But all the Debian packages are 5 years out of date.
Broadly true (if exaggerated) for Debian Stable, but not for Debian Unstable. In Debian parlance "stable" vs "unstable" doesn't refer to how reliable the platform is: Debian Unstable does not kernel panic regularly. "Stable" means "packages will only be updated for very good reasons".
This makes Debian Stable the kind of platform you might choose to run a mission-critical service on. I'd probably be wary of running something important on Debian Unstable: the whole point of that distro is that a package can change just because the developer thinks it's a good idea.... and my understanding of Gentoo is that it's even more mercurial than Debian Unstable. That's fantastic for rapid development, desktops, environments where a glitch caused by a package change doesn't cost some business thousands of dollars, but it's not good for solid, stable servers.
Sometimes 5 years out of date is what you want (exception: security patches!)
FTP/TLS is a big part of my job. It's an exciting time for the protocol because after years sitting around as a commonly used draft standard, it's just been promoted to a standards track RFC.
It covers things like the difference between SFTP (SSH) and FTPS (SSL) (although instead of discussing the merits of either, it links to another page)... and has a long (but not comprehensive) list of clients.
However, the OP asks about implicit SSL. The IETF frowns on implicit SSL, and the FTP/TLS standard negotiates TLS implicitly (with "AUTH TLS").
Some of the listed clients may support implicit SSL however. I suspect WS-FTP does, for example.
What you're actually saying (if I understand you) is that Europeans always use "Lego" as an adjective.
Not really. Since I don't have the right grammatical term at my fingertips, I'll just have to say that "sugar" is the best analogue I can come up with (salt also works... or sand...)
Sugar: "I bought some sugar" - "a bag of sugar" - "a grain of sugar" Lego: "I bought some Lego" - "a box of Lego" - "a Lego brick" US Lego: "I bought some Legos" - "a box of Legos" - "a Lego".
Hey, I don't care what you call it. Whatever you like.
It's just that I had never heard Lego referred to as "Legos" until a Lego story appeared on Slashot (I think it would have been the C compiler for Mindstorms).
I'm still not sure I understand the thinking behind "Legos". Is an individual brick "a Lego"?
It must simply be yet another US/Europe cultural difference.
If I was really hidebound by corporate dictat, then I'd be insisting on "LEGO" (all caps), but that looks like shouting, and I ain't doing it until someone tells me it's an acronym for something.
Dear Parents and Children
The word LEGO(R) is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!
Susan Williams
Consumer Services (Susan's name is a pseudonym for the service dptmt.)
I used to spend time on the qmail mailing list. A few people on there made reasonable money as consultants, writing addons to qmail to provide some esoteric feature their client required.
Most of the time, the resultant software was Open Source. The client got their software, the consultant got his money, the community got the software too.
You might ask "but why not hoard the software so you can sell it again?". I guess those consultants felt they owed something back to the community that gave them their tools and their support.
Apple has been using Open Source and making money from it for a few years now. Their model is to have open source and freely available core components (Darwin, Webkit, etc) then build value on top of it and charge for that.
But as I see it, in the case of Darwin, Apple is not making money writing OSS. Rather, Apple has saved itself the bother of writing an OS by simply tweaking someone else's work instead (which, of course, is entirely within their rights).
Admittedly those tweaks are not all that trivial, but regardless Apple gets to start with 80% of the OS they want rather than 0% of an OS, which is nice for them.
This is an example of how other people can make money from your work as an OSS programmer.
Similarly, modifying KHTML into WebCore is cheaper for Apple than writing a HTML renderer from scratch.
An OSS programmer's general reaction to that is to Get Over It. You know the deal when you choose the license.
I argue elsewhere that you can make money writing OSS -- I just don't think these components of MacOS X are a shining example.
If you look at Apple's Open Source projects you'll find that they broadly fall into two categories: forks of reasonably mature non-Apple products, and implementations of protocols which it's in Apple's interest to see more widely adopted on other platforms.
I think that second category -- Streaming Server, Rendezvous, OpenPlay -- is a far better example of how creating Open Source software can be part of a serious money making business model. Gift implementations to the community, in order to push the prevalent technology in the direction your business wants, or in order to make your for-pay product more useful.
