Yah... and to me the fact that non-special users have sudo is a bit scary. I had presumed that this was only automatically granted to the first account created (and that good security would suggest that I create another account to use as my main account). To hear it repeatedly suggested that this isn't so is a bit scary. Even the first strikes me as insecure...though not drastically so.
I have Ubuntu installed (two versions in two partitions) and have been considering migrating to it if Etch didn't quickly improve (except that Ubuntu seems to have the same problems with networked printing to an HP PSC 2510. O, well, I can always boot into Sarge whenever I want to print.) This repeated assertion that all users are created with sudo privileges, however, disturbs me greatly. The first user is one thing, all users is something much more serious.
I've had good luck with both Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake WRT sound and video...of course I don't do anything very fancy.
OTOH, both have failed with printing to my networked HP PSC 2510. For that I still need to switch to my Sarge installation...or boot the Mephis live CD (I think that's the one).
OTGH, the real problem that I have with Ubuntu is package selection, even with Universe and Multiverse selected. So I'm using Etch as my main distribution, even though it ALSO has failed printing to my networked HP PSC 2510. I'd think it was the printer or the connection if I didn't have a Sarge installation that worked. This breakage happened sometime recently when the libraries were upgraded, as my original Etch installation worked at printing (or so I remember). And I don't even know which upgrade, because I don't print that often.
Do remember that some substantial number of copyrights in the kernel are held by Caldera (now tSCOg). Well, perhaps not substantial...I haven't counted. They were certainly thought important at one time.
Somehow I doubt that tSCOg would be amenable to a license modification...esp. if IBM wanted it. (And IBM holds a bunch of other copyrights...though I don't know if those are on the kernel. They may just be on file systems and utilities.)
True, standing would be a (frequently legitimate) ground. And you are correct, he would need to sue Linus (or the ODF). This is even *more* reason for Linus to be reluctant to change the kernel license.
Caution. IANAL, so this is only a layman's theory. Possibly he could also sue anyone else in the chain who redistributed his work. That they would have been acting in good faith would reduce damages to a pittance, but wouldn't prevent an injunction against further copyright infringement.
You don't NEED to assert a claim over the entire kernel to prevent your piece of it from being redistributed under a changed license. It suffices that you assert a claim over your own piece.
This cost was realized over a decade ago when Linus originally decided to not automatically allow "any later version" of the GPL to apply to the kernel. It hasn't gone away, and isn't likely to. At best the GPL3 will be compatible with the GPL2, and the pieces of the kernel that current contributors own the rights to can be relicensed. That will result in a kernel which is a mix of GPL2 and GPL3, which will be licensed under the more restrictive of whichever clause is under consideration (i.e., to redistribute the composite work will require agreeing to BOTH GPL2 AND GPL3).
Big hassle. If GPL2 suffices for what you want, it's simpler to just stick with the GPL2.
Partly. Another part is that the kernel *IS* under GPL version 2, and there is no provision for allowing it to be extended to a later version. This means that in order to relicense the kernel as a whole (rather than pieces of it) it would be required to get ALL the copyright holders to agree. Isn't going to happen.
Another part, of course, is that Linus has NEVER been philosophically committed to the GPL rather than to, say, the BSD. His choice of the GPL for Linux was pragmatic, based on the gcc & its libraries. So he really isn't personally interested in moving to a new GPL version...not unless he needs to.
So. He isn't interested, and it would be difficult or impossible anyway. And he REALLY isn't interested. What do you expect him to say? (Remember: He's also a good manager, and doesn't want to unnecessarily rile the troops.)
Convoluted? Public Domain? Not hardly. Companies have repeatedly bent when challenged over breaking the GPL. That's why it never (rarely) ends up in court. When it has gone to court, it has won, but going to court is expensive, and the Linux community has tried to avoid this.
Re:Is Forbes going to let RMS tell his side?
on
Linus on GPL3 In Forbes
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Forbes is also one of the dingbats claiming that tSCOg has a good case. Do you need more evidence? (I don't, but Google is your friend..my memory says you'll find LOTS.)
Seriously, even if all the other problems were resolved, e-books require an expensive, delicate, reader that doesn't have very good resolution. Even on a desktop system my eyes quickly tire if I'm reading dense text. This isn't too bad a defect there, as I'm continually switching from item to item, or from tutorial to the editor to the command screen. Lots of changes help reduce the effect. But when I come to a huge block of text my eyes glaze over...and that happens.
I can enjoy reading a book when I'm even too tired to play anything more challenging than solitaire on the computer. Why, then, would an e-book be a good choice.
