will act defensively.
who has never looked at a map.
The "keep free" boundary is a bit different (file vs. library), but it is not that difficult to go from one to another. The Mozilla people actually called the MPL a "fixed" version of the LGPL.
I see it mostly from the other side, a few users who ask for something that makes no sense, and when you explain that it makes no sense they get extremely rude. It sounds like you are a MMORPG player, and judging from the fora for those they are among the absolutely worst users. They seem to be convinced that the whole world (virtual and real) revolves around them, and that every aspect of the game should satisfy their immediate desires.
Anyone writing free software for that community have my sympathy.
[ The MMORPG companies hire community contacts who are incredible patient and polite, no matter the amount of insane insults and demands the players spit out. Which I find worrisome, as they are teaching a generation that they can get by in with the social skills of a 1 year old. I fear the time when they grow old enough to use my software. ]
> Do all OS developers become assholes?
No, just you. You are calling others assholes, something none of the people in the original thread did.
> Well, if you were to invest your dollar, would you want a 64% return ($0.64) or a 243% return
($2.43)?
I'd prefer an order of magnitude better ($6.40).
> Incidentally (and I'm guessing this is where you're coming from) being a "homosexual
...
:0)>
> offender" (1 Corinthians 6:9) means doing something sexual to someone of the same sex. If
> you refuse to follow the stimulus then no "sin" is committed (YMMV). Just as if you're
> tempted to steal but don't you are not a thief, etc..
It is not really relevant, as the accusation of being homosexual in this context refers to being attracted to your own gender.
> The you-hate-it-means-you-are-one argument is quite an intriguing one (I hate bananas!).
If you really emotionally hate bananas, rather than just disliking the taste of them, I'd believe some interesting psychological artifact must lie behind. Could it be that they a vaguely phallic, and thus remind you of sides of your own sexuality that makes you uncomfortable?
> It's logically flawed, of course, but is a "stronger" argument for those lacking any
> factual basis than a simple ad-hominem attack as it's hard to refute against a weak
> minded opposition.
In general yes, like many generalizations, but for a specific case, no.
I came independently to the conclusion in my youth because a (at the time) common "rational" argument for suppressing homosexual practice was that if everyone were allowed to practice homosexual sex, there would be no children, and the human race would go extinct. That argument makes only sense for someone who is attracted to his or her own gender.
> Of course the reason you hate theists is because you realise the truth about your
> relationship with god but don't want to admit it.
I believe people who hate theist have some deep emotional problems, typically dating back to their childhood, growing up in a suppressive theist environment. Atheism is, by nature, not something the "believers" tend to feel strong about. There really isn't anything there to feel strong about. All the fanatical atheists I have meet have been reformed theists. Their hate is part of their liberation process. Similar to how the most fanatical anti-smokers and anti-drinking people are former addicts.
According to the article, US pay 70% of the running cost of the station. Could this be a tactic to make ESA pay a larger share?
> But what would compel a company to support FreeBSD when they could just take the code, use
> it for their own needs, and never make upstream contributions?
When the Netscape codes was released (as Mozilla), they claimed that "the stupidity tax" would prevent this. The stupidity tax is the extra effort you have to take to re-port your proprietary additions to each new release of the base code.
Isolated, I believe the stupidity tax is enough to make it worthwhile to contribute your additions back, at least if the base project has a strong following.
However, the reason a copyleft license like nonetheless GPL is generally preferred by businesses is friendly than a "almost-pd" license like BSDL, is concern about what the competitors do. Will they take your additions in their product, but never release their own additions?
With BSDL (or similar) companies will pay the stupidity tax in fear of giving the competition an unfair advantage. Which will hurt all the users of the base code. With the GPL, that unfair advantage is not an option, so business will be far more willing to share their improvements for the benefit of both themselves and other users.
This is why BSD is dying.
The European scale goes like this:
...
10^6 Million
10^9 Milliard
10^12 Billion
10^15 Billiard
10^18 Trillion
10^21 Trilliard
10^24 Quadrillion
As you see, no "gaps".
> I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you
> did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry
> in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your
> audience.
I work in agricultural science, not exactly a new field.
"I'm currently working on a physically based model of how pesticides can move with water through the soil and reach the drain pipes. The idea behind this research is that once we have this model, we can use measurements taken from the drain pipes to help estimate how many pesticides might reach the depths where we extract our drinking water."
That's not a lie, and can be used as a basis to fill on details in the unlikely case the listener is interested.
Not all scientists work on number theory or quantum physics, most of us work on stuff that is quite more down to earth.
I'd be able to hire another contractor to work for me, if the first one wouldn't prolong. With proprietary software, you don't have that option. You are artificially limited by whatever CEO "vision" governs the providers business plan at the moment.
Using proprietary software for any mission critical part of your business is reckless.
The FSF has resolved a lot of similar cases without going to court. After the situation is explained to them, all the companies up until now has accepted to either withdraw the infringing code, or release it under the terms of the GPL.
Either Monsoon Multimedia is more stubborn than most, or the BusyBox developers lack the finesse of the FSF.
Real programmers can code memory leaks in any programming language.
:-)
(I'm not kidding, it is very easy to accidentally use a strong pointer, where a weak pointer should have been used. Especially in languages that doesn't support the later concept
I actually read it as some kind of double plus good 1984 reference...
Neither can you if you hire people to implement it on your own company.
And if you do it yourself, you can be sure that the security will not be higher than your own skill set.
If you want to trust nobody, you might as well retreat to am isolated island somewhere, as you will be unable to function in a society. The key to functioning in a society isn't distrust, but to to be able to judge who to trust and who not to. Which is quite annoyingly mostly a social rather than a technical skill.
----
I personally trust the people at Google more than I trust the people and products responsible for our internal mail solution (which is also available as web mail). Especially with regards to competence (as opposed to integrity). So I would love for us to switch.