This doesn't quite answer your question ('How [a] company can make money, if its products are available for free?'), but it's one example of how people who are making money can produce free software as a side effect.
The Apache guys were people administrating web sites for various reasons associated with their jobs. They could have used the CERN HTTPd, or they could have used NCSA HTTPd and been happy with what they got.
It turns out that cooperating on improving NCSA HTTPd, into what became Apache, was a better way of running their web sites than the alternatives:... the alternatives being:
Muddle through with an existing HTTPd
Hack an existing HTTPd without sharing the source
Buy a commercial HTTPd
Running a website was the aim. Apache just fell out of that activity.
Another example might be TiVo: they sell boxes. It is cheaper for them to customise a free OS for those boxes, and participate in the community, than the alternatives -- write their own OS from scratch, or buy commercial licenses. TiVo isn't a great example because I don't see any Free software that's come from TiVo that's particularly useful to the community at large.
So the answer is: follow a business model which is not related to selling software, yet produces Free Software as a side effect.
Nice try at an analogy. Now you get to show how it applies.
The proportion of American citizens who care about democracy, and thus are "zealots" by your definition, is a hell of a lot higher than the proportion of computer users who care about the "freedoms" that the FSF espouses.
Hehe, well I didn't want to start a post with "In Soviet Russia" now, did I.
While most Americans would claim to care about democracy if asked, it would be interesting to see just how many of them would get off their arses and did anything about it if their freedoms were taken away from them: as long as their lives remained reasonably comfortable. Just look at all those people who simply didn't bother voting in the presidential election.
Having principles and sticking to them is difficult. So much so, that I don't really want to condemn those who take the easy route, shop at Walmart, buy non-Fairtrade coffee, use non-free software.
But, I think it's unfair to deride those who have principles and adhere to them. The more computers become intrinsic to life, the more important software becomes. A healthy Free Software ecosystem is a boon to humankind.
This seems like the very opposite of "tactile" to me. I used to own a programmable A/V remote with a touch screen, and I never got on with it because there was no touch feedback. I wanted to feel where the buttons were, and whether I was pressing it.
There's scope to invent a tactile screen which would achieve this: "touch pixels" ("tixels"?) that can rise or lower under software control.
I have yet to see an operating system that can be installed 'within minutes' certaintly not windows, or linux, or os x, or well, anything that doesn't come bootable off a cd or somesuch
Why do you discount bootable CDs?
Knoppix and its cousins seem to be the ideal riposte to those who insist Linux is hard to install and configure.
I dont understand why anyone would pick Linux over OS X besides the fact it's free.
Both gratis and libre, and both of those are excellent reasons for me.
I'm curious about OSX, and I'd like to give it a go, but:
The cost of admission is high. Even the Mac Mini is a lot of money to pay just for an experiment. I'm reluctant to pay £100 for an old mac because it would be an unfair test to try out the OS on slow hardware
An environment so completely controlled by a single coroporation, frankly scares me. With Windows at least one can shop around for hardware. With Linux (and other Free OSs) you can shop around for the lot.
So Darwin is Open Source: big deal. The rest of MacOS X is the ultimate in closed software.
Of course many other OSs did memory protection and preemptive multitasking -- not least all those UNIXes. In 1995 NT was only used for high-end stuff, and was beyond the budget of home users. OS/2 did all kinds of slick stuff, but lost out because IBM didn't know how to market.
Whether or not Windows 95 was well underway by 1992, it went gold late in '95 or early in '96 (I should look this up, but instead I'm relying on memory).
In 1995, Linux was already a perfectly usable environment: X worked, GCC worked, Mosaic worked. I may have an old fashioned way of working, but apart from my window manager, I work pretty much the same way on a modern Linux as I did on Linux back then. Trust me when I say that the only thing on Slackware '95 that required a reboot was a new kernel.
Windows 95 multitasked and did memory protection, but it never felt as if it was comfortable doing so. Windows 98 was a slight improvement, but still felt clunky doing so. On both those systems, reboots for silly little configuration changes were the norm, and it was irritating.
With Windows 2000, I finally felt that here was a Windows that did these things right. And I still believe that without Linux MS would never have fed those features into a home/desktop OS. Whether or not other OSs did those things, it was Linux that educated a critical mass of end-users that you DON'T need to reboot just to change IP address.
