It would be really neat if it actually worked this way. It doesn't. The civil courts are less and less about who's in the right and more and more about who can afford to play the game. The math works in the RIAA's favor here. If I'm going to have to lawyer up to the tune of ten grand I don't have and waste a year of my hairline to defend my name, or pay two grand that I can spread out on credit cards, how is that so different from "pay us 30% out of the register, or maybe have an electrical fire?"
As for open and shut cases, do you really trust an organization that's suing a list of IP addresses because they can't actually go to the trouble of finding actual defendants? Given that a significant percentage of the last batch of addresses aren't even in the United States (the jurisdiction of the court in which the suits were filed), do we trust their investigative prowess so much as to call the cases open and shut? If you're truly concerned about harm to your business, you do the research. If you can't even be bothered to
for ip in `cat ip-addresses.txt`; do whois -h whois.arin.net $ip | grep 'Country:' | grep -i us | wc ; done
before you trot your ass down to the courtroom, you look a little less than honest in your plaintive wails of "stop the evil file sharers from starving our artists!"
If you happen to know the plaintiff in the RICO countersuit, and you know she is guilty, then my apologies for my tone. Otherwise, I'll keep an open mind as to who the real extortionist is.
Am I the only one who had trouble reading the article because the MySQL server on the article's host site had stopped working? Quite an argument for the stability of PostgreSQL, I should say.
For departmental-level stuff, there's also the Teacup Problem Report Management System, which I wrote. It's available here. It's written in Perl, and uses the PostgreSQL DBMS as its backend. It's fairly new (released early May) so it may not show up on any catchall problem reporting sites yet.
I think there are two clauses of the GPL everyone is overlooking here... Version 2, clauses 11 and 12, state:
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Now, UCITA sets default liabilities. But the GPL overrides them (no warranty "to the extent permitted by applicable law"; where UCITA is applicable, it permits override of those default liabilities). So UCITA cannot interfere with the disclaimer of warranty in the GPL.
Don't get me wrong. Anybody representing me who has this placed on their desk will get a letter and a phone call from me explaining why it's a horrible idea. Anybody representing me who votes for it will not get my vote the following election. UCITA is a limit to the natural rights of consumers, but the GPL has nothing to fear in it.
The number listed "if you have any questions" is 1-800-2-CITIFI (1-800-224-8434). Call up and ask if they realize they're cutting out a sizable (and affluent) demographic with their browser-restricted design.
What keeps geeks in a metro area? Young geeks seem to like large, active geek communities (Pittsburgh has this in CMU, though I'm not sure how active a community it is). Besides that, they like what all other young groups like; generally, vibrant cities with lots of stuff to do, not too much crime, government that agrees with their general views, a transportation system (public or otherwise) that's not choking on itself, etc.
I'm finishing up at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta come May. And then I'm packing my crap into a U-Haul. And driving to Pittsburgh.
Why? A couple of reasons. One, I, like many more experienced Linux geeks, tend to see things on the rise and jump to them. That's why we were all suffering through difficult installations and a relative paucity of applications in the early 1990s. Pittsburgh has the potential for a great explosion in information technology (a supportive local government, lots of jobs, and lots of people to fill them) as well as in general (Pittsburgh's older, depopulated urban demographic and adequate urban infrastructure is extremely ripe for the type of young, educated urban recolonization that has been sweeping American cities, especially those hardest hit by white flight in the former Confederacy).
Also, Atlanta is on the decline. The metro area is choked by battles between urban and suburban governments. The transportation system is abysmal. Land use decisions were made years ago with no value placed on quality of life. Atlanta has the lowest population density of major American metro areas, and the traffic, smog, lack of a sense of community, and jurisdictional bickering that come with it. In short, while Atlanta's geek community is quite active (see Requirement One), all of that other stuff is leading Atlanta's optimistic boosterism into a head on train wreck with reality.
Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has fewer of these problems. The former Steel City choked in smog now has air that is far easier to breathe than that of Atlanta (or Boston or the Valley for that matter). Pittsburgh was a fair sized city before the advent of automotive transportation, so the types of walking neighborhoods so prized by the recolonization people and their new urbanism brethren are abundant. Fewer surrounding jurisdictions mean regional planning is possible without political deadlock.
