You can think of this as your own colo system if you like - you get root access. The overall system is using IBM's z/VM operating system to carve the system up into thousands of smaller systems, and to manage their interactions. Think "VMWare", but better - they get the idea from IBM. z/VM and its precursors have been doing this since 1967 - they've had time to work out the kinks.
Ask yourself why IBM would do something like this.
For the sake of the Linux community? Hardly.
Obviously you're not on the mailing list where the setup for this system was discussed. You've got it all wrong - the reason is exactly to do something good for the Linux community. The idea was proposed by a non-IBMer in the Linux/390 community, and nursed along by a crew of folks outside and inside IBM, more than a few at the lowest levels.
This isn't one of those "the suits want to look good" ideas.
If you read the ZDNet article before it vanished (I guess it got slashdotted), Perens was quoted as saying that he planned "to put them on the spot". Nobody said anything about asking, Perens is being reported as making demands.
VM.. a proprietary closed source operating system with large license fees.
Costly, sure, but not by S/390 standards. Closed source, hardly. The IBM VM development group has provided source code for most of their system continuously since 1967. In the early 1980s, IBM entered the dark days of their Object Code Only policy, under which much source code was withdrawn. But since the early 1990s, all that code and almost everything else that hadn't been delivered has been released to the customers. These days, the so-called open source parts of VM are the largest parts IBM doesn't provide source for, and that's because they're forbidden to do so by the original authors (e.g. DCE, Java).
Next time, keep your opinions to yourself if you don't know the facts.
MAC != Crypto - Go read the Orange Book!
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 1
If things are so bad for NSA officials to keep tabs on terrorists and the
way they commit digital crimes in association with their acts, then why
would they release an OS that could further help these terrorists hide/secure their data.
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is one of the requirements of a B1-secure ("Labeled Security Protection") system under the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria book originally published by NCSC way back in 1983 (the so-called Orange Book). None of the TCSEC security ratings (C2, B1, B2, etc.) mention cryptography. I've seen B1 and even B2 systems (rare though they may be), none of which had encrypted filesystems. Sure, most systems have an encryption capability, but so did Bell Labs Unix - the crypt command. Crypto ain't MAC, and TCSEC don't care 'bout no crypto. The two are orthoganal.
TCSEC is all about isolation and protection - about ensuring that access to data and information is restricted according to clearly defined rules and that information cannot be "leaked" from one security zone to another. What the NSA has produced in Linux SE is a variant of Linux that is harder to crack, even from the inside. Cryptography has nothing to do with that. But that doesn't make Linux SE bad - I'd love a less-crackable Linux, even though I personally despise living under MAC restrictions.
Under GPL, don't they have to release the source code?
Nope. What they do have to do is make the source available to anyone they give binaries to. This idea that "they have to release mods to GPL'ed code" is the most common misconception about the GPL. Anyone is within their rights to modify a GPLed program and withold the source mods, so long as they also don't share the binaries. So if all the NSA wanted to do was to implement MAC for Linux for their own (and other USGov) use, they could have kept the changes behind the "it's classified" wall.
However, we have no control over what a GPL++ might happen to say. What if RMS sells out (yeah, sure)? What happens after he dies? What happens if someone else takes over the FSF?
That's an interesting topic. Stallman, of course, would never sell out. Monomaniacs rarely reverse their positions without extensive treatment and lots of maintenance pharmaceuticals. But the FSF could be taken over in a heartbeat. One good lawsuit loss and it would be bankrupt, with its assets attached by the victor to pay the judgement. Don't laugh, that's how the Church of Scientology became the proprietor of the Cult Awareness Network. CAN became a pro-cult website that attacked its former anti-cult stance.
The FSF advocates authors assigning their copyrights to it, in part because there's some reason to believe that the GPL might not be valid without the assignment, and in part because it allows the FSF to file suit for copyright infringement when someone violates the GPL. But that also gives the FSF assets that could be attached.
Wouldn't it just suck if Microsoft or Sun suddenly owned the copyrights to large volumes of supposedly-free software?
2) This strikes me as an important point. What deja.com is selling is not the rights to the posts, or the posts themselves, but the work that they put into archiving the posts, which is considerable. [...] So, while you may have put a lot of effort into writing that post for alt.silly.rantings, deja.com didn't sell that work, deja.com merely sold the work that went into collecting your work.