Oh, yawn. Anyone who makes a leap between war, hunger, and UNIX is doing nothing more than finding an excuse to be a sarcastic sod. But, I'll reply anyway.
Obviously, hardware and the way that it's addressed is going to vary from system to system, but would it *really* be so difficult to some up with some sort of UNIX standards body? Sure, it would take a number of years to really get anything out of it, but the only other alternative is further fragmentation, which will give Microsoft even more fodder in the future.
Yes, sorry about being gratuitously sarcastic...
The point remains though, it's easy to form a standards body. Let's imagine a hypothetical standards body declares that henceforth RPM is the standard UNIX packaging solution, and that everyone who's using something different should jolly well buck up their ideas and migrate to the standard ASAP.
Do you see all the YAST and APT users nodding sagely, saying "OK, it's inconvenient, but I will change my ways for the good of unity"?
Having to administer mostly Sun systems with a smattering of AIX and SCO systems, it's astounding to see how many differences there are between them.
Yes indeed, there are many differences. Wouldn't it be so much better if we made them all the same? Then everything would be easy!
Great.
Now, for each of these differences, who decides which is the RIGHT way to do it -- the way we should keep, and which was the WRONG way to do it, the one which should change?
Once we've sorted that one out, we can move on to solving world hunger, and maybe put an end to war while we're at it.
From the article: So the battle in the free UNIX space is entirely over command line options, system administration paradigms, installation packaging, and 3D GUI features. I've got news for you: Real Programmers Don't Care about that garbage.
Maybe real programmers don't, but real users and real sysadmins do care. In a monoculture, things just don't improve. I far prefer that RPM and apt-get both exist, than for only RPM to exist.
The other (all too common) trap this article falls into is talking about "the Open Source movement" as if it is a single consciousness:
"Has it managed to completely escape the attention of the "open source" movement that Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and so forth have blithely continued to remain virtually Windows-only while waiting for the dust to settle?"
"The Open Source movement" doesn't have an opinion. The "movement" consists of thousands of people, each of whom may have one opinion, a different opinion, or no opinion whatsovever. There will be those who worry every day about what Macromedia is doing with Linux, and there will be those who don't care in the slightest what Macromedia, Corel or Adobe do or do not do.
Meanwhile, whether a particular Linux distribution wins in the end, or if Windows wins in the end, all this competition has been nothing but good news for consumers. The distros constantly out-do each other.
Having been exposed to Windows since 1.0, it's clear to me that many of the improvements that make it tolerable today (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, configuration changes without reboots, etc.) simply would not have been developed without that competition from Linux.
Re:Firefox has a small footprint?
on
Peeking at Netscape 8
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't get me wrong, I love and use firefox, but you won't get it installed on an old PI-233 with 32MB RAM.
I have a Pentium 233 on my desktop. It runs Debian unstable, and Firefox runs OK. It feels a little sluggish on image-heavy pages, but that's life.
Is the Windows version so much different?
Now, Mozilla on the other hand is unuasably slow on this machine.
Google really slaps together a pile of junk. Parts fail left and right, and nobody bothers to fix them. The software hides all this from the users.
Google even checksums the data, on the assumption that it is frequently getting corrupted by all the junk hardware they buy.
I find this self-healing incredibly elegant. I understand that it makes better economic sense for Google to simply ignore broken hardware than to attend to it. I read that they would not even send someone round to turn off a broken machine.
But - the environmentalist in my is repelled by the idea. As time passes, Google will amass a huge and growing number of completely useless energy wasting units... what's their plan to dispose of antiquated datacentre equipment?
Slashdot Mirror
But all the Debian packages are 5 years out of date.
... and my understanding of Gentoo is that it's even more mercurial than Debian Unstable. That's fantastic for rapid development, desktops, environments where a glitch caused by a package change doesn't cost some business thousands of dollars, but it's not good for solid, stable servers.
Broadly true (if exaggerated) for Debian Stable, but not for Debian Unstable. In Debian parlance "stable" vs "unstable" doesn't refer to how reliable the platform is: Debian Unstable does not kernel panic regularly. "Stable" means "packages will only be updated for very good reasons".
