>
Such accusations are not very useful (nor friendly) without something more specific.
Sorry, but database field is too rich to give all the specifics in a Slashdot post. You can go to DB Debunk, Open Directory or Wiki Encyclopaedia for specifics: or better yet, buy An Introduction to Database Systems by Chris J Date.
And no, I was not caring to be much friendly. I believe people should educate themselves before publishing their thoughts to the world, and the database field has suffered much already from people who did not.
But just because you seem interested, a relational database is based on two-valued predicate logic, where predicates are expressed by n-tuples organized on relations, which are time-varying values of relation variables. This is what makes it so simple and powerful. If you break this model, as SQL did, you get something at the same time more complex and less powerful. Programming languages should adapt to it, not the other way round.
>
building sets *into* the programming language may make inter-language info sharing harder
I fail to see that. Can you point to somewhere where this is demonstrated? On the contrary, if a programming language gets the relational elements right, they will be the same as in any other programming language that does the same. They would all get the data structures directly from the RDBMS. What that subtracts from tables? It is just higher level, because relations do not have ordering, duplicates, undifferentiated NULLs and all the inconsistencies of SQL.
>
it would be interesting to see OO-like classes based on sets rather than trees.
Read The Third Manifesto, and make sure to buy the book too. A class, by definition, is a set. So it maps to data types on the programming language, and domains on the database. Not only maps in the sense of having some relation to, but they are identical. The inheritance thing is orthogonal, and should be done thru Specialisation by Constraint.
>
Are you saying that the xBase approach is "flat"?
I said what I said, please read carefully. I said that more distant from relational than xBase would be OO and flat files, but that does not make xBase relational. It is what was called navigational in olden times. But you miss the point, because you have not yet grokked how distant SQL is from the relational model.
Tim manages at the same time to only reproduce emails that do not go for the jugular against his Apple eulogy, and to ignore the strikingly good contestation published at freshmeat.
It is like his other blunders, creating proprietary documentation for free software and starting the whole open source useful innocents propaganda that confused so much the free software message: he puts his foot in his mouth, and then ignores criticism, or put only rehashing of old arguments as a counterpoint, perhaps hoping critics will go away...
It is all right for the likes of you and me to ignore some criticism, but for him, a publisher to do that so openly and so often, and having the advantage of being, well, a publisher... he should know, and behave, better.
>
Things that are more likely to change are things where non-equality comparisons are less likely.
And why non-equality comparisons should be special?
>
For example, with CustomerID, you almost never use greater-than or less-than.
Which comparison operator are mostly used is immaterial. The real thing is the domain itself. For example, CustomerID cannot be compared, say, to SaleID. They are different domains. Now, if you map any of this domains to a specific language data type, and you want this language to use dynamic typing, your call. But do not let your language do meaningless cross-domain comparisons.
>
Perhaps we should make a distinction between "street relational" and "pure relational".
No, we should make a distinction between relational and non-relational, SQL being non-relational. But if you want, you can call it quasi-relational. But it is not relational, simply because relations are sets, while SQL tables are bags. And bags, by definition, are not sets and do not behave as such.
>
Until/if the industry starts to back pure relational, I am not going to assume/wait for it to happen, and try to work with what we have now WRT "relational".
So you only will used something good if everyone does? BTW you do not have to wait, unless you want it free. Go Alphora Dataphor.
>
I am all for overhauling SQL.
SQL must be thrown away, not overhauled. It is too inconsistent, illogical and idiosyncratic for overhauling.
>
I have kicked around new syntax and structure for such. It tends to resemble functional programming in many ways.
If you do not want to do the right thing and go relational, at least do not wast your efforts by duplication. Go SchemeQL.
>
One problem with strong-typing based on fields that come from the database is that if you change the schema type, then it is out of sync with the code.
But this is good! If a data type changes, code around it must change. The same comparisons are not anymore valid, for instance.
The way too keep code stable is to begin with a good data model. Granted, SQL makes this impossible by not supporting domains as required by the relational model: what it calls domains are ridiculous. But if we had real domains, and domain Specialization by Constraint, then they would be stable and precise, and seldom code would need a data type change.
>
Relational databases are not going away
I sure hope not, once they arrive indeed. Up to now, we have only Alphora Dataphor, and that is not yet a full-blown DBMS, not to mention being proprietary and MS W32-only. Remember and repeat to yourself: SQL is not relational!
Be sure to read The Third Manifesto and its clear, logic, simple proposal for rich, precise, reusable type hierarchies thru Specialisation by Constraint.
>
Another anti-OO "relational alegebra is all we ever need" rant by Tablizer.
Sorry, but Tablizer could never say relational algebra is all we ever need first, because the algebra is not the central point of the relational model, as it is just one of the two ways of manipulating relations, the other being relational calculus: the real points are two-valued predicate logic and set theory.
Second, Tablizer never quite understood the relational model, so how can he properly advocate it? A cursory read at his homepage shows he does not grok that it is based on sets.
He complains that he cannot map sets into his programming models, not realizing that, data being central to programming, sets are the easiest way to view them and that programming should adapt to sets, not the other way round.
That becomes even more clear when, after reading his complaints about SQL, you realize that he wants SQL to be even less relational -- and it is not by any means, being based on bags, not relations.
And he is no hypochrite, having written FoxPro software -- what do you want less relational than that, OO or flat files?
That being said, I should add that bein anti-OO is a very salutary thing to be, seeing how much confusion and fuzzyness OO has brought upon us, making the field even less clear than it was twenty years ago by focusing on programming, not data or even algorithms. We could be in a functional programming, relational data nirvana if it was not for all this OO garbage on us now.
>
just because someone does not buy into your philosphy doesn't entitle you to claim they are doing something which they are clearly not.
What I am claiming they are doing is to create proprietary lock-in by developing and distributing proprietary software. This way they benefit from other distributions work without giving the expected counterpart. This they are doing, and this is free riding as I understand it.
>
If you can't accept other people having other ideas and their own philosophies, then you shouldn't even talk about freedom.
I can accept, and I do, that people have other ideas. What you cannot expect is that they go unchallenged. As we see it, challenging proprietariness, free riding and software hoarding is called standing for freedom.
>
What GNU software calls for is what's stated in the license - asking for stuff which is not covered in there is cheating.
No.
The GNU GPL is a part of GNU. Other parts are GNU FDL, GNU LGPL, all the source code and documentation under these licenses, the philosophy and political papers, education and political activism, up to and including the advocacy of the necessity of free software and open standards for all users, specially government, by legal means if necessary.
Licensing, including the GNU GPL, is just one of a range of fronts in this wider battle.