It's called a "compilation copyright", and lots of online services claim it. You're exactly right, the basis the collection, not its specific contents. Google/Deja has every right to make the claim.
[I]s it truly possible to avoid having the linux kernel end up forking somehwhere along the line?
You keep it optimized for your 386, you wouldnt consider putting it anywhere near your mainframe without major code changes, ala what IBM is doing.
The "major code changes [that] IBM is doing" are platform support, not kernel-forking, are entirely contained within the approved architecture-variant directories (linux/arch/s390 and linux/drivers/s390) and are being integrated into Linus' kernel as fast as humanly possible. Alan Cox's 2.2 kernels have been incorporating those changes molto rapido since 2.2.1. The IBM System/390 kernel patch gets smaller with each new kernel level as a result. If anything, the s390 support in Linus' kernel is better than the PPC support, and that appears to be entirely the result of the IBM programmers following Linus' preferences for code modification.
I know the PPC kernel effectively forked a "long" time ago, and that there's bad feeling in the PPC camp (see KernelTraffic for the easy-to-follow version of the fights), but it doesn't have to be that way. Linus controls the One True Source (TM), and if you want him to accept patches you have to work within his rules.
There's a difference between being a CxO and being anything else in the company. Any company officer has obligations and responsibilities well beyond those of an employee. When you accepted the Chief Technology Officer role, you accepted those obligations too. That's why we CTOs get compensated at such high levels - you're an executive, and you don't necessarily get to think and act just for yourself.
You're going to bail, just like all the (mostly employee) folks here suggest. Right now you're just looking to feel better about your decision. That's clear from your statements, as others here have pointed out. So when you go to your next company, ask yourself these questions: "Am I comfortable being responsible for more than just my own and my family's livelihood? Or would I just like to draw a paycheck and make decisions based on me and mine?" If the answers are "no" and "yes", don't go for a CTO job, because you don't want the troubles that come with the job.
My major gripe with his article is that it seems to be one big rant against OO with very little in the way of decent alternatives.
Foul! Only at the dinner table (and then only when Mom is presiding) is it fair to tell someone that "If you don't have something positive to contribute, don't interrupt." Negativism is a perfectly good debating position - it worked for Martin Luther!
Even when he talks about C, he is critical; so my question is, what techniques/languages does he suggest we use?
PL/I would be a good start. Algol (but not '68) would have been too. What's that you say? PL/who? Right, these languages were the darlings of the Structured Programming fanatics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You don't find them in too many places any more, although Algol has survived somewhat as Pascal.
VB? Pascal?
Edgser Dijkstra (please don't say "who?") said (way back in the early 1980s),
"FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
Loony as a toon! Everyone knows that OOP is Capitalism, not Communism! Objects frequently rip each other off, stealing behaviors and data (calling it "inheritance", just like Napsterites "sharing" other people's songs). This is a classic Capitalist growth model. Capitalizing on another's work is such a predatory practice that even the Guiding Lights Of The Free World felt compelled to create the US Patent Office to allow inventors some period of time when others were not allowed to steal their hard-earned ideas from them.
COBOL, on the other hand, is Communism. Ever try to write anything in that language? The declarative sections are longer than War and Peace and read worse than Marx and Hegel, and it actually does accept "ADD A TO B GIVING C."! Hell, the books even encouraged it some years back!
In every single system known to man or mathematics, to identify an entity X, you must trust something to say "method Y is an accurate method to identify X". Unfortunately, the default way to get get that identification method in SSH and SSL is fundementally flawed.
Perhaps for SSH (I'm not up on the protocol, but the article's description makes it sound weak), but not for SSL. What's fundamentally flawed about SSL is that connections are only half-secured. That's because client certificates are optional, resulting in the normal situation where the client knows exactly who the server is, but the server hasn't a clue who the client is. Man-in-the-middle attacks aren't possible for SSL, because one of the directions is firmly established. If you want to break SSL, you've got to crack the CA and generate bogus certificates, or you've got to trick the client into accepting a bogus certificate (probably by inserting your CA certificate into the client's database).
