Perhaps you can't truly "buy" the code to the project itself (although, in some cases it would be possible to buy the original copyright). However, if the community ends up forking the (commercialized) code, they lose the brand name of the original project and (most likely) the original developers of the project. Forking code is (relatively) easy. So is rewriting an entire project from scratch. What's really tough is maintaining the energy and enthusiasm to to ensure the new project succeeds in the long term. That's not going to be easy if you have high developer turnover.
I think a lot of people underestimate the value of a project's core developers. If you lose them, the dynamics of the project can change dramatically.
Didn't Nikola Tesla work on remote power transmission way back when? I thought I remembered seeing info about this in the back of old Popular Science magazines when I was a kid.
I have been working with Netware server products for a few years (since 3.x) and I have to say that I love the admin utilities, etc. Nothing beats them (in NT or Linux) from a sysadmin point of view, especially when it comes to ACLs on volumes, directories or files. Mabye this will mean that we'll see better ACL support for files/directories under Linux? I know the Linux Trustees project attempts to duplicate this functionality, but its still a bit of a hack.
Sorry, not yet. As noted on the GD website , the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year. So no GIF support in the GD library for another year.:-(
Linksys Powerline products use 56-bit encryption to protect communication. You set a passphrase on each device and you can (obviously) only talk with other devices that have the same passphrase.
I've got two Linksys Powerline Etherfast 10/100 Bridges at my apartment which work great. They work to make a bridge between my cable modem, which sits in my living room, and my linux router, which is located in my bedroom. The specs say the devices are capable for transferring up to 14Mbps over the powerlines, although I have not had a chance to test this.
Each unit was about $80 through Amazon and I couldn't be happier with them (except that the config utility must be run from a Win* box). Beats the hell out of wires running over the floor. Anyone who can't easily wire their domicile and doesn't want to roll out wireless should definitely have a look.
SimonDelivers has been doing this in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for a few years now and they seem to be sucessful at it. From speaking to people who use their service, they say its fast, reasonable in price, etc. SD has also been slowly increasing its coverage area over time.
The GPL violations are most likely just the straw that finally broke him. The other reasons you cite are probably at the core of the problem.
As the creator/developer of NetSaint (soon to be Nagios, I can understand where his frustration comes from.
I've gone through several periods where I feel like just throwing in the towel and calling it quits. During those times I usually take 2 or 3 months to stop development, not respond to email, etc. and just relax. After a few months time I feel like starting up again at full swing. Granted, I've got a load of email and coding to catch up on (or to redirect to/dev/null) when I return, but its the only thing that has kept me going this far. For me I've always returned because:
I felt I still had unfinished business in the project (TODO lists never die)
I felt I had invested too much time in the project to simply quit and leave it all behind
I didn't want to leave all the users out in the cold
etc...
It also helps to develop an attitude of *not* wanting to help people at a certain point. If people are not reading the docs and always coming to me for help, I discard their support requests. References to the docs and mailing lists must be in a dozen places, but people just don't care to try things on their own. The only way you can survive in the long run is to leave these people to their own helplessness and concentrate on what you feel is important. If you loose sight of that, you're done for. Bad attitude, I know, but a necessary evil I think.
I realize that people always say that because a project is released under the GPL that others will step in and pick it up. I tend to question this attitude. People often don't realize what they're getting into when starting or taking over a project. I would guess most developers of popular GPL packages never thought their apps would require the amount of work that they do.
Besides, having a mob of coders trying to have their way at making architecture decisions never got a project very far. Its a better bet that several forks of the project will emerge, each with a small number of leaders. Remember, meetings don't become more meaningful if you add more PHBs.
While we're mentioning monitoring software, I'll put in a blatant plug for NetSaint(www.netsaint.org) - a GPL'ed monitoring package for Linux and most all other *NIX OSes that I started about 2 years ago.