But this gives no excuse for SuSE to enforce fragmentation by denying other people the right to see and use the source code it has created to use a free installer and configure a free OS.
Next time, if you want an answer, please identify yourself and read the arguments before repeating something that has nothing to do with the issue.
>>
the implication is that they are getting something from free and not retributing. Open source types may accept that one contributes partially, holding some cards; free software, on the other hands, calls for total cooperation.
>
Agree - and that's a lie, so why call them free riders, when they are clearly not?
Would you read, please? Free software, especially the GNU project that started all of GNU/Linux, calls for total contribution. It is no good to contribute where others also do, but then keep pieces proprietary so as to generate a proprietary lock in?
But then you are excused of being confused, because even Linus himself has been using proprietary tools and calling Linux open source, instead of free software, besides forgetting GNU.
>>>
That they don't contribute to Linux is simply not true.
>>No one said that.
> that is the implication by calling someone a free rider.
No, the implication is that they are getting something from free and not retributing. Open source types may accept that one contributes partially, holding some cards; free software, on the other hands, calls for total cooperation.
>
As for the fragmenting: that's one area where proprietary or not, does not matter at all.
Most obviously it matters. With free software one has the opportunity of, while not being compelled to, reuse. With proprietary code one cannot reuse.
>
The fragmentation is caused by a variety of different tools to do the same thing.
No, no, not! You are committing the most basic rhetorical error, trying to explain something merely by repeating it in other words.
Fragmentation is not caused by, it is different tools to do the same thing.
The explanation is quite another stuff, and is multiple: imperfect decisions out of lack of knowledge, divergent goals, hope of lock-in or Not Invented Here syndrome.
>
Nobody is picking up one of the free tools, and makes it standard.
Because of previous fragmentation, and none of the existing ones is up to the task yet. But even so it is not entirely true. Debian is pretty much the same whatever distribution you pick, but the derived ones initiated tools like PGI that are now being broadened to allow for inclusion in the official, original Debian. RPM is a confusion, but that is because it was a bad idea in the first place.
>
Debian is not going to use rpms any time soon, neither will others switch to Debian management tools.
Wrong, and wrong. Debian ideed will not ever use RPM, because that would be regressing. But a common format is being worked on to succeed both.rpm and.deb.
And others are switching to Debian management tools. UnitedLinux is probably using Conetiva's port of Debian's apt for rpm, and when both Debian and UnitedLinux migrate to the new, yet unfinished commom package format, then mostly what will differentiate them will be policies. If that works as expected, even Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSe will be forced to pay attention.
>
apparently freedom and coherence are conflicting targets in the open source world.
Dear AC, probably you are just trolling from the heights of your ignorance, since you proved to not grok freedom and community. Moreover, your comment is currently scored zero, thus it will not be read by many, perhaps not even yourself.
But because I have a Charlie Brownesque belief in grace and the consequent second chance, I will try to enlighten you and whomever else happens to share in your cluelessness and come to read this.
Yes, there is much unnecessary forking and lots of Not Invented Here syndrome around. Yes, GNU/Linux is yet painful in many aspects, like internationalization and hardware drivers availability.
But freedom is a long-term tool, process and goal together, not a quick fix. The current state of software bloat and badness comes not from freedom, but proprietarization -- hoarding.
It was software hoarding that kept the POSIX desktop fragmented, thus giving closed systems the current lease of life they are enjoying. And it were proprietary systems which have most contributed to change the preparation of practitioners from education to training, thus keeping the whole field in a permanent state of immaturity. Much like the beautiful White Witch in CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe kept Narnia in permanent winter, without ever allowing Christmas to come.
It is freedom what is allowing people to have the information they need to at least try to educate themselves. It is freedom that allows developers to try different approaches, and allows users to at least choose what they think best instead of being forced into stupidity by software hoarders' products.
With freedom, Microsoft would have stick to Xenix and today we could have a Microsoft OpenXenix or the like, that would be a fast, lean, really free and standards-compliant cross platform Mac OS X, including its ease of use. We have lost that train, but with freedom we are trying to catch up on what is missing, and given the pragmatic climate of opinion unfortunately that will be by trial and error.
So please learn you History, or you will be condemned to keep repeating the errors already committed by people who at least had less examples to learn from than you have now.
Can you lend me your crystal ball, or put your powers of prophecy to better uses, like when Microsoft will be forced to a niche or to free its code?
Seriously, perhaps you are right. Perhaps such stupid takeovers of perfectly nice free software code by proprietary lock-in suits will give GNU/Hurd the chance it has been denied until now.
But I guess the free software, international communities like Debian will give Linux a lease on life until the Hurd is ready, even if now decent companies like Red Hat are taken over by suits, First World patents and the such.
>
that is their business model. It makes sense, but it's annoying.
I fail to see how annoying users into trying competitors makes sense to your bottom line. If it was really so much better than anything else, it would still be wrong but at least they would be rich.
Bad conscience does not give good dreams, even in silk sheets; but he way it goes, they might as well have the bad conscience nightmares and in a slum.
At least suffering the consequences gives one an incentive to repent.
>
That they don't contribute to Linux is simply not true.
No one said that. It is well known that they contribute to GNU the OS, Linux the kernel and several utilities and applications.
The thing is that they keep fragmenting the platform from the end user point of view by keeping such an important tool proprietary. As long as they do it, no other distribution will be able to use it; they will have to duplicate effort and probably keep the user experience different even if everyone agreed YaST is the best and greatest. Even a one-year delayed GPLing like Ghostscript's would avoid this.
They are free riders indeed. No matter how much they contribute elsewhere, people like Debian or even Red Hat do not hold back anything. That SuSe does hold things back is what sets them apart. This is what fragmented the original Unix: no matter how much Sun contributed to X or NFS NIS or whatever else more, they never made things like the desktop or the kernel and core libraries free software. So it is the same story all over again, just that now the chances of fragmentation and of proprietary lock-in are much smaller, because both the totally proprietary competition (MS W32) and the totally free one (GNU/Linux) are much stronger.
Summing up, they help prolong the agony of proprietary software as a concept. All things considered, YaST is unmitigated evil.
>
I don't think the target audience of this program (Linux newbies) care very much about whether their package manager contributes to "GNU freedom".
It is not about catering for any particular class of users, but about making GNU a coherent, open platform, not simply a fragmented, proprietary product.
In the long run, freedom and coherence matters, even for newbies. Or perhaps especially for them, as hackers can always find their way around.
Is it free or proprietary? I seem to remember it was proprietary. If it has not changed, then it does little good to GNU freedom, and even if it may make Linux more popular, it would be a fragmented popularity, so none the better in the end.
