>
Why the hell should a company, you know, one of those things set up to make money, subsidise anything?
Because they are part of the human race, and being a company they can do more for it in some ways, like ones that require costly resources, than individuals. Granted they can do even more useful things than porting a state-of-the-art game to the GNU system, but this at least would be related to their own turf.
>
why is advocating the production of a game on one platform helping our ruin?
Because the owners of that platform are conspiring with other copyright and patent owners and with corrupt politicians and media to destroy our freedoms and prosperity. That is because they support DMCA, TCPA, software patents and all this absurd intellectual property monstruosity. It had a limited scope and good intentions when it was created, but now it is a monstruosity.
>
im sorry but i didnt see "Property of a fat penguin" stamped on Slashdot anywhere.
I do not particularly care about penguins, I am fond of gnus... but seriously, some of us still do care about liberty.
>
Yes, some people might not like Microsoft, but that doesnt mean we should stop reporting on stuff happening.
It is not about dislike, but judgement. And this was not reporting, but advancing.
>
And, if you didnt notice, id have only donated code in such a way to destroy older engines, so companies only license newer engines from them at probably a much greater price.
I did not notice indeed. Can you expand on this, and perhaps even give some nice URLs? Thanks in advance.
>
are more and more people advocating linux and OSS soley on the basis that its costless
Not my case, I assure you. But in these economical hard times, it is only natural that the free beer camp has more of a hearing. I would rather freedom.
>
ANYONE can show me a OSS compliant document format that even approaches the usefull ness of the.doc format
Both LaTeX (LyX) and SGML (DocBook, TEI, XML and the like) do semantics, stylesheets and have user friendly tools available. There are others I am missing probably, not to mention things with a more limited scope as Info and the like. Now Microsoft Word for Windows is a disaster&hellip. It stopped being useful when around version 2 or 6 it quit suporting stylesheets and switched to templates.
But then there is the question, what makes a document format useful for you?
>
The file format that opensource applications seem to live on is plain txt
Wrong. It is either SGML, its XML sibling and some DTD, or LaTeX.
XBox is proprietary and owned by our eternal foe Microsoft. Therefore this is helping our ruin. Now, if the company would use profits from XBox sales to subsidize a copylefted, up-to-date port for GNU systems, I'd be all for it.
At lease id has always created cross-platform code, and even donated some of it, even if belatedly.
You happy people (non-tech) will put us in jail for attempting to help you use technology in a secure way, because you hate and fear us so much.
This pressuposes ill faith. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (Napoleon Bonaparte). I do think incompetence does become malice when it comes from unrepenteded negligence, and further on when one tries to cover up his mistakes. But malice alone does not explain the origin of the problem.
As I see it, this situation arises because IT practitioners are not adequately instructed on the fundamentals of technology on one hand, and on the other, even when they are, do not have the authority to take decisions based on that.
For example, we should be able to say no to managers when they require us to use substandard technologies. We should have been able to say no to PCs instead of X terminals; to client-server instead of TP monitors or host-terminal; to MS Windows instead of POSIX; to SQL instead of QUEL. And even to say no to implementations: no to insecure 802.11, to unmanaged connection to the Net, to application protocols overloaded on HTTP. But we cannot, either for lack of knowledge, or of authority.
If nothing else, frequently the user himself who may be a director, VP, CEO, CTO or CIO will take it to himself to hire his geek nephew or allocate some time from the nerd subassistant who knows how to use his PC to implement unsafe, unsound and ultimately costly network and PCs.
LWN was run voluntarily at first. Can it continue in this fashion?
Totally agree. During time they added lots of coverage that are kind out of scope for me: too much recommended reading, to much items in the News section, too much proprietary software coverage, many security items that arent really essential to LWN, but are better found elsewhere. The hard thing is that perhaps other people have different itchings, so the right balance between what to include or not is very hard to achieve.
Also disclosing their plans and budget perhaps would give the community a better idea of how much to contribute.