Anyway, detecting a "real" failure of network services (like POP, SMTP, etc) at a remote location (i.e. a popular website) is more difficult to do than most people may think. Since the remote host is serveral hops away from you, there are a number of potential breaking points in the network connection between you and the host.
Most monitoring software will tell you if the service is unavailable from your point of view, but this may not be accurate for the rest of the world. If you want to know whether or not a particular service like SMTP was really down on a remote host (and not just down/unreachable from your point of view), you'd need to have several locations from which you are doing the monitoring. Since you don't own/aren't in charge of the host in question, you probably won't be able to get a really accurate view of what's going on, unless you can place enough monitoring hosts around the 'net or peer with other people who are doing monitoring...
Aside from the invasion of privacy issues this brings up, whats to stop an organization with the financial backing from sueing the pants off these guys?
Say for instance you're a large corporation which is very security-conscious. One dark weekend evening your border machines/firewalls/whatever sense that someone is launching a widespread scan of all your machines. Admins get paged, people come in to work, and everyone spends a few hours figuring out what the heck what happened, where the scan came from, and evaluating potential security breaches that may have resulted from this. Even after you realizing that its nothing too serious, the company has dropped a lot of time/money responding to and investigating this event.
What's to stop someone from sueing them over this? I would be surprised if someone doesn't. Hey, if people can sue because McDonald's coffee is hot and you're uncoordinated enough to spill it on yourself, anything is possible. I won't even mention the hot pickle / scalding suit...
Perhaps I've missed something, but the High-Availability Linux Project (http://www.linux-ha.org) already has similiar goals for clustering and failover.
Wouldn't it be better to put more community effort into a "real" OpenSource (GPL'ed) solution instead of trying to port Irix's existing product and possibly getting a half-baked license?
Things like this are tough decisions to make. On one hand, its nice to have centralized administration of registrations. On the other hand, competition encourages better service (faster response time, lower rates, etc.) I for one hope that we see more competition in the future for name registration.
People I've talked with (mostly M$ users) tend to believe that the different UNIX variants will eventually die because that refuse to be unified. Personally I love the fact that I have the ability to choose which flavor of a particular OS I choose to install on a server, workstation, etc. I love the fact that I have more than one window manager to choose from. I love the ability to run without a GUI if I see fit. I think these things are strengths, not weaknesses. I doubt anyone can deny that UNIX-based OSes will be around for quite some time.
Let's all hope they aren't using NT servers to protect our national defense secrets or control any weapons. Remember the naval "smart ship"?:-)
On another note, I always wondered what intrusion detection systems were like at high security government agencies. It would be interesting to actually see an incident response team in action, along with any custom software they've developed...
Connection between Mayans and Egyptians
on
Star Wars in Egypt
·
· Score: 1
Few techies seems to be interested in archaeology or ancient history, but I have been fascinated by the stuff since I was in grade school. Perhaps it was Indiana Jones that tuned me in...
Anyway, there are theories and some evidence that there was contact between the Americas and Africa/Europe. Although you won't find mention of it in any "standard" archaeology or history books (it goes against the grain!), several archaeologist have actually found ancient Egyption artifacts in Mayan and Aztec ruins. I only have one URL on the top of my head. Check out www.ancientamerican.com - it is a bimonthly zine on pre-Columbian inhabitation of the Americas and international trade in ancient times.
One thing you should always do is to never just blindly accept whatever you are taught, whether in school, in "accepted" books, etc. Challenge the system and find out whats real for yourself. After all, if you didn't you'd probably think MS software was great:-)
Yes, they do have a right to do whatever they want with the software they develop. *But* if they are collecting and sending this type of information out over the net, they have a responsibility to tell everyone about it *before* they make it available for purchase. How long has thing kind of crap been going on with MS products?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you can't truly "buy" the code to the project itself (although, in some cases it would be possible to buy the original copyright). However, if the community ends up forking the (commercialized) code, they lose the brand name of the original project and (most likely) the original developers of the project. Forking code is (relatively) easy. So is rewriting an entire project from scratch. What's really tough is maintaining the energy and enthusiasm to to ensure the new project succeeds in the long term. That's not going to be easy if you have high developer turnover.
