The only family support I did last month was to help my 8 year old install the newest Mandrake 9.2 for the first time; 1 hour. What are all these complex hard to install desktop systems, virus's, popups, rogue mail clients executiing code, and other things I keep hearing about, all requiring this intensive support? I never seem to see them at home or at the office, where we also use free (libre) software. It sounds like I am missing a lot of fun.
From what I read, it seems that any vague set of facts can be sufficient for him to validate a past prediction. I suppose if Linus left Transmeta for OSDL this year rather than last, he would be able to have claimed his 'prediction' on Linux kernel development reorganization in 2004 had been met!
My only prediction is that at the start of next year he will again claim to be at least 70% correct. But there are some useful trends suggested that are worth considering. I now see why the start of the new year is always such a low moment in readership.
The only place I have seen any impact in the SCO garbage has been isolated individuals, such as a certain nameless contract officer in my state government, who use it to further reinforce their own existing prejudices or bias against using fs/os solutions in general. However, in the larger view, these are people that probably will never really change their bias regardless of if there had been a SCO or not, and the best one can hope for is that they are retired or replaced over time.
I've also had generally good experiances with using FreeBSD, sometimes in the role of a desktop system, sometimes as a server. Generally I do find it runs the same common applications at least a little faster on the same hardware (when refering to low-mid level pc hardware), kde being a good example of this. I also agree there are places where improvement is needed, where some hardware support is missing, and where some application choices do not exist. This will likely improve over time.
However, I don't think FreeBSD should be changed to meet any one individuals specific vision or such a narrow or specific objective. At best, it would seem to me, an approach like that would result in a fork (UserBSD?!).
I think the question that should be asked first is rather if FreeBSD meets the needs of it's existing community, which, in general terms, I suspect it does, and how it can do so better.
This is actually a falacy. What treacherous computing will do in this respect is prevent other third party applications from reading/writing/accessing your address book or accessing system files, requiring one to use only the trusted and specific applications of the original vendor. However, even today, many viruses and worms are propegated not through rogue executables but rather through flaws and exploits in existing applications (such as Microsoft outlook) and services (such as iis), and these exploitable applications, in their trusted form, would still have access to your data which would also be accessible to the virus and worm the application is permitting to run as part of it.
In the end, all that will be accomplished is that the users will be denied physical access to their own data. This prevents migration to and use of alternate products, prevents users from executing their own programs or third parties from supplying products unless they also have licensed and paid for certificates at the behest of the issuing authority, whomever that might be, and, as such, is actually a form of restraint of trade as well as a fundimental attack on software freedom zero. It does virtually nothing for preventing viruses and worms.
There have been recorded and documented misuse of the existing Patriot act. The most curious has been the now occassional use of "anti-terrorism" laws and provisions to prosecute common drug offenders. I am reminded that German facism also started with the prosecuting of the "unpopular" in society outside the scope of normal law.
I also remember that even in periods when normal constitutional protections still did exist intact in this country, they were major abuses by some. How soon we forget the bugging and domestic spying on Dr. King, or the Nixon plumbers engaged in domestic espionage against percieved political "enemies", in the press and elsewhere. Even under the existing Patriot act and certainly under these new extensions, these and other past outragous might well now be technically "legal".
The consitution exists in it's limited form to protect citizens from the potential danger of their own government, both as understood from direct experiance (of prior British rule), and of potential and percieved dangers and risks to liberty that were only guessed at at that time.
The framers of the contitution were generally pessimists, for they thought constitutionally protected freedoms would only last at most a few generations before there would be need to start over...but while perhaps wrong on time scale, on this, like so many other things, they may yet, unfortunately, be proven correct in time.
When software is used to impliment a matter of law, the public must have an absolute right and need to review such software, even before one speaks of issues of software freedom. We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in this country, ie, laws that effect the public in general, and that the public is not permitted to know or examine, but yet will be held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force. Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, we now permit machinary with no public means of review to impliment laws, such as voting. No democracy can exist where voting is a secret or unaccountable process to the public that participates in it.
Re:The ITU made a good job of the phone system, no
on
Imagine A UN-Run Internet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I must assume this was a sarcastic post. The ITU is perhaps one of the most unfit organizations for this or even it's own purpose that exists today. Basically, it is composed of representitives from different countries, true; however, unlike the IETF, for example, they don't nessisary represent true "experts" in their chosen field. For example, US representation in the ITU is appointed by the State Department.