Other ideas tossed around are doing CSS to reduce bandwidth and storage needs, doing away with the new, storage-consuming comments letters to the editors were just fine. What would really entice me is more focus on free software. While I like to read about free software deployments in businesses, I dont care about proprietary software for GNU/Linux. Others may feel similarly.
The FSF regularly toys around with the idea of a free software-only news service. I would love such a service in the LWN format.
One thing that really bothers me is that almost every voluntary effort that tries to turn commercial does so after it has grown too much to be sort-to-medium-term viable. Perhaps reverting back to the original, smaller format, going commercial, and then growing back to current format as revenues allow would do the trick. Just my 2.
I see... only for those who have time to spare. Unfortunately I don't.
Also unfortunately my suggestion isn't comic at all, I do believe it's the single most important missing link in software development. But so do that COSA guy...
If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.
I found that PCKeyboard does still provide the old IBM BS keyboards, and they even promise to deliver soon 105 (non-English) keys layouts with the stick!
Too bad there's nor Brazilian Portuguese neither Swiss French layouts, and those are the ones I'm after.
I would like to get a layout that once was created specifically with the same goals as the Dvorak one, but tailored for Portuguese…
>
I think you have a good point and present it pretty well too.
Thanks for the compliment, that’s a rare thing indeed around here!
>
I'm a marine engineer in Mexico and wish there were more women in my field, but things just aren't that way I guess.
I guess it’s not PC to say that, but there may be more than one reason for that wish!
>
Unfortunately it will probably take this pathetic wave of PCness to get way more women into the sciences.
But then is that a good thing in itself?
>
The two best mathematics teachers I've ever were women (well, I'm sure they're still women), there should just be more, so whatever works.
A reasonable conclusion, but from a small sample. And we must be careful about roles: women traditionally have been into teaching, but many woman teachers will rather have a male than female school principal, and that not because of any romantic delusion, but just to avoid known, common problems that tend to arise with female principals.
Last but not least, I must disagree with the ‘whatever works’ part. There are something that must be done or avoided because of ethics, not expediency.
under the new security system, GPL programs will
not be able to be "trusted" by MS' hardware/software security system,
so GPL based systems (like Apache web servers) will become
unusable
First, Apache is not GPL’d.
Second, the guy mentioned (GNU) GPL as an instance of copyleft.
MPL and GNU LGPL would be other affected licenses examples.
Third, the difference between merely free (or the Marketspeak
‘Open Source’) and free and copylefted
software in this issue is that it affects copylefted software more drastically.
Because with free, non-copylefted software like Apache, a company like
Covalent can – and actually already does – take the free
code and release proprietary, DRM-compliant binaries. Incidentally,
that would kill most of the incentive to develop Apache as viable
competition to MS IIS, but Microsoft will try hard to cover the fact
in Congressional hearings and media events.
It would still possible to take GNU GPL code and generate supported,
DRM-compliant binary distributions – too bad one wouldn’t
be able to use the source code he earned by getting the binary to
compile a DRM-compliant version customized to his needs. It is this
restriction which would all but kill GNU GPL’d software.
> Oh yeah, and I notice that your.sig doesn't say
anything about a being a P.Eng or any B.ASc or B.E.
And...? Why would that be relevant?
> Don't speak on behalf of us if you haven't put in the time.
You must be talking to someone else, I never spoke on behalf of anyone, at least not in this thread. Oh, sorry, spoke on behalf of Brasilians, from which part of Brasil are you?
You disgust yourself too easily. Spoiled by Northern Europe cultural malaise AKA bad conscience AKA political correctness, probably.
> First of all, there are a lot of women in undergrad engineering at U of T, and a lot of my T.A.s (grad engineering students) were women too.
and? I didn’t say there are no women, just less. And that’ a general statement, you can’t disproof it just by citing a particular experience.
> What the hell does being a "Real man" have to do with engineering?
Perhaps if people will do what they like instead of trying to keep a stupid 50-50% split in every profession, men will follow their natural or social tendency towards some of them, and women towards other. And then, perhaps Engineering and Computing Sciences will be preferred by more men than women. Is that so difficult to understand?