Let me see... it is now possible, or will soon be, to code KDE apps in mono. How is this not adopting? So you have not adopted C++ too, just because it is not mandatory? After all, one can code KDE apps in Assembler too, I guess!
Note my comments did not say that KDE was switching to mono, but that members of KDE were committing to use and support mono. As far as I know this is pretty much what every KDE developer in this thread is asserting, that some of them are gonna use it.
I wonder at how any hint at collaboration or change arouses such a flame war among developers -- and more so among KDE, BSD and the like folks. Usually I find the FSF folks to be more balanced. I wonder if that is because people who have rejected more sound, farsighted strategies know to have painted themselves in a corner?
Debian does not deal correctly with diacritical-accented characters. Most applications are just OK, but Mozilla & Galeon are not. Also, there's not a decent graphical email that can do all of local mail, POP, news and IMAP at once. Evolution, for example, crashes; Mozilla mail, besides being too big and slow is useless due to not handling accents.
Moreover, the LANG environment variable doesn't always affect GDM, Gnome and several Gnome applications consistently. For example, Galeon always launches in English, but its second window opened will be localised.
I wonder if Libranet or any other Debian derivative, or even unstable, is better?
POSIX, X Window System, NFS, LDAP, GTK+ and Gnome.
All of these can be run on any platform, providing a cross-platform, single-login environment. And throw in Scheme and Common Lisp for languages even more powerful and high-level than Java or C#.
Substitute or add C++ and wxWindows or Qt and KDE or Objective C and GNUStep or whatever you like for Lisp, GTK+ and Gnome if you don't like copyleft or too much openness or multiple languages. Why, you can even use Java or.Net now.
Even MS had an open standards strategy to migrate all users to Xenix, before it realised it had power enough to get users into a proprietary lock-in.
See Fink for the Mac OS X. It's based on Debian, and install all the missing part of open standards support on Mac OS X. Granted it would be more difficult to do on MS W32, but not impossible.
CygW32 is already part of the answer; refine it, rework it for dpkg, integrate better with MS W32 -- especially making X Window getting its configuration from the registry and integrating its windows on the MS W32 desktop -- and you have everything Mozilla is supposed to do, but better, faster, more powerful. And native.
>
I would be more willing to bet that the reason no
one listens to you when you try to educate them is because you come
across with an elitist attitude, more so than the Mac Zealots around
here do.
That is sure an issue. But unfortunately, there is such a thing as
an elite: the people who read and understand. It may not be organised
as such, but it still is an elite. And there are small elites of
specialists in each area of knowledge.
Now, when I ask people to read and educate themselves, I mean it.
And it's not dismissing the person, it's asking one to do his
homework, so that he can talk sensibly. I sincerily can't see what's
wrong with that.
Faced with a real elite in a particular area, a person can take
several courses. One can dismiss it and continue to talk as if he was
never shown there is better knowledge available. Or one can strive to
educate himself to the elite's level. Or one can decide it's none of
his business, but then he should refrain from giving opinion on that
area.
That's the choice offered me when I faced first IT, then functional
programming, then databases. Just that I decided that first IT, and
then databases, are my areas, but functional programming isn't.
Now freedom is an area where we can't afford to have an elite. But
that does not mean not learning; it means trying to educate
everyone.
>
I was not being sarcastic when I said if you don't
keep trying to educate, you wind up doing nothing at all. It was a
simple statement of fact, you can not further a cause without
educating those who are unaware of your cause.
I never interpreted it as sarcasm. It was a legitimate statement,
because I was questioning the usefulness of writing.
>
propaganda n. 1)The systematic propagation of
a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and
interests of those advocating such a doctrine or
cause.
Exactly. But views can't be assumed from interests. One can't
talk of them as they always went together. One can have views quite
contrary to his own interests.
>
2)Material disseminated by the advocates or
opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
Exactly, again. But note that I didn't complain about denotation,
I complained about connotation.
>
I was not merely dissmissing the arguments
presented, however, I am also not willing to accept only those
arguments.
But then you must be able to show counter proof.
>
Just as you would not trust Apple's claims and
studies which show the G4 to be twice as fast as the P4, I would not
soley trust arguments presented by the leadership of a
movement.
I think we are in the different moral leagues. But then I don't
ask you to trust, but to analyse in order to either confirm or refute.
So far you've done none, and is none the wiser.
>
What is true for the leader is not nessesarily
true for the individuals
Well, if you are a relativist I don't think we have ground enough
in common to debate.
>
therefore, I am more willing to accept arguments
from the end users, and less willing to accept them from the
philosophers.
Now you're the extremist... you are in the extremes of pragmatism,
in effect denying the value of reason and wisdom. Sorry for you, but
if you don't educate yourself better you will be to the current system
operators what leftists used to call "useful innocents".
>
Fine. Open source software, which relies on the
community as it's developers, without any commercial backing, has not
proven to be a viable alternative for the users.
Perhaps because it's not finished!
Please do your bit of reading. The main missing links are
proprietary interoperability, which is necessarily long in coming
until we reach critical mass, and preinstalled systems, which are long
in coming due to MS immoral OEM agreements and practices.
>
Despite years of development, Linux still remains
unuseable to most of the population.
Let's see... MS Windows XP is a direct descendant of CP/M, which is
29 years old now (http://www.gaby.de/edefine.htm). It has had
extensive corporate support for some 23 years now, including
Microsoft's for 20 years. And in the last 15 years, to wit since
IBM's PS/2 flop, Microsoft has been the dominant force in PCs.
The GNU system, in contrast, had only a specialist community until
some, say, seven years ago. The sprint for the desktop has only begun
in the last two or three years. Meanwhile, it can scale down
(embedded systems, low end PDAs) and up (clusters, 8+ way
multiprocessing, 64 bits) much further than MS Windows, has been
localised to languages which simply aren't interesting for Microsoft,
is not subject to the same level of privacy and security risks, and
fosters competition and freedom instead of preventing and denying
them.
So, you're blinded not only by your pragmatism, but also by your
focus on the present and the desktop -- you have got no sense of
history, and no idea of the size of the industry and the user
communities beyond the end-user desktop.
Moreover, you are limited by your own knowledge, which is
constrained by your experience. Just for an example, I can do
full-color remote windows and multiple text and graphical in my iBook
running Debian 3.0 GNU/Linux with Gnome 1.4. My wife can use it.