If entity W has no way to identify X, but wants to talk to X for the very first time, W simply asks X "what is a question that only you can answer correctly, and by answering proves that you are X?" That leads to a false sense of security at best, because entity Z can step in front of X, and provide a false answer to the "how can I identify you?" question.
Again, not for SSL clients validating SSL servers. SSL's handshake is nicely secured by the fact that the "question that only you can answer" and the answer to the question are both carried in the certificate, under the private key of the CA. As long as the client's copy of the CA's public key isn't tainted, forgeries will be recognized and the protocol shuts down.
But don't get me started on SSL's weak side - the optional status of client certificates. Suffice it to say that SSL is fine for what it was intended for - web browsers talking to web servers.
Or perhaps a printed publication listing current correct fingerprints for major e-commerce sites; a "yellow pages" of the internet. It seems "backwards" but it solves a lot of problems. No, wait - I claim copyright on that idea!
Too late! Whitfield Diffie came up with the idea of a public-key directory way back in the Dark Ages.
Under current law, my code is my property. Thus, you have no right to distribute it without me allowing it.
Correct. That's Capitalism. In fact, if you're a practicing programmer, it's much more likely that your code is your employer's property. That's really Capitalism. Marx understood that, and advocated turning the "means of production" over to those who did the producing.
Just because GPL software is distributed with full source code doesn't mean it's public domain.
Correctomundo! It it were public domain, it couldn't be GPL'ed - GPL derives its teeth from U.S. Copyright law, and public domain is copyright's anthithesis. Copyright is all about use of force and coercion, it's just that the GPL uses them to advance an agenda many of us approve of.
This isn't communist. I'm not forcing you to give anything away.
Au contraire, mon amis! The GPL is exactly communist, and it is forcing me to give something away. It forces me to give away any changes I make to your GPL'ed code when I deliver the binary form of those changes to someone. Marx would be proud: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Free Software is Communism, and that's just fine.
Things could be worse - wanna try out Software Maoism?
Try clicking on your own URL. Kaffe put out a new release just a few months back, and announce that they'd be merging the free (Kaffe) and for-fee (Transvirtual) versions together, distributed free as Kaffe.
I hope they're paying royalties to Walter Lantz's estate for use of Chilly Willy as their penguin! One would expect a commercial software company to honor the Intellectual Property of others;-)
Those who do not study Stallman are compelled to hear him repeat himself.
-- with apologies to Georges Santayana
If you don't want to listen to a recitation of dogma, you shouldn't ask the High Priest of Free Software how to make non-disclosure work with Open Source.
You wouldn't ask the Pope how to reconcile Baal-worship with Catharism, would you? Tyberghein made the mistake of soliciting Stallman's opinion on the best way to comprimise with Evil without turning his back on Heresy. Of course Stallman responded by refusing to offer advice until Tyberghein renounced the Open Source heresy, and then replied with a sermon on Freedom.
Until people get it straight in their heads that Free Software is a religion, Stallman will always seem weird, dogmatic, and holier-than-thou.
Once they do understand, "weird" will become "sacred", "dogmatic" a compliment, and "holier-than-thou" simply "holy". Likewise his antipathy for the schismatic Open Source Movement and it's Martin Luther, Eric Raymond. It will also then make perfect sense that Stallman is regarded by himself and his followers as the ultimate arbiter of Free-ness, and that he takes the clerical position of accepting donations while advocating poverty as a virtue. Like most religions, Free Software even has its lay evangelical arm, the League for Programming Freedom.
Tech Square is Stallman's cloister.
Those who expect him to recognize terms like "console" and "PS2" ignore the Christian zealot's desire to be "in the world, but not of the world". Stallman knows about that which impinges upon his ascetic life as the chief prophet of software freedom. Like the most fervent and true practicers of monasticism, he is blissfully unaware of all else, and appears out of touch with reality to the world at large.
There's nothing wrong with religion.
Like everything else, it has its place. And like most organized religions, Free Software is usually not well-understood outside of the priesthood. The lay preachers (those who write software but get paid to do so) tend to honor and in some cases revere the priests, but also tend to hold forth on scripture incorrectly. The Christian Bible is so full of contradictions and passages open to interpretation that the Roman Catholic church used to forbid its study outside the priesthood. At least Stallman asks his followers to read his works (see "What is Free Software?"), although he tends to reserve their interpretation to himself. Like most other religions in their infancy, Free Software lacks a category of simple adherents - the non-programmer software users in this case.
