The GPL licence [gnu.org] implies fundamental financial differences between GPL software and open-source software.
Well, without rehashing different scenarios, I'm not saying you can't get Free software for free. I'm taking issue with the original post that said you can't charge for it. You can - how effective that is depends on market conditions, (ex., media vs. bandwidth costs, altruism of your audience) but you are free to try.
Strictly speaking, you're right that there may be economic consequences that devolve from the "Free" model. For example, some people say you can't build a business model on it. I think the jury is out on that one, I'm certainly not on the "other" side if that's what you are afraid of.
unless there is a specific law that forbids you from doing something, then you are generally free in law to act as you choose so long as your actions do not harm anybody or anything else
Not sure about the UK, but in the US as I understand it, creative works are governed by copyright, modified by the doctrine of fair use, which basically say that you *can't* copy anything without the owner's permission with some exceptions (ex., backups). Which is why the GPL is called "copyleft" (it explicitly permits what copyright would deny). It's a joke, get it?
You cannot speak for all programmers.
I'm not speaking for all programmers at all, or even everything I will ever write. I just said that the stuff I've done so far isn't ready for public consumption (so, nobody would want to "consume" my source code, either). Can I take my Nomex longjohns off, now? (whew)
Looks like Jens Axboe released a patch against 2.4.19-pre10, but I'm not sure it made it in.
Did you see "Journalling Support For IDE In 2.4" he released later for 2.4.21-pre4-bk and 2.4.20 in Kernel Traffic? Might be close to what you are after. . .
I don't think it's coincidental that those who view source redistribution to be a right, invented a license to guarantee that right. (We're just talking about different ends of cause-and-effect.)
My point was that money is not the difference.
As a programmer, even the distinction between closed and open source is irrelevant, because although some people at work will use my code (and there are no potential users elsewhere!), there isn't anybody who can (or wants to) read it there. OK, there's one guy who copies & pastes where I tell him to, but that's not the same thing:0)
If I ever make something for public consumption, though, I will probably GPL it.
Right, but I don't see any difference between the free-as-in-beerness of "Open Source" vs. "Free" software.
Neither philosophy prohibits you from charging the first person to get the software, and neither prohibits that person from either charging for or not charging for it. Maybe under the "Free" model you say you are charging for your time (instead of the software, or a license to use it), but that's just semantics - I could reduce the price by a factor of 1000 and hope 1000 people buy it. It would be less likely if it was "open source" or "free", but it's possible. How many people bought CDs from the FSF?
I thought the distinction was more a philosophical one based on *why*: "Open Source" says allowing redistribution of the source to more practical, while "Free" software declares it to be a right. Neither says you have an obligation to hand it down to the next guy. I have the ability to let a friend borrow my Knoppix CDs, I'm not *obligated* to do so at all, money or no money.
From that angle, having free or low-cost copies available is just a statistical side effect of people offering copies because it doesn't cost them much and it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside, cheap bandwidth, and others caring more about the software itself more than the pretty boxes it might otherwise be available in.
If we were all stuck with 300 bps modems, you, me, ESR and RMS would all be hiking down to the nearest Best Buy for our next software fix. And we'd all be smilin' because the source code would be inside, as long as they were charging less than it would cost for us to download it. (I used to buy boxed Linux distros until they went over $30)
ordering manuals,
t-shirts and especially CD-ROMs from the FSF.
Most of the FSF's funds come from selling copies
of things that everyone is free to copy.
From what I gather, what LIDS, and other "Trusted (insert OS here)" variants actually are doing are shoehorning some of the capability monitoring and authorization ideas into existing operating systems, while EROS claims to be a pure capabilities system that emulates a Unix environment for "legacy" applications.
The difference appears to be granularity and pervasiveness, rather than the nature of the approach.
(ObTopic) OpenBSD takes a different approach altogether, going on the theory that it's OK to have all of your eggs in one basket, if you really watch that basket.
One camp seems to say (oversimplifying here, of course there are great Unix designers and great implementers of other systems) that insecurity is the result of poor design, and the other camp blames poor implementation, but really the computer doesn't know the difference between the two - it's just bits and bytes. The distinction is pretty arbitrary.
Douglas Hofstadter makes a pretty good case that a side effect of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is, no matter how hard you try, you just can't make an unbreakable machine in this universe. Not that you shouldn't try to keep ahead of the riffraff:-)
Where you draw the line will depend on what environment you want. The Windows crowd will say that OpenBSD is extreme, and OpenBSD to the EROS folks probably looks overly conventional. To each his or her own.
IIRC, these are more common Un*ces that are patched to provide "capabilities" - that is, instead of the root being the one-size-fits-all user that has enough privileges to get anything done, different kinds of access are broken down
so that if a running program getw 0wned, it
limits the damage.
