it's espioage, sabotage or disruption of communication.
Actually, the book the OP was referring to, Network Centric Warfare (NCW), does not take the stance you are describing -- I think that's why he brought it up. The discussion of the use of communication networks in war extends beyond what public discourse usually touches on.
It's basically about the use of communication networks to increase situational awareness, plus everything else we tend to talk about.
Anyone used to be able to request a free paperback copy of NCW from some govvy site or another. It's over 10 years old now. Not sure if that has changed, but you can find it online in PDF form as well.
Careful, you are dangerously close to demagoguery with a comparison to murder. A manipulative appeal to emotions not logic.
The analogy illustrated the problem with argument you gave; it was not comparing non-free software development with murder...
The first poster said that if you want to make money without contributing to the project, it is easier with a BSD license.
You said, rightly, that many BSD users do contribute back.
In my first two paragraphs, I stated that regardless of how many people or companies decide to contribute code back to the project, the potential for user exploitation exists within BSD licensed code.
The same argument you advanced could be used to say that a crime -- any crime -- does not need a law against it because it isn't often committed. The crime used as demonstration is unimportant (I intended the "etc" to convey this). The number of people who don't do a bad thing is not important; it's still a bad thing. The GPL folks want protection against such people because they don't want to be locked out of their code.
I will leave it up to the mods to determine if I was not clear enough. I think the rest of the post shows that I am not interested in manipulation, but a debate about the subject that has been raised.
It seems GPL enthusiasts have committed similar offenses and have taken from a community without giving back to that community.
In my eyes, the real danger that exists in the gap between the GPL and the BSD licenses are the companies who can take BSD-licensed code, modify it, and re-release modified binaries without source. For me, this is why I am extremely hesitant to contribute to such projects.
Under both licenses, anyone could grab the code and do whatever they want with it in-house or for personal use. Only under the BSD licenses (and similar ones) can you distribute modified code without telling your users what has changed. I'm surprised that Theo didn't take a stance on that, rather than on the code that he retained access to. His bigger problem seemed to be the thing with Alan Cox, which was a case of someone either not understanding or not caring about the license terms. Both are problems.
GPL people don't trust the huge companies to play nice -- not all of them do, and the rest of them are not all nice all the time -- and I don't particularly want them benefiting from my code if they aren't.
That's a somewhat FUD'ish response. There are plenty of BSD users who contribute back.
He was not arguing that the number of users who contribute is too small. If you want to use/improve code and *not* contribute back, it is easier to use code that is under a BSD license. Juniper and Apple are the two big examples of what he means. I'll grant you all of the contributions that these companies may have made over the years; to argue over what they have or have not contributed would be missing the point. The point is that the opportunity exists to take someone else's code, modify it, sell it, and never contribute back or tell your users what has changed, because this is permitted by the BSD-family licenses.
Arguing against this is analogous to arguing against a law forbidding murder (or theft, etc.) because hardly anyone does it anyway.
I know the FSF claims otherwise, but they are not the free'er license. Restriction are restrictions, whether or not those restrictions have a socially beneficial goal and are altruistic.
The GPL gives freedom to the community (or to the code itself) over freedom to individual users. I agree that this is not always conveyed accurately by the FSF. These restrictions are the very reason why I, and I suspect many others, license our code under the GPL or contribute to GPL software. A restriction is not bad simply because it is a restriction. Some restrictions are particularly good, which I will talk about later. You haven't argued against this yet, so I will assume you know what I mean. I can clarify if necessary.
I agree that a BSD license is more free. The freedom taken away by the GPL involves other people's ability to "leech" from the community. Everyone likes this except the leeches and those who simply don't want to be told what they may or may not do. I can understand both of these (very different) approaches to not liking the GPL, but I don't share either of them. (For the record, I am not suggesting that you are a leech; the argument you are advancing fits into the second camp.)
I don't *need* to be told not to leech, and I appreciate that I have a recourse against those who do.
if a church or government was compelling you to do good and altruistic things would you consider that freedom?
