GDB as well. All the old Cygnus stuff went to Red Hat.
Note that while Red Hat fund and host the development, thay may or may not be the largest contributor, and they go to great pain to set a "neutral" scene for the various commercial players. Apple is a huge contributor these days, and SUSE do their part too. And then there are the independents like CodeSourcery, who actually employ the current maintainer.
There are close to none these days. FSF is mainly a legal and political organization. Programming on GNU projects is done by volunteers, or contributed by other organizations.
Of course, you can be a volunteer programmer for FSF working on OO.o, but that is hardly different from being a volunteer programmer working on OO.o.
What you can do is to be a volunteer on OO.o and be aware of the need of the GNU project ( acompletely free system). Which I suspect is what RMS hoped for in the first place.
> As for those who point to the developed world's > most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence > of our devolution
Actually, in the Nordic countries, which probably have the most all-encompassing wellfare systems, children has become a status symbol for the socially strong (not quite the same as rich, but close).
It used to be that poor, and poorly educated, people got more children than rich, and highly educated people. Probably because the later group was better aware of birth control techniques, got children with a lower mortality rate, and had their retirement funds in working order.
But this seems to have been a temporary effect, even though still dominating in most of the world. Today, just about nobody in our contries get children without having planned to do so. And having more than 1 or 2 children is increasingly a sign of surplus: See I have this perfect wife, perfect jobs, perfect friends, and three wonderful kids. Much more impressive than a new car.
It is a rather new demographic effect, 10 years old or se.
They hope to sell the box before christmas... It is still quite possible that you will be able to buy machines with CPU's faster than 3.0 GHz from Apple before you can buy them from Microsoft.
Well, a show like Futurama with a geeky humor and a lot of science jokes may inspire some young people to study science, thus helping the future of mankind.
Having a vendor neutral open format will make it easier to get government agencies to put it down as a requirement. Government agencies loves that sort of thing.
It is likely that Microsoft will even implement some kind of half-hearted and useless support for this format, just enough to make MS Office meet the formal requirements for compliance, but not enough to be useful (as they did with the Posix subsystem in NT).
> Except in the case of FOSS, the reason I should do it is because the users simply insist I should.
What on Earth give you that impression? I write free software because I'm paid to do so. If you look at the succesful free software projects, you will see that most of the code is contributed to people who are paid to do so.
I have said it a zillion times, and I'll say it again: My code is free, my time isn't!
When people need to code functionality and they can't develop it inhouse, they have two options:
1) Pay someone to develop the code and license it from them under a proprietary license.
2) Pay someone to develop the code and publish it under a free license.
The first option is often cheaper on the short timescale, but the second option is cheaper on a longer timescale. If you want any further changes, the free software allows you to choose the cheapest bidder, while the propritary software developer will have a monopoly and can set the price as they wish.
Smart organizations are therefore increasingly prefering option 2 over option 1. However, smart is rare, business rarely think further ahead than the next quarterly report, and municipal and givernment organization have at most a time horizon spanning to the next election.
The third option is to develop inhouse or buy ownership in which case license doesn't matter, and is still far the most common. Option 1 & 2 only really has an advantage if others can use the code as well, and thus contribute to the development.
d_jedi is a nut who has no idea of how the software industry works.
First of all, the vast majority of all programmers work on in-house projects, for which license doesn't matter a squat one way or another. The vast majority of the rest work on vertical markets, for which switching to an pay-for-development model rather than pay-for-code model would not be a major change.
So students job opportunities would not be affected.
A very small minority work on mass-produced shrink wrap software for which a world in which "RMS's way" would require some rethought.
[ Actually, d_jedi is not a not, he is just very young and inexperienced. The mass-produced is far the most visisble, so if you avoid putting thought into what "mass-produced" actually means, you will conclude tat is also where most people work. ]
Businesses usually have support contracts, so mass produced software development financed through support contract is quote viable.
The leave the "home entertainment" industry, which is the only place where I don't believe "RMS's way" would work. There would off-course stil be games, because hobbyist programmers love games, but the finished movie-like play-once game wouldn't survive.
Re:Shouldn't they have done this 10 years ago?
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
> What took GCC so long?
GCC didn't have the proper middle-end for this kind of optimizations. The big thing in 4.0 is that it now has a middle-end not 20 years out of date.
What took it so long? How wasy do you believe it is to change middle end for an old compiler that support as many front-ends and back-ends as GCC?
Getting the funding is also hard, the task is too large for a volunteer, and too generic for a traditional sponsor.