Theo's answer to that probably would be, "code it right in the first place and it won't GET 0wned!!!", which is a valid point, the devil (no pun intended) is in the details.
BTW, I first came across EROS comes from Alan Cox in an interview with Robert Metcalfe a few years ago (remember the "Open Sores" series of articles? Great trolling, Bob!), in response to a question of what he thought was going to be the next big thing after Linux. He was impressed with the response (having previously accused Linux-y types of monomaniacal zeal), but it didn't overturn his opinion at the time that Linux was doomed. Oh well. (This comes to you courtesy of the similarly fated Internet.)
Theoretically, a capabilities-based OS like EROS would be even more secure than OpenBSD, if the implementation was as careful.
Of course, the same tradeoffs that OpenBSD makes would be even more extreme (application support definitely, performance probably I would think)
Over the last two years on a production database server running RedHat, I found that I needed to recompile the kernel quite a few times to get new hardware support/bugfixes not found (at the time) in the stock RedHat kernel. Support for the Promise controllers on Asus motherboards, for example, tends to lag a few months behind the appearance of the hardware, the first patches, and support in the vanilla kernel release. More recently, the latest RedHat kernel (2.4.18-19.7.x) for Athlon does not enable IO-APIC, because apparently it locks up some laptops. Well, I think it's a good idea for my server, so away I go getting kernel-source.rpm.
Now, I respect the testing and validation RedHat provides with their kernels, so I use them when I can. Arguably, if I would use more server-oriented hardware it wouldn't be an issue, but my budget is, to put it mildly, modest.
But you're right in the sense that there is probably little to be gained in saving, say, 50KB in your bzImage by cutting out drivers that you don't use, etc. At least I don't see it subjectively, maybe somebody else can volunteer some benchmarks, but I think the attitude that you can really see the difference by recompiling your own kernel for performance is a holdover from the days when the major distros only compiled for i386 and memory was a whole lot tighter.
I'm not saying that you have to buy the distro to get up2date. I was under the impression that you needed a rhn subscription to make it work, and it was actually cheaper to buy the distro with 1 free year than to buy the subscription alone last time I checked.
RHN's FAQ says:...
Why does the Red Hat Update Agent no longer work?
The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) requires a valid System Profile on Red Hat Network, and the system must be entitled to some level of RHN service. To create a System Profile, run the Red Hat Network Registration Client (rhn_register) on the system that you wish to register with Red Hat Network.
Every user receives one free subscription for basic Red Hat Network service. To purchase additional subscriptions, go to the Purchase Info page for instructions....
Now, if that is no longer the case, that's great, but where did you get the information to put in those blanks? Just curious.
FWIW, the specs for Alcatel's OmniPBX state that it runs ChorusOS, which IIRC is an embedded SystemV variant.
I had thought it was the product of Chorus,a French company, but it looks like Sun bought them out in 1997.
The above page says that it isn't being sold any more, but IS available as a free, open source version.
Yippee!
Interestingly, I notice when the techs at work log in to our Alcatel OmniPBX, they are greeted by a banner indicating that it uses GNU software from the Linux operating system.
Either the front end box is running Linux, or, more likely, the fact that ChorusOS incorporates GNU tools, in which case strictly speaking the software is really from the GNU project, but interesting nonetheless.
I remember there being a big writeup in the Van Norstrand Scientific Encyclopedia , around 1965 (3rd or 4th ed.?) about fluidics. IIRC, they discussed possible applications for environments inhospitable to electronics, like washing machines. ..
Was a fun read. I donated my copy to Lincoln Tech in Allentown, so if you're in the area. . .
No, I'm saying that working with remote data locally instead of having the procedure run on the server can lead to performance problems because of network overhead, assembly language or no assembly language. I mentioned VB because that is what the ActiveX client controls that ship with Caché are designed for, although they can be made to mostly work in Delphi, for example.
To be fair, there are other clients that ship with Caché, but they probably wouldn't be used in the environment he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the conventional wisdomis, yes it does, very much so.
:-)
#foo works for me, but
info:foo gives me:
File I/O error
Could not be opened for reading
on Mandrake 8.2
Like, how the Pentium Pro didn't have a 16-bit selector cache, and the PII put it back in?
Which was progress?
The GPL licence [gnu.org] implies fundamental financial differences between GPL software and open-source software.
Well, without rehashing different scenarios, I'm not saying you can't get Free software for free. I'm taking issue with the original post that said you can't charge for it. You can - how effective that is depends on market conditions, (ex., media vs. bandwidth costs, altruism of your audience) but you are free to try.