/ 2006/03/ethan_galstad_o.html
I think a lot of people underestimate the value of a project's core developers. If you lose them, the dynamics of the project can change dramatically.
Dave Rosenberg wrote up a response the the BW article yesterday. I responded with some comments and he posted them at the URL below. If you're interested in my take on things as the lead developer of Nagios, check it out:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives
-- Ethan Galstad, Nagios Developer
Didn't Nikola Tesla work on remote power transmission way back when? I thought I remembered seeing info about this in the back of old Popular Science magazines when I was a kid.
I have been working with Netware server products for a few years (since 3.x) and I have to say that I love the admin utilities, etc. Nothing beats them (in NT or Linux) from a sysadmin point of view, especially when it comes to ACLs on volumes, directories or files. Mabye this will mean that we'll see better ACL support for files/directories under Linux? I know the Linux Trustees project attempts to duplicate this functionality, but its still a bit of a hack.
Sorry, not yet. As noted on the GD website , the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year. So no GIF support in the GD library for another year. :-(
As noted on the GD website, the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year.
Linksys Powerline products use 56-bit encryption to protect communication. You set a passphrase on each device and you can (obviously) only talk with other devices that have the same passphrase.
I've got two Linksys Powerline Etherfast 10/100 Bridges at my apartment which work great. They work to make a bridge between my cable modem, which sits in my living room, and my linux router, which is located in my bedroom. The specs say the devices are capable for transferring up to 14Mbps over the powerlines, although I have not had a chance to test this.
Each unit was about $80 through Amazon and I couldn't be happier with them (except that the config utility must be run from a Win* box). Beats the hell out of wires running over the floor. Anyone who can't easily wire their domicile and doesn't want to roll out wireless should definitely have a look.
Forgot the URL - its http://www.simondelivers.com/
SimonDelivers has been doing this in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for a few years now and they seem to be sucessful at it. From speaking to people who use their service, they say its fast, reasonable in price, etc. SD has also been slowly increasing its coverage area over time.
The GPL violations are most likely just the straw that finally broke him. The other reasons you cite are probably at the core of the problem.
As the creator/developer of NetSaint (soon to be Nagios, I can understand where his frustration comes from. I've gone through several periods where I feel like just throwing in the towel and calling it quits. During those times I usually take 2 or 3 months to stop development, not respond to email, etc. and just relax. After a few months time I feel like starting up again at full swing. Granted, I've got a load of email and coding to catch up on (or to redirect to /dev/null) when I return, but its the only thing that has kept me going this far. For me I've always returned because:
It also helps to develop an attitude of *not* wanting to help people at a certain point. If people are not reading the docs and always coming to me for help, I discard their support requests. References to the docs and mailing lists must be in a dozen places, but people just don't care to try things on their own. The only way you can survive in the long run is to leave these people to their own helplessness and concentrate on what you feel is important. If you loose sight of that, you're done for. Bad attitude, I know, but a necessary evil I think.
I realize that people always say that because a project is released under the GPL that others will step in and pick it up. I tend to question this attitude. People often don't realize what they're getting into when starting or taking over a project. I would guess most developers of popular GPL packages never thought their apps would require the amount of work that they do. Besides, having a mob of coders trying to have their way at making architecture decisions never got a project very far. Its a better bet that several forks of the project will emerge, each with a small number of leaders. Remember, meetings don't become more meaningful if you add more PHBs.
While we're mentioning monitoring software, I'll put in a blatant plug for NetSaint(www.netsaint.org) - a GPL'ed monitoring package for Linux and most all other *NIX OSes that I started about 2 years ago.