The ITU has a history of mandating REQUIRED international standards that include patented (and without royalty free/non-rand requirements...). Nor is their standards formation promotion open to the public, nor even the resulting standards available except at (sometimes considerable) cost.
Last night I received notification from the director of MERIT at Maastricht that they had withdrawn participation from the conference. Prof. Soete also indicated that this decision was taken in "consultation" with the European Commision. However, this neither indicates whether it was the EC choice to withdraw, or that MERIT for other reasons choose to no longer sponser or act as an intermediary. In the latter case, perhaps the EC would find a different conduit for funding.
Originally I had been asked to participate at this conference primarely to talk about recent work in developing free software solutions built around GNU Bayonne to enable e-government access for the blind. I knew they were having some type of difficulty with sponsorship and funding. I think it is unfortunate this happened, but I have seen no facts to indicate what precisely had gone wrong, although I am naturally curious.
...news at 11. Well, at least that was my initial reaction. I did not find it unexpected since they looked like they were getting themselves all worked up to sue somebody, although the timing and choice of target was most unexpected by me.
The one real danger I see in this suit is that it tries to assert the idea of intellectual contamination, that seeing and using one piece of source from one entity contaminates what those engineers later do in another. Taken into other contexts and as a precidence, it could endanger the occupation and very basic freedom and individual dignity of any engineer anywhere.
There is a fundimental error in the statement "balance of our rights against the rights of content owners" which often are used to justify things like digital restriction management.
First, there is NO SUCH RIGHTS by so called "content owners" to be balanced against the very real rights of individuals. The constitution offers an optional privilege in article I that can be granted or revoked at the whim of congress, so long as it serves the public interest. Priviledges have no "owner" the way real property does.
One cannot balance off this limited privledge with the very real rights enumerated in the first and fourth ammendments that are given to individuals, and their very real application under fair use, as if they are equals.
Just because we currently have laws that treat ideas as property does not in fact make it property. At one time in this country we also had laws that claimed people could be legally treated as property, but this did not make that any more ethically right to do or true either. Fortunately back then we had people of good sense and concous to protest and overturn that lunacy, and hopefully we will be able to do the same against those that try to treat ideas as if it were property as well. Intellectual slavery is also abhorent and unnatural.
Most things that are referred to as "EULA"'s are in fact commercial contracts and often attempt to restrict the way a given piece of software can be used by the recipient through the language of common contract law.
While I cannot offer any thoughts on most of the licenses the OSI may choose to endorse, the GPL operates using copyright law rather than contract law, and only comes in effect when distributing software; indeed, it is the only legal instrument available to permit one even to (re)distribute a GPL'd package since otherwise copyright law would prevent you from doing this.
Since no actual ownership changes hands and no contract is formed between the distributor and the receiver governing the continued use of the software that would require their further assent, I do not believe click-thru license questions even apply to the GPL.
There our those who say our former ambassador (Hamilton has, from I understand, been recently replaced) has an obligation to promote legitimate interests of the US government and industry.
However, it is very wrong for our government to promote the interests of any single American company or small group of companies against the interests of other American companies, and this is part of what Mr. Hamilton did so very wrong. Should the government similarly promote specific companies against their competitors in the marketplace here? If so this is neither capitalism nor a free market.
The fact is that many American companies could well have benefited from the proposed changes in Peruvian procurement law, and it is those interests, which must be held of equal value by a fair and impartial government, that Mr. Hamilton has betrayed.
Finally, what is our interest in Peru? Is it to promote the long term goals of helping a stanble civil democratic society to form, or is it to create a chatel state thru colonial economics? Surely if it is the former, assisting in the creation of a free and open software market in Peru must be our national interest and the free software bill the Peruvians had crafted meets this goal admirably well.
When I first heard about many of the recent actions of our previous Ambassador, I was deeply dissapointed. I hope his replacement is better able to serve the long term needs and interests of the American public, rather than the interests of a single corporate entity as his predeccesor had done.
I have just returned from Brasil (Internacional Forum Software Livre 2002, in Porto Alegre) where I had spoken at some length, with the help of different volunteer translators, with one of the people from "GNU Peru" involved in getting the original Peruvian Free Software bill drafted as well as having had read to me the original bill which unfortunately is only available in Spanish currently.