In short, the answer then is "do nothing." Pittsburgh's upswing will start soon enough. Just wait for it. You can help by trying to stir up more activity in the geek community. Start or help out a Linux user's group. Help out PUMP (the Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project, pump.org) and maybe see if you can start a geek interest group. Become a city booster in general. If you're not into the whole extroversion thing, find a friend who is and convince them to do all that.
One major problem I see with this... while having your military come in on commercial airliners - perhaps your own national carrier - to take a "beachhead" at the airports will look convincing enough to allow them to land, the US air defense system would certainly see your materiel cargo planes behind them, and would turn them back or just splash them outright into the Atlantic.
So now you've got your nation's whole GDP for the last couple of years turning into reef fodder on the ocean floor and control of a couple of airports. Oh, yes, and a bunch of US Marines in your capitol building, too.:)
Corel's license is (IMHO, and I'm pretty sure legally as well) in direct violation of the GPL, applied to the core of Corel Linux (unless they've managed to build a Linux without a kernel, libc, or complier)...
So the simple solution to this conundrum would be to treat the license like the invalid legal effluvium that it is, and violate it. Get a copy of Corel Linux Beta. Distribute it to the world. If Corel really wants to try to defend their license, let them. It simply won't stand up in court.
Unless these guys have come up with some way to circumvent the whole pesky speed-of-light thing, it is absolutely physically impossible to have any circuit at wafer-scale size clocked in the terahertz range.
A 1THz clock has a period of.001 ns - about the amount of time it takes light to travel 200 microns (I may be _way_ off here - I'm using Admiral Hopper's demostration of 1 ns being about.2 m - someone please correct my calculations). Wafer scale ICs are about 10 cm (100,000 microns) across - the clock signal couldn't even propogate across 1/500th of the chip before it repeated.
Most likely, this is a third rate tech company trying to throw around terminology that Joe Wintel knows about (Hertz - clock speed - and as we all know clock speed is the ultimate metric of computer performance, right?) to impress people and rack up more hits for their site. Sad, really.
Excellent! This is precisely the resolution I was talking about - higher quality applicants (and higher quality companies) migrate to services like these, the agencies are stuck with the Dilberts and the PHB's.:)
This situation bothered me a bit, as well, during a recent job search. Then I realized something: Organizations that rely on such "generic" HR resources to select new employees are going to get employees that match their efforts: people who throw around buzzwords in attempts to impress management types, not people who actually know what's going on. Eventually, these organizations will be at a competitive disadvantage as the highly skilled information workers end up other companies - their engineering efforts and products will suffer, and their more highly skilled competitors will move into dominant positions.
Yes, it's frustrating now - the environment is changing and the situation has not yet evolved to meet the new environment. This is an annoyance, yes, but a temporary one - the history of the world is driven by the resolution of such evolutionary tension.
If you're fortunate enough to live in a BellSouth area that has both ADSL and broadband service from your cable company, get the cable modem. I've heard no problems from friends in Atlanta running Linux with RoadRunner (MediaOne) or AtHome. BellSouth FastAccess, on the other hand, is generally a LOT more expensive. And if their customer service is anything like you get with their telephone side...
Perhaps we, as a community, could organize an independent testing group (made up of Linux users, but no kernel hackers, Redhat/Caldera/SuSE/etc. employees, FSF guys, etc.) to issue this very challenge. Perhaps several categories: best $1,000 server, best $2,500 server, best $5,000 server, etc. Entries could be received from any operating system whose advocates wanted to play: Macs, Microsoft boxen, commercial Unices, turnkey solutions like Cobalt, etc.
I'll volunteer my time to help coordinate this, though I don't have the financial resources to test any category beyond the best sub-$25 system.:)
"RedHat is evil" is nothing but flamebait from some bored, paranoid script kiddies. Every (well, okay, almost every) Linux distribution has its place.
Wanna learn Linux? REALLY learn Linux? Get Slackware. By the time you've got it running happily you'll be employable as a Linux sysadmin. (It's true. And only six months earlier I'd been a mac guy whose only exposure to emacs was its entry in the jargon file).
Hack a lot? Need to have a system that runs well with only a little effort, but that you can tweak and hack on to your heart's content. Get Debian.