No, I would consider it the underpinning of a civil society. Not all freedom is good. For instance, giving other people the freedom to commit horrendous acts (child abuse, murder, theft, etc.) without retribution is not a good thing. Realizing this, many governments have laws against such things.
I do not need compulsion in order to act with, at minimum, a basic civility toward my fellow creatures, but I recognize that there are some who do -- we call them sociopaths.
Why is being compelled by the FSF any different?
Same thing holds for the FSF. I don't need to be compelled to see the value in the GPL. It expressed the wishes I have for my code very well. I think I am primarily glad that the GPL exists for these reasons:
1) I know that my code is legally protected against those would take advantage of me, my work, my code, and my community.
2) I have a legal recourse if others do attempt to take advantage of the above, and there are powerful, user-made organizations that can protect the community as a whole.
3) I know that the community will continue to thrive as a result of this security.
If you check the website linked to in the article, they're now hosting an image that says: "Turns out this wasn't Qwest after all, but another (to remain nameless) ISP in our area. My apologies to Qwest for the mistake." Oops.
The Free Software Foundation can use lawyers to help answer questions from non-lawyers about the General Public License (GPL). The GPL is one of the most widely used free/open software licenses. See here for more information: http://www.fsf.org/volunteer
The relevant snippet from the web site:
Are you a law geek?
* Be a Licensing Volunteer. Help us answer the many questions we receive every day at the FSF regarding the use and abuse of free software licenses. If you are interested, write to licensing@fsf.org and tell us a bit about your background, both legal and with the free software community, if you are interested. Please also run through the GPL quiz and let us know how you do.
As an aside, if you are *neither* a lawyer nor a programmer and you're still interested in supporting open source projects, there are lots of ways to get involved. This includes those with an interest in art, linguistics, writing, testing, organizing/assisting at public functions, etc. Tons of very different approaches. Check out the link above for more info.
Is "just one web" really the best thing? What about competition?
There is already competition between ISPs, who give you access to the web -- that's why we're getting cool things like LTE, LTE-Advanced, WiMAX, etc. If you meant splitting up the resources that make up the web, like the web sites, I don't see what benefit that would bring -- and there is no incentive to be the first one doing it... since that means no one is going to be able to see your site.
If they attack ONE OF THE WEBS, there is the possibility of switching to the other network when that happens.
The nature of the Internet is that most attacks are only going to affect an isolated portion of it. "THE WEB" is not a single entity. BGP is as close as you could get to massive disruption (without silently owning thousands of individual ISPs), but if someone really is being malicious with BGP (rather than the occasional "oops"), they can always be blacklisted. That would still be disruptive, and we could make a global backup network to combat it, but the real solution there is to secure BGP.
Backup networks work for "small scale" networks (read: large companies, governments). This is for internal use for that organization (remember your history: US DoD and the Internet). A global backup network for public use will have big problems, especially if we want to be able to count on *it* being available if the other is *not*.
Also, for any kind of security between the two networks in the event of some huge theoretical attack, the networks would need to be physically separated. This means nothing on one network can access anything on the other network. So you have two isolated PDAs, ISPs have two sets of racks of isolated gear, two sets of intercontinental fiber...
Device manufacturers would be the only ones happy with that.
It's funny how everyone who uses Wave on a team can't live without it, and everyone who has never tried it can't see the point in it. Directed at the replies to the OP.
CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed.
That really is great. It's so nice to see a popular icon getting involved in some way with science. Just getting his name along side genetic research goes a long way to popularize science -- after all, we know how much children and teens look up to him.
The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage.
Oh Ozzy, we still love you! Ha, ha!
What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years
Um, Mr. Osbourne, look--the kids--
not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine
--oh, God--
sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol
//turns pale, covers child's ears//
there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.
JonySuede, thank you for the link. Always interesting to hear what Chomsky has to say, even though I don't agree with all of it. In this case I think he is 100% correct. Both posts deserve mod-ups.