It is important to know that even though "As Seen On TV" *talk* like he is an Apple insider, he *really* doesn't have a clue about what is going on. He is making stuff up as he go.
Objective C++ was an Apple internal thing all the way, one Apple employee implemented it, another Apple employee rejected it, and they never resolved their technical differences.
The rest of the GCC developers didn't care one way or another, but had promissed Apple that Objective-C++ would be included. However, given the situation with Apple blocking Apple, that promise was void.
It can all be found on the public GCC developer lists.
One Apple employee refused to accept a patch to the common C-family code made by another Apple employee that was part of the Objective C++ support, and the two of them never seemed to resolve the conflict
> If anybody was wondering, this is why we stay as far away from the Gnu people as humanly possible.
Who are "we"? Clueless Apple fanboys? The Apple developers are certainly working closely together with GNU people on GCC and other GNU projects, and are valued members of the GNU developer community.
> We're not shipping "a fork" of GCC 4. We're shipping GCC 4.0.0, > which we compiled from source for Darwin 8.
The Apple developers are not as deeply incompetent as you insinuate above. Apple is shipping a version of their own branch of GCC, which was synchronized some time ago with the FSF branch that eventually became GCC 4.0. Synchronizing with GCC 4.0 would give them a week for final testing...
> In fact, when you're talking about shipping a compiler for a specific > platform, the whole notion of "a fork" is basically meaningless.
Wrong. pgcc was clearly platform specific fork of GCC. So was DJGPP.
In case someone with a clue reads this: Yes, most (but not all!) vendors keep their own branch of GCC with platform specific changes, allthough few have as many as Apple (which is not a critique of Apple, unlike what the fanboy I'm replying to claims, Apple have behaved excellent with regard to GCC and been a model for cooperation).
I'll call these brances, not forks.
> (Setting aside, of course, that the whole notion of "a fork" runs 100% counter to all that > open-source stuff that you guys are supposedly so hip to anyway.)
First "we", now "you guys"? From an anonymous writer on a public forum?
I speak for myself. Voltaire has credited for saying "I disagree with wath you say, but I will until my death fight for your right to say it".
The right to fork is essential, if you don't want to hand over your freedom to your software supplier. But the cost of forking is high, so it is a right that should only be excercises after careful considerations of the alternatives.
A big part of the reason for going to 4.0 instead 3.5 is that the ".0" hopefully will be a big clue that this version had an entirely new middle end, and thus the potential for tons of breakage.
Turning it off by default would be silly, making web browsing faster by utilizing the idle time of the connection is what most people want. The gearheads who think they are smarter than the prefetch algorithms may want to turn it off, but they are not the prime target for Firefox.
A likely outcome of this is that Red Hat (and others?) will put more effort into GCJ. So if the result of OO.o relying more on java is the free software community getting a better Java compiler, that is splendid.
> In Europe, we have the same growing right-wing > as in the US, but it has not been incorporated > by religious factions.
The two leading ideologists of the isolationalist anti-immigrant "Danish People Party" are priests. The anti-immigrant retorics is increasingle turning into anti-moslem retorics, and (more slowly) pro-Lutheran.
> NB: European countries don't have state religions
In Denmark we do. The "Peoples Church" is the official religion of the nation, and the head of the church is appointed by the prime minister and part of the government. You don't have to be a member, but 80+% are, and the member fee is collected by the national tax service, using the same form as for local and state tax.
I'm not sure how much closer you can come to a state religion, at least formally. We are on par with Iran with regard to the concept of separation between Church and State.
The constitution *does* guarentee everybody the right to "worship God as they like" (a guarentee which is usually interpreted as covering ateists and polyteists as well, despite the singular God).
Slashdot Mirror
GDB as well. All the old Cygnus stuff went to Red Hat.
Note that while Red Hat fund and host the development, thay may or may not be the largest contributor, and they go to great pain to set a "neutral" scene for the various commercial players. Apple is a huge contributor these days, and SUSE do their part too. And then there are the independents like CodeSourcery, who actually employ the current maintainer.
There are close to none these days. FSF is mainly a legal and political organization. Programming on GNU projects is done by volunteers, or contributed by other organizations.
Of course, you can be a volunteer programmer for FSF working on OO.o, but that is hardly different from being a volunteer programmer working on OO.o.
What you can do is to be a volunteer on OO.o and be aware of the need of the GNU project ( acompletely free system). Which I suspect is what RMS hoped for in the first place.