Strictly speaking, you're right that there may be economic consequences that devolve from the "Free" model. For example, some people say you can't build a business model on it. I think the jury is out on that one, I'm certainly not on the "other" side if that's what you are afraid of.
unless there is a specific law that forbids you from doing something, then you are generally free in law to act as you choose so long as your actions do not harm anybody or anything else
Not sure about the UK, but in the US as I understand it, creative works are governed by copyright, modified by the doctrine of fair use, which basically say that you *can't* copy anything without the owner's permission with some exceptions (ex., backups). Which is why the GPL is called "copyleft" (it explicitly permits what copyright would deny). It's a joke, get it?
You cannot speak for all programmers.
I'm not speaking for all programmers at all, or even everything I will ever write. I just said that the stuff I've done so far isn't ready for public consumption (so, nobody would want to "consume" my source code, either). Can I take my Nomex longjohns off, now? (whew)
Looks like Jens Axboe released a patch against 2.4.19-pre10, but I'm not sure it made it in.
Did you see "Journalling Support For IDE In 2.4" he released later for 2.4.21-pre4-bk and 2.4.20 in Kernel Traffic? Might be close to what you are after. . .
My point was that money is not the difference.
As a programmer, even the distinction between closed and open source is irrelevant, because although some people at work will use my code (and there are no potential users elsewhere!), there isn't anybody who can (or wants to) read it there. OK, there's one guy who copies & pastes where I tell him to, but that's not the same thing :0)
If I ever make something for public consumption, though, I will probably GPL it.
Neither philosophy prohibits you from charging the first person to get the software, and neither prohibits that person from either charging for or not charging for it. Maybe under the "Free" model you say you are charging for your time (instead of the software, or a license to use it), but that's just semantics - I could reduce the price by a factor of 1000 and hope 1000 people buy it. It would be less likely if it was "open source" or "free", but it's possible. How many people bought CDs from the FSF?
I thought the distinction was more a philosophical one based on *why*: "Open Source" says allowing redistribution of the source to more practical, while "Free" software declares it to be a right. Neither says you have an obligation to hand it down to the next guy. I have the ability to let a friend borrow my Knoppix CDs, I'm not *obligated* to do so at all, money or no money.
From that angle, having free or low-cost copies available is just a statistical side effect of people offering copies because it doesn't cost them much and it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside, cheap bandwidth, and others caring more about the software itself more than the pretty boxes it might otherwise be available in.
If we were all stuck with 300 bps modems, you, me, ESR and RMS would all be hiking down to the nearest Best Buy for our next software fix. And we'd all be smilin' because the source code would be inside, as long as they were charging less than it would cost for us to download it. (I used to buy boxed Linux distros until they went over $30)
See?
- Oracle says, people are upset at Windows' instability, say they are coming out with Oracle on Linux.
- Linux businesses rub their hands together, tool up, and start selling
- Larry Ellison says in some sort of press conferance that you'd be nuts to run Oracle on Linux (or words to that effect)
- VA Linux, which apparently had been telling customers that it was a good idea, gets miffed
- (Customers panic?)
- VA Linux isn't selling systems any more
- Oracle says, customers are upset at Windows' insecurity, promote running on Linux
What did I miss?ordering manuals, t-shirts and especially CD-ROMs from the FSF. Most of the FSF's funds come from selling copies of things that everyone is free to copy.
From what I gather, what LIDS, and other "Trusted (insert OS here)" variants actually are doing are shoehorning some of the capability monitoring and authorization ideas into existing operating systems, while EROS claims to be a pure capabilities system that emulates a Unix environment for "legacy" applications.
The difference appears to be granularity and pervasiveness, rather than the nature of the approach.
(ObTopic) OpenBSD takes a different approach altogether, going on the theory that it's OK to have all of your eggs in one basket, if you really watch that basket.
One camp seems to say (oversimplifying here, of course there are great Unix designers and great implementers of other systems) that insecurity is the result of poor design, and the other camp blames poor implementation, but really the computer doesn't know the difference between the two - it's just bits and bytes. The distinction is pretty arbitrary.
Douglas Hofstadter makes a pretty good case that a side effect of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is, no matter how hard you try, you just can't make an unbreakable machine in this universe. Not that you shouldn't try to keep ahead of the riffraff :-)
Where you draw the line will depend on what environment you want. The Windows crowd will say that OpenBSD is extreme, and OpenBSD to the EROS folks probably looks overly conventional. To each his or her own.
Trusted Solaris
andPit Bull from Argus Systems
IIRC, these are more common Un*ces that are patched to provide "capabilities" - that is, instead of the root being the one-size-fits-all user that has enough privileges to get anything done, different kinds of access are broken down so that if a running program getw 0wned, it limits the damage.
Theo's answer to that probably would be, "code it right in the first place and it won't GET 0wned!!!", which is a valid point, the devil (no pun intended) is in the details.
BTW, I first came across EROS comes from Alan Cox in an interview with Robert Metcalfe a few years ago (remember the "Open Sores" series of articles? Great trolling, Bob!), in response to a question of what he thought was going to be the next big thing after Linux. He was impressed with the response (having previously accused Linux-y types of monomaniacal zeal), but it didn't overturn his opinion at the time that Linux was doomed. Oh well. (This comes to you courtesy of the similarly fated Internet.)