This makes Debian Stable the kind of platform you might choose to run a mission-critical service on.
I'd probably be wary of running something important on Debian Unstable: the whole point of that distro is that a package can change just because the developer thinks it's a good idea.
Sometimes 5 years out of date is what you want (exception: security patches!)
According to the documentation: "PSFTP, the PuTTY SFTP client, is a tool for transferring files securely between computers using an SSH connection."
Whereas the OP said: "I need a command line FTP client that supports 'Implicit SSL'"
SSH is not SSL.
FTP/TLS is a big part of my job. It's an exciting time for the protocol because after years sitting around as a commonly used draft standard, it's just been promoted to a standards track RFC.
... and has a long (but not comprehensive) list of clients.
Pretty much all you could need to know about FTP/TLS (TLS being the current Right Way to refer to SSL) is at the RFC author's "FTP/TLS State of Play" page.
It covers things like the difference between SFTP (SSH) and FTPS (SSL) (although instead of discussing the merits of either, it links to another page)
However, the OP asks about implicit SSL. The IETF frowns on implicit SSL, and the FTP/TLS standard negotiates TLS implicitly (with "AUTH TLS").
Some of the listed clients may support implicit SSL however. I suspect WS-FTP does, for example.
What you're actually saying (if I understand you) is that Europeans always use "Lego" as an adjective.
Not really. Since I don't have the right grammatical term at my fingertips, I'll just have to say that "sugar" is the best analogue I can come up with (salt also works... or sand...)
Sugar: "I bought some sugar" - "a bag of sugar" - "a grain of sugar"
Lego: "I bought some Lego" - "a box of Lego" - "a Lego brick"
US Lego: "I bought some Legos" - "a box of Legos" - "a Lego".
Right?
(Is a Lego brick "a lego"
What else would it be?
"A Lego brick": but at least you've clarified to me the usage that Americans have somehow adopted (I wonder how it happened).
If it helps you understand, calling a Lego brick "a Lego" is, to a European, kind of like calling a grain of sugar "a sugar".
Consider yourself told that Lego indeed is an acronym.
Originally, Lego = Lek Godt. That's Norwegian, directly translated "Play Well".
You're
True enough, an acronym has two meanings: a word made up of initials, or a a word made up of word fragments.
However, I think only the first meaning justifies an all-caps presentation.
Lek Godt might translate to "LeGo" but not to "LEGO".
People will start referring to 'Lego Bricks' as soon as 'GNU\Linux' catches on.
Seriously, throughout my childhood (in Britain), "Lego bricks" was the only way I ever heard them referred to.
Hey, I don't care what you call it. Whatever you like.
It's just that I had never heard Lego referred to as "Legos" until a Lego story appeared on Slashot (I think it would have been the C compiler for Mindstorms).
I'm still not sure I understand the thinking behind "Legos". Is an individual brick "a Lego"?
It must simply be yet another US/Europe cultural difference.
If I was really hidebound by corporate dictat, then I'd be insisting on "LEGO" (all caps), but that looks like shouting, and I ain't doing it until someone tells me it's an acronym for something.
See the rec.toys.lego FAQ:
This brings to mind the inspired idea that is Lego Star Wars: the videogame.
I'm quite excited about it, and I'm not even a Star Wars fan...
I used to spend time on the qmail mailing list. A few people on there made reasonable money as consultants, writing addons to qmail to provide some esoteric feature their client required.
Most of the time, the resultant software was Open Source. The client got their software, the consultant got his money, the community got the software too.
You might ask "but why not hoard the software so you can sell it again?". I guess those consultants felt they owed something back to the community that gave them their tools and their support.
Apple has been using Open Source and making money from it for a few years now. Their model is to have open source and freely available core components (Darwin, Webkit, etc) then build value on top of it and charge for that.
But as I see it, in the case of Darwin, Apple is not making money writing OSS. Rather, Apple has saved itself the bother of writing an OS by simply tweaking someone else's work instead (which, of course, is entirely within their rights).
Admittedly those tweaks are not all that trivial, but regardless Apple gets to start with 80% of the OS they want rather than 0% of an OS, which is nice for them.
This is an example of how other people can make money from your work as an OSS programmer.