Need to have a web server up from bare metal in thirty minutes to impress a manager who's a member of the "I've heard IIS is the fastest and most popular web server ever*" crowd? RedHat worked for me (the server has been up for a year)
Need to keep your Novell-running company from migrating to Windows NT? Will your manager not approve any OS he can't see a number higher than $50 on a P.O. for? Caldera.
Like RedHat, like KDE, don't wanna wait for RH6? Mandrake.
What other OS has an _entirely separate product_ just to change the look and feel? Come on, choice is one of Linux' cardinal strongpoints!
(If I didn't mention your favorite distro, I'm sure it's cool too. I just haven't used it yet.:)
Our community is percieved by many as being fragmented because of these multiple choices; don't give them any ammunition...
As for the "RedHat may take over Linux and commericalize it until it sucks" argument, well, RMS might dust off a big pile of software patents he was just granted on GCC tomorrow and make all of us pay $495.00 for using his compiler. Oh, wait. It's all protected by the GPL. Nevermind, we're safe. Even if RedHat wanted to do something like this (which is, as in my example here, extremely unlikely), it couldn't.
* This statement about IIS was obtained by a scientific poll, conducted a couple of weeks ago in Redmond, WA, USA. The size of the sample for this study was 1.:)
To: flux@microsoft.com Subject: write what you know
Regarding the insufferable piece of self-serving fluff at
Mr. Boling does not understand simple laws of postindustrial economic models, and should therefore reserve his punditry for other domains of knowledge.
1. In Paragraph 7, the argument that free software sows the seeds of its own destruction makes several erroneous assumptions. "If they actually succeed in making software free..." implies that free software is an all-or-nothing movement, which it is not (save perhaps to stalwarts like Stallman). Free software will never penetrate highly vertical markets; this domain will be left closed-source and highly profitable.
2. Paragraph 8 extrapolates the free software argument beyond reason to ludicracy in a failed attempt to attempt to make the free software concept seen ludicrous. The logical conclusion of Stallman's argument is NOT the freeing of all intellectual property; this is either gross misunderstanding or intentional mendacity. In any case, the hyperbolic extrapolation of this erroneous assertion to "If intellectual property isn't property, then just what is property? Why not just give away cars, houses, and everything else?" is yet another failed (and quite laughable) attempt to sow fear in those with a vested interest in the current economic system that free software may lead to the downfall of said system. The quality of the argument is something I'd expect from the climax of a legal pulp novel.
3. Paragraphs 9-10 show that Boling has not bothered to read either of Raymond's works on free software, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere", or even the Microsoft-generated "Halloween" memos that referenced these works. Boling would understand the reason credit matters had he read these works. His lack of understanding of these foundations of the free software movement shows a lack of journalistic acumen, and would be embarrassing even for a first-year newspaper copywriter fresh out of college.
In the future, your public relations and marketing arms would be well-served not to point to such badly written fluff as support for your arguments. It only makes you look stupid and scared.
I've also been somewhat perplexed at the amount of backlash directed at ESR. Yes, we must be very careful as free software grows larger as a blip on the mainstream radar screen. But without the OSI's efforrs, without Raymond's efforts to improve our community's image in the eyes of those who (for better or worse) run the industry, we'd still be very much an enlightened backwater, unable to get the ideas of intellectual freedom beyond our own little community.
I started using Linux in the summer of 1996. I was amazed that something so powerful was free. With source code, even. I wished that one day the rest of the world would discover it too. Thanks largely to the OSI's efforts, that wish is coming true.
So back off. Flaming ESR without suggesting a alternate, rational course of action only gives Mickeysoft and their defenders in the press the ammunition to make us look silly.
While I agree with Tom Christiansen's complaint here (Linux is Linux, not GNU/Linux), I think his solution (an FSF-free Linux) is dangerous. Having used several different Linuxes (all with GNU tools), NetBSD (with BSD tools), and Solaris (with Sun's tools), I must say I found the GNU stuff more featureful AND more robust. Using a different set of tools just to shut a firebrand like RMS up simply does not make sense.
Linux is about software quality, people, not politics. We can't lose sight of that.
Well, I can't write anything in OLE (hehe) or (bwa...bwahahahaheheh!) COM...
I'm sorry. They make me laugh. Let me try again.
I can't write anything in OLE or COM (horrendous design infuriates me), but I am (right now) writing a database library generator in Perl. That is, a Perl program that takes in a database specification and outputs a set of Perl code that allows fast, easy access to that database from Perl. Do that with Virtually Basic.:) Oh yeah, and all the software I'm using is free.