I can't remember the URL and haven't bookmarked it, but some time ago there was a nice explanation for women going into Medicine instead of Engineering or Computing: Medicine pays more and work less.
Not to mention that there may be a natural or social differentiation in roles and tastes, and that's not bad in itself. I don't see anything in the Natural Law stating each profession must have a 50-50% split on sex lines. We Brasilians tend to like being real men and having our women really different from ourselves.
The one book to have about databases is Christopher J Date’s An Introduction to Database Systems, 7th edition, Addison-Wesley 1.999. The edition is relevant, because it includes recent, fundamental work about type inheritance and other fundaments for relational databases supporting OO programming.
If I make any additions to GPLd code, I must release my changes. this is denying me my freedom, over my own code.
Your changes in these case are a derived work, and the original work was licensed in such as way of keeping it free even in derivations. Either you respect the freedom of others, or you choose another codebase to improve upon. Either way no freedom as denied, except as to preserve others&rsquo.
> Fact: The per seat licensing is for United Linux.
Do anyone has any real pointer here? I think this is only rumours up to know.
> That is, everything included on the CDs -- which is more than strictly GPLd software.
That is the point. No one can restrict one’s freedom to run GNU GPL software. Will they substitute a proprietary kernel or init so that one can’t run the GNU GPL programs contained in UnitedLinux above one’s specific per-seat license arrangement? Or will their licensing specify which pieces are under a non-copyleft license or are actually owned by him, and thus can have their usage restricted on a per-seat basis?
Remember, this is about usage, not copying. So your other points are true, but moot.
So we can’t agree. You are stating the anarchist’s position. If we were anarchists we would go the BSD route, not the copyleft one.
> people like the KKK and the black panthers would be put in prison on the sole bases of their views.
If their views is that you must kill and restrict other people’s freedom, that would be fine with me. But this would be a form of censorship, and the discussion is over software licensing. Off-topic and ad hominem.
> Blind faith
Wrong definition. Zealot is one who cares too much. Zeal is caring.
> no it is not always a good thing.
I agree zeal is not always a good thing, it depends on its subject. I said it is good in itself, perhaps I should have been more careful and stated that it is neutral. But I still think that, the object being good, zeal is good in itself. Overshooting it is bad, as overshooting by definition is bad.
> If you don't want to make money fine
I never mentioned money.
> why deny someone else the FREEDOM?
That’t the point, why? Because it is wrong denying freedom, copyleft consists in making sure everyone has freedom by denying the right of denying freedom.
> When it is the other way around (software piracy) people in the slashdot community instantly try to rationalize it.
Didn’t got your point. What is the other way round? What piracy has got to do with this? Who’s defending “Slashdot community”? This is about GNU GPL, RMS and UnitedLinux rumoured use of a per-seat license.
> What they can say is "If you want our help or support, then you need to pay per user" which is what I believe that they are saying.
That’s the point, they are saying nothing. Everything I’ve seen up to now is only speculation. It may not be idle, since these discussions can preempt any stupid move from UnitedLinux.
> if they don't give you what you want on the terms that you want they might as well not give anything because you won't give them credit for it anyways?
I’m not sure I understood, but I think that if they don’t give me freedom I want nothing from them. BTW, they are not giving, they are selling, so you have to redefine your question. I’m not buying proprietary software, if it comes to that.
> But, say (and this is reaching) the init program used by this OS is proprietary, not the GPL'd version.
You have a point here! This poses other questions: for instance, would such OS be still GNU/Linux?
> The publisher is certainly within their rights to require per-seat licensing of said proprietary init binary.
Correct. And of incurring the ire of everyone but Bill Gates.
> To say otherwise, to claim that the GNU software can ONLY be run on all-GNU platforms, would require the removal of all GNU software from any 'un-pure' OS, and that's just NOT gonna happen anytime soon.