Reminds me of the Seal Team 6 story. The US Navy made a Seal Team 1 and 2, then skipped up to 6 -- to make it seem like there was a total of 6 teams, when there were really only 3.
I've been through DAHDI and Zaptel-hell many times in 1.4, 1.6, and now 1.8. Playing around with the 1.8 code (beta has been out since mid summer), DAHDI/dahdidummy is working just fine on my Ubuntu 8.10 box for conferencing. Coaxing Zaptel into behaving was hell the first time around, this isn't bad at all. So be happy.:-)
I dunno, I have no idea what's in the darwin kernel. If you're interested, you could ask him in e-mail how he got the idea. An event for renamed files doesn't seem that difficult to come up with independently, though.
Re:Whether a file has changed = complex?
on
Linux 2.6.36 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've used incron on production boxen heavily over the past couple years and haven't noticed any problems with it, personally.
fanotify looks pretty sweet, though. Eric Paris made a sort of introductory post about it last year, which is a good read:
Particularly interesting is his idea of adding 'rename' events. This would mean you could implement something like 'updatedb' in realtime, and always have current results for 'locate'. Not sure if the rename events made it in or not, still digging around.
Slashdot Mirror
it's espioage, sabotage or disruption of communication.
Actually, the book the OP was referring to, Network Centric Warfare (NCW), does not take the stance you are describing -- I think that's why he brought it up. The discussion of the use of communication networks in war extends beyond what public discourse usually touches on.
It's basically about the use of communication networks to increase situational awareness, plus everything else we tend to talk about.
Anyone used to be able to request a free paperback copy of NCW from some govvy site or another. It's over 10 years old now. Not sure if that has changed, but you can find it online in PDF form as well.
Careful, you are dangerously close to demagoguery with a comparison to murder. A manipulative appeal to emotions not logic.
The analogy illustrated the problem with argument you gave; it was not comparing non-free software development with murder...
The first poster said that if you want to make money without contributing to the project, it is easier with a BSD license.
You said, rightly, that many BSD users do contribute back.
In my first two paragraphs, I stated that regardless of how many people or companies decide to contribute code back to the project, the potential for user exploitation exists within BSD licensed code.
The same argument you advanced could be used to say that a crime -- any crime -- does not need a law against it because it isn't often committed. The crime used as demonstration is unimportant (I intended the "etc" to convey this). The number of people who don't do a bad thing is not important; it's still a bad thing. The GPL folks want protection against such people because they don't want to be locked out of their code.
I will leave it up to the mods to determine if I was not clear enough. I think the rest of the post shows that I am not interested in manipulation, but a debate about the subject that has been raised.
It seems GPL enthusiasts have committed similar offenses and have taken from a community without giving back to that community.
In my eyes, the real danger that exists in the gap between the GPL and the BSD licenses are the companies who can take BSD-licensed code, modify it, and re-release modified binaries without source. For me, this is why I am extremely hesitant to contribute to such projects.
Under both licenses, anyone could grab the code and do whatever they want with it in-house or for personal use. Only under the BSD licenses (and similar ones) can you distribute modified code without telling your users what has changed. I'm surprised that Theo didn't take a stance on that, rather than on the code that he retained access to. His bigger problem seemed to be the thing with Alan Cox, which was a case of someone either not understanding or not caring about the license terms. Both are problems.
GPL people don't trust the huge companies to play nice -- not all of them do, and the rest of them are not all nice all the time -- and I don't particularly want them benefiting from my code if they aren't.
That's a somewhat FUD'ish response. There are plenty of BSD users who contribute back.
He was not arguing that the number of users who contribute is too small. If you want to use/improve code and *not* contribute back, it is easier to use code that is under a BSD license. Juniper and Apple are the two big examples of what he means. I'll grant you all of the contributions that these companies may have made over the years; to argue over what they have or have not contributed would be missing the point. The point is that the opportunity exists to take someone else's code, modify it, sell it, and never contribute back or tell your users what has changed, because this is permitted by the BSD-family licenses.