If I'm really interested in something I'm reading, I can read it all the way into the shower, put it down while the water's running, dry off my hands, and pick it up to continue while drying the rest of me. How would an e-book reader fare if I treated it this way?
I frequently dump a few books into my backpack and throw that around as I move in a bus. Pick one to read, occasionally drop it onto the street or sidewalk. How would an e-book reader fare? Even if it continued to work, wouldn't the screen be damaged?
E-books don't seem ready technically. They are still inferior technical solutions to books. They are also inferior at a price-performance analysis. They are also inferior at a straight price analysis. Why would anyone want them? (To look "cool" is all I can think of, but look cool to who*?)
* I don't know whether that should be "who" or "whom", and since I'm a native speaker of English, I'm presuming that's a good piece of evidence that "whom" is obsolescent, and probably deprecated.
There are those who call Java a compiled language. It is, look at gcj (actually even there I think only a large subset of java is compiled, and a part ends up being interpreted [see gij]). I call Sun's java an interpreter, however. That many call it a compiler proves the efficacy of marketing.
Can't speak for him, but I used to use Red Hat, before the dropped without warning the Professional Edition. I've also tried SUSE. I always end up replacing it within a week. I don't have a clear answer of "why", basically it didn't "feel" right. Things were unreasonably slow at unpredictable times. And I wasn't really fond of YAST. (It's better than up2date, but that's *REALLY* faint praise). Not that I though Red Hat had a better approach, but YAST wasn't good enough to be a selling point.
Of course, I basically formed my opinions several years ago, and recently I've only looked at things occasionally, but I tried the recent free download of SUSE recently, and it stayed installed less than a week before I reused that partition to check out the new Ubuntu. OTOH, the recent release of CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise clone) didn't stay up any longer. In the case of CentOS it was that they didn't have the packages I wanted (forget which ones...Ruby? wxPython? Bigloo? something), but again I can't say WHY I didn't keep SUSE longer. I just didn't like it much. I'm not saying I disliked it, but I didn't actively like it. Now I've only got four spare partitions that I use for this kind of experimentation, and I'm keeping one of those at Debian Sarge for awhile yet (some applications haven't yet satisfactorally transitioned to Etch), so the number of distros I examine is limited, and any one has a limited amount of time to convince me that it's the one I should stick with, but that's my testimony.
If that proves Dell right to you, welcome to your satisfaction.
Most choices aren't obvious straightforward ones. If you oversimplify, you miss important features. There wasn't an assertion that they SHOULD have chosen SUSE rather than Red Hat, there was a question of why, and an list of a few reasons why the querent found it unobvious. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. (I'd also like the reasons, though I suspect that business reasons may have been more decisive than technical reasons...and in that case I wouldn't be interested in the details.)
I understand your point. Intentionally making it difficult to develop games for the Mac was one of Apple's weirder decisions. (I'm fairly sure they've changed their minds since then, but I've never encountered an official statement to that effect.)
I'm rather certain that "disingenuous" is a mild word to describe his statements now and his company's in the past. I don't have any current evidence, but I'd sooner believe a "Nigerian Vice President with an urgent request for your assistance".
Which is fine, I hope, if you end up stuck with a Dell. Personally I'd rather NOT have to jump through hoops to upgrade my system. Personally I rather not have to jump through hoops to INSTALL my system (at which point even looking up a web page is a bit dubious).
If Dell hadn't lied about supporting Linux in the past, I might take this promo piece at face value. As it is... I'll wait. Excuses are excuses, not actions. When they start selling Linux systems alongside MSWind systems, then I might consider them again. Perhaps. If I hear lots of different people, each of whom I respect, say nice things about them. (Currently I've heard lots of different people, many of whom I respect, say perfectly foul things about Dell computers.)
Red Hat *isn't interested* in the desktop market. They aren't clueless, for years they put out a perfectly decent, if a bit conservative, desktop distribution (just don't install the x.0 version).
Still, Ubuntu or Debian would be a better choice for a desktop computer...I've chosen Debian, but that was driven by Ubuntu's limited selection of packages. I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake up on one partition, and Ubuntu Breezy Badger up on another, but Debian Etch is what I use. It's not the default boot, but it's the one that I'm normally in.
Have you gone to their web page and tried to order one? Every time I did it wasn't offered. Now I'll grant you that the only times I checked were right after they had advertised that the systems were for sale, perhaps if I'd checked back a couple of weeks later they would be there. But even with the precise model number in hand the only thing I could order would have been an MSWind system, and I'm not about to do that.
Perhaps it's changed, but I'm no longer interested enough in Dell to check.
Dell doesn't have the Linux community as a potential customer because it's refused to sell to them, and lied about it.