> As for those who point to the developed world's
> most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence
> of our devolution
Actually, in the Nordic countries, which probably have the most all-encompassing wellfare systems, children has become a status symbol for the socially strong (not quite the same as rich, but close).
It used to be that poor, and poorly educated, people got more children than rich, and highly educated people. Probably because the later group was better aware of birth control techniques, got children with a lower mortality rate, and had their retirement funds in working order.
But this seems to have been a temporary effect, even though still dominating in most of the world. Today, just about nobody in our contries get children without having planned to do so. And having more than 1 or 2 children is increasingly a sign of surplus: See I have this perfect wife, perfect jobs, perfect friends, and three wonderful kids. Much more impressive than a new car.
It is a rather new demographic effect, 10 years old or se.
As we all know, this includes Linux :-)
I associate the number 360 with some clunky old IBM mainframes. The CPU is from IBM, but that is hardly the intended association.
:)
It could be 360 degree vision. Does the console have souround video
They hope to sell the box before christmas... It is still quite possible that you will be able to buy machines with CPU's faster than 3.0 GHz from Apple before you can buy them from Microsoft.
> Woe! Disaster! JWZ's changes to the Emacs codebase
> can't be easily folded back into GNU/Emacs. It's
> full of things that are XEmacs specific!
Not a good comparison. Both parties wanted a single Emacs, but disagreed on release schedule, technical questions, and who had the bigger penis.
But but but... The fun of watching the movie *is* to point out all these errors.
Actually, for some of us, the fun of the Simpsons is not watching Homer being stupid (again), but watching cars explode when hit by a leaf.
Well, a show like Futurama with a geeky humor and a lot of science jokes may inspire some young people to study science, thus helping the future of mankind.
Having a vendor neutral open format will make it easier to get government agencies to put it down as a requirement. Government agencies loves that sort of thing.
It is likely that Microsoft will even implement some kind of half-hearted and useless support for this format, just enough to make MS Office meet the formal requirements for compliance, but not enough to be useful (as they did with the Posix subsystem in NT).
It is a GCC bug, and it has already been fixed on mainline. The KDE people are going to love 4.0.1 :-)
> Except in the case of FOSS, the reason I should do it is because the users simply insist I should.
What on Earth give you that impression? I write free software because I'm paid to do so. If you look at the succesful free software projects, you will see that most of the code is contributed to people who are paid to do so.
I have said it a zillion times, and I'll say it again: My code is free, my time isn't!
When people need to code functionality and they can't develop it inhouse, they have two options:
1) Pay someone to develop the code and license it from them under a proprietary license.
2) Pay someone to develop the code and publish it under a free license.
The first option is often cheaper on the short timescale, but the second option is cheaper on a longer timescale. If you want any further changes, the free software allows you to choose the cheapest bidder, while the propritary software developer will have a monopoly and can set the price as they wish.
Smart organizations are therefore increasingly prefering option 2 over option 1. However, smart is rare, business rarely think further ahead than the next quarterly report, and municipal and givernment organization have at most a time horizon spanning to the next election.
The third option is to develop inhouse or buy ownership in which case license doesn't matter, and is still far the most common. Option 1 & 2 only really has an advantage if others can use the code as well, and thus contribute to the development.
d_jedi is a nut who has no idea of how the software industry works.
First of all, the vast majority of all programmers work on in-house projects, for which license doesn't matter a squat one way or another. The vast majority of the rest work on vertical markets, for which switching to an pay-for-development model rather than pay-for-code model would not be a major change.
So students job opportunities would not be affected.
A very small minority work on mass-produced shrink wrap software for which a world in which "RMS's way" would require some rethought.
[ Actually, d_jedi is not a not, he is just very young and inexperienced. The mass-produced is far the most visisble, so if you avoid putting thought into what "mass-produced" actually means, you will conclude tat is also where most people work. ]
Businesses usually have support contracts, so mass produced software development financed through support contract is quote viable.
The leave the "home entertainment" industry, which is the only place where I don't believe "RMS's way" would work. There would off-course stil be games, because hobbyist programmers love games, but the finished movie-like play-once game wouldn't survive.
> What took GCC so long?
GCC didn't have the proper middle-end for this kind of optimizations. The big thing in 4.0 is that it now has a middle-end not 20 years out of date.
What took it so long? How wasy do you believe it is to change middle end for an old compiler that support as many front-ends and back-ends as GCC?
Getting the funding is also hard, the task is too large for a volunteer, and too generic for a traditional sponsor.
Well, correct, except that both the UC and GCC representives were Apple employees.
