Anyone who's taken high-school physics can infer this if they're reasonably bright.
Yup. So can physics, chemistry, or engineering majors. I think that one of the great failures in limiting nuclear proliferation has been permitting foreign nationals to attend US colleges and uiniversities. It makes all the sense in the world to me for the US to open its borders and permit people of all nations to renounce their native citizenship, live in the US, become US citiznes, and learn all they want to. It strikes me as the height of insanity to train foreign nationals in fields which would permit their national governments to conduct a nuclear war against us.
demanding that you turn YOUR project into a GPL-polluted project.
The project would not be "polluted" if they had not first chosen to include GPL code. In order to include GPL code, you MUST agree to the licensing terms. If they did not understand the licensing terms before they began including the code, that makes them stupid. The terms are very clear and available for all to see.
Ummm...Java didn't fail. Nor is it a fad "Hype" is the product of a gullible media and a techno-ignorant marketer. The idea that java failed is ludicrous. It was considered viable enough that Microsoft polluted it. Bill Gates reportedly screamed an experinced senior executive out of a meeting because the executive dared sugest that MS prepare for the world of Java. The number of java developers is growing. Many web sites are difficult to deal with if you don't have a Java-enabled browser. But because Java-powered office suites did not immediately appear and replace Windows, Java is a failure? If, in the year to come, Linux doesn't displace Windows on the desktop, the mainstream media will doubtless begin considering Linux a failure, too.
The CLI doesn't make things easier. For your wife, by herself, to do what you did, she would have to learn quite a bit. A decent CLI can automate things, which is GREAT, but to say that is easy is tantamount to saying that programming is easy.
It is definitely easier, though, to automate with a CLI than with a GUI. Under a GUI, you have to worry about more than text; you have to worry about when to click and where to click. A window might take longer to come up than it did when you originally tried to automate the task. A window can be resized, or moved, which makes it nearly impossible to determine where the pointer should point.
Anyway, given that little disagreement over language, I definitely agree that it is easier to automate tasks using a CLI than a GUI.
Yup. Linux CANNOT go away, and if we want to use it, we will always be able to. If Microsoft totally scares away ALL comercial interest in Linux among corporate users, OEMs, and application vendors, and if all the big names in liberated software died today, if no one in the press ever noticed it again, Linux would still be here and people would still use it and improve it. So we might be worried that Microsoft will keep "the Linux experience" (whatever that means) out of the hands of the masses, but we shouldn't worry too much, because no one can take Linux away from us.
That's one possible interpretation of the situation. But consider this - Did the employer "distribute" the software to the employees? Or did the employer merely install the software on all of his/her computers, and then permit the employees use the computers? It's a subtle distinction, I know, but that's the kind of thing a legal decision would hinge on.
So I guess here is the question I would ask: If I own a computer, and I install GPL software on it, and I permit someone else to use that computer, does that constitute distribution to the other person under the GPL as it is currently written?
I know that if I modify the source code and fail to share those modifications, I violate the spirit of the GPL, but I'm not sure I violate the letter of the GPL.
I believe you are correct; you only have to provide source code if you redistribute your changes. Making changes does not force you to share those changes. Otherwise, you'd be in violation of the license the instant you inserted a single space into the source code and recompiled it on an non-networked computer.
However, it is unclear to me whether or not internal distribution is considered distribution. In other words, if a corporation, which legally is a single individual, puts a modified version of GNU/Linux on all their computers, are they then required to let their employees have the source code and redistribute it? Would installing GNU/Linux on a system that another individual will use be considered distributing it? I don't think so, but the license isn't clear.
Wouldn't it be funny if Solaris refunded all of Microsoft's money and then revoked the licenses on all Sun's software running on the Hotmail servers? Give them something like an hour to comply, and then prosecute them for civil and criminal copyright violations if Hotmail is still up when the time is up.
Systems management features refers to the ability to remotely manage other machines - he's probably referring to their SMS (Systems management Server) software. The idea is that an IT guy can sit at a server and completely manage all client systems - take inventory of their hardware and software, install new software, see if someone has opened the case, reboot the machine, that sort of thing. You can also do mass software upgrades over the network - upgrade everyone to Windows 98 or Office 97 or whatever.
If you've got Linux for a server and Windows 95 for clients, gates is basically correct. But if you've got Linux for clients, then what he says is total FUD. i'm no linux expert, but (correct me if I'm wrong) all configuration is based on text files, which are easy to manipulate across the network. You can telnet into a Linux box and make all the changes you need without leaving your chair. You can write scripts to make mass changes on all clients across the network. In fact, anything you can do while sitting at a Linux system, you can do remotely.
The only thing that may be lacking in Linux(again, correct me if I'm wrong) is the ability to do a network broadcast to update the software on multiple machines simultaneously. I don't know if SMS can do this, but there are packages for Windows NT that can do this.