Similarly, modifying KHTML into WebCore is cheaper for Apple than writing a HTML renderer from scratch.
An OSS programmer's general reaction to that is to Get Over It. You know the deal when you choose the license.
I argue elsewhere that you can make money writing OSS -- I just don't think these components of MacOS X are a shining example.
If you look at Apple's Open Source projects you'll find that they broadly fall into two categories: forks of reasonably mature non-Apple products, and implementations of protocols which it's in Apple's interest to see more widely adopted on other platforms.
I think that second category -- Streaming Server, Rendezvous, OpenPlay -- is a far better example of how creating Open Source software can be part of a serious money making business model. Gift implementations to the community, in order to push the prevalent technology in the direction your business wants, or in order to make your for-pay product more useful.
The Apache guys were people administrating web sites for various reasons associated with their jobs. They could have used the CERN HTTPd, or they could have used NCSA HTTPd and been happy with what they got.
It turns out that cooperating on improving NCSA HTTPd, into what became Apache, was a better way of running their web sites than the alternatives:
- Muddle through with an existing HTTPd
- Hack an existing HTTPd without sharing the source
- Buy a commercial HTTPd
Running a website was the aim. Apache just fell out of that activity.Another example might be TiVo: they sell boxes. It is cheaper for them to customise a free OS for those boxes, and participate in the community, than the alternatives -- write their own OS from scratch, or buy commercial licenses. TiVo isn't a great example because I don't see any Free software that's come from TiVo that's particularly useful to the community at large.
So the answer is: follow a business model which is not related to selling software, yet produces Free Software as a side effect.
Nice try at an analogy. Now you get to show how it applies.
The proportion of American citizens who care about democracy, and thus are "zealots" by your definition, is a hell of a lot higher than the proportion of computer users who care about the "freedoms" that the FSF espouses.
Hehe, well I didn't want to start a post with "In Soviet Russia" now, did I.
While most Americans would claim to care about democracy if asked, it would be interesting to see just how many of them would get off their arses and did anything about it if their freedoms were taken away from them: as long as their lives remained reasonably comfortable. Just look at all those people who simply didn't bother voting in the presidential election.
Having principles and sticking to them is difficult. So much so, that I don't really want to condemn those who take the easy route, shop at Walmart, buy non-Fairtrade coffee, use non-free software.
But, I think it's unfair to deride those who have principles and adhere to them. The more computers become intrinsic to life, the more important software becomes. A healthy Free Software ecosystem is a boon to humankind.
The only people who care about "free as in speech" as applied to software are zealots. The rest of us just want to get the job done.
The only people who care about "democracy" are zealots. The rest of us just want the trains to run on time.
This seems like the very opposite of "tactile" to me. I used to own a programmable A/V remote with a touch screen, and I never got on with it because there was no touch feedback. I wanted to feel where the buttons were, and whether I was pressing it.
There's scope to invent a tactile screen which would achieve this: "touch pixels" ("tixels"?) that can rise or lower under software control.
If you go into any GM dealership the salesman will tell you that Ford's aren't as reliable and that their service departments sucks. That's business.
In my country there are laws against slandering your competitors. I expect there are in your country too.
I have yet to see an operating system that can be installed 'within minutes' certaintly not windows, or linux, or os x, or well, anything that doesn't come bootable off a cd or somesuch
Why do you discount bootable CDs?
Knoppix and its cousins seem to be the ideal riposte to those who insist Linux is hard to install and configure.
Both gratis and libre, and both of those are excellent reasons for me.
I'm curious about OSX, and I'd like to give it a go, but:
So Darwin is Open Source: big deal. The rest of MacOS X is the ultimate in closed software.
I accept some of these points.
Of course many other OSs did memory protection and preemptive multitasking -- not least all those UNIXes. In 1995 NT was only used for high-end stuff, and was beyond the budget of home users. OS/2 did all kinds of slick stuff, but lost out because IBM didn't know how to market.
Whether or not Windows 95 was well underway by 1992, it went gold late in '95 or early in '96 (I should look this up, but instead I'm relying on memory).