And perhaps that's the biggest reason for Stallman's hatred of Open Source. Those who are not practicing programmers are much more attracted to the heresy than to the mother church. Free Software is focused on software practitioners, and has no story to attract software users other than that they will benefit as a side-effect of having free practicioners loose in the world. Open Source focuses on the availability of quality software, and that interests users and programmers alike.
IBM ported Linux to System/390 because that's what IBM's customers wanted. Some customers actually attempted a port without IBM's help, although it fizzled when IBM announced theirs. Check out the Slashdot archives for the reasons:
IBM's customers don't want to run HURD. We don't (apparently) want to run Free/Net/WhateverBSD. We want to run Linux. When and if enough of us want to run HURD, there will be a HURD for big iron. In the mean time, don't condescend to us and tell us we should be running something else if you run Linux on your favorite platform. We know an awful lot about the capabilities of big iron, and many of us have been deep in OS design and cosntruction over the years, enough so to recognize the value of the Linux kernel.
The cannonical "big iron" is IBM's System/390 mainframe family. The "G6" models (biggest available so far) support 12 CPUs sharing memory and I/O devices, and many more in a clustering formation (known as "Parallel Sysplex"). Likewise, RAM is indeed measured in GB, to a max of 32GB. And yes, lots of fast LAN attachments, including Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, and FDDI. The other real measurement is I/O bandwidth. A G6 has up to 256 parallel paths from I/O devices into memory without CPU intervention (DMA in Intel terms), all transferring at either 17MB/sec. or 100MB/sec. (megabytes, not megabits).
The newly-announced, available early-2001 "zSeries 900" is the next step in the System/390 family, and offers up to 16 64-bit CPUs (still binary-compatible with the 32-bit System/390) in SMP configurations (up to 640 clustered) and RAM doubles to a max of 64GB.
Slashdot Mirror
You can think of this as your own colo system if you like - you get root access. The overall system is using IBM's z/VM operating system to carve the system up into thousands of smaller systems, and to manage their interactions. Think "VMWare", but better - they get the idea from IBM. z/VM and its precursors have been doing this since 1967 - they've had time to work out the kinks.
Ask yourself why IBM would do something like this. For the sake of the Linux community? Hardly.
Obviously you're not on the mailing list where the setup for this system was discussed. You've got it all wrong - the reason is exactly to do something good for the Linux community. The idea was proposed by a non-IBMer in the Linux/390 community, and nursed along by a crew of folks outside and inside IBM, more than a few at the lowest levels.
This isn't one of those "the suits want to look good" ideas.
Check out the article mentioned in the initial posting - Tommorow's World is the source.
That sucks.
VM.. a proprietary closed source operating system with large license fees.
Costly, sure, but not by S/390 standards. Closed source, hardly. The IBM VM development group has provided source code for most of their system continuously since 1967. In the early 1980s, IBM entered the dark days of their Object Code Only policy, under which much source code was withdrawn. But since the early 1990s, all that code and almost everything else that hadn't been delivered has been released to the customers. These days, the so-called open source parts of VM are the largest parts IBM doesn't provide source for, and that's because they're forbidden to do so by the original authors (e.g. DCE, Java).
Next time, keep your opinions to yourself if you don't know the facts.
If things are so bad for NSA officials to keep tabs on terrorists and the way they commit digital crimes in association with their acts, then why would they release an OS that could further help these terrorists hide/secure their data.
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is one of the requirements of a B1-secure ("Labeled Security Protection") system under the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria book originally published by NCSC way back in 1983 (the so-called Orange Book). None of the TCSEC security ratings (C2, B1, B2, etc.) mention cryptography. I've seen B1 and even B2 systems (rare though they may be), none of which had encrypted filesystems. Sure, most systems have an encryption capability, but so did Bell Labs Unix - the crypt command. Crypto ain't MAC, and TCSEC don't care 'bout no crypto. The two are orthoganal.
TCSEC is all about isolation and protection - about ensuring that access to data and information is restricted according to clearly defined rules and that information cannot be "leaked" from one security zone to another. What the NSA has produced in Linux SE is a variant of Linux that is harder to crack, even from the inside. Cryptography has nothing to do with that. But that doesn't make Linux SE bad - I'd love a less-crackable Linux, even though I personally despise living under MAC restrictions.
