I agree with you for the most part. I don't have a reply, so I'll just do a brain dump:)
Here's a suggestion: Let's ask Redhat to base Fedora on Debian, for the greater good:) If all major Linux distros pooled their resources, I'm sure we could see a new Sarge every 6 months! Given the amount of distros that are based on Debian, and the amount of community support behind it, it would make more sense for everyone to adopt a Debian-centric Linux rather than a Redhat-centric one. Everyone race to get Debian released, then there is less touch-up work necessary when it comes time for vendors to do packaging and customization. Get everyone to work on getting a modern, stable Debian out the door, then everyone is compatible, and everyone has less touch-up work to do in the end.
Ok, that's never going to happen.:)
There is discussion, amongst Debian people, of dropping support for very obscure archs, and having as short as 6-month release cycles. Though I'm not sure how likely these are to happen, just noting that some discussion is taking place.
What I think both Debian and Ubuntu should do is forget about their huge package repositories, on the grounds that it's an unscalable way to distribute software and focus purely on making a great OS.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don't use Debian. If my assumption is correct, I must ask: "Why does every distribution have to be what you want?" There's already Redhat, Mandrake, etc. Why do we need another one? And if Redhat is so ideal, why do you think Ubuntu is based on Debian and not a Redhat system? Of course Debian has problems, but what you are saying is that Debian should abandon everything that makes it stand out (and be the base of choice for Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) to become another Redhat, which seems rather pointless..
I shouldn't reply to flamebait, but since this was modded up I feel it's warranted.
I'm sure you can turn off eyecandy if you want to use your 386. People who do nothing more than surf the web and read email have machines in excess of 2Ghz. Who cares even if it does add a 0.5% performance hit?
One interesting application for this technology, for example, would be resolution-independant desktops. Imagine a deskop of 1024x768 but running under a resolution of 1600x1200, for example.There are a number of possibilities for this technology to improve the user experience - you simply lack the imagination to consider them.
Stop being a dick about a proof of concept demo.. Who even knows if they're going to include this feature in the Luminocity release? (I hope they do, personally.)
You would have a point if Microsoft had acheived its market dominance on good products alone, but the fact is that they got where they for the most part by using nasty (and illegal) business practices. And since they acheived their dominance partly by disregarding the law, it is only fair that they be smacked down by it.
You Microsoft apologists need to understand that nobody forced Microsoft to be anti-competetive to the point that they actually broke the law. They have noone to blame but themselves for the hot water they're in. You are talking about consumer's choice to not buy an OS at the expense of not being able to run independant software that was written explicitly for Windows for no other reason that "that's what everyone is using" (relatively unreasonable), but what about a company's choice to focus on products and quality and not on absolute market domination (reasonable)?
You can say that the Microsoft and Google situations are the same, if you forget the fact that Microsoft was brought to court and found to have violated anti-trust laws, while Google was not.
Is it really abandonment when they give you separate products with the exact same set of features, that are compatible? There really isn't much to gain from having an all-in-one suite over separate applications.
Karn writes "After the reports of problems with Social Security reform development earlier this week there are now rumblings about more serious problems with the US Senate. Some politicians want to leave Social Security in place with some adjustments, and others want to create a privatized retirement system in response to the pending fiscal troubles related to the Baby Boomer generation retiring."
Perhaps you should learn how to sensationalize things like sebFlyte does. Honestly, what sounds better: "Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble" or "Mozilla Foundation Experiencing Perfectly Normal Behavior" ? The first implies that not only was the Mozilla Foundation in trouble before, they are now in even MORE trouble now! Based on this headline, I'd say it's only a matter of hours before the Mozilla project dies completely.
My mother-in-law came to the US (Mayo) for the cancer that she has. They were treating her at home, but the treatment was sub-par, and being productive members of your society, they had the means to buy the care they wanted here in the US.
Careful, enough of that and your people may just decide that they could move 100 miles south and keep more of their money and have better healthcare. And if enough productive members of your society exercise their right to go where the cost of living is the lowest, the tax burden there is going to go way up. Remember, not everyone in Canada is a die-hard socialist or is die-hard anti-American.
If the US let anyone in Canada move south, do you think you could sustain your healthcare system? How many business owners and service providers there do you think would not choose to move south so that they could keep more of their money and have better services? When I first met my wife (who is Canadian), I recall her being resentful of the fact that the US was 'stealing' all of your hockey players. I wonder if the US allowed productive Canadians to move here if a similar thing would occur?