My understanding, although I am not sure if this is correct (being a second hand account, and then translated), is that when the Peruvian director for Microsoft Corporation wrote their original letter in response to this bill, that the people from "GNU Peru" had contacted Richard for additional help. Richard had suggested someone he knew in Argentina who I gathered then helped the Senator and his staff with some of the technical language in drafting this response. I do not know who this other person is, but I would personally suggest him (and the Peruvian Senator) for this year's FSF free software award if I did.
Due to some unusual circumstances, I had an oppertunity to speak before a multi-agency federal conference, held at the National Science Foundation last month. It was an interesting group as it included some fairly senior level people from several agencies.
This conference was not announced for until the Friday before, and yet was fairly well attended, for reasons that became appearent fairly appearent even by the OPEN remarks made by the by some.
To understand the context of those remarks, one must understand I have had some experiance in federal contracting in the past. Occasionally federal employees would complain about certain vendors entirely in private, and certainly some vendors achieved some level of dislike and disgust in the past, particularly telecomm vendors.
However, never before had I been in a room with federal employees showing such open and complete contempt for a given vendor. The reason became clear when one of them spoke openly of how reps of this particular vendor had targetted her and the process and methods used to harrass her and other federal employees who would consider to openly choose other products. That this would happen in front of outsiders and also in front of some senior policy people, was a complete shock to me.
To have one such person in any completely random meeting of federal employees that this might happen to would be surprising. To have this same circumstances explained to me by others, some later in private, and some in other venues since that I had known in the past because I became curious and called some people I used to know, is statistically mind boggling.
The vendor in question would use a very simple method of intimidation to those that it's reps identified. The next time they would speak to a given person they would make it clear they are watching them and are reporting any inappropriate activity to their superior, the threat implied and clear. They would state specific complaints, whether valid or not, and then that employee would find his/her manager asking about these same things a few weeks later.
Never in all my years dealing with federal employees had I ever before, personally, or even second hand, heard of ANY vendor doing anything like this, let alone on the scale and scope required for people from random agencies to have much the same story to tell. To say I was and still am very angry is an understatement.
Out of this it was clear also a grave miscalculation has occured. It became clear that for every person so harrassed, perhaps 10 others would become aware it happened, and all 11 would become rightly angry. There is a groundswell of support for free software in the fed, and really for ANY other software, and this vendor has created it!
Other things came out of this conference that were also interesting. Certainly there are some who "get" free software, who understands what it means and could do for them, who would prefer it. Certainly it was also true that there were others who would do anything to never have to purchase, install, or deploy any product ever made by such a vendor ever again. I would love to talk more about each these things, and particularly about those who understood free software.
The reaction of the more senior level agency people was most ammusing of all. For years these people had "friends" who would try to help them with their it needs. These vendor "friends" were of course paid to be such a "friend" to a key agency person, what some might call a "buddy" in the parlance of that particular vendor. For years, they would tell these people free software was not usable, would describe editing and word processing as or in terms of emacs and vi, etc.
To show these people gnome, kde, abiWord, open office, etc, this was very much an eye opening experiance for many of these senior agency people.
Clearly those that would be the enemies of free (and open source) software depend on ignore and terror to sell their products. Clearly we must respond with education, enlightenment, and make it clear they alone are the terrorists.
GNU Common C++ certainly does abstract network I/O (sockets) as well as threads, serial I/O, XML parsing, and logging. There is also a supplimental RTP stack for it (ccRTP). It compiles native under win32 as well as under posix targets. It recently has had a very extensive rewrite, and is still recovering from that.
Bayonne is part of the larger GNU Telephony project (GNUCOMM) (as well as being part of GNU Enterprise). In GNUCOMM there are several projects underway to address deployment of VoIP gateways specifically, including Troll. Troll is a rump Bayonne server which just includes the Bayonne driver stack, a GNU ccRTP stack for streaming, and session manager plugins, including one for use with the oSIP package.
OpenH323 is another project which attempts to be a standards compliant H323 implimentation and also includes interfaces for some telephony devices to build gateways as well as H323 user agents and proxy servers.
> Why would you name Telecom software after a crappy > city in New Jersey?