We've had no viruses or crashes since it was installed. There is much
to be improved, but I'm slow moving; people who've been using more
recent Gnome 2 have even better experiences than ours. There is
already a US company selling PowerPC systems with GNU/Linux
preinstalled, and there are some preparing to do so in Europe. But
the x86 space is still denied us by OEM restrictions.
So your comparision is so unfair that I don't know why to loose
time refuting it.
>
The programs availible require too much user
effort just to get running let alone run well. The reason this is so
is because the software is being developed in people's spare time and
as a hobby.
That was true, but now corporations are supporting and
participating in the development of Gnome, OpenOffice and other
pieces. When this works comes to fruition, probably in the next year,
you will have a better view of where we are coming.
Remember, not being a company has some advantages. We are not
constrained to the short-term view, because companies may be folded by
their shareholders but developers will continue. You can't even be
sure of Microsoft's permanence, see
http://billparish.com./presslist.html.
>
And it will not improve beyond hobbyist styles and
structures until there is a reason to improve it. That reason is
money.
You are wrong in both accounts. Not only money is getting
involved, but also there *are* hobbyists that care for user
friendliness. It's just a process that takes time to mature.
>
And to provide money, you need to restrict
information. Money flow is related to scarcity. The more common
something is, the less the money flows. Therefore, by restricting code
and information, you generate a money flow, thereby inticing people to
improve and develop the software beyond "hobbyist levels". This sort
of money flow can not be achieved without some sort of restriction on
the information, hence the development of a company.
The problem is, do we need this sort of money flow? This is the
same sort of money flow that has corrupted popular arts beyond any
possible recognition, and is now stifling competition and invention
with copyrights and patents.
You miss a very basic point: the interests of users. Users'
interests would be better served by competition. Short term software
copyrights and no software patents would indeed benefit competition,
but in they current form they make for a monopoly.
Now the real reason why open systems (as in POSIX, not free
software necessarily) never got user friendly was because of the
desktop wars. The GNU GPL provides a disincentive for forking: as it
is seen, even if people try to rekindle the flames between Gnome and
KDE, the cooperation levels between them increased, and are still
increasing, since KDE became GNU GPL compliant. Again, this is a
long-term proposition. You loose the argument for being to hasty.
>
Believe me, I am no more of a fan of large
overberring corporations thanth next person is, however, just because
a few corporations are or have been corrupt does not lead to the
conclusion that all, or even a majority are corrupt. To advocate the
elimination of corporate powers just because of a few corrupt entities
would be the equivilent of advocating the end of government simply
because a few politicians are corrupt.
In fact you are stretching my argument and putting words in my
mouth. Never, never do that.
I am not advocating that the majority of enterprises are corrupt,
but it is clear for anyone over 30 that corruption is spreading, for
many causes that ultimately can be traced to the decadence of Western
civilization, which is throwing away its high post-Reformation ideals.
The most evident symptoms are practical materialism, pragmatism as a
substitute for Philosophy, and sheer greed.
My solution is not eliminating corporations, or government. But to
give freedom back: limitation of copyright terms to the original ones,
elimination of copyright on everything but printed matters, creation
of a more limited copyright term for recordings and software
distributions, elimination of software and methods patents,
restitution of the freedom to travel and trade across national
borders, submission of supranational entities to democratic
controls.
And obviously, government shouldn't be allowed to keep data in
proprietary formats, or buy systems with second-rate or non-existent
support for open standards.
>
That's all well and good, but untill that new
future is a reality, don't turn away help just because it doesn't
conform to your views 100%. When a company releases a program under a
semi-free licence, embrace it. Giv eth release a warm welcome and show
the company that the users and the OSS movement can be trusted to
privde quality and not just spew doctrine.
Well, I guess you are arguing Apple's case here, and perhaps Sun
Java's also.
Now tell me what they have really done to help us.
We still have no QuickTime codecs from Apple, no Cocoa classes.
Darwin is a farse, because it releases as semi-open what is already
available free, namely Mach (which is obsolete BTW) and BSD (which
isn't user-friendly at all, BTW).
Sun Java did such a bad job over programming languages support,
over solving the type impedance system and over standards that even.Net, with all its failures, is getting more enthusiast support in the
free software community.
>
Unfortunately here lies the paradox of OSS. On the
one hadn you're fighting for a licensing scheme, and on the other hadn
you're fighting to have software which you can licence in the first
place.
I'm not fighting for software to license. We have already what we
need, it's just maturing yet. Apple is more part of the problem, by
doing a proprietary fork on free software and not adhering to open
standards such as the X Window System.
When Apple offers something that is interesting, then I will want
it free. But ultimately we can just bid our time until they are
forced to either confine themselves to a niche again or learn to play
at least the open standars game, perhaps even the free software one
too.
>
The OSS comunity needs to decide which war they
will fight first.
Haven't you noticed I don't care for OSS, but for free software?
This only shows you haven't read what I recommended you, and thus this
answer is more than you earned.
>
Will they develop the software and then come up
with a common licence, or will they come up with a common license
first.
This is old history. There is software, it is under either
copyleft or simple free licenses, and is maturing.
You can't blame us for not wanting the Greek's horse present inside
the city of Troy.
>
I was simply asking the same I ask of any
movement, philosophy or belief. To show me the real world
evidence. The end users of whom the philosophy is enriching their
lives. Is that truly too much to ask? To see real hard evidence and
not just theoretical papers?
If you have taken the time and effort to look around, you'd see
it's no theory. We're building an edifice, you can't judge it by its
looks before its done. While it's being built, you must look for the
foundations. BTW, even after it's done, it is better to be sure of
the foundations anyway. And that's what you are refusing to do. You
want the fruits but are already picking the flowers, that won't do,
sir.
I've taken a look at the whole site, not only the article. It's so misinformed, it is not simple biased, it's willful disinformation.
Dismissing Hugo Chavez authoritatism and attacks on democracy as patriotism is bad enough, but calling the war on Iraq aggression is worse. It's Chamberlain revived, without even the excuse Chamberlain had of being on the same level as current climate of opinion. Even the current climate of opinion is better informed than that.
>>
That Chavez doesn't fit into any of the formerly useful categories of "right" and "left" is the source of whatever confusion there is about what he believes, but this is due to the myopia of his critics, for the most part, and not - as we shall see - any fuzziness in his own thinking.
Incidentally, this single phrase is correct. He isn't rightist or leftist, he's simply a populist caudillo.
I've read that, and found it pretty much uninformed about Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular. Almost another instance of the Western quest for the good savage.
I would recommend you read Carlos Rangel's Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario: mitos y realidades de America Latina, if you ever hope to see thru populist, Third World rethorics. There are also French and Portuguese translations.