Arguing against this is analogous to arguing against a law forbidding murder (or theft, etc.) because hardly anyone does it anyway.
I know the FSF claims otherwise, but they are not the free'er license. Restriction are restrictions, whether or not those restrictions have a socially beneficial goal and are altruistic.
The GPL gives freedom to the community (or to the code itself) over freedom to individual users. I agree that this is not always conveyed accurately by the FSF. These restrictions are the very reason why I, and I suspect many others, license our code under the GPL or contribute to GPL software. A restriction is not bad simply because it is a restriction. Some restrictions are particularly good, which I will talk about later. You haven't argued against this yet, so I will assume you know what I mean. I can clarify if necessary.
I agree that a BSD license is more free. The freedom taken away by the GPL involves other people's ability to "leech" from the community. Everyone likes this except the leeches and those who simply don't want to be told what they may or may not do. I can understand both of these (very different) approaches to not liking the GPL, but I don't share either of them. (For the record, I am not suggesting that you are a leech; the argument you are advancing fits into the second camp.)
I don't *need* to be told not to leech, and I appreciate that I have a recourse against those who do.
if a church or government was compelling you to do good and altruistic things would you consider that freedom?
No, I would consider it the underpinning of a civil society. Not all freedom is good. For instance, giving other people the freedom to commit horrendous acts (child abuse, murder, theft, etc.) without retribution is not a good thing. Realizing this, many governments have laws against such things.
I do not need compulsion in order to act with, at minimum, a basic civility toward my fellow creatures, but I recognize that there are some who do -- we call them sociopaths.
Why is being compelled by the FSF any different?
Same thing holds for the FSF. I don't need to be compelled to see the value in the GPL. It expressed the wishes I have for my code very well. I think I am primarily glad that the GPL exists for these reasons:
1) I know that my code is legally protected against those would take advantage of me, my work, my code, and my community.
2) I have a legal recourse if others do attempt to take advantage of the above, and there are powerful, user-made organizations that can protect the community as a whole.
3) I know that the community will continue to thrive as a result of this security.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
If you check the website linked to in the article, they're now hosting an image that says: "Turns out this wasn't Qwest after all, but another (to remain nameless) ISP in our area. My apologies to Qwest for the mistake." Oops.
Apparently the extra columns can be used to the effect of doing "more" than store data. A link in the article explains how lots of extra columns can be useful for querying data (Casandra doesn't use SQL). http://maxgrinev.com/2010/07/12/do-you-really-need-sql-to-do-it-all-in-cassandra/
So the primary reason for this doesn't seem to be that one's run-of-the-mill database needs more columns.
The relevant snippet from the web site:
Are you a law geek?
* Be a Licensing Volunteer. Help us answer the many questions we receive every day at the FSF regarding the use and abuse of free software licenses. If you are interested, write to licensing@fsf.org and tell us a bit about your background, both legal and with the free software community, if you are interested. Please also run through the GPL quiz and let us know how you do.
As an aside, if you are *neither* a lawyer nor a programmer and you're still interested in supporting open source projects, there are lots of ways to get involved. This includes those with an interest in art, linguistics, writing, testing, organizing/assisting at public functions, etc. Tons of very different approaches. Check out the link above for more info.
Time for that 7600 series you've always wanted. That or go with a nice ISR. You'll get used to the Cisco stamp on your forehead. :-P
Is "just one web" really the best thing? What about competition?
There is already competition between ISPs, who give you access to the web -- that's why we're getting cool things like LTE, LTE-Advanced, WiMAX, etc. If you meant splitting up the resources that make up the web, like the web sites, I don't see what benefit that would bring -- and there is no incentive to be the first one doing it... since that means no one is going to be able to see your site.
If they attack ONE OF THE WEBS, there is the possibility of switching to the other network when that happens.