Actually it's the bridge, not the city. Long ago we decided to use a bridge name, but what bridge? Well, there is the Golden Gate bridge, but many software projects seem to use this. The Brooklyn bridge had some interesting connotations. There was that other very famous bridge, up in washington state, but we felt that with it's propensity for self distruction it was best left for use by a local proprietary vendor. So that left the Bayonne bridge...
A gcc front end and back end is certainly a part of the goal of DotGNU. This means both a C# front end that can generate native binaries like was done for Java, as well as potentially a back end tool chain that can generate common runtime out of any gcc supported language.
What this does not mean is a gcc compiler that can parse source secret binaries into native code (such as bytecode) for that would allow one to create source secret applications compiled thru gcc.
While I do not recall anything specific in the default RFC's for RTP that cover this, I do recall that the Robust Audio Tool (rat) actually does have an option to send redundent audio packets in a different encoding format. However, I believe the redundent path is targetted at the same port number and is mixed in the same RTP packet stream.
Copyright is a TEMPORARY priviledge granted to encourage people to publish/produce works that will eventually become fully free to the public at large. While copyright goes back to english common law which has less to say on questions of freedom, this much is cleary stated by both Artile I of the US constitution, and as clearified a little bit in the writing of Madison in the Federalist papers, the idea of copyright being a priviledge granted temporarily in exchange for and to encourage full public availablility certainly is a key provision and aspect of virtually every copyright act passed by congress of historic note prior to the DMCA.
I do not believe works that are provided in protected forms should even properly constitute works subject to or that should benifit from copyright protection. Clearly this was never intended, and access controls are by their very nature a restriction of the use of the work that denegrates the purpose of copyright as envisioned to "promote useful arts".
Furthermore a "protected work" does not expire, since the protections on it never expire, and hence, it cannot ever go into the publics hands as specifically required by copyright and stated in article I itself; copyright is a temporary priviledge only, but protected works cannot unprotect themselves even if their theoretical copyright "expires".
Copyright does imply a fairly broad priviledge for the period it is in effect, and some of this also can conflict with the publics right to a work, which is clearly a means test for copyright itself, while under copyright protection. Fair use laws exist in part to balance these potentially conflicting goals by specifically limiting rights of a published and copyrighted work.
Clearly I do not believe that a "protected work" (or secret work, like say proprietary software) should enjoy or deserve what should only be a temporary priviledge of copyright at the public's expense. In this respect I do not believe what the copyright office chose to state is either ethical or constitutional, nor does it serve the publics interest for which it is ulimately required to uphold.
QNX, prounced I believe "QNIX", was originally created by Dan Hilderbrant back in the very early 80's and first ran on 8086 and 286 class machines. It was formed into Quantum Systems, a Canadian company, and was originally named "QNIX" until AT&T threatened to sue (which is why I believe that remains the correct pronounciation).
QN(i)X, unlike the name suggests, has no relationship to, code in common with, or even many concepts similar to UNIX systems. It was from the start a fully distributed and true realtime microkernel system using a common message passing architecture applied both locally and over a LAN whereby most services were user mode applications, including file systems and device drivers. In a number of ways QNX achieved much of what Plan 9 had hoped to, some 20 years earlier, and perhaps that is the most comperable system.
While there were many actually innovate ideas first used widely in QNX, unfortunately it has always been and remains essentially a proprietary system,and this seems both to have limited it's growth, and it's future potential substancially.
I do understand your sentiment and concern. By the way, I have tried Hercules and must say it does bring back some memories. My concern is similar in that I currently maintain several large scale C++ projects; Common C++, Bayonne, ccaudio, ccscript, and goose on an interum basis, all of which are generally made available in some RPM form for user convenience as well as the original tarball.
This suggests there is now a third "incompatible" C++ binary name mangling format that might be out there, sitting between 2.95 and 3.0 C++ "nervana". I really do not wish to build or maintain multiple RPM binaries for each distribution or to have to figure out which RPMS work with which distribution, let alone worry about which distributions suddenly can or cannot compile my code by making an oddball gcc snapshot widely deployed. That being said, I think it is a very bad precident.
I have lived with 2.95 and think they could have for this redhat release and should have just called it 6.3, since a new release will still be needed for true 2.4 kernel support, gcc 3.0, etc, and that rather than what I have seen deserves a major release. In fact most of the other vendors seem to have settled on 2.95 for the moment, warts and all.