IOW, if you're a poor Canadian and you're stricken by a serious, life threatening illness, you get the help you need. In the US, if you're poor and you're stricken by a serious, life threatening illness, you die.
This is not entirely true. There are options for people like this who have no insurance, but there is no guarantee that if they don't have insurance that they will get treated. This is called incentive. We have hospitals here in the US that are free (charity hospitals, in fact, one of my sisters was born at one of them.) Many hospitals are obligated to take N ununsured patients each year. In addition to these options, decent Americans aren't going to sit around with other decent Americans die from curable ailments. If you don't have insurance for your child and your child needs an expensive prcedure done, you can always appeal to the public for help (many a time I have seen 'tip jars' in convenience stores to help out children who are sick and in need.)
In your country, healthcare is a right, but here it isn't a right. Why should I have to pay for someone else's drug habits? Why should you pay for the fact that my mom, even after having had a triple bypass, still continues to smoke? What sense does it make to have a right to wreck her body and have guaranteed healthcare?
I may sound like a cold-hearted person, but I'm not. I want to help people, I take pride in helping others, I just don't want to be forced to do it.
Isn't it perfectly legal to read/write about child pornography? The reason child porn is banned here is because it is the *actual* filmed/recorded exploitation of children. It seems that our right to free speech is not affected by the ban on actual child pornography.
Then again, it's still early in the presidency, and we may see a constitutional amendment banning anything that mentions child porn.
Denying the holocaust is idiocy, just like preventing people from saying or reading idiotic things. Someone spewing idiocy is NOT infrining upon anyone's rights.
Yes, Redhat has given more options, but the problem is that the "leeches" were singled out as to not have the option to run Redhat's own server distro without the support tacked on. More options does not mean things automatically become better. It seems to me that if Redhat was as interested in giving the community options as it was in getting them to pay up, they would allow people to download RHEL from Ibiblio and install it on their file server, and allow them to purchase a support contract if they so desire. The problem isn't more options, it is the marrying of the support to their distro, and they way in which they accomplish this, by playing the "Intellectual Property" card. The problem isn't what they offer, it is what they don't offer, and who they don't offer it to. The issue is more than just a name change.
The one thing that Redhat can do to alleviate this animosity towards them is to simply allow people to download ISOs from Tucows and Ibiblio, instead of making them go through the rigmarole of getting a white box equivalent. If they're going to provide the SRPMs anyway, why not go the extra step and let people download the ISOs? Is their business model so fragile that they have to force people to buy their support by finding a legal loophole for disallowing downloads of their ISOs?
Looks like UserLinux is still in the works. Last time I checked their website, it was a wiki, but they have a very professional-looking site now, and they have installer isos available. I have used it in the past, and it was not bad, basically Debian unstable with their package set.
Anybody here active in UserLinux that can give us a quick summary of what's been happening lately?
Regarding the spelling of Redhat: Their logo reads redhat (notice the lack of a space,) so perhaps you could email their marketing department and have them change it so as to make it clear that there is a space between the words Red and Hat? Personally, I don't give a shit whether a fellow slashdotter eliminated a space between their name or not, but that's just me..
Regarding the actual meat of the post, I'm well aware that I can download the SRPMS and recompile, them, and I can even run a White Box RHEL. That (which is actually a testament to the GPL and free software in general) is beside the point. The point is that Redhat is now offering less to the "leeches" (ie the people who played a critical role in Redhat's popularity, but gave the least amount of hard cash) because the wind changed directions. Who can say that they won't do it again, generating yet another headache for people who still feel that Linux should be free? You can say that they just changed things to stay afloat, and that technically I can go download the sources and compile myself, but the net effect of their actions is that organizations like mine are excluded from running their stable distro. The primary reason we migrated from SunOS/Solaris to Linux was that it was free. I'm not going to go back and tell my boss that we now have to pay X/year for Linux, I'm going to use something else, and had I known then that Redhat was going to either require me to compile SRPMS or pay more than Windows for something that used to be free, I wouldn't have even standardized on it. Not many people would have, I'd wager.
I don't blame anybody for trying to make a buck, but I think they could have handled things differently, and as a result, I feel that us "leeches" can do better by putting a different distro on our servers and desktops, and by recommending a different distro to our friends. When Ubuntu matures and has KDE support, I think it and Debian will be my recommendation for desktop and server, respectively. Long live non-profit distros.