So, I'll keep my tools, ignore the toys, and you can stay in your little VB box and watch as the world passes you by.
Slashdot Mirror
As for open and shut cases, do you really trust an organization that's suing a list of IP addresses because they can't actually go to the trouble of finding actual defendants? Given that a significant percentage of the last batch of addresses aren't even in the United States (the jurisdiction of the court in which the suits were filed), do we trust their investigative prowess so much as to call the cases open and shut? If you're truly concerned about harm to your business, you do the research. If you can't even be bothered to before you trot your ass down to the courtroom, you look a little less than honest in your plaintive wails of "stop the evil file sharers from starving our artists!"
If you happen to know the plaintiff in the RICO countersuit, and you know she is guilty, then my apologies for my tone. Otherwise, I'll keep an open mind as to who the real extortionist is.
For a good source on the electronic voting issue in general and the push for Rep. HR2239 in particular, see Verified Voting.
Am I the only one who had trouble reading the article because the MySQL server on the article's host site had stopped working? Quite an argument for the stability of PostgreSQL, I should say.
For departmental-level stuff, there's also the Teacup Problem Report Management System, which I wrote. It's available here. It's written in Perl, and uses the PostgreSQL DBMS as its backend. It's fairly new (released early May) so it may not show up on any catchall problem reporting sites yet.
I think there are two clauses of the GPL everyone is overlooking here... Version 2, clauses 11 and 12, state:
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Now, UCITA sets default liabilities. But the GPL overrides them (no warranty "to the extent permitted by applicable law"; where UCITA is applicable, it permits override of those default liabilities). So UCITA cannot interfere with the disclaimer of warranty in the GPL.
Don't get me wrong. Anybody representing me who has this placed on their desk will get a letter and a phone call from me explaining why it's a horrible idea. Anybody representing me who votes for it will not get my vote the following election. UCITA is a limit to the natural rights of consumers, but the GPL has nothing to fear in it.
The number listed "if you have any questions" is 1-800-2-CITIFI (1-800-224-8434). Call up and ask if they realize they're cutting out a sizable (and affluent) demographic with their browser-restricted design.
What keeps geeks in a metro area? Young geeks seem to like large, active geek communities (Pittsburgh has this in CMU, though I'm not sure how active a community it is). Besides that, they like what all other young groups like; generally, vibrant cities with lots of stuff to do, not too much crime, government that agrees with their general views, a transportation system (public or otherwise) that's not choking on itself, etc.
:)
I'm finishing up at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta come May. And then I'm packing my crap into a U-Haul. And driving to Pittsburgh.
Why? A couple of reasons. One, I, like many more experienced Linux geeks, tend to see things on the rise and jump to them. That's why we were all suffering through difficult installations and a relative paucity of applications in the early 1990s. Pittsburgh has the potential for a great explosion in information technology (a supportive local government, lots of jobs, and lots of people to fill them) as well as in general (Pittsburgh's older, depopulated urban demographic and adequate urban infrastructure is extremely ripe for the type of young, educated urban recolonization that has been sweeping American cities, especially those hardest hit by white flight in the former Confederacy).
Also, Atlanta is on the decline. The metro area is choked by battles between urban and suburban governments. The transportation system is abysmal. Land use decisions were made years ago with no value placed on quality of life. Atlanta has the lowest population density of major American metro areas, and the traffic, smog, lack of a sense of community, and jurisdictional bickering that come with it. In short, while Atlanta's geek community is quite active (see Requirement One), all of that other stuff is leading Atlanta's optimistic boosterism into a head on train wreck with reality.
Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has fewer of these problems. The former Steel City choked in smog now has air that is far easier to breathe than that of Atlanta (or Boston or the Valley for that matter). Pittsburgh was a fair sized city before the advent of automotive transportation, so the types of walking neighborhoods so prized by the recolonization people and their new urbanism brethren are abundant. Fewer surrounding jurisdictions mean regional planning is possible without political deadlock.
In short, the answer then is "do nothing." Pittsburgh's upswing will start soon enough. Just wait for it. You can help by trying to stir up more activity in the geek community. Start or help out a Linux user's group. Help out PUMP (the Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project, pump.org) and maybe see if you can start a geek interest group. Become a city booster in general. If you're not into the whole extroversion thing, find a friend who is and convince them to do all that.