Slashdot Mirror
The only family support I did last month was to help my 8 year old install the newest Mandrake 9.2 for the first time; 1 hour. What are all these complex hard to install desktop systems, virus's, popups, rogue mail clients executiing code, and other things I keep hearing about, all requiring this intensive support? I never seem to see them at home or at the office, where we also use free (libre) software. It sounds like I am missing a lot of fun.
From what I read, it seems that any vague set of facts can be sufficient for him to validate a past prediction. I suppose if Linus left Transmeta for OSDL this year rather than last, he would be able to have claimed his 'prediction' on Linux kernel development reorganization in 2004 had been met!
My only prediction is that at the start of next year he will again claim to be at least 70% correct. But there are some useful trends suggested that are worth considering. I now see why the start of the new year is always such a low moment in readership.
The only place I have seen any impact in the SCO garbage has been isolated individuals, such as a certain nameless contract officer in my state government, who use it to further reinforce their own existing prejudices or bias against using fs/os solutions in general. However, in the larger view, these are people that probably will never really change their bias regardless of if there had been a SCO or not, and the best one can hope for is that they are retired or replaced over time.
Psst. Here is the secret. It's called freedom. If they offered real software freedom, they too would be able to produce world class software.
I've also had generally good experiances with using FreeBSD, sometimes in the role of a desktop system, sometimes as a server. Generally I do find it runs the same common applications at least a little faster on the same hardware (when refering to low-mid level pc hardware), kde being a good example of this. I also agree there are places where improvement is needed, where some hardware support is missing, and where some application choices do not exist. This will likely improve over time.
However, I don't think FreeBSD should be changed to meet any one individuals specific vision or such a narrow or specific objective. At best, it would seem to me, an approach like that would result in a fork (UserBSD?!).
I think the question that should be asked first is rather if FreeBSD meets the needs of it's existing community, which, in general terms, I suspect it does, and how it can do so better.
The difference between voting machines and slot machines is that with voting machines you are almost always gaurenteed to get a row of lemons!
This is actually a falacy. What treacherous computing will do in this respect is prevent other third party applications from reading/writing/accessing your address book or accessing system files, requiring one to use only the trusted and specific applications of the original vendor. However, even today, many viruses and worms are propegated not through rogue executables but rather through flaws and exploits in existing applications (such as Microsoft outlook) and services (such as iis), and these exploitable applications, in their trusted form, would still have access to your data which would also be accessible to the virus and worm the application is permitting to run as part of it.
In the end, all that will be accomplished is that the users will be denied physical access to their own data. This prevents migration to and use of alternate products, prevents users from executing their own programs or third parties from supplying products unless they also have licensed and paid for certificates at the behest of the issuing authority, whomever that might be, and, as such, is actually a form of restraint of trade as well as a fundimental attack on software freedom zero. It does virtually nothing for preventing viruses and worms.
There have been recorded and documented misuse of the existing Patriot act. The most curious has been the now occassional use of "anti-terrorism" laws and provisions to prosecute common drug offenders. I am reminded that German facism also started with the prosecuting of the "unpopular" in society outside the scope of normal law.
I also remember that even in periods when normal constitutional protections still did exist intact in this country, they were major abuses by some. How soon we forget the bugging and domestic spying on Dr. King, or the Nixon plumbers engaged in domestic espionage against percieved political "enemies", in the press and elsewhere. Even under the existing Patriot act and certainly under these new extensions, these and other past outragous might well now be technically "legal".
The consitution exists in it's limited form to protect citizens from the potential danger of their own government, both as understood from direct experiance (of prior British rule), and of potential and percieved dangers and risks to liberty that were only guessed at at that time.
The framers of the contitution were generally pessimists, for they thought constitutionally protected freedoms would only last at most a few generations before there would be need to start over...but while perhaps wrong on time scale, on this, like so many other things, they may yet, unfortunately, be proven correct in time.
When software is used to impliment a matter of law, the public must have an absolute right and need to review such software, even before one speaks of issues of software freedom. We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in this country, ie, laws that effect the public in general, and that the public is not permitted to know or examine, but yet will be held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force. Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, we now permit machinary with no public means of review to impliment laws, such as voting. No democracy can exist where voting is a secret or unaccountable process to the public that participates in it.
I must assume this was a sarcastic post. The ITU is perhaps one of the most unfit organizations for this or even it's own purpose that exists today. Basically, it is composed of representitives from different countries, true; however, unlike the IETF, for example, they don't nessisary represent true "experts" in their chosen field. For example, US representation in the ITU is appointed by the State Department.