How does letting Joe Smoe and his small business run RHEL without the support take focus from the server market? Redhat doesn't have to exclude people who can't afford their support from running their distribution. They could just not support you unless you purchase support, and let you run their stable product.
The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare. Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder. Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.
Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.
Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.
Note: I migrated my users and servers from SunOS and Digital Unix to Redhat about 5 years ago, and migrated servers from Redhat 9 to Debian Woody about 2 years ago, and am currently in the market for a Desktop Linux replacment for Fedora.
Re:Somone get these ppl some free software!
on
Given Up to Spyware?
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· Score: 1
Instead of cleaning up my parent's computer again, I decided to put Linux on it. So far, so good. Set my mom up with AOL Instant Messanger and Google Mail accounts (which Kopete and Kontact handle nicely), installed a bunch of those mindless tile games, and they're good to go.
Consider how many revisions of the original Counter-strike there have been, how many upgrades the Half-life 1 engine has seen.. Now consider that Source and CS:Source are essentially.0 releases. The only issues I have seen are minor ones, and those will be trivial for them to fix. The engine enhancements are well worth the minor annoyances that exist with these.0 releases.
didja ever git that deer cleaned out of urine radiator? How 'bout that gun rack, didja ever git that thin installed in urine pickup? I really enjoyed that squirrel stew yall fixed last time I was over!
Anyway, you're riat 'bout ol'ladies not bein able ta drive. Why last Sunday, Betty-Sue was tryin ta part the truck when weunz went ta our muntly KKK convention, an' hell if she didn't run inta Jimmy's 4x4 tryin ta park next ta him. She tried ta blame it on my 3 dogs that weunz brin wif us, but weunz know that's just an excuse. Them Taleban had the riat idea, I recon weunz in the US could learn a thin or two from 'em an' whump the shit out of our ol'ladies, an' tekk away their riat ta vote an' all that..
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you for the most part. I don't have a reply, so I'll just do a brain dump :)
:) If all major Linux distros pooled their resources, I'm sure we could see a new Sarge every 6 months! Given the amount of distros that are based on Debian, and the amount of community support behind it, it would make more sense for everyone to adopt a Debian-centric Linux rather than a Redhat-centric one. Everyone race to get Debian released, then there is less touch-up work necessary when it comes time for vendors to do packaging and customization. Get everyone to work on getting a modern, stable Debian out the door, then everyone is compatible, and everyone has less touch-up work to do in the end.
:)
Here's a suggestion: Let's ask Redhat to base Fedora on Debian, for the greater good
Ok, that's never going to happen.
There is discussion, amongst Debian people, of dropping support for very obscure archs, and having as short as 6-month release cycles. Though I'm not sure how likely these are to happen, just noting that some discussion is taking place.
What I think both Debian and Ubuntu should do is forget about their huge package repositories, on the grounds that it's an unscalable way to distribute software and focus purely on making a great OS.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don't use Debian. If my assumption is correct, I must ask: "Why does every distribution have to be what you want?" There's already Redhat, Mandrake, etc. Why do we need another one? And if Redhat is so ideal, why do you think Ubuntu is based on Debian and not a Redhat system? Of course Debian has problems, but what you are saying is that Debian should abandon everything that makes it stand out (and be the base of choice for Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) to become another Redhat, which seems rather pointless..
If Ubuntu chose Debian as its base over all over Linux distros, what does that say about Debian?
I shouldn't reply to flamebait, but since this was modded up I feel it's warranted.
I'm sure you can turn off eyecandy if you want to use your 386. People who do nothing more than surf the web and read email have machines in excess of 2Ghz. Who cares even if it does add a 0.5% performance hit?
One interesting application for this technology, for example, would be resolution-independant desktops. Imagine a deskop of 1024x768 but running under a resolution of 1600x1200, for example.There are a number of possibilities for this technology to improve the user experience - you simply lack the imagination to consider them.
Stop being a dick about a proof of concept demo.. Who even knows if they're going to include this feature in the Luminocity release? (I hope they do, personally.)
You would have a point if Microsoft had acheived its market dominance on good products alone, but the fact is that they got where they for the most part by using nasty (and illegal) business practices. And since they acheived their dominance partly by disregarding the law, it is only fair that they be smacked down by it.