I'll be there in May to help you out.
- Brian
One major problem I see with this... while having your military come in on commercial airliners - perhaps your own national carrier - to take a "beachhead" at the airports will look convincing enough to allow them to land, the US air defense system would certainly see your materiel cargo planes behind them, and would turn them back or just splash them outright into the Atlantic.
:)
So now you've got your nation's whole GDP for the last couple of years turning into reef fodder on the ocean floor and control of a couple of airports. Oh, yes, and a bunch of US Marines in your capitol building, too.
Well. That's pretty broad. It seems to describe shared memory itself. Anyone know if I can still #include without paying Yahoo royalties?
So the simple solution to this conundrum would be to treat the license like the invalid legal effluvium that it is, and violate it. Get a copy of Corel Linux Beta. Distribute it to the world. If Corel really wants to try to defend their license, let them. It simply won't stand up in court.
I kind of like that the silly legalese is at the top of the query now. It makes it a lot easier to ignore as it scrolls off the top of my xterm. :)
Unless these guys have come up with some way to circumvent the whole pesky speed-of-light thing, it is absolutely physically impossible to have any circuit at wafer-scale size clocked in the terahertz range.
.001 ns - about the amount of time it takes light to travel 200 microns (I may be _way_ off here - I'm using Admiral Hopper's demostration of 1 ns being about .2 m - someone please correct my calculations). Wafer scale ICs are about 10 cm (100,000 microns) across - the clock signal couldn't even propogate across 1/500th of the chip before it repeated.
A 1THz clock has a period of
Most likely, this is a third rate tech company trying to throw around terminology that Joe Wintel knows about (Hertz - clock speed - and as we all know clock speed is the ultimate metric of computer performance, right?) to impress people and rack up more hits for their site. Sad, really.
Excellent! This is precisely the resolution I was talking about - higher quality applicants (and higher quality companies) migrate to services like these, the agencies are stuck with the Dilberts and the PHB's. :)
This situation bothered me a bit, as well, during a recent job search. Then I realized something: Organizations that rely on such "generic" HR resources to select new employees are going to get employees that match their efforts: people who throw around buzzwords in attempts to impress management types, not people who actually know what's going on. Eventually, these organizations will be at a competitive disadvantage as the highly skilled information workers end up other companies - their engineering efforts and products will suffer, and their more highly skilled competitors will move into dominant positions.
Yes, it's frustrating now - the environment is changing and the situation has not yet evolved to meet the new environment. This is an annoyance, yes, but a temporary one - the history of the world is driven by the resolution of such evolutionary tension.
If you're fortunate enough to live in a BellSouth area that has both ADSL and broadband service from your cable company, get the cable modem. I've heard no problems from friends in Atlanta running Linux with RoadRunner (MediaOne) or AtHome. BellSouth FastAccess, on the other hand, is generally a LOT more expensive. And if their customer service is anything like you get with their telephone side...
Perhaps we, as a community, could organize an independent testing group (made up of Linux users, but no kernel hackers, Redhat/Caldera/SuSE/etc. employees, FSF guys, etc.) to issue this very challenge. Perhaps several categories: best $1,000 server, best $2,500 server, best $5,000 server, etc. Entries could be received from any operating system whose advocates wanted to play: Macs, Microsoft boxen, commercial Unices, turnkey solutions like Cobalt, etc.
:)
I'll volunteer my time to help coordinate this, though I don't have the financial resources to test any category beyond the best sub-$25 system.
"RedHat is evil" is nothing but flamebait from some bored, paranoid script kiddies. Every (well, okay, almost every) Linux distribution has its place.
:)
:)
Wanna learn Linux? REALLY learn Linux? Get Slackware. By the time you've got it running happily you'll be employable as a Linux sysadmin. (It's true. And only six months earlier I'd been a mac guy whose only exposure to emacs was its entry in the jargon file).
Hack a lot? Need to have a system that runs well with only a little effort, but that you can tweak and hack on to your heart's content. Get Debian.
Need to have a web server up from bare metal in thirty minutes to impress a manager who's a member of the "I've heard IIS is the fastest and most popular web server ever*" crowd? RedHat worked for me (the server has been up for a year)
Need to keep your Novell-running company from migrating to Windows NT? Will your manager not approve any OS he can't see a number higher than $50 on a P.O. for? Caldera.