The ITU has a history of mandating REQUIRED international standards that include patented (and without royalty free/non-rand requirements...). Nor is their standards formation promotion open to the public, nor even the resulting standards available except at (sometimes considerable) cost.
To the ITU? No thank you...
Last night I received notification from the director of MERIT at Maastricht that they had withdrawn participation from the conference. Prof. Soete also indicated that this decision was taken in "consultation" with the European Commision. However, this neither indicates whether it was the EC choice to withdraw, or that MERIT for other reasons choose to no longer sponser or act as an intermediary. In the latter case, perhaps the EC would find a different conduit for funding.
Originally I had been asked to participate at this conference primarely to talk about recent work in developing free software solutions built around GNU Bayonne to enable e-government access for the blind. I knew they were having some type of difficulty with sponsorship and funding. I think it is unfortunate this happened, but I have seen no facts to indicate what precisely had gone wrong, although I am naturally curious.
David
...news at 11. Well, at least that was my initial reaction. I did not find it unexpected since they looked like they were getting themselves all worked up to sue somebody, although the timing and choice of target was most unexpected by me.
The one real danger I see in this suit is that it tries to assert the idea of intellectual contamination, that seeing and using one piece of source from one entity contaminates what those engineers later do in another. Taken into other contexts and as a precidence, it could endanger the occupation and very basic freedom and individual dignity of any engineer anywhere.
There is a fundimental error in the statement "balance of our rights against the rights of content owners" which often are used to justify things like digital restriction management.
First, there is NO SUCH RIGHTS by so called "content owners" to be balanced against the very real rights of individuals. The constitution offers an optional privilege in article I that can be granted or revoked at the whim of congress, so long as it serves the public interest. Priviledges have no "owner" the way real property does.
One cannot balance off this limited privledge with the very real rights enumerated in the first and fourth ammendments that are given to individuals, and their very real application under fair use, as if they are equals.
Just because we currently have laws that treat ideas as property does not in fact make it property. At one time in this country we also had laws that claimed people could be legally treated as property, but this did not make that any more ethically right to do or true either. Fortunately back then we had people of good sense and concous to protest and overturn that lunacy, and hopefully we will be able to do the same against those that try to treat ideas as if it were property as well. Intellectual slavery is also abhorent and unnatural.
Most things that are referred to as "EULA"'s are in fact commercial contracts and often attempt to restrict the way a given piece of software can be used by the recipient through the language of common contract law.
While I cannot offer any thoughts on most of the licenses the OSI may choose to endorse, the GPL operates using copyright law rather than contract law, and only comes in effect when distributing software; indeed, it is the only legal instrument available to permit one even to (re)distribute a GPL'd package since otherwise copyright law would prevent you from doing this.
Since no actual ownership changes hands and no contract is formed between the distributor and the receiver governing the continued use of the software that would require their further assent, I do not believe click-thru license questions even apply to the GPL.
There our those who say our former ambassador (Hamilton has, from I understand, been recently replaced) has an obligation to promote legitimate interests of the US government and industry.
However, it is very wrong for our government to promote the interests of any single American company or small group of companies against the interests of other American companies, and this is part of what Mr. Hamilton did so very wrong. Should the government similarly promote specific companies against their competitors in the marketplace here? If so this is neither capitalism nor a free market.
The fact is that many American companies could well have benefited from the proposed changes in Peruvian procurement law, and it is those interests, which must be held of equal value by a fair and impartial government, that Mr. Hamilton has betrayed.
Finally, what is our interest in Peru? Is it to promote the long term goals of helping a stanble civil democratic society to form, or is it to create a chatel state thru colonial economics? Surely if it is the former, assisting in the creation of a free and open software market in Peru must be our national interest and the free software bill the Peruvians had crafted meets this goal admirably well.
When I first heard about many of the recent actions of our previous Ambassador, I was deeply dissapointed. I hope his replacement is better able to serve the long term needs and interests of the American public, rather than the interests of a single corporate entity as his predeccesor had done.
David Sugar
I have just returned from Brasil (Internacional Forum Software Livre 2002, in Porto Alegre) where I had spoken at some length, with the help of different volunteer translators, with one of the people from "GNU Peru" involved in getting the original Peruvian Free Software bill drafted as well as having had read to me the original bill which unfortunately is only available in Spanish currently.