The nature of the Internet is that most attacks are only going to affect an isolated portion of it. "THE WEB" is not a single entity. BGP is as close as you could get to massive disruption (without silently owning thousands of individual ISPs), but if someone really is being malicious with BGP (rather than the occasional "oops"), they can always be blacklisted. That would still be disruptive, and we could make a global backup network to combat it, but the real solution there is to secure BGP.
Backup networks work for "small scale" networks (read: large companies, governments). This is for internal use for that organization (remember your history: US DoD and the Internet). A global backup network for public use will have big problems, especially if we want to be able to count on *it* being available if the other is *not*.
Also, for any kind of security between the two networks in the event of some huge theoretical attack, the networks would need to be physically separated. This means nothing on one network can access anything on the other network. So you have two isolated PDAs, ISPs have two sets of racks of isolated gear, two sets of intercontinental fiber...
Device manufacturers would be the only ones happy with that.
Dr. Tae: Your Skateboarding Physics Professor
http://drtae.org/
Dr. Tae rocks. If you haven't seen him, go to his site and watch his videos right now.
And whoever suggested Buckaroo Bonzai should be +5 modded. I think his name was John.
He just updated the README included in the source to include the license; it's a BSD style license.
Geoff Tate's lyrics have a whole new meaning to me now!
Or Orwell.
cyber -> mind -> thought
cybercrime -> mindcrime -> thoughtcrime
See you in the place where there is no darkness.
It was funny =p
It's funny how everyone who uses Wave on a team can't live without it, and everyone who has never tried it can't see the point in it. Directed at the replies to the OP.
Had a TV show a few years back and his own WoW commercial, that's all it takes to be famous in the US. For the rest of the world, 40 years of music.
Maybe more of a pop icon in the 80s and 90s, but his name is still out there...
CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed.
That really is great. It's so nice to see a popular icon getting involved in some way with science. Just getting his name along side genetic research goes a long way to popularize science -- after all, we know how much children and teens look up to him.
The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage.
Oh Ozzy, we still love you! Ha, ha!
What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years
Um, Mr. Osbourne, look--the kids--
not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine
--oh, God--
sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol
//turns pale, covers child's ears//
there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.
B-be sure to let us know... //clears throat//
JonySuede, thank you for the link. Always interesting to hear what Chomsky has to say, even though I don't agree with all of it. In this case I think he is 100% correct. Both posts deserve mod-ups.
Ever tried explaining a buffer overflow stack-smashing attack to someone?
Only "for fun and profit."
from the please-take-my-freedoms-I-don't-deserve-them dept.
Not much more to say.
Reminds me of the Seal Team 6 story. The US Navy made a Seal Team 1 and 2, then skipped up to 6 -- to make it seem like there was a total of 6 teams, when there were really only 3.
I've been through DAHDI and Zaptel-hell many times in 1.4, 1.6, and now 1.8. Playing around with the 1.8 code (beta has been out since mid summer), DAHDI/dahdidummy is working just fine on my Ubuntu 8.10 box for conferencing. Coaxing Zaptel into behaving was hell the first time around, this isn't bad at all. So be happy. :-)
I dunno, I have no idea what's in the darwin kernel. If you're interested, you could ask him in e-mail how he got the idea. An event for renamed files doesn't seem that difficult to come up with independently, though.
I've used incron on production boxen heavily over the past couple years and haven't noticed any problems with it, personally.
fanotify looks pretty sweet, though. Eric Paris made a sort of introductory post about it last year, which is a good read:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/24/242
Particularly interesting is his idea of adding 'rename' events. This would mean you could implement something like 'updatedb' in realtime, and always have current results for 'locate'. Not sure if the rename events made it in or not, still digging around.
The tags for this post are just hilarious.
troll trolltroll trolltrolltroll trolltrolltrolltroll
LOL
It plans to provide no cost, no freedom software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups
Free can mean more than one thing. Gratis MS products enables a lower cost of entry into slavery.