Under GPL, don't they have to release the source code?
Nope. What they do have to do is make the source available to anyone they give binaries to. This idea that "they have to release mods to GPL'ed code" is the most common misconception about the GPL. Anyone is within their rights to modify a GPLed program and withold the source mods, so long as they also don't share the binaries. So if all the NSA wanted to do was to implement MAC for Linux for their own (and other USGov) use, they could have kept the changes behind the "it's classified" wall.
However, we have no control over what a GPL++ might happen to say. What if RMS sells out (yeah, sure)? What happens after he dies? What happens if someone else takes over the FSF?
That's an interesting topic. Stallman, of course, would never sell out. Monomaniacs rarely reverse their positions without extensive treatment and lots of maintenance pharmaceuticals. But the FSF could be taken over in a heartbeat. One good lawsuit loss and it would be bankrupt, with its assets attached by the victor to pay the judgement. Don't laugh, that's how the Church of Scientology became the proprietor of the Cult Awareness Network. CAN became a pro-cult website that attacked its former anti-cult stance.
The FSF advocates authors assigning their copyrights to it, in part because there's some reason to believe that the GPL might not be valid without the assignment, and in part because it allows the FSF to file suit for copyright infringement when someone violates the GPL. But that also gives the FSF assets that could be attached.
Wouldn't it just suck if Microsoft or Sun suddenly owned the copyrights to large volumes of supposedly-free software?
2) This strikes me as an important point. What deja.com is selling is not the rights to the posts, or the posts themselves, but the work that they put into archiving the posts, which is considerable. [...] So, while you may have put a lot of effort into writing that post for alt.silly.rantings, deja.com didn't sell that work, deja.com merely sold the work that went into collecting your work.
It's called a "compilation copyright", and lots of online services claim it. You're exactly right, the basis the collection, not its specific contents. Google/Deja has every right to make the claim.
Anybody else notice that the Slashdot rendering of the Caldera logo looks a lot like half of Mickey Mouse's head?
Whatcha tryin' to tell us, Taco?
[I]s it truly possible to avoid having the linux kernel end up forking somehwhere along the line?
You keep it optimized for your 386, you wouldnt consider putting it anywhere near your mainframe without major code changes, ala what IBM is doing.
The "major code changes [that] IBM is doing" are platform support, not kernel-forking, are entirely contained within the approved architecture-variant directories (linux/arch/s390 and linux/drivers/s390) and are being integrated into Linus' kernel as fast as humanly possible. Alan Cox's 2.2 kernels have been incorporating those changes molto rapido since 2.2.1. The IBM System/390 kernel patch gets smaller with each new kernel level as a result. If anything, the s390 support in Linus' kernel is better than the PPC support, and that appears to be entirely the result of the IBM programmers following Linus' preferences for code modification.
I know the PPC kernel effectively forked a "long" time ago, and that there's bad feeling in the PPC camp (see KernelTraffic for the easy-to-follow version of the fights), but it doesn't have to be that way. Linus controls the One True Source (TM), and if you want him to accept patches you have to work within his rules.
Don't you hate it when your id is a close match for someone elses?
That's exactly what TurboLinux has done with some of their clustering stuff. And I don't see TL getting torched on SlashDot like Corel!
There's a difference between being a CxO and being anything else in the company. Any company officer has obligations and responsibilities well beyond those of an employee. When you accepted the Chief Technology Officer role, you accepted those obligations too. That's why we CTOs get compensated at such high levels - you're an executive, and you don't necessarily get to think and act just for yourself.
You're going to bail, just like all the (mostly employee) folks here suggest. Right now you're just looking to feel better about your decision. That's clear from your statements, as others here have pointed out. So when you go to your next company, ask yourself these questions: "Am I comfortable being responsible for more than just my own and my family's livelihood? Or would I just like to draw a paycheck and make decisions based on me and mine?" If the answers are "no" and "yes", don't go for a CTO job, because you don't want the troubles that come with the job.
My major gripe with his article is that it seems to be one big rant against OO with very little in the way of decent alternatives.