In 1995, Linux was already a perfectly usable environment: X worked, GCC worked, Mosaic worked. I may have an old fashioned way of working, but apart from my window manager, I work pretty much the same way on a modern Linux as I did on Linux back then. Trust me when I say that the only thing on Slackware '95 that required a reboot was a new kernel.
Windows 95 multitasked and did memory protection, but it never felt as if it was comfortable doing so. Windows 98 was a slight improvement, but still felt clunky doing so. On both those systems, reboots for silly little configuration changes were the norm, and it was irritating.
With Windows 2000, I finally felt that here was a Windows that did these things right. And I still believe that without Linux MS would never have fed those features into a home/desktop OS. Whether or not other OSs did those things, it was Linux that educated a critical mass of end-users that you DON'T need to reboot just to change IP address.
Oh, yawn. Anyone who makes a leap between war, hunger, and UNIX is doing nothing more than finding an excuse to be a sarcastic sod. But, I'll reply anyway.
Obviously, hardware and the way that it's addressed is going to vary from system to system, but would it *really* be so difficult to some up with some sort of UNIX standards body? Sure, it would take a number of years to really get anything out of it, but the only other alternative is further fragmentation, which will give Microsoft even more fodder in the future.
Yes, sorry about being gratuitously sarcastic...
The point remains though, it's easy to form a standards body. Let's imagine a hypothetical standards body declares that henceforth RPM is the standard UNIX packaging solution, and that everyone who's using something different should jolly well buck up their ideas and migrate to the standard ASAP.
Do you see all the YAST and APT users nodding sagely, saying "OK, it's inconvenient, but I will change my ways for the good of unity"?
I don't think so either.
Having to administer mostly Sun systems with a smattering of AIX and SCO systems, it's astounding to see how many differences there are between them.
Yes indeed, there are many differences. Wouldn't it be so much better if we made them all the same? Then everything would be easy!
Great.
Now, for each of these differences, who decides which is the RIGHT way to do it -- the way we should keep, and which was the WRONG way to do it, the one which should change?
Once we've sorted that one out, we can move on to solving world hunger, and maybe put an end to war while we're at it.
From the article:
So the battle in the free UNIX space is entirely over command line options, system administration paradigms, installation packaging, and 3D GUI features. I've got news for you: Real Programmers Don't Care about that garbage.
Maybe real programmers don't, but real users and real sysadmins do care. In a monoculture, things just don't improve. I far prefer that RPM and apt-get both exist, than for only RPM to exist.
The other (all too common) trap this article falls into is talking about "the Open Source movement" as if it is a single consciousness:
"Has it managed to completely escape the attention of the "open source" movement that Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and so forth have blithely continued to remain virtually Windows-only while waiting for the dust to settle?"
"The Open Source movement" doesn't have an opinion. The "movement" consists of thousands of people, each of whom may have one opinion, a different opinion, or no opinion whatsovever. There will be those who worry every day about what Macromedia is doing with Linux, and there will be those who don't care in the slightest what Macromedia, Corel or Adobe do or do not do.
Meanwhile, whether a particular Linux distribution wins in the end, or if Windows wins in the end, all this competition has been nothing but good news for consumers. The distros constantly out-do each other.
Having been exposed to Windows since 1.0, it's clear to me that many of the improvements that make it tolerable today (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, configuration changes without reboots, etc.) simply would not have been developed without that competition from Linux.
Don't get me wrong, I love and use firefox, but you won't get it installed on an old PI-233 with 32MB RAM.
I have a Pentium 233 on my desktop. It runs Debian unstable, and Firefox runs OK. It feels a little sluggish on image-heavy pages, but that's life.
Is the Windows version so much different?
Now, Mozilla on the other hand is unuasably slow on this machine.
Google really slaps together a pile of junk.
Parts fail left and right, and nobody bothers
to fix them. The software hides all this from
the users.
Google even checksums the data, on the assumption
that it is frequently getting corrupted by all the
junk hardware they buy.
I find this self-healing incredibly elegant. I understand that it makes better economic sense for Google to simply ignore broken hardware than to attend to it. I read that they would not even send someone round to turn off a broken machine.
But - the environmentalist in my is repelled by the idea. As time passes, Google will amass a huge and growing number of completely useless energy wasting units... what's their plan to dispose of antiquated datacentre equipment?