You Microsoft apologists need to understand that nobody forced Microsoft to be anti-competetive to the point that they actually broke the law. They have noone to blame but themselves for the hot water they're in. You are talking about consumer's choice to not buy an OS at the expense of not being able to run independant software that was written explicitly for Windows for no other reason that "that's what everyone is using" (relatively unreasonable), but what about a company's choice to focus on products and quality and not on absolute market domination (reasonable)?
You can say that the Microsoft and Google situations are the same, if you forget the fact that Microsoft was brought to court and found to have violated anti-trust laws, while Google was not.
Is it really abandonment when they give you separate products with the exact same set of features, that are compatible? There really isn't much to gain from having an all-in-one suite over separate applications.
Karn writes "After the reports of problems with Social Security reform development earlier this week there are now rumblings about more serious problems with the US Senate. Some politicians want to leave Social Security in place with some adjustments, and others want to create a privatized retirement system in response to the pending fiscal troubles related to the Baby Boomer generation retiring."
Perhaps you should learn how to sensationalize things like sebFlyte does. Honestly, what sounds better: "Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble" or "Mozilla Foundation Experiencing Perfectly Normal Behavior" ? The first implies that not only was the Mozilla Foundation in trouble before, they are now in even MORE trouble now! Based on this headline, I'd say it's only a matter of hours before the Mozilla project dies completely.
My mother-in-law came to the US (Mayo) for the cancer that she has. They were treating her at home, but the treatment was sub-par, and being productive members of your society, they had the means to buy the care they wanted here in the US.
Careful, enough of that and your people may just decide that they could move 100 miles south and keep more of their money and have better healthcare. And if enough productive members of your society exercise their right to go where the cost of living is the lowest, the tax burden there is going to go way up. Remember, not everyone in Canada is a die-hard socialist or is die-hard anti-American.
If the US let anyone in Canada move south, do you think you could sustain your healthcare system? How many business owners and service providers there do you think would not choose to move south so that they could keep more of their money and have better services? When I first met my wife (who is Canadian), I recall her being resentful of the fact that the US was 'stealing' all of your hockey players. I wonder if the US allowed productive Canadians to move here if a similar thing would occur?
IOW, if you're a poor Canadian and you're stricken by a serious, life threatening illness, you get the help you need. In the US, if you're poor and you're stricken by a serious, life threatening illness, you die.
This is not entirely true. There are options for people like this who have no insurance, but there is no guarantee that if they don't have insurance that they will get treated. This is called incentive. We have hospitals here in the US that are free (charity hospitals, in fact, one of my sisters was born at one of them.) Many hospitals are obligated to take N ununsured patients each year. In addition to these options, decent Americans aren't going to sit around with other decent Americans die from curable ailments. If you don't have insurance for your child and your child needs an expensive prcedure done, you can always appeal to the public for help (many a time I have seen 'tip jars' in convenience stores to help out children who are sick and in need.)
In your country, healthcare is a right, but here it isn't a right. Why should I have to pay for someone else's drug habits? Why should you pay for the fact that my mom, even after having had a triple bypass, still continues to smoke? What sense does it make to have a right to wreck her body and have guaranteed healthcare?
I may sound like a cold-hearted person, but I'm not. I want to help people, I take pride in helping others, I just don't want to be forced to do it.
are the UK taxpayers paying for this?
Is (s)he correct? I wouldn't know. I exercised my right to not read content from childish idiots as soon as I encountered 'USian'.
Isn't it perfectly legal to read/write about child pornography? The reason child porn is banned here is because it is the *actual* filmed/recorded exploitation of children. It seems that our right to free speech is not affected by the ban on actual child pornography.
Then again, it's still early in the presidency, and we may see a constitutional amendment banning anything that mentions child porn.
Denying the holocaust is idiocy, just like preventing people from saying or reading idiotic things. Someone spewing idiocy is NOT infrining upon anyone's rights.
Yes, Redhat has given more options, but the problem is that the "leeches" were singled out as to not have the option to run Redhat's own server distro without the support tacked on. More options does not mean things automatically become better. It seems to me that if Redhat was as interested in giving the community options as it was in getting them to pay up, they would allow people to download RHEL from Ibiblio and install it on their file server, and allow them to purchase a support contract if they so desire. The problem isn't more options, it is the marrying of the support to their distro, and they way in which they accomplish this, by playing the "Intellectual Property" card. The problem isn't what they offer, it is what they don't offer, and who they don't offer it to. The issue is more than just a name change.