Foul! Only at the dinner table (and then only when Mom is presiding) is it fair to tell someone that "If you don't have something positive to contribute, don't interrupt." Negativism is a perfectly good debating position - it worked for Martin Luther!
Even when he talks about C, he is critical; so my question is, what techniques/languages does he suggest we use?
PL/I would be a good start. Algol (but not '68) would have been too. What's that you say? PL/who? Right, these languages were the darlings of the Structured Programming fanatics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You don't find them in too many places any more, although Algol has survived somewhat as Pascal.
VB? Pascal?
Edgser Dijkstra (please don't say "who?") said (way back in the early 1980s),
(emphasis mine)Loony as a toon! Everyone knows that OOP is Capitalism, not Communism! Objects frequently rip each other off, stealing behaviors and data (calling it "inheritance", just like Napsterites "sharing" other people's songs). This is a classic Capitalist growth model. Capitalizing on another's work is such a predatory practice that even the Guiding Lights Of The Free World felt compelled to create the US Patent Office to allow inventors some period of time when others were not allowed to steal their hard-earned ideas from them.
COBOL, on the other hand, is Communism. Ever try to write anything in that language? The declarative sections are longer than War and Peace and read worse than Marx and Hegel, and it actually does accept "ADD A TO B GIVING C."! Hell, the books even encouraged it some years back!
In every single system known to man or mathematics, to identify an entity X, you must trust something to say "method Y is an accurate method to identify X". Unfortunately, the default way to get get that identification method in SSH and SSL is fundementally flawed.
Perhaps for SSH (I'm not up on the protocol, but the article's description makes it sound weak), but not for SSL. What's fundamentally flawed about SSL is that connections are only half-secured. That's because client certificates are optional, resulting in the normal situation where the client knows exactly who the server is, but the server hasn't a clue who the client is. Man-in-the-middle attacks aren't possible for SSL, because one of the directions is firmly established. If you want to break SSL, you've got to crack the CA and generate bogus certificates, or you've got to trick the client into accepting a bogus certificate (probably by inserting your CA certificate into the client's database).
If entity W has no way to identify X, but wants to talk to X for the very first time, W simply asks X "what is a question that only you can answer correctly, and by answering proves that you are X?" That leads to a false sense of security at best, because entity Z can step in front of X, and provide a false answer to the "how can I identify you?" question.
Again, not for SSL clients validating SSL servers. SSL's handshake is nicely secured by the fact that the "question that only you can answer" and the answer to the question are both carried in the certificate, under the private key of the CA. As long as the client's copy of the CA's public key isn't tainted, forgeries will be recognized and the protocol shuts down.
But don't get me started on SSL's weak side - the optional status of client certificates. Suffice it to say that SSL is fine for what it was intended for - web browsers talking to web servers.
Or perhaps a printed publication listing current correct fingerprints for major e-commerce sites; a "yellow pages" of the internet. It seems "backwards" but it solves a lot of problems. No, wait - I claim copyright on that idea!
Too late! Whitfield Diffie came up with the idea of a public-key directory way back in the Dark Ages.
JQP
Everything old is new again!
- Cole Porter
Under current law, my code is my property. Thus, you have no right to distribute it without me allowing it.
Correct. That's Capitalism. In fact, if you're a practicing programmer, it's much more likely that your code is your employer's property. That's really Capitalism. Marx understood that, and advocated turning the "means of production" over to those who did the producing.
Just because GPL software is distributed with full source code doesn't mean it's public domain.
Correctomundo! It it were public domain, it couldn't be GPL'ed - GPL derives its teeth from U.S. Copyright law, and public domain is copyright's anthithesis. Copyright is all about use of force and coercion, it's just that the GPL uses them to advance an agenda many of us approve of.
This isn't communist. I'm not forcing you to give anything away.
Au contraire, mon amis! The GPL is exactly communist, and it is forcing me to give something away. It forces me to give away any changes I make to your GPL'ed code when I deliver the binary form of those changes to someone. Marx would be proud: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Free Software is Communism, and that's just fine.
Things could be worse - wanna try out Software Maoism?
Try clicking on your own URL. Kaffe put out a new release just a few months back, and announce that they'd be merging the free (Kaffe) and for-fee (Transvirtual) versions together, distributed free as Kaffe.