My understanding, although I am not sure if this is correct (being a second hand account, and then translated), is that when the Peruvian director for Microsoft Corporation wrote their original letter in response to this bill, that the people from "GNU Peru" had contacted Richard for additional help. Richard had suggested someone he knew in Argentina who I gathered then helped the Senator and his staff with some of the technical language in drafting this response. I do not know who this other person is, but I would personally suggest him (and the Peruvian Senator) for this year's FSF free software award if I did.
Due to some unusual circumstances, I had an oppertunity to speak before a multi-agency federal conference, held at the National Science Foundation last month. It was an interesting group as it included some fairly senior level people from several agencies.
This conference was not announced for until the Friday before, and yet was fairly well attended, for reasons that became appearent fairly appearent even by the OPEN remarks made by the by some.
To understand the context of those remarks, one must understand I have had some experiance in federal contracting in the past. Occasionally federal employees would complain about certain vendors entirely in private, and certainly some vendors achieved some level of dislike and disgust in the past, particularly telecomm vendors.
However, never before had I been in a room with federal employees showing such open and complete contempt for a given vendor. The reason became clear when one of them spoke openly of how reps of this particular vendor had targetted her and the process and methods used to harrass her and other federal employees who would consider to openly choose other products. That this would happen in front of outsiders and also in front of some senior policy people, was a complete shock to me.
To have one such person in any completely random meeting of federal employees that this might happen to would be surprising. To have this same circumstances explained to me by others, some later in private, and some in other venues since that I had known in the past because I became curious and called some people I used to know, is statistically mind boggling.
The vendor in question would use a very simple method of intimidation to those that it's reps identified. The next time they would speak to a given person they would make it clear they are watching them and are reporting any inappropriate activity to their superior, the threat implied and clear. They would state specific complaints, whether valid or not, and then that employee would find his/her manager asking about these same things a few weeks later.
Never in all my years dealing with federal employees had I ever before, personally, or even second hand, heard of ANY vendor doing anything like this, let alone on the scale and scope required for people from random agencies to have much the same story to tell. To say I was and still am very angry is an understatement.
Out of this it was clear also a grave miscalculation has occured. It became clear that for every person so harrassed, perhaps 10 others would become aware it happened, and all 11 would become rightly angry. There is a groundswell of support for free software in the fed, and really for ANY other software, and this vendor has created it!
Other things came out of this conference that were also interesting. Certainly there are some who "get" free software, who understands what it means and could do for them, who would prefer it. Certainly it was also true that there were others who would do anything to never have to purchase, install, or deploy any product ever made by such a vendor ever again. I would love to talk more about each these things, and particularly about those who understood free software.
The reaction of the more senior level agency people was most ammusing of all. For years these people had "friends" who would try to help them with their it needs. These vendor "friends" were of course paid to be such a "friend" to a key agency person, what some might call a "buddy" in the parlance of that particular vendor. For years, they would tell these people free software was not usable, would describe editing and word processing as or in terms of emacs and vi, etc.
To show these people gnome, kde, abiWord, open office, etc, this was very much an eye opening experiance for many of these senior agency people.
Clearly those that would be the enemies of free (and open source) software depend on ignore and terror to sell their products. Clearly we must respond with education, enlightenment, and make it clear they alone are the terrorists.
David
GNU Common C++ certainly does abstract network I/O (sockets) as well as threads, serial I/O, XML parsing, and logging. There is also a supplimental RTP stack for it (ccRTP). It compiles native under win32 as well as under posix targets. It recently has had a very extensive rewrite, and is still recovering from that.
Bayonne is part of the larger GNU Telephony project (GNUCOMM) (as well as being part of GNU Enterprise). In GNUCOMM there are several projects underway to address deployment of VoIP gateways specifically, including Troll. Troll is a rump Bayonne server which just includes the Bayonne driver stack, a GNU ccRTP stack for streaming, and session manager plugins, including one for use with the oSIP package.
OpenH323 is another project which attempts to be a standards compliant H323 implimentation and also includes interfaces for some telephony devices to build gateways as well as H323 user agents and proxy servers.
> Why would you name Telecom software after a crappy > city in New Jersey?