The one thing that Redhat can do to alleviate this animosity towards them is to simply allow people to download ISOs from Tucows and Ibiblio, instead of making them go through the rigmarole of getting a white box equivalent. If they're going to provide the SRPMs anyway, why not go the extra step and let people download the ISOs? Is their business model so fragile that they have to force people to buy their support by finding a legal loophole for disallowing downloads of their ISOs?
Looks like UserLinux is still in the works. Last time I checked their website, it was a wiki, but they have a very professional-looking site now, and they have installer isos available. I have used it in the past, and it was not bad, basically Debian unstable with their package set.
Anybody here active in UserLinux that can give us a quick summary of what's been happening lately?
Regarding the spelling of Redhat: Their logo reads redhat (notice the lack of a space,) so perhaps you could email their marketing department and have them change it so as to make it clear that there is a space between the words Red and Hat? Personally, I don't give a shit whether a fellow slashdotter eliminated a space between their name or not, but that's just me..
Regarding the actual meat of the post, I'm well aware that I can download the SRPMS and recompile, them, and I can even run a White Box RHEL. That (which is actually a testament to the GPL and free software in general) is beside the point. The point is that Redhat is now offering less to the "leeches" (ie the people who played a critical role in Redhat's popularity, but gave the least amount of hard cash) because the wind changed directions. Who can say that they won't do it again, generating yet another headache for people who still feel that Linux should be free? You can say that they just changed things to stay afloat, and that technically I can go download the sources and compile myself, but the net effect of their actions is that organizations like mine are excluded from running their stable distro. The primary reason we migrated from SunOS/Solaris to Linux was that it was free. I'm not going to go back and tell my boss that we now have to pay X/year for Linux, I'm going to use something else, and had I known then that Redhat was going to either require me to compile SRPMS or pay more than Windows for something that used to be free, I wouldn't have even standardized on it. Not many people would have, I'd wager.
I don't blame anybody for trying to make a buck, but I think they could have handled things differently, and as a result, I feel that us "leeches" can do better by putting a different distro on our servers and desktops, and by recommending a different distro to our friends. When Ubuntu matures and has KDE support, I think it and Debian will be my recommendation for desktop and server, respectively. Long live non-profit distros.
Warning: Redhat Rant Ahead
How does letting Joe Smoe and his small business run RHEL without the support take focus from the server market? Redhat doesn't have to exclude people who can't afford their support from running their distribution. They could just not support you unless you purchase support, and let you run their stable product.
The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare. Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder. Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.
Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.
Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.
Note: I migrated my users and servers from SunOS and Digital Unix to Redhat about 5 years ago, and migrated servers from Redhat 9 to Debian Woody about 2 years ago, and am currently in the market for a Desktop Linux replacment for Fedora.
Glad to see everyone has a sense of humor..
Go ahead, mis-underestimate us at your own peril!
Instead of cleaning up my parent's computer again, I decided to put Linux on it. So far, so good. Set my mom up with AOL Instant Messanger and Google Mail accounts (which Kopete and Kontact handle nicely), installed a bunch of those mindless tile games, and they're good to go.
Consider how many revisions of the original Counter-strike there have been, how many upgrades the Half-life 1 engine has seen.. Now consider that Source and CS:Source are essentially .0 releases. The only issues I have seen are minor ones, and those will be trivial for them to fix. The engine enhancements are well worth the minor annoyances that exist with these .0 releases.
Gentoo is for Ricers
Laugh, it's funny!
Billy-Bob?
didja ever git that deer cleaned out of urine radiator? How 'bout that gun rack, didja ever git that thin installed in urine pickup? I really enjoyed that squirrel stew yall fixed last time I was over!
Anyway, you're riat 'bout ol'ladies not bein able ta drive. Why last Sunday, Betty-Sue was tryin ta part the truck when weunz went ta our muntly KKK convention, an' hell if she didn't run inta Jimmy's 4x4 tryin ta park next ta him. She tried ta blame it on my 3 dogs that weunz brin wif us, but weunz know that's just an excuse. Them Taleban had the riat idea, I recon weunz in the US could learn a thin or two from 'em an' whump the shit out of our ol'ladies, an' tekk away their riat ta vote an' all that..