I hope they're paying royalties to Walter Lantz's estate for use of Chilly Willy as their penguin! One would expect a commercial software company to honor the Intellectual Property of others ;-)
The "News Courtesy of Slashdot" link goes to www.slashdot.org. We all know not to go there, right?
Those who do not study Stallman are compelled to hear him repeat himself.
-- with apologies to Georges Santayana
If you don't want to listen to a recitation of dogma, you shouldn't ask the High Priest of Free Software how to make non-disclosure work with Open Source. You wouldn't ask the Pope how to reconcile Baal-worship with Catharism, would you? Tyberghein made the mistake of soliciting Stallman's opinion on the best way to comprimise with Evil without turning his back on Heresy. Of course Stallman responded by refusing to offer advice until Tyberghein renounced the Open Source heresy, and then replied with a sermon on Freedom.
Until people get it straight in their heads that Free Software is a religion, Stallman will always seem weird, dogmatic, and holier-than-thou. Once they do understand, "weird" will become "sacred", "dogmatic" a compliment, and "holier-than-thou" simply "holy". Likewise his antipathy for the schismatic Open Source Movement and it's Martin Luther, Eric Raymond. It will also then make perfect sense that Stallman is regarded by himself and his followers as the ultimate arbiter of Free-ness, and that he takes the clerical position of accepting donations while advocating poverty as a virtue. Like most religions, Free Software even has its lay evangelical arm, the League for Programming Freedom.
Tech Square is Stallman's cloister. Those who expect him to recognize terms like "console" and "PS2" ignore the Christian zealot's desire to be "in the world, but not of the world". Stallman knows about that which impinges upon his ascetic life as the chief prophet of software freedom. Like the most fervent and true practicers of monasticism, he is blissfully unaware of all else, and appears out of touch with reality to the world at large.
There's nothing wrong with religion. Like everything else, it has its place. And like most organized religions, Free Software is usually not well-understood outside of the priesthood. The lay preachers (those who write software but get paid to do so) tend to honor and in some cases revere the priests, but also tend to hold forth on scripture incorrectly. The Christian Bible is so full of contradictions and passages open to interpretation that the Roman Catholic church used to forbid its study outside the priesthood. At least Stallman asks his followers to read his works (see "What is Free Software?"), although he tends to reserve their interpretation to himself. Like most other religions in their infancy, Free Software lacks a category of simple adherents - the non-programmer software users in this case.
And perhaps that's the biggest reason for Stallman's hatred of Open Source. Those who are not practicing programmers are much more attracted to the heresy than to the mother church. Free Software is focused on software practitioners, and has no story to attract software users other than that they will benefit as a side-effect of having free practicioners loose in the world. Open Source focuses on the availability of quality software, and that interests users and programmers alike.
IBM ported Linux to System/390 because that's what IBM's customers wanted. Some customers actually attempted a port without IBM's help, although it fizzled when IBM announced theirs. Check out the Slashdot archives for the reasons:
IBM's customers don't want to run HURD. We don't (apparently) want to run Free/Net/WhateverBSD. We want to run Linux. When and if enough of us want to run HURD, there will be a HURD for big iron. In the mean time, don't condescend to us and tell us we should be running something else if you run Linux on your favorite platform. We know an awful lot about the capabilities of big iron, and many of us have been deep in OS design and cosntruction over the years, enough so to recognize the value of the Linux kernel.
The cannonical "big iron" is IBM's System/390 mainframe family. The "G6" models (biggest available so far) support 12 CPUs sharing memory and I/O devices, and many more in a clustering formation (known as "Parallel Sysplex"). Likewise, RAM is indeed measured in GB, to a max of 32GB. And yes, lots of fast LAN attachments, including Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, and FDDI. The other real measurement is I/O bandwidth. A G6 has up to 256 parallel paths from I/O devices into memory without CPU intervention (DMA in Intel terms), all transferring at either 17MB/sec. or 100MB/sec. (megabytes, not megabits).
The newly-announced, available early-2001 "zSeries 900" is the next step in the System/390 family, and offers up to 16 64-bit CPUs (still binary-compatible with the 32-bit System/390) in SMP configurations (up to 640 clustered) and RAM doubles to a max of 64GB.
That's big iron, folks.