That’s what 3, item (c) is for: ”as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.’. I can imagine GNU GPL 4 yanking that off, since by then GNU/Hurd and GNU/Linux may have already driven all proprietary OSs to legacy status
Slashdot Mirror
Because they are part of the human race, and being a company they can do more for it in some ways, like ones that require costly resources, than individuals. Granted they can do even more useful things than porting a state-of-the-art game to the GNU system, but this at least would be related to their own turf.
Because the owners of that platform are conspiring with other copyright and patent owners and with corrupt politicians and media to destroy our freedoms and prosperity. That is because they support DMCA, TCPA, software patents and all this absurd intellectual property monstruosity. It had a limited scope and good intentions when it was created, but now it is a monstruosity.
I do not particularly care about penguins, I am fond of gnus... but seriously, some of us still do care about liberty.
It is not about dislike, but judgement. And this was not reporting, but advancing.
I did not notice indeed. Can you expand on this, and perhaps even give some nice URLs? Thanks in advance.
Not my case, I assure you. But in these economical hard times, it is only natural that the free beer camp has more of a hearing. I would rather freedom.
Both LaTeX (LyX) and SGML (DocBook, TEI, XML and the like) do semantics, stylesheets and have user friendly tools available. There are others I am missing probably, not to mention things with a more limited scope as Info and the like. Now Microsoft Word for Windows is a disaster&hellip. It stopped being useful when around version 2 or 6 it quit suporting stylesheets and switched to templates.
But then there is the question, what makes a document format useful for you?
Wrong. It is either SGML, its XML sibling and some DTD, or LaTeX.
XBox is proprietary and owned by our eternal foe Microsoft. Therefore this is helping our ruin. Now, if the company would use profits from XBox sales to subsidize a copylefted, up-to-date port for GNU systems, I'd be all for it.
At lease id has always created cross-platform code, and even donated some of it, even if belatedly.
This pressuposes ill faith. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (Napoleon Bonaparte). I do think incompetence does become malice when it comes from unrepenteded negligence, and further on when one tries to cover up his mistakes. But malice alone does not explain the origin of the problem.
As I see it, this situation arises because IT practitioners are not adequately instructed on the fundamentals of technology on one hand, and on the other, even when they are, do not have the authority to take decisions based on that.
For example, we should be able to say no to managers when they require us to use substandard technologies. We should have been able to say no to PCs instead of X terminals; to client-server instead of TP monitors or host-terminal; to MS Windows instead of POSIX; to SQL instead of QUEL. And even to say no to implementations: no to insecure 802.11, to unmanaged connection to the Net, to application protocols overloaded on HTTP. But we cannot, either for lack of knowledge, or of authority.
If nothing else, frequently the user himself who may be a director, VP, CEO, CTO or CIO will take it to himself to hire his geek nephew or allocate some time from the nerd subassistant who knows how to use his PC to implement unsafe, unsound and ultimately costly network and PCs.
For all I could gather OpenSTA is still MSW32-only, with plans to porting to other platforms; and it can't yet do tests other than http yet.
IANATester.
Totally agree. During time they added lots of coverage that are kind out of scope for me: too much recommended reading, to much items in the News section, too much proprietary software coverage, many security items that arent really essential to LWN, but are better found elsewhere. The hard thing is that perhaps other people have different itchings, so the right balance between what to include or not is very hard to achieve.
Also disclosing their plans and budget perhaps would give the community a better idea of how much to contribute.
Other ideas tossed around are doing CSS to reduce bandwidth and storage needs, doing away with the new, storage-consuming comments letters to the editors were just fine. What would really entice me is more focus on free software. While I like to read about free software deployments in businesses, I dont care about proprietary software for GNU/Linux. Others may feel similarly.
The FSF regularly toys around with the idea of a free software-only news service. I would love such a service in the LWN format.
One thing that really bothers me is that almost every voluntary effort that tries to turn commercial does so after it has grown too much to be sort-to-medium-term viable. Perhaps reverting back to the original, smaller format, going commercial, and then growing back to current format as revenues allow would do the trick. Just my 2.