Thanks for providing me a reason to keep trying to educate. It may be pathetic and pitiful, but not everyone can hope to be great.
>
by shoving document after document of propaganda, doctrine and philosiphy
What is wrong with that? You can't dismiss arguments by classifying them as propaganda or doctrine. One has to read, understand, and then prove them wrong. Your failure to do that can be interpreted in many ways: reading incompetence, unwillingness to face intellectual challenge are some of them.
>
you are an extremist
I read from Paul Krugman that it isfunny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself?. Also from him, sometimes you have to be extremist to be truthful. Because being at some extreme or at the middle has nothing to do with being right or wrong, but with not agreeing with the current climate of opinion. Where extremism is unseemingly is when the extreme is pursued as an end in itself: that's what I call "opositionism", or opposing something just because it's unfashionable to be in accordance.
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The extremes to which you would want to go with free software is unatainable at best, and at worst, absolute insanity.
Please prove them so.
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I have not experienced this evilness of corporate which does not allow me to get my work done.
I don't know what's your field, but in the database industry is bad enough that people are bashing the only fundamentally sound approach to the field because they don't realise it was never attempted, instead Big Corp pushes SQL which is brain-damaged. If you don't have database education I won't ever be able to tell you how bad this is, neither in bad faith nor in consequences.
But even outside of IT, haven't you heard about the railroad tycoons, or the military industrial complex, or Enron, or the California energy crisis, or Microsoft? I can't provide you with every piece of reading that's good for your education, but for a starter you could read some Paul Krugman or some Bill Parish. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, much more can be said at the deeper cultural, even philosophical level. Then you will have to do deeper reading, from Plato & St Augustine to Francis A Schaeffer & Rookmaaker, along with their contradictors.
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philosophy means nothing without fact and proof
Well, show me where my own philosophy is lacking. I don't doubt it has lackings, as I am young enough and even elders aren't perfect, being human. But you never cared to disprove it.
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I have yet to come across a person who uses only free software and who's life has dramaticaly improved because of it.
That's show you are missing the whole point. Free software isn't pragmatical in the first place, even if we hope it will be eventually. It's idealistic. It's building a new future, with all the sacrifices that entails.
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it is a rare enough instance just to come across someone who uses all free software period.
Yes, and I've given you the reasons: unreasonable forking (because there is such a thing as reasonable forking too) and time wasted reverse engineering file formats, protocols & APIs which should be documented in the first place.
Anyway, free software is not about being popular -- not yet. We do know it's not yet fit for general consumption, and therefore we are far enough from World Domination(TM).
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When you show me the proof of corporate evil and rule. When you show me the proof of GNU Nirvana, then I will consider your position. But sending me link after link of propaganda is nothing more than that. Propaganda.
Now spare me the junk. These last phrases in your comment are just that, junk. If you can't do your reading and understand your own time and its signs, even yet don't ever go around calling names and putting words in other people's mouths.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but database field is too rich to give all the specifics in a Slashdot post. You can go to DB Debunk, Open Directory or Wiki Encyclopaedia for specifics: or better yet, buy An Introduction to Database Systems by Chris J Date.
And no, I was not caring to be much friendly. I believe people should educate themselves before publishing their thoughts to the world, and the database field has suffered much already from people who did not.
But just because you seem interested, a relational database is based on two-valued predicate logic, where predicates are expressed by n-tuples organized on relations, which are time-varying values of relation variables. This is what makes it so simple and powerful. If you break this model, as SQL did, you get something at the same time more complex and less powerful. Programming languages should adapt to it, not the other way round.
I fail to see that. Can you point to somewhere where this is demonstrated? On the contrary, if a programming language gets the relational elements right, they will be the same as in any other programming language that does the same. They would all get the data structures directly from the RDBMS. What that subtracts from tables? It is just higher level, because relations do not have ordering, duplicates, undifferentiated NULLs and all the inconsistencies of SQL.
Read The Third Manifesto, and make sure to buy the book too. A class, by definition, is a set. So it maps to data types on the programming language, and domains on the database. Not only maps in the sense of having some relation to, but they are identical. The inheritance thing is orthogonal, and should be done thru Specialisation by Constraint.
I said what I said, please read carefully. I said that more distant from relational than xBase would be OO and flat files, but that does not make xBase relational. It is what was called navigational in olden times. But you miss the point, because you have not yet grokked how distant SQL is from the relational model.
Tim manages at the same time to only reproduce emails that do not go for the jugular against his Apple eulogy, and to ignore the strikingly good contestation published at freshmeat.
It is like his other blunders, creating proprietary documentation for free software and starting the whole open source useful innocents propaganda that confused so much the free software message: he puts his foot in his mouth, and then ignores criticism, or put only rehashing of old arguments as a counterpoint, perhaps hoping critics will go away...
It is all right for the likes of you and me to ignore some criticism, but for him, a publisher to do that so openly and so often, and having the advantage of being, well, a publisher... he should know, and behave, better.
And why non-equality comparisons should be special?
Which comparison operator are mostly used is immaterial. The real thing is the domain itself. For example, CustomerID cannot be compared, say, to SaleID. They are different domains. Now, if you map any of this domains to a specific language data type, and you want this language to use dynamic typing, your call. But do not let your language do meaningless cross-domain comparisons.
No, we should make a distinction between relational and non-relational, SQL being non-relational. But if you want, you can call it quasi-relational. But it is not relational, simply because relations are sets, while SQL tables are bags. And bags, by definition, are not sets and do not behave as such.
So you only will used something good if everyone does? BTW you do not have to wait, unless you want it free. Go Alphora Dataphor.
SQL must be thrown away, not overhauled. It is too inconsistent, illogical and idiosyncratic for overhauling.
If you do not want to do the right thing and go relational, at least do not wast your efforts by duplication. Go SchemeQL.
But this is good! If a data type changes, code around it must change. The same comparisons are not anymore valid, for instance.
The way too keep code stable is to begin with a good data model. Granted, SQL makes this impossible by not supporting domains as required by the relational model: what it calls domains are ridiculous. But if we had real domains, and domain Specialization by Constraint, then they would be stable and precise, and seldom code would need a data type change.
I sure hope not, once they arrive indeed. Up to now, we have only Alphora Dataphor, and that is not yet a full-blown DBMS, not to mention being proprietary and MS W32-only. Remember and repeat to yourself: SQL is not relational!
Be sure to read The Third Manifesto and its clear, logic, simple proposal for rich, precise, reusable type hierarchies thru Specialisation by Constraint.