Actually it's the bridge, not the city. Long ago we decided to use a bridge name, but what bridge? Well, there is the Golden Gate bridge, but many software projects seem to use this. The Brooklyn bridge had some interesting connotations. There was that other very famous bridge, up in washington state, but we felt that with it's propensity for self distruction it was best left for use by a local proprietary vendor. So that left the Bayonne bridge...
A gcc front end and back end is certainly a part of the goal of DotGNU. This means both a C# front end that can generate native binaries like was done for Java, as well as potentially a back end tool chain that can generate common runtime out of any gcc supported language.
What this does not mean is a gcc compiler that can parse source secret binaries into native code (such as bytecode) for that would allow one to create source secret applications compiled thru gcc.
While I do not recall anything specific in the default RFC's for RTP that cover this, I do recall that the Robust Audio Tool (rat) actually does have an option to send redundent audio packets in a different encoding format. However, I believe the redundent path is targetted at the same port number and is mixed in the same RTP packet stream.
Copyright is a TEMPORARY priviledge granted to encourage people to publish/produce works that will eventually become fully free to the public at large. While copyright goes back to english common law which has less to say on questions of freedom, this much is cleary stated by both Artile I of the US constitution, and as clearified a little bit in the writing of Madison in the Federalist papers, the idea of copyright being a priviledge granted temporarily in exchange for and to encourage full public availablility certainly is a key provision and aspect of virtually every copyright act passed by congress of historic note prior to the DMCA.
I do not believe works that are provided in protected forms should even properly constitute works subject to or that should benifit from copyright protection. Clearly this was never intended, and access controls are by their very nature a restriction of the use of the work that denegrates the purpose of copyright as envisioned to "promote useful arts".
Furthermore a "protected work" does not expire, since the protections on it never expire, and hence, it cannot ever go into the publics hands as specifically required by copyright and stated in article I itself; copyright is a temporary priviledge only, but protected works cannot unprotect themselves even if their theoretical copyright "expires".
Copyright does imply a fairly broad priviledge for the period it is in effect, and some of this also can conflict with the publics right to a work, which is clearly a means test for copyright itself, while under copyright protection. Fair use laws exist in part to balance these potentially conflicting goals by specifically limiting rights of a published and copyrighted work.
Clearly I do not believe that a "protected work" (or secret work, like say proprietary software) should enjoy or deserve what should only be a temporary priviledge of copyright at the public's expense. In this respect I do not believe what the copyright office chose to state is either ethical or constitutional, nor does it serve the publics interest for which it is ulimately required to uphold.
QNX, prounced I believe "QNIX", was originally created by Dan Hilderbrant back in the very early 80's and first ran on 8086 and 286 class machines. It was formed into Quantum Systems, a Canadian company, and was originally named "QNIX" until AT&T threatened to sue (which is why I believe that remains the correct pronounciation).
QN(i)X, unlike the name suggests, has no relationship to, code in common with, or even many concepts similar to UNIX systems. It was from the start a fully distributed and true realtime microkernel system using a common message passing architecture applied both locally and over a LAN whereby most services were user mode applications, including file systems and device drivers. In a number of ways QNX achieved much of what Plan 9 had hoped to, some 20 years earlier, and perhaps that is the most comperable system.
While there were many actually innovate ideas first used widely in QNX, unfortunately it has always been and remains essentially a proprietary system,and this seems both to have limited it's growth, and it's future potential substancially.
I do understand your sentiment and concern. By the way, I have tried Hercules and must say it does bring back some memories. My concern is similar in that I currently maintain several large scale C++ projects; Common C++, Bayonne, ccaudio, ccscript, and goose on an interum basis, all of which are generally made available in some RPM form for user convenience as well as the original tarball.
This suggests there is now a third "incompatible" C++ binary name mangling format that might be out there, sitting between 2.95 and 3.0 C++ "nervana". I really do not wish to build or maintain multiple RPM binaries for each distribution or to have to figure out which RPMS work with which distribution, let alone worry about which distributions suddenly can or cannot compile my code by making an oddball gcc snapshot widely deployed. That being said, I think it is a very bad precident.
I have lived with 2.95 and think they could have for this redhat release and should have just called it 6.3, since a new release will still be needed for true 2.4 kernel support, gcc 3.0, etc, and that rather than what I have seen deserves a major release. In fact most of the other vendors seem to have settled on 2.95 for the moment, warts and all.