I know you didn't. Just that all these silver-bullet claims, including mine, sound very comical. But I hope this one is for real.
I see... only for those who have time to spare. Unfortunately I don't.
Also unfortunately my suggestion isn't comic at all, I do believe it's the single most important missing link in software development. But so do that COSA guy...
That was to give some background, because this is a very misunderstood subject.
But Memepool looked curious, I just couldn't grok it. What's that about?
No, and I happen not to know what's that about.
The Alphora Dataphor DAE is the first relational database management system since IBM BS12 and the QUEL version of Postgres.
It was coded for MS .Net, thus it should be readily portable to Ximian Mono or GNUs & Southern Storms DotGNU Portable.Net.
If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.
And that with unreprochable theoretical foundations attested by the luminars of the field.
I found that PCKeyboard does still provide the old IBM BS keyboards, and they even promise to deliver soon 105 (non-English) keys layouts with the stick!
Too bad there's nor Brazilian Portuguese neither Swiss French layouts, and those are the ones I'm after.
I would like to get a layout that once was created specifically with the same goals as the Dvorak one, but tailored for Portuguese…
Thanks for the compliment, that’s a rare thing indeed around here!
I guess it’s not PC to say that, but there may be more than one reason for that wish!
But then is that a good thing in itself?
A reasonable conclusion, but from a small sample. And we must be careful about roles: women traditionally have been into teaching, but many woman teachers will rather have a male than female school principal, and that not because of any romantic delusion, but just to avoid known, common problems that tend to arise with female principals.
Last but not least, I must disagree with the ‘whatever works’ part. There are something that must be done or avoided because of ethics, not expediency.
First, Apache is not GPL’d.
Second, the guy mentioned (GNU) GPL as an instance of copyleft. MPL and GNU LGPL would be other affected licenses examples.
Third, the difference between merely free (or the Marketspeak ‘Open Source’) and free and copylefted software in this issue is that it affects copylefted software more drastically. Because with free, non-copylefted software like Apache, a company like Covalent can – and actually already does – take the free code and release proprietary, DRM-compliant binaries. Incidentally, that would kill most of the incentive to develop Apache as viable competition to MS IIS, but Microsoft will try hard to cover the fact in Congressional hearings and media events.
It would still possible to take GNU GPL code and generate supported, DRM-compliant binary distributions – too bad one wouldn’t be able to use the source code he earned by getting the binary to compile a DRM-compliant version customized to his needs. It is this restriction which would all but kill GNU GPL’d software.
> Oh yeah, and I notice that your .sig doesn't say
anything about a being a P.Eng or any B.ASc or B.E.
And...? Why would that be relevant?
> Don't speak on behalf of us if you haven't put in the time.
You must be talking to someone else, I never spoke on behalf of anyone, at least not in this thread. Oh, sorry, spoke on behalf of Brasilians, from which part of Brasil are you?
> your post is disgusting.
You disgust yourself too easily. Spoiled by Northern Europe cultural malaise AKA bad conscience AKA political correctness, probably.
> First of all, there are a lot of women in undergrad engineering at U of T, and a lot of my T.A.s (grad engineering students) were women too.
and? I didn’t say there are no women, just less. And that’ a general statement, you can’t disproof it just by citing a particular experience.
> What the hell does being a "Real man" have to do with engineering?
Perhaps if people will do what they like instead of trying to keep a stupid 50-50% split in every profession, men will follow their natural or social tendency towards some of them, and women towards other. And then, perhaps Engineering and Computing Sciences will be preferred by more men than women. Is that so difficult to understand?
I can't remember the URL and haven't bookmarked it, but some time ago there was a nice explanation for women going into Medicine instead of Engineering or Computing: Medicine pays more and work less.
Not to mention that there may be a natural or social differentiation in roles and tastes, and that's not bad in itself. I don't see anything in the Natural Law stating each profession must have a 50-50% split on sex lines. We Brasilians tend to like being real men and having our women really different from ourselves.