Sorry, but Tablizer could never say relational algebra is all we ever need first, because the algebra is not the central point of the relational model, as it is just one of the two ways of manipulating relations, the other being relational calculus: the real points are two-valued predicate logic and set theory.
Second, Tablizer never quite understood the relational model, so how can he properly advocate it? A cursory read at his homepage shows he does not grok that it is based on sets.
He complains that he cannot map sets into his programming models, not realizing that, data being central to programming, sets are the easiest way to view them and that programming should adapt to sets, not the other way round.
That becomes even more clear when, after reading his complaints about SQL, you realize that he wants SQL to be even less relational -- and it is not by any means, being based on bags, not relations.
And he is no hypochrite, having written FoxPro software -- what do you want less relational than that, OO or flat files?
That being said, I should add that bein anti-OO is a very salutary thing to be, seeing how much confusion and fuzzyness OO has brought upon us, making the field even less clear than it was twenty years ago by focusing on programming, not data or even algorithms. We could be in a functional programming, relational data nirvana if it was not for all this OO garbage on us now.
What I am claiming they are doing is to create proprietary lock-in by developing and distributing proprietary software. This way they benefit from other distributions work without giving the expected counterpart. This they are doing, and this is free riding as I understand it.
I can accept, and I do, that people have other ideas. What you cannot expect is that they go unchallenged. As we see it, challenging proprietariness, free riding and software hoarding is called standing for freedom.
No.
The GNU GPL is a part of GNU. Other parts are GNU FDL, GNU LGPL, all the source code and documentation under these licenses, the philosophy and political papers, education and political activism, up to and including the advocacy of the necessity of free software and open standards for all users, specially government, by legal means if necessary.
Licensing, including the GNU GPL, is just one of a range of fronts in this wider battle.
Please read the GNU philosophy if you doubt me.
But this gives no excuse for SuSE to enforce fragmentation by denying other people the right to see and use the source code it has created to use a free installer and configure a free OS.
Next time, if you want an answer, please identify yourself and read the arguments before repeating something that has nothing to do with the issue.
Would you read, please? Free software, especially the GNU project that started all of GNU/Linux, calls for total contribution. It is no good to contribute where others also do, but then keep pieces proprietary so as to generate a proprietary lock in?
But then you are excused of being confused, because even Linus himself has been using proprietary tools and calling Linux open source, instead of free software, besides forgetting GNU.
Many people cannot find their way around without a nice GUI. So for these people there is real fragmentation. Not to mention packaging, policies, etc.
No, the implication is that they are getting something from free and not retributing. Open source types may accept that one contributes partially, holding some cards; free software, on the other hands, calls for total cooperation.
Most obviously it matters. With free software one has the opportunity of, while not being compelled to, reuse. With proprietary code one cannot reuse.
No, no, not! You are committing the most basic rhetorical error, trying to explain something merely by repeating it in other words.
Fragmentation is not caused by, it is different tools to do the same thing.
The explanation is quite another stuff, and is multiple: imperfect decisions out of lack of knowledge, divergent goals, hope of lock-in or Not Invented Here syndrome.
Because of previous fragmentation, and none of the existing ones is up to the task yet. But even so it is not entirely true. Debian is pretty much the same whatever distribution you pick, but the derived ones initiated tools like PGI that are now being broadened to allow for inclusion in the official, original Debian. RPM is a confusion, but that is because it was a bad idea in the first place.
Wrong, and wrong. Debian ideed will not ever use RPM, because that would be regressing. But a common format is being worked on to succeed both .rpm and .deb.
And others are switching to Debian management tools. UnitedLinux is probably using Conetiva's port of Debian's apt for rpm, and when both Debian and UnitedLinux migrate to the new, yet unfinished commom package format, then mostly what will differentiate them will be policies. If that works as expected, even Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSe will be forced to pay attention.
Dear AC, probably you are just trolling from the heights of your ignorance, since you proved to not grok freedom and community. Moreover, your comment is currently scored zero, thus it will not be read by many, perhaps not even yourself.
But because I have a Charlie Brownesque belief in grace and the consequent second chance, I will try to enlighten you and whomever else happens to share in your cluelessness and come to read this.
Yes, there is much unnecessary forking and lots of Not Invented Here syndrome around. Yes, GNU/Linux is yet painful in many aspects, like internationalization and hardware drivers availability.
But freedom is a long-term tool, process and goal together, not a quick fix. The current state of software bloat and badness comes not from freedom, but proprietarization -- hoarding.
It was software hoarding that kept the POSIX desktop fragmented, thus giving closed systems the current lease of life they are enjoying. And it were proprietary systems which have most contributed to change the preparation of practitioners from education to training, thus keeping the whole field in a permanent state of immaturity. Much like the beautiful White Witch in CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe kept Narnia in permanent winter, without ever allowing Christmas to come.
It is freedom what is allowing people to have the information they need to at least try to educate themselves. It is freedom that allows developers to try different approaches, and allows users to at least choose what they think best instead of being forced into stupidity by software hoarders' products.
With freedom, Microsoft would have stick to Xenix and today we could have a Microsoft OpenXenix or the like, that would be a fast, lean, really free and standards-compliant cross platform Mac OS X, including its ease of use. We have lost that train, but with freedom we are trying to catch up on what is missing, and given the pragmatic climate of opinion unfortunately that will be by trial and error.
So please learn you History, or you will be condemned to keep repeating the errors already committed by people who at least had less examples to learn from than you have now.
Can you lend me your crystal ball, or put your powers of prophecy to better uses, like when Microsoft will be forced to a niche or to free its code?
Seriously, perhaps you are right. Perhaps such stupid takeovers of perfectly nice free software code by proprietary lock-in suits will give GNU/Hurd the chance it has been denied until now.
But I guess the free software, international communities like Debian will give Linux a lease on life until the Hurd is ready, even if now decent companies like Red Hat are taken over by suits, First World patents and the such.
I fail to see how annoying users into trying competitors makes sense to your bottom line. If it was really so much better than anything else, it would still be wrong but at least they would be rich.
Bad conscience does not give good dreams, even in silk sheets; but he way it goes, they might as well have the bad conscience nightmares and in a slum.
At least suffering the consequences gives one an incentive to repent.
No one said that. It is well known that they contribute to GNU the OS, Linux the kernel and several utilities and applications.
The thing is that they keep fragmenting the platform from the end user point of view by keeping such an important tool proprietary. As long as they do it, no other distribution will be able to use it; they will have to duplicate effort and probably keep the user experience different even if everyone agreed YaST is the best and greatest. Even a one-year delayed GPLing like Ghostscript's would avoid this.