Like RedHat, like KDE, don't wanna wait for RH6? Mandrake.
What other OS has an _entirely separate product_ just to change the look and feel? Come on, choice is one of Linux' cardinal strongpoints!
(If I didn't mention your favorite distro, I'm sure it's cool too. I just haven't used it yet.
Our community is percieved by many as being fragmented because of these multiple choices; don't give them any ammunition...
As for the "RedHat may take over Linux and commericalize it until it sucks" argument, well, RMS might dust off a big pile of software patents he was just granted on GCC tomorrow and make all of us pay $495.00 for using his compiler. Oh, wait. It's all protected by the GPL. Nevermind, we're safe. Even if RedHat wanted to do something like this (which is, as in my example here, extremely unlikely), it couldn't.
* This statement about IIS was obtained by a scientific poll, conducted a couple of weeks ago in Redmond, WA, USA. The size of the sample for this study was 1.
To: flux@microsoft.com
Subject: write what you know
Regarding the insufferable piece of self-serving fluff at
Mr. Boling does not understand simple laws of postindustrial economic
models, and should therefore reserve his punditry for other domains of
knowledge.
1. In Paragraph 7, the argument that free software sows the seeds of its
own destruction makes several erroneous assumptions. "If they actually
succeed in making software free..." implies that free software is an
all-or-nothing movement, which it is not (save perhaps to stalwarts like
Stallman). Free software will never penetrate highly vertical markets;
this domain will be left closed-source and highly profitable.
2. Paragraph 8 extrapolates the free software argument beyond reason to
ludicracy in a failed attempt to attempt to make the free software concept
seen ludicrous. The logical conclusion of Stallman's argument is NOT the
freeing of all intellectual property; this is either gross
misunderstanding or intentional mendacity. In any case, the hyperbolic
extrapolation of this erroneous assertion to "If intellectual property
isn't property, then just what is property? Why not just give away cars,
houses, and everything else?" is yet another failed (and quite laughable)
attempt to sow fear in those with a vested interest in the current
economic system that free software may lead to the downfall of said
system. The quality of the argument is something I'd expect from the
climax of a legal pulp novel.
3. Paragraphs 9-10 show that Boling has not bothered to read either of
Raymond's works on free software, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and
"Homesteading the Noosphere", or even the Microsoft-generated "Halloween"
memos that referenced these works. Boling would understand the reason
credit matters had he read these works. His lack of understanding of these
foundations of the free software movement shows a lack of journalistic
acumen, and would be embarrassing even for a first-year newspaper
copywriter fresh out of college.
In the future, your public relations and marketing arms would be
well-served not to point to such badly written fluff as support for your
arguments. It only makes you look stupid and scared.
Respectfully,
Brian H. Trammell
I've also been somewhat perplexed at the amount of backlash directed at ESR. Yes, we must be very careful as free software grows larger as a blip on the mainstream radar screen. But without the OSI's efforrs, without Raymond's efforts to improve our community's image in the eyes of those who (for better or worse) run the industry, we'd still be very much an enlightened backwater, unable to get the ideas of intellectual freedom beyond our own little community.
I started using Linux in the summer of 1996. I was amazed that something so powerful was free. With source code, even. I wished that one day the rest of the world would discover it too. Thanks largely to the OSI's efforts, that wish is coming true.
So back off. Flaming ESR without suggesting a alternate, rational course of action only gives Mickeysoft and their defenders in the press the ammunition to make us look silly.
-brian
Linux is about software quality, people, not politics. We can't lose sight of that.
-- Brian Trammell
Well, I can't write anything in OLE (hehe) or (bwa...bwahahahaheheh!) COM...
:) Oh yeah, and all the software I'm using is free.
I'm sorry. They make me laugh. Let me try again.
I can't write anything in OLE or COM (horrendous design infuriates me), but I am (right now) writing a database library generator in Perl. That is, a Perl program that takes in a database specification and outputs a set of Perl code that allows fast, easy access to that database from Perl. Do that with Virtually Basic.
So, I'll keep my tools, ignore the toys, and you can stay in your little VB box and watch as the world passes you by.
- the mad hawk was here