The one book to have about databases is Christopher J Date’s An Introduction to Database Systems, 7th edition, Addison-Wesley 1.999. The edition is relevant, because it includes recent, fundamental work about type inheritance and other fundaments for relational databases supporting OO programming.
I just use Debian, nothing else. Perhaps it’s Anaconda, but then please enlighten me as to what Anaconda is.
It’s just me or other people also noted EnGarde’s installer looks just like the Debian one? Would it be Debian-based?
I haven’t seen them at Debian’s derived distributions list, so maybe I’m mistaken.
They still have, but Microsoft has circumvented the requirement. I wonder why it’s not taken to task for that.
Your changes in these case are a derived work, and the original work was licensed in such as way of keeping it free even in derivations. Either you respect the freedom of others, or you choose another codebase to improve upon. Either way no freedom as denied, except as to preserve others&rsquo.
> Fact: The per seat licensing is for United Linux.
Do anyone has any real pointer here? I think this is only rumours up to know.
> That is, everything included on the CDs -- which is more than strictly GPLd software.
That is the point. No one can restrict one’s freedom to run GNU GPL software. Will they substitute a proprietary kernel or init so that one can’t run the GNU GPL programs contained in UnitedLinux above one’s specific per-seat license arrangement? Or will their licensing specify which pieces are under a non-copyleft license or are actually owned by him, and thus can have their usage restricted on a per-seat basis?
Remember, this is about usage, not copying. So your other points are true, but moot.
> true freedom is all or nothing
So we can’t agree. You are stating the anarchist’s position. If we were anarchists we would go the BSD route, not the copyleft one.
> people like the KKK and the black panthers would be put in prison on the sole bases of their views.
If their views is that you must kill and restrict other people’s freedom, that would be fine with me. But this would be a form of censorship, and the discussion is over software licensing. Off-topic and ad hominem.
> Blind faith
Wrong definition. Zealot is one who cares too much. Zeal is caring.
> no it is not always a good thing.
I agree zeal is not always a good thing, it depends on its subject. I said it is good in itself, perhaps I should have been more careful and stated that it is neutral. But I still think that, the object being good, zeal is good in itself. Overshooting it is bad, as overshooting by definition is bad.
> If you don't want to make money fine
I never mentioned money.
> why deny someone else the FREEDOM?
That’t the point, why? Because it is wrong denying freedom, copyleft consists in making sure everyone has freedom by denying the right of denying freedom.
> When it is the other way around (software piracy) people in the slashdot community instantly try to rationalize it.
Didn’t got your point. What is the other way round? What piracy has got to do with this? Who’s defending “Slashdot community”? This is about GNU GPL, RMS and UnitedLinux rumoured use of a per-seat license.
> What they can say is "If you want our help or support, then you need to pay per user" which is what I believe that they are saying.
That’s the point, they are saying nothing. Everything I’ve seen up to now is only speculation. It may not be idle, since these discussions can preempt any stupid move from UnitedLinux.
> if they don't give you what you want on the terms that you want they might as well not give anything because you won't give them credit for it anyways?
I’m not sure I understood, but I think that if they don’t give me freedom I want nothing from them. BTW, they are not giving, they are selling, so you have to redefine your question. I’m not buying proprietary software, if it comes to that.
> But, say (and this is reaching) the init program used by this OS is proprietary, not the GPL'd version.
You have a point here! This poses other questions: for instance, would such OS be still GNU/Linux?
> The publisher is certainly within their rights to require per-seat licensing of said proprietary init binary.
Correct. And of incurring the ire of everyone but Bill Gates.
> To say otherwise, to claim that the GNU software can ONLY be run on all-GNU platforms, would require the removal of all GNU software from any 'un-pure' OS, and that's just NOT gonna happen anytime soon.
That’s what 3, item (c) is for: ”as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.’. I can imagine GNU GPL 4 yanking that off, since by then GNU/Hurd and GNU/Linux may have already driven all proprietary OSs to legacy status