They are free riders indeed. No matter how much they contribute elsewhere, people like Debian or even Red Hat do not hold back anything. That SuSe does hold things back is what sets them apart. This is what fragmented the original Unix: no matter how much Sun contributed to X or NFS NIS or whatever else more, they never made things like the desktop or the kernel and core libraries free software. So it is the same story all over again, just that now the chances of fragmentation and of proprietary lock-in are much smaller, because both the totally proprietary competition (MS W32) and the totally free one (GNU/Linux) are much stronger.
Summing up, they help prolong the agony of proprietary software as a concept. All things considered, YaST is unmitigated evil.
What a pity! I wonder how one can think it sustainable to be the only free rider to keep its code proprietary in a sharing community.
It is not about catering for any particular class of users, but about making GNU a coherent, open platform, not simply a fragmented, proprietary product.
In the long run, freedom and coherence matters, even for newbies. Or perhaps especially for them, as hackers can always find their way around.
Is it free or proprietary? I seem to remember it was proprietary. If it has not changed, then it does little good to GNU freedom, and even if it may make Linux more popular, it would be a fragmented popularity, so none the better in the end.
Let me see... it is now possible, or will soon be, to code KDE apps in mono. How is this not adopting? So you have not adopted C++ too, just because it is not mandatory? After all, one can code KDE apps in Assembler too, I guess!
Note my comments did not say that KDE was switching to mono, but that members of KDE were committing to use and support mono. As far as I know this is pretty much what every KDE developer in this thread is asserting, that some of them are gonna use it.
I wonder at how any hint at collaboration or change arouses such a flame war among developers -- and more so among KDE, BSD and the like folks. Usually I find the FSF folks to be more balanced. I wonder if that is because people who have rejected more sound, farsighted strategies know to have painted themselves in a corner?
Actually I invented nothing, only pointed to The Register's story.
Debian does not deal correctly with diacritical-accented characters. Most applications are just OK, but Mozilla & Galeon are not. Also, there's not a decent graphical email that can do all of local mail, POP, news and IMAP at once. Evolution, for example, crashes; Mozilla mail, besides being too big and slow is useless due to not handling accents.
Moreover, the LANG environment variable doesn't always affect GDM, Gnome and several Gnome applications consistently. For example, Galeon always launches in English, but its second window opened will be localised.
I wonder if Libranet or any other Debian derivative, or even unstable, is better?
POSIX, X Window System, NFS, LDAP, GTK+ and Gnome.
All of these can be run on any platform, providing a cross-platform, single-login environment. And throw in Scheme and Common Lisp for languages even more powerful and high-level than Java or C#.
Substitute or add C++ and wxWindows or Qt and KDE or Objective C and GNUStep or whatever you like for Lisp, GTK+ and Gnome if you don't like copyleft or too much openness or multiple languages. Why, you can even use Java or .Net now.
Even MS had an open standards strategy to migrate all users to Xenix, before it realised it had power enough to get users into a proprietary lock-in.
See Fink for the Mac OS X. It's based on Debian, and install all the missing part of open standards support on Mac OS X. Granted it would be more difficult to do on MS W32, but not impossible.
CygW32 is already part of the answer; refine it, rework it for dpkg, integrate better with MS W32 -- especially making X Window getting its configuration from the registry and integrating its windows on the MS W32 desktop -- and you have everything Mozilla is supposed to do, but better, faster, more powerful. And native.
That is sure an issue. But unfortunately, there is such a thing as an elite: the people who read and understand. It may not be organised as such, but it still is an elite. And there are small elites of specialists in each area of knowledge.
Now, when I ask people to read and educate themselves, I mean it. And it's not dismissing the person, it's asking one to do his homework, so that he can talk sensibly. I sincerily can't see what's wrong with that.
Faced with a real elite in a particular area, a person can take several courses. One can dismiss it and continue to talk as if he was never shown there is better knowledge available. Or one can strive to educate himself to the elite's level. Or one can decide it's none of his business, but then he should refrain from giving opinion on that area.
That's the choice offered me when I faced first IT, then functional programming, then databases. Just that I decided that first IT, and then databases, are my areas, but functional programming isn't.
Now freedom is an area where we can't afford to have an elite. But that does not mean not learning; it means trying to educate everyone.
I never interpreted it as sarcasm. It was a legitimate statement, because I was questioning the usefulness of writing.
Exactly. But views can't be assumed from interests. One can't talk of them as they always went together. One can have views quite contrary to his own interests.
Exactly, again. But note that I didn't complain about denotation, I complained about connotation.
But then you must be able to show counter proof.
I think we are in the different moral leagues. But then I don't ask you to trust, but to analyse in order to either confirm or refute. So far you've done none, and is none the wiser.
Well, if you are a relativist I don't think we have ground enough in common to debate.
Now you're the extremist... you are in the extremes of pragmatism, in effect denying the value of reason and wisdom. Sorry for you, but if you don't educate yourself better you will be to the current system operators what leftists used to call "useful innocents".
Perhaps because it's not finished!
Please do your bit of reading. The main missing links are proprietary interoperability, which is necessarily long in coming until we reach critical mass, and preinstalled systems, which are long in coming due to MS immoral OEM agreements and practices.
Let's see... MS Windows XP is a direct descendant of CP/M, which is 29 years old now (http://www.gaby.de/edefine.htm). It has had extensive corporate support for some 23 years now, including Microsoft's for 20 years. And in the last 15 years, to wit since IBM's PS/2 flop, Microsoft has been the dominant force in PCs.
The GNU system, in contrast, had only a specialist community until some, say, seven years ago. The sprint for the desktop has only begun in the last two or three years. Meanwhile, it can scale down (embedded systems, low end PDAs) and up (clusters, 8+ way multiprocessing, 64 bits) much further than MS Windows, has been localised to languages which simply aren't interesting for Microsoft, is not subject to the same level of privacy and security risks, and fosters competition and freedom instead of preventing and denying them.
So, you're blinded not only by your pragmatism, but also by your focus on the present and the desktop -- you have got no sense of history, and no idea of the size of the industry and the user communities beyond the end-user desktop.
Moreover, you are limited by your own knowledge, which is constrained by your experience. Just for an example, I can do full-color remote windows and multiple text and graphical in my iBook running Debian 3.0 GNU/Linux with Gnome 1.4. My wife can use it. We've had no viruses or crashes since it was installed. There is much to be improved, but I'm slow moving; people who've been using more recent Gnome 2 have even better experiences than ours. There is already a US company selling PowerPC systems with GNU/Linux preinstalled, and there are some preparing to do so in Europe. But the x86 space is still denied us by OEM restrictions.