I normally buy my distributions, and I have three times tried to order a Linux computer from Dell after they had advertised that they were available. In every case I ended up buying the computer elsewhere, because they weren't selling a computer with Linux (or they were charging more for the Linux computer than for the MSWind equivalent...lots more when you consider the difference in default accessories).
But this is the way that MOST interpreted languages have worked, back to the days of UCSD Pascal. Even prior to that I think that there were tokenized Basics. That's the way interpreters *usually* work, and calling them compilers is obscurantism. They have a compiler as a piece of them, but that's hardly the same thing. (For that matter, in Python, if you so choose, you can turn parse, compile, and execute into separate steps. You need to use library routines to accomplish this, but look under parser and "abstract syntax tree". [The error message handling could be improved, but there's rarely any need to do things this way.])
Remember that a large part of the resistance that people have to learning a computer language has to do with how difficult it was to learn the last one.
When it's difficult to learn to do something, one doesn't want to write off that investment. Do you still use a qwerty keyboard? So do I. But I'm well aware that other keyboards are easier and faster. If you press me, I'm likely to make up an excuse, but the real answer is I don't want to invest the time involved in relearning touch typing.
??? Can you say P.A.T.R.I.O.T.? Checks and balances? Can you say wiretaps without warrant? Checks and balances?
You call THIS an "OK" system? It's seriously broken.
For that matter, the entire justice system is seriously broken. Just look at the cost that IBM is paying to defend themselves from a lawsuit that is totally without merit. Yes, SCOX will eventually be put out of business, but that doesn't excuse the cost to IBM. And IBM can defend themselves. Consider the number of lawsuits "settled" because the defendant can't afford to seek justice. Consider the number of "plea bargains" made because it's too dangerous to attempt to prove ones innocence. Broken may be too charitable a word.
If we would *admit* that that was what we were doing, the problems would instantly become a lot simpler.
Personally, I've been an advocate of sintering the waste into glass, surrounding that with ceramic and then concrete (or possibly metal), and using the resulting cannisters as a heat source...but perhaps that would make it difficult to get at if we needed to.
I agree with that! AFAIK it's been consistently downhill ever since. (Mind you, I've "missed" the recent changes, since Office 2000. I wouldn't accept the EULA, and wouldn't tie myself to a system that required it.)
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Yah... and to me the fact that non-special users have sudo is a bit scary. I had presumed that this was only automatically granted to the first account created (and that good security would suggest that I create another account to use as my main account). To hear it repeatedly suggested that this isn't so is a bit scary. Even the first strikes me as insecure...though not drastically so.
I have Ubuntu installed (two versions in two partitions) and have been considering migrating to it if Etch didn't quickly improve (except that Ubuntu seems to have the same problems with networked printing to an HP PSC 2510. O, well, I can always boot into Sarge whenever I want to print.) This repeated assertion that all users are created with sudo privileges, however, disturbs me greatly. The first user is one thing, all users is something much more serious.
True. For Windows issues you turn in the exact opposite direction.
I've had good luck with both Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake WRT sound and video...of course I don't do anything very fancy.
OTOH, both have failed with printing to my networked HP PSC 2510. For that I still need to switch to my Sarge installation...or boot the Mephis live CD (I think that's the one).
OTGH, the real problem that I have with Ubuntu is package selection, even with Universe and Multiverse selected. So I'm using Etch as my main distribution, even though it ALSO has failed printing to my networked HP PSC 2510. I'd think it was the printer or the connection if I didn't have a Sarge installation that worked. This breakage happened sometime recently when the libraries were upgraded, as my original Etch installation worked at printing (or so I remember). And I don't even know which upgrade, because I don't print that often.
Do remember that some substantial number of copyrights in the kernel are held by Caldera (now tSCOg). Well, perhaps not substantial...I haven't counted. They were certainly thought important at one time.
Somehow I doubt that tSCOg would be amenable to a license modification...esp. if IBM wanted it. (And IBM holds a bunch of other copyrights...though I don't know if those are on the kernel. They may just be on file systems and utilities.)
True, standing would be a (frequently legitimate) ground. And you are correct, he would need to sue Linus (or the ODF). This is even *more* reason for Linus to be reluctant to change the kernel license.
Caution. IANAL, so this is only a layman's theory. Possibly he could also sue anyone else in the chain who redistributed his work. That they would have been acting in good faith would reduce damages to a pittance, but wouldn't prevent an injunction against further copyright infringement.
You don't NEED to assert a claim over the entire kernel to prevent your piece of it from being redistributed under a changed license. It suffices that you assert a claim over your own piece.