Anyway, detecting a "real" failure of network services (like POP, SMTP, etc) at a remote location (i.e. a popular website) is more difficult to do than most people may think. Since the remote host is serveral hops away from you, there are a number of potential breaking points in the network connection between you and the host.
Most monitoring software will tell you if the service is unavailable from your point of view, but this may not be accurate for the rest of the world. If you want to know whether or not a particular service like SMTP was really down on a remote host (and not just down/unreachable from your point of view), you'd need to have several locations from which you are doing the monitoring. Since you don't own/aren't in charge of the host in question, you probably won't be able to get a really accurate view of what's going on, unless you can place enough monitoring hosts around the 'net or peer with other people who are doing monitoring...
Aside from the invasion of privacy issues this brings up, whats to stop an organization with the financial backing from sueing the pants off these guys?
Say for instance you're a large corporation which is very security-conscious. One dark weekend evening your border machines/firewalls/whatever sense that someone is launching a widespread scan of all your machines. Admins get paged, people come in to work, and everyone spends a few hours figuring out what the heck what happened, where the scan came from, and evaluating potential security breaches that may have resulted from this. Even after you realizing that its nothing too serious, the company has dropped a lot of time/money responding to and investigating this event.
What's to stop someone from sueing them over this? I would be surprised if someone doesn't. Hey, if people can sue because McDonald's coffee is hot and you're uncoordinated enough to spill it on yourself, anything is possible. I won't even mention the hot pickle / scalding suit...
In case some people weren't aware, AIDE has been available as a GPL'ed replacement for Tripwire for a while now...
Perhaps I've missed something, but the High-Availability Linux Project (http://www.linux-ha.org) already has similiar goals for clustering and failover.
Wouldn't it be better to put more community effort into a "real" OpenSource (GPL'ed) solution instead of trying to port Irix's existing product and possibly getting a half-baked license?
Things like this are tough decisions to make. On one hand, its nice to have centralized administration of registrations. On the other hand, competition encourages better service (faster response time, lower rates, etc.) I for one hope that we see more competition in the future for name registration.
Trailer 2 is up at
real.extension.umn.edu/starwars
Woohoo! 10 minutes to download while I'm at work.
People I've talked with (mostly M$ users) tend to believe that the different UNIX variants will eventually die because that refuse to be unified. Personally I love the fact that I have the ability to choose which flavor of a particular OS I choose to install on a server, workstation, etc. I love the fact that I have more than one window manager to choose from. I love the ability to run without a GUI if I see fit. I think these things are strengths, not weaknesses. I doubt anyone can deny that UNIX-based OSes will be around for quite some time.
Let's all hope they aren't using NT servers to protect our national defense secrets or control any weapons. Remember the naval "smart ship"? :-)
On another note, I always wondered what intrusion detection systems were like at high security government agencies. It would be interesting to actually see an incident response team in action, along with any custom software they've developed...
Few techies seems to be interested in archaeology or ancient history, but I have been fascinated by the stuff since I was in grade school. Perhaps it was Indiana Jones that tuned me in...
:-)
Anyway, there are theories and some evidence that there was contact between the Americas and Africa/Europe. Although you won't find mention of it in any "standard" archaeology or history books (it goes against the grain!), several archaeologist have actually found ancient Egyption artifacts in Mayan and Aztec ruins. I only have one URL on the top of my head. Check out www.ancientamerican.com - it is a bimonthly zine on pre-Columbian inhabitation of the Americas and international trade in ancient times.
One thing you should always do is to never just blindly accept whatever you are taught, whether in school, in "accepted" books, etc. Challenge the system and find out whats real for yourself. After all, if you didn't you'd probably think MS software was great
Yes, they do have a right to do whatever they want with the software they develop. *But* if they are collecting and sending this type of information out over the net, they have a responsibility to tell everyone about it *before* they make it available for purchase. How long has thing kind of crap been going on with MS products?