So your comparision is so unfair that I don't know why to loose time refuting it.
That was true, but now corporations are supporting and participating in the development of Gnome, OpenOffice and other pieces. When this works comes to fruition, probably in the next year, you will have a better view of where we are coming.
Remember, not being a company has some advantages. We are not constrained to the short-term view, because companies may be folded by their shareholders but developers will continue. You can't even be sure of Microsoft's permanence, see http://billparish.com./presslist.html.
You are wrong in both accounts. Not only money is getting involved, but also there *are* hobbyists that care for user friendliness. It's just a process that takes time to mature.
The problem is, do we need this sort of money flow? This is the same sort of money flow that has corrupted popular arts beyond any possible recognition, and is now stifling competition and invention with copyrights and patents.
You miss a very basic point: the interests of users. Users' interests would be better served by competition. Short term software copyrights and no software patents would indeed benefit competition, but in they current form they make for a monopoly.
Now the real reason why open systems (as in POSIX, not free software necessarily) never got user friendly was because of the desktop wars. The GNU GPL provides a disincentive for forking: as it is seen, even if people try to rekindle the flames between Gnome and KDE, the cooperation levels between them increased, and are still increasing, since KDE became GNU GPL compliant. Again, this is a long-term proposition. You loose the argument for being to hasty.
In fact you are stretching my argument and putting words in my mouth. Never, never do that.
I am not advocating that the majority of enterprises are corrupt, but it is clear for anyone over 30 that corruption is spreading, for many causes that ultimately can be traced to the decadence of Western civilization, which is throwing away its high post-Reformation ideals. The most evident symptoms are practical materialism, pragmatism as a substitute for Philosophy, and sheer greed.
My solution is not eliminating corporations, or government. But to give freedom back: limitation of copyright terms to the original ones, elimination of copyright on everything but printed matters, creation of a more limited copyright term for recordings and software distributions, elimination of software and methods patents, restitution of the freedom to travel and trade across national borders, submission of supranational entities to democratic controls.
And obviously, government shouldn't be allowed to keep data in proprietary formats, or buy systems with second-rate or non-existent support for open standards.
Well, I guess you are arguing Apple's case here, and perhaps Sun Java's also.
Now tell me what they have really done to help us.
We still have no QuickTime codecs from Apple, no Cocoa classes. Darwin is a farse, because it releases as semi-open what is already available free, namely Mach (which is obsolete BTW) and BSD (which isn't user-friendly at all, BTW).
Sun Java did such a bad job over programming languages support, over solving the type impedance system and over standards that even .Net, with all its failures, is getting more enthusiast support in the
free software community.
I'm not fighting for software to license. We have already what we need, it's just maturing yet. Apple is more part of the problem, by doing a proprietary fork on free software and not adhering to open standards such as the X Window System.
When Apple offers something that is interesting, then I will want it free. But ultimately we can just bid our time until they are forced to either confine themselves to a niche again or learn to play at least the open standars game, perhaps even the free software one too.
Haven't you noticed I don't care for OSS, but for free software? This only shows you haven't read what I recommended you, and thus this answer is more than you earned.
This is old history. There is software, it is under either copyleft or simple free licenses, and is maturing.
You can't blame us for not wanting the Greek's horse present inside the city of Troy.
If you have taken the time and effort to look around, you'd see it's no theory. We're building an edifice, you can't judge it by its looks before its done. While it's being built, you must look for the foundations. BTW, even after it's done, it is better to be sure of the foundations anyway. And that's what you are refusing to do. You want the fruits but are already picking the flowers, that won't do, sir.
I've taken a look at the whole site, not only the article. It's so misinformed, it is not simple biased, it's willful disinformation.
Dismissing Hugo Chavez authoritatism and attacks on democracy as patriotism is bad enough, but calling the war on Iraq aggression is worse. It's Chamberlain revived, without even the excuse Chamberlain had of being on the same level as current climate of opinion. Even the current climate of opinion is better informed than that.
Incidentally, this single phrase is correct. He isn't rightist or leftist, he's simply a populist caudillo.
I've read that, and found it pretty much uninformed about Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular. Almost another instance of the Western quest for the good savage.
I would recommend you read Carlos Rangel's Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario: mitos y realidades de America Latina, if you ever hope to see thru populist, Third World rethorics. There are also French and Portuguese translations.
Thanks for providing me a reason to keep trying to educate. It may be pathetic and pitiful, but not everyone can hope to be great.
What is wrong with that? You can't dismiss arguments by classifying them as propaganda or doctrine. One has to read, understand, and then prove them wrong. Your failure to do that can be interpreted in many ways: reading incompetence, unwillingness to face intellectual challenge are some of them.
I read from Paul Krugman that it isfunny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself?. Also from him, sometimes you have to be extremist to be truthful. Because being at some extreme or at the middle has nothing to do with being right or wrong, but with not agreeing with the current climate of opinion. Where extremism is unseemingly is when the extreme is pursued as an end in itself: that's what I call "opositionism", or opposing something just because it's unfashionable to be in accordance.
Please prove them so.
I don't know what's your field, but in the database industry is bad enough that people are bashing the only fundamentally sound approach to the field because they don't realise it was never attempted, instead Big Corp pushes SQL which is brain-damaged. If you don't have database education I won't ever be able to tell you how bad this is, neither in bad faith nor in consequences.
But even outside of IT, haven't you heard about the railroad tycoons, or the military industrial complex, or Enron, or the California energy crisis, or Microsoft? I can't provide you with every piece of reading that's good for your education, but for a starter you could read some Paul Krugman or some Bill Parish. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, much more can be said at the deeper cultural, even philosophical level. Then you will have to do deeper reading, from Plato & St Augustine to Francis A Schaeffer & Rookmaaker, along with their contradictors.
Well, show me where my own philosophy is lacking. I don't doubt it has lackings, as I am young enough and even elders aren't perfect, being human. But you never cared to disprove it.
That's show you are missing the whole point. Free software isn't pragmatical in the first place, even if we hope it will be eventually. It's idealistic. It's building a new future, with all the sacrifices that entails.
Yes, and I've given you the reasons: unreasonable forking (because there is such a thing as reasonable forking too) and time wasted reverse engineering file formats, protocols & APIs which should be documented in the first place.
Anyway, free software is not about being popular -- not yet. We do know it's not yet fit for general consumption, and therefore we are far enough from World Domination(TM).
Now spare me the junk. These last phrases in your comment are just that, junk. If you can't do your reading and understand your own time and its signs, even yet don't ever go around calling names and putting words in other people's mouths.