It is important to know that even though "As Seen On TV" *talk* like he is an Apple insider, he *really* doesn't have a clue about what is going on. He is making stuff up as he go.
Objective C++ was an Apple internal thing all the way, one Apple employee implemented it, another Apple employee rejected it, and they never resolved their technical differences.
The rest of the GCC developers didn't care one way or another, but had promissed Apple that Objective-C++ would be included. However, given the situation with Apple blocking Apple, that promise was void.
It can all be found on the public GCC developer lists.
One Apple employee refused to accept a patch to the common C-family code made by another Apple employee that was part of the Objective C++ support, and the two of them never seemed to resolve the conflict
The Objective C++ user community blamed Red Hat.
> If anybody was wondering, this is why we stay as far away from the Gnu people as humanly possible.
Who are "we"? Clueless Apple fanboys? The Apple developers are certainly working closely together with GNU people on GCC and other GNU projects, and are valued members of the GNU developer community.
> We're not shipping "a fork" of GCC 4. We're shipping GCC 4.0.0,
> which we compiled from source for Darwin 8.
The Apple developers are not as deeply incompetent as you insinuate above. Apple is shipping a version of their own branch of GCC, which was synchronized some time ago with the FSF branch that eventually became GCC 4.0. Synchronizing with GCC 4.0 would give them a week for final testing...
> In fact, when you're talking about shipping a compiler for a specific
> platform, the whole notion of "a fork" is basically meaningless.
Wrong. pgcc was clearly platform specific fork of GCC. So was DJGPP.
In case someone with a clue reads this: Yes, most (but not all!) vendors keep their own branch of GCC with platform specific changes, allthough few have as many as Apple (which is not a critique of Apple, unlike what the fanboy I'm replying to claims, Apple have behaved excellent with regard to GCC and been a model for cooperation).
I'll call these brances, not forks.
> (Setting aside, of course, that the whole notion of "a fork" runs 100% counter to all that
> open-source stuff that you guys are supposedly so hip to anyway.)
First "we", now "you guys"? From an anonymous writer on a public forum?
I speak for myself. Voltaire has credited for saying "I disagree with wath you say, but I will until my death fight for your right to say it".
The right to fork is essential, if you don't want to hand over your freedom to your software supplier. But the cost of forking is high, so it is a right that should only be excercises after careful considerations of the alternatives.
A big part of the reason for going to 4.0 instead 3.5 is that the ".0" hopefully will be a big clue that this version had an entirely new middle end, and thus the potential for tons of breakage.
Firefox is not made for gearheads.
Turning it off by default would be silly, making web browsing faster by utilizing the idle time of the connection is what most people want. The gearheads who think they are smarter than the prefetch algorithms may want to turn it off, but they are not the prime target for Firefox.
Modem users pay for the time the spend connected, including idle time, so this is perfect for modem users. It puts the idle time to good use.
The people who will want to disable this are those who pay for the amount the download.
GPLv2> Such new versions will be similar in spirit to
GPLv2> the present version, but may differ in detail
GPLv2> to address new problems or concerns.
I believe a convincing case can be made that the MS EULA is not "similar in spirit" to the GPLv2...
A likely outcome of this is that Red Hat (and others?) will put more effort into GCJ. So if the result of OO.o relying more on java is the free software community getting a better Java compiler, that is splendid.
> P.S. to the right wing tool in the house (Rep. Bob Ney) that came up with the idiotic moniker Freedom fries, they were invented in fucking Belgium.
Actually, Belgium was much more strongly opposed to the Iraq war than France were. It is just that nobody cares was Belgium thinks of anything.
Of course, if Belgium had been part of the "Coalision of the Willing", it would have been an all-important military partner, just like Denmark.
> In Europe, we have the same growing right-wing
> as in the US, but it has not been incorporated
> by religious factions.
The two leading ideologists of the isolationalist anti-immigrant "Danish People Party" are priests. The anti-immigrant retorics is increasingle turning into anti-moslem retorics, and (more slowly) pro-Lutheran.
> NB: European countries don't have state religions
In Denmark we do. The "Peoples Church" is the official religion of the nation, and the head of the church is appointed by the prime minister and part of the government. You don't have to be a member, but 80+% are, and the member fee is collected by the national tax service, using the same form as for local and state tax.
I'm not sure how much closer you can come to a state religion, at least formally. We are on par with Iran with regard to the concept of separation between Church and State.
The constitution *does* guarentee everybody the right to "worship God as they like" (a guarentee which is usually interpreted as covering ateists and polyteists as well, despite the singular God).