Does Bill Gates really believe this? I know many attribute statements like this to the FUD machine, but remember that Bill has a family now, so he's got less time to devote to ruling the world. He is surrounded by executives whose jobs and stock options depend on Mr. Gates' good will. They've got every reason in the world to feed him lies to keep him happy. It's entirely possible that Bill's arguments aren't based entirely on maliciousness; they may be based on stupidity and ignorance. I think stockholders would forgive their CEO for spreading FUD and lying (it's part of the job description), but there is no way in the world that I would ever invest in a company led by a man so out of touch with reality as to believe that a product which had better market penetration and a higher growth rate was a hobbyist system that posed no threat.
I hope someone is archiving all these quotes by Bill and company so that we can laugh about them in five years when Linux rules the OS world and Microsoft is one of many application developers for the Linux platform.
Regardless of what you think, people will call it what they want. That is the nature of language. Stallman was (apparently) trying to control people, which is rude at best.
And do you call it/g'nu/ or/nu/? And/lin-uks/ or/lIn-uks/?
I think RMS's and GNU's contributions are well-known in the hacker community. If Mr. Stallman were as easy-going as Mr. Torvalds, people would readily acknowledge him. Most people respond well to facts. But saying "You MUST acknowledge me! You MUST use my words!" encourages people to marginalize you. Mr. Stallman's own actions will cause the world at large to ignore his contributions.
Yeah, I read the post, and the response from Mr. Mettler. I even read his web site. We'll see if ZDNN posts my response, in which I completely debunked him, and in two paragraphs, no less! Sumary:
To make your own security holes, you need physical access (which is root access), or the ability to recompile the kernel (which is root access). So, if you've got root access, you can get root access!
I know this is vastly oversimplified, but it's essentially true.
The GPL places NO limitations on further distribution. Nothing in there says I can't distribute the code without crediting the author. In fact, if there were credits, I could change them all to my name and redistribute the software.
However, while the GPL would let me get away with it (and rightly so - free is free; there are no partial freedoms), the hacker community wouldn't. Anyone who became aware of my actions would shun me. I would gain no recognition from them - and who else cares about what was in the source code?
Why does this (and the comment that follows) have a score of two? Did some moderator do this? Did Cmdrtaco increase the score of this response to test some feature? Does CmdrTaco automatically have a score of two?
Regardless, somebody is responsible for annoying me, and that person shall PAY!
Wow! This article about something Estra Special for the moderators has been moderated up to the top of the list!!! Clearly, the moderators thought this would be of interest to us all!!! Not a selfish bone in their bodies, those moderators!!!
Hey, Bone Crusher. I'm the guy who had to take over your project after you left. You talk about a "final product". That's a mythical beast; there will always be a 1.01, a 1.2, a 2.0 and so on - unless you're writing code for a space probe that will never again be touched by human hand (and even then, they're likely to tinker via radio).
Without the documentation that you so kindly glossed over, I had to make guesses about what your code was supposed to do. Don't kid yourself - there were bugs in your code. I could tell what your code was actually doing, but sometimes it was hard to tell what it was supposed to do. But I did the best I could. And because you didn't document what you had done in your 45,000 lines of code, I had to go over every single line, trying to find where you had implemented that function they wanted changed RIGHT NOW. Don't get me wrong - it was fun to have half the organization breathing down my neck, wanting to know why I couldn't just read the specs, find the function, and change it. And your reasons for choosing the original architecture were doubtless sound, but a month or so after you left, the Big Boss came back from a seminar and said we should have done it as a intranet-based centralized client-server structured object-oriented module. And I didn't have the time to analyze the entire application and tell him why he was wrong, and you hadn't left any record of WHY your architecture was better, so I had to capitulate.
This probably pleases you. You probably feel like Mel, the real programmer, whose code was fast, functional, and incomprehensible. You think if I was only as good as you are, I wouldn't have these problems - I'd be writing my own 1.0s instead of maintaining your code. You may be right, and I hope it gives you warm fuzzies. I hope you enjoy feeling like an artist. But I hope you realize that there is nothing left of your art. By the time we hit version 6.24.06a, not a single line of your code was left. It was like you had painted this beautiful vision of the Mandelbrot set on the wall of the Louvre, only they changed their mind and asked me for a surrealist landscape, so I sandblasted it a bit at a time and transformed your vision into mine.
I'll be leaving the project pretty soon now - going to work for Microsoft. Bill says it's important - something about how they're going to be the next Red Hat. Anyway, I know that whoever takes my place won't be as good as me, and won't have my experience on this project, but at least they will be able to understand my thought-processes while developing the program. I bit the bullet, sucked it up, and followed the documentation procedures.
I don't really disagree with your points on freedom or one-size-fits-all templates. But don't skimp on documentation. Those who have to maintain your code thank you.
Looking at the picture on the main page (a someone's claw-like hand pressing the keypad against their palm) makes my wrist ache. Using this thing for an extended period of time can't be good for you - although I suppose you might be able to switch it between hands from time to time. Has anyone seen any studies on the ergonomic benefits/costs of these devices?