This cost was realized over a decade ago when Linus originally decided to not automatically allow "any later version" of the GPL to apply to the kernel. It hasn't gone away, and isn't likely to. At best the GPL3 will be compatible with the GPL2, and the pieces of the kernel that current contributors own the rights to can be relicensed. That will result in a kernel which is a mix of GPL2 and GPL3, which will be licensed under the more restrictive of whichever clause is under consideration (i.e., to redistribute the composite work will require agreeing to BOTH GPL2 AND GPL3).
Big hassle. If GPL2 suffices for what you want, it's simpler to just stick with the GPL2.
Partly. Another part is that the kernel *IS* under GPL version 2, and there is no provision for allowing it to be extended to a later version. This means that in order to relicense the kernel as a whole (rather than pieces of it) it would be required to get ALL the copyright holders to agree. Isn't going to happen.
Another part, of course, is that Linus has NEVER been philosophically committed to the GPL rather than to, say, the BSD. His choice of the GPL for Linux was pragmatic, based on the gcc & its libraries. So he really isn't personally interested in moving to a new GPL version...not unless he needs to.
So. He isn't interested, and it would be difficult or impossible anyway. And he REALLY isn't interested. What do you expect him to say? (Remember: He's also a good manager, and doesn't want to unnecessarily rile the troops.)
Convoluted? Public Domain? Not hardly. Companies have repeatedly bent when challenged over breaking the GPL. That's why it never (rarely) ends up in court. When it has gone to court, it has won, but going to court is expensive, and the Linux community has tried to avoid this.
Forbes is also one of the dingbats claiming that tSCOg has a good case. Do you need more evidence? (I don't, but Google is your friend..my memory says you'll find LOTS.)
Seriously, even if all the other problems were resolved, e-books require an expensive, delicate, reader that doesn't have very good resolution. Even on a desktop system my eyes quickly tire if I'm reading dense text. This isn't too bad a defect there, as I'm continually switching from item to item, or from tutorial to the editor to the command screen. Lots of changes help reduce the effect. But when I come to a huge block of text my eyes glaze over...and that happens.
I can enjoy reading a book when I'm even too tired to play anything more challenging than solitaire on the computer. Why, then, would an e-book be a good choice.
If I'm really interested in something I'm reading, I can read it all the way into the shower, put it down while the water's running, dry off my hands, and pick it up to continue while drying the rest of me. How would an e-book reader fare if I treated it this way?
I frequently dump a few books into my backpack and throw that around as I move in a bus. Pick one to read, occasionally drop it onto the street or sidewalk. How would an e-book reader fare? Even if it continued to work, wouldn't the screen be damaged?
E-books don't seem ready technically. They are still inferior technical solutions to books. They are also inferior at a price-performance analysis. They are also inferior at a straight price analysis. Why would anyone want them? (To look "cool" is all I can think of, but look cool to who*?)
* I don't know whether that should be "who" or "whom", and since I'm a native speaker of English, I'm presuming that's a good piece of evidence that "whom" is obsolescent, and probably deprecated.
There are those who call Java a compiled language. It is, look at gcj (actually even there I think only a large subset of java is compiled, and a part ends up being interpreted [see gij]). I call Sun's java an interpreter, however. That many call it a compiler proves the efficacy of marketing.
Can't speak for him, but I used to use Red Hat, before the dropped without warning the Professional Edition. I've also tried SUSE. I always end up replacing it within a week. I don't have a clear answer of "why", basically it didn't "feel" right. Things were unreasonably slow at unpredictable times. And I wasn't really fond of YAST. (It's better than up2date, but that's *REALLY* faint praise). Not that I though Red Hat had a better approach, but YAST wasn't good enough to be a selling point.
Of course, I basically formed my opinions several years ago, and recently I've only looked at things occasionally, but I tried the recent free download of SUSE recently, and it stayed installed less than a week before I reused that partition to check out the new Ubuntu. OTOH, the recent release of CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise clone) didn't stay up any longer. In the case of CentOS it was that they didn't have the packages I wanted (forget which ones...Ruby? wxPython? Bigloo? something), but again I can't say WHY I didn't keep SUSE longer. I just didn't like it much. I'm not saying I disliked it, but I didn't actively like it. Now I've only got four spare partitions that I use for this kind of experimentation, and I'm keeping one of those at Debian Sarge for awhile yet (some applications haven't yet satisfactorally transitioned to Etch), so the number of distros I examine is limited, and any one has a limited amount of time to convince me that it's the one I should stick with, but that's my testimony.
If that proves Dell right to you, welcome to your satisfaction.