Theoretically, a capabilities-based OS like EROS would be even more secure than OpenBSD, if the implementation was as careful. Of course, the same tradeoffs that OpenBSD makes would be even more extreme (application support definitely, performance probably I would think)
OK, before somebody LARTs me for not reading the article. . .
.sandwiched between organic thin films. . ."
". .
So it's a hybrid - not as bad as I thought.
I thought the active ingredient to OLEDs was organic material, not just a conductive pathway, or am I missing something?
They need a new acronym I think. . .
.
But No! It's better to conform to existing buzzwords to be correct. .
Aaargh.
Mandrake says they get a bigger "cut" from Mandrake Club memberships than they do from the boxed product.
.ISO's, I would never have gone through the trouble to install it.
If there were no
Not having installed it, I wouldn't have felt the need to give anything back by "joining".
So, I get to do easy installations, they get their money, this is a bad thing?
Of course, it remains to be seen whether relying on others' sense of duty is a sustainable business model, but I hope it does.
Over the last two years on a production database server running RedHat, I found that I needed to recompile the kernel quite a few times to get new hardware support/bugfixes not found (at the time) in the stock RedHat kernel. Support for the Promise controllers on Asus motherboards, for example, tends to lag a few months behind the appearance of the hardware, the first patches, and support in the vanilla kernel release. More recently, the latest RedHat kernel (2.4.18-19.7.x) for Athlon does not enable IO-APIC, because apparently it locks up some laptops. Well, I think it's a good idea for my server, so away I go getting kernel-source.rpm.
Now, I respect the testing and validation RedHat provides with their kernels, so I use them when I can. Arguably, if I would use more server-oriented hardware it wouldn't be an issue, but my budget is, to put it mildly, modest.
But you're right in the sense that there is probably little to be gained in saving, say, 50KB in your bzImage by cutting out drivers that you don't use, etc. At least I don't see it subjectively, maybe somebody else can volunteer some benchmarks, but I think the attitude that you can really see the difference by recompiling your own kernel for performance is a holdover from the days when the major distros only compiled for i386 and memory was a whole lot tighter.
I'm not saying that you have to buy the distro to get up2date. I was under the impression that you needed a rhn subscription to make it work, and it was actually cheaper to buy the distro with 1 free year than to buy the subscription alone last time I checked.
...
...
RHN's FAQ says:
Why does the Red Hat Update Agent no longer work?
The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) requires a valid System Profile on Red Hat Network, and the system must be entitled to some level of RHN service. To create a System Profile, run the Red Hat Network Registration Client (rhn_register) on the system that you wish to register with Red Hat Network.
Every user receives one free subscription for basic Red Hat Network service. To purchase additional subscriptions, go to the Purchase Info page for instructions.
Now, if that is no longer the case, that's great, but where did you get the information to put in those blanks? Just curious.
with Mandrake you have urpmi, which seems to do the same thing. Setting up repositories by hand is a pain though.
RedHat has up2date but you need to have rhn to make it work - if you buy the distro instead of dl it that's not a problem (the first year anyway).
Unless I'm horribly wrong (wouldn't be the first time. . .), more were looking for "Dragonball Z" than doing embedded programming.
It's a joke, get it?
How did you type it then. . .
I had thought it was the product of Chorus,a French company, but it looks like Sun bought them out in 1997.
The above page says that it isn't being sold any more, but IS available as a free, open source version.
Yippee!
Interestingly, I notice when the techs at work log in to our Alcatel OmniPBX, they are greeted by a banner indicating that it uses GNU software from the Linux operating system.
Either the front end box is running Linux, or, more likely, the fact that ChorusOS incorporates GNU tools, in which case strictly speaking the software is really from the GNU project, but interesting nonetheless.
Per pixel.
That's $8450.00! I'm buying one right now!
This probably goes farther back to algebraic convention - constants go a,b,c; variables go x,y,z; subscript variables go i,j,k.
I remember there being a big writeup in the Van Norstrand Scientific Encyclopedia , around 1965 (3rd or 4th ed.?) about fluidics. IIRC, they discussed possible applications for environments inhospitable .
to electronics, like washing machines. .
Was a fun read. I donated my copy to Lincoln Tech in Allentown, so if you're in the area. . .
(OK, I'll bite.)
No, I'm saying that working with remote data locally instead of having the procedure run on the server can lead to performance problems because of network overhead, assembly language or no assembly language. I mentioned VB because that is what the ActiveX client controls that ship with Caché are designed for, although they can be made to mostly work in Delphi, for example.
To be fair, there are other clients that ship with Caché, but they probably wouldn't be used in the environment he's talking about.