Most choices aren't obvious straightforward ones. If you oversimplify, you miss important features. There wasn't an assertion that they SHOULD have chosen SUSE rather than Red Hat, there was a question of why, and an list of a few reasons why the querent found it unobvious. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. (I'd also like the reasons, though I suspect that business reasons may have been more decisive than technical reasons...and in that case I wouldn't be interested in the details.)
I understand your point. Intentionally making it difficult to develop games for the Mac was one of Apple's weirder decisions. (I'm fairly sure they've changed their minds since then, but I've never encountered an official statement to that effect.)
I'm rather certain that "disingenuous" is a mild word to describe his statements now and his company's in the past. I don't have any current evidence, but I'd sooner believe a "Nigerian Vice President with an urgent request for your assistance".
Considering what I've heard about their quality, "poor Dell" sounds exactly right.
Which is fine, I hope, if you end up stuck with a Dell. Personally I'd rather NOT have to jump through hoops to upgrade my system. Personally I rather not have to jump through hoops to INSTALL my system (at which point even looking up a web page is a bit dubious).
If Dell hadn't lied about supporting Linux in the past, I might take this promo piece at face value. As it is... I'll wait. Excuses are excuses, not actions. When they start selling Linux systems alongside MSWind systems, then I might consider them again. Perhaps. If I hear lots of different people, each of whom I respect, say nice things about them. (Currently I've heard lots of different people, many of whom I respect, say perfectly foul things about Dell computers.)
Red Hat *isn't interested* in the desktop market. They aren't clueless, for years they put out a perfectly decent, if a bit conservative, desktop distribution (just don't install the x.0 version).
Still, Ubuntu or Debian would be a better choice for a desktop computer...I've chosen Debian, but that was driven by Ubuntu's limited selection of packages. I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake up on one partition, and Ubuntu Breezy Badger up on another, but Debian Etch is what I use. It's not the default boot, but it's the one that I'm normally in.
Have you gone to their web page and tried to order one? Every time I did it wasn't offered. Now I'll grant you that the only times I checked were right after they had advertised that the systems were for sale, perhaps if I'd checked back a couple of weeks later they would be there. But even with the precise model number in hand the only thing I could order would have been an MSWind system, and I'm not about to do that.
Perhaps it's changed, but I'm no longer interested enough in Dell to check.
Dell doesn't have the Linux community as a potential customer because it's refused to sell to them, and lied about it.
I normally buy my distributions, and I have three times tried to order a Linux computer from Dell after they had advertised that they were available. In every case I ended up buying the computer elsewhere, because they weren't selling a computer with Linux (or they were charging more for the Linux computer than for the MSWind equivalent...lots more when you consider the difference in default accessories).
But this is the way that MOST interpreted languages have worked, back to the days of UCSD Pascal. Even prior to that I think that there were tokenized Basics. That's the way interpreters *usually* work, and calling them compilers is obscurantism. They have a compiler as a piece of them, but that's hardly the same thing. (For that matter, in Python, if you so choose, you can turn parse, compile, and execute into separate steps. You need to use library routines to accomplish this, but look under parser and "abstract syntax tree". [The error message handling could be improved, but there's rarely any need to do things this way.])
Remember that a large part of the resistance that people have to learning a computer language has to do with how difficult it was to learn the last one.
When it's difficult to learn to do something, one doesn't want to write off that investment. Do you still use a qwerty keyboard? So do I. But I'm well aware that other keyboards are easier and faster. If you press me, I'm likely to make up an excuse, but the real answer is I don't want to invest the time involved in relearning touch typing.
??? Can you say P.A.T.R.I.O.T.? Checks and balances? Can you say wiretaps without warrant? Checks and balances?
You call THIS an "OK" system? It's seriously broken.
For that matter, the entire justice system is seriously broken. Just look at the cost that IBM is paying to defend themselves from a lawsuit that is totally without merit. Yes, SCOX will eventually be put out of business, but that doesn't excuse the cost to IBM. And IBM can defend themselves. Consider the number of lawsuits "settled" because the defendant can't afford to seek justice. Consider the number of "plea bargains" made because it's too dangerous to attempt to prove ones innocence. Broken may be too charitable a word.
If you're kind, you'll pick someone out of state. (Bill Gates?)
If we would *admit* that that was what we were doing, the problems would instantly become a lot simpler.
Personally, I've been an advocate of sintering the waste into glass, surrounding that with ceramic and then concrete (or possibly metal), and using the resulting cannisters as a heat source...but perhaps that would make it difficult to get at if we needed to.
I agree with that! AFAIK it's been consistently downhill ever since. (Mind you, I've "missed" the recent changes, since Office 2000. I wouldn't accept the EULA, and wouldn't tie myself to a system that required it.)