There was a story on NPR about this a few months back; the idea was that they would use chip fabrication technologies, but instead of making transistors and traces, they would make microscopic compartments and tubes to connect them, so you could have the equivalent of thousands of flasks on a chip to do complicated chemical analysis.
On a different note, there are currently some really interesting cancer treatments being researched which use an individual's cancer cells to create antibodies which attack the cancer cells.
So imagine this - you go see the doctor and he suspects cancer. He pulls out his tricorder, attaches a sterile hollow needle and pokes it into the suspected tumor. It sucks a few cells up into the chemchip. It analyzes them, determines they are malignant, creates antibodies for the cancer cells, and injects them through the needle. All in a few seconds. A red light comes on the tricorder, and the doctor tells you "Yes, that lump was cancerous, but it has been inoculated. You will notice some soreness and swelling in the area for a few days as the tumor subsides."
Too Little, Too Late. (also, viva free speech!)
on
Novell Opens Source
·
· Score: 1
IBM lost its dominance in the PC market in the early 80s but is still an $80 billion/yr company. They make more money than most other PC manufacturers combined. For comparison - Dell: $7 billion/yr. Gateway: $5 billion/yr.
If the vendor lets you see the source but doesn't let you do anything with it but try to grok it, they're not hiding it, they're not opening it, but they are revealing it. Perhaps a good thing to call it would be "revealed source"
Slashdot Mirror
be a free domain name system
There will never be a free press either. Who would pay for the ink, the paper, the printing presses themselves?
Wait a minute...you mean free like "free beer" don't you? Oops, my mistake!
Anyone who's taken high-school physics can infer this if they're reasonably bright.
Yup. So can physics, chemistry, or engineering majors. I think that one of the great failures in limiting nuclear proliferation has been permitting foreign nationals to attend US colleges and uiniversities. It makes all the sense in the world to me for the US to open its borders and permit people of all nations to renounce their native citizenship, live in the US, become US citiznes, and learn all they want to. It strikes me as the height of insanity to train foreign nationals in fields which would permit their national governments to conduct a nuclear war against us.
demanding that you turn YOUR project into a GPL-polluted project.
The project would not be "polluted" if they had not first chosen to include GPL code. In order to include GPL code, you MUST agree to the licensing terms. If they did not understand the licensing terms before they began including the code, that makes them stupid. The terms are very clear and available for all to see.
I found it almost exactly one year ago. It's how I learned about Linux in the first place.
me too
Ummm...Java didn't fail. Nor is it a fad "Hype" is the product of a gullible media and a techno-ignorant marketer. The idea that java failed is ludicrous. It was considered viable enough that Microsoft polluted it. Bill Gates reportedly screamed an experinced senior executive out of a meeting because the executive dared sugest that MS prepare for the world of Java. The number of java developers is growing. Many web sites are difficult to deal with if you don't have a Java-enabled browser. But because Java-powered office suites did not immediately appear and replace Windows, Java is a failure? If, in the year to come, Linux doesn't displace Windows on the desktop, the mainstream media will doubtless begin considering Linux a failure, too.
The CLI doesn't make things easier. For your wife, by herself, to do what you did, she would have to learn quite a bit. A decent CLI can automate things, which is GREAT, but to say that is easy is tantamount to saying that programming is easy.
It is definitely easier, though, to automate with a CLI than with a GUI. Under a GUI, you have to worry about more than text; you have to worry about when to click and where to click. A window might take longer to come up than it did when you originally tried to automate the task. A window can be resized, or moved, which makes it nearly impossible to determine where the pointer should point.
Anyway, given that little disagreement over language, I definitely agree that it is easier to automate tasks using a CLI than a GUI.
Yup. Linux CANNOT go away, and if we want to use it, we will always be able to. If Microsoft totally scares away ALL comercial interest in Linux among corporate users, OEMs, and application vendors, and if all the big names in liberated software died today, if no one in the press ever noticed it again, Linux would still be here and people would still use it and improve it. So we might be worried that Microsoft will keep "the Linux experience" (whatever that means) out of the hands of the masses, but we shouldn't worry too much, because no one can take Linux away from us.
That's one possible interpretation of the situation. But consider this - Did the employer "distribute" the software to the employees? Or did the employer merely install the software on all of his/her computers, and then permit the employees use the computers? It's a subtle distinction, I know, but that's the kind of thing a legal decision would hinge on.
So I guess here is the question I would ask: If I own a computer, and I install GPL software on it, and I permit someone else to use that computer, does that constitute distribution to the other person under the GPL as it is currently written?
I know that if I modify the source code and fail to share those modifications, I violate the spirit of the GPL, but I'm not sure I violate the letter of the GPL.
I believe you are correct; you only have to provide source code if you redistribute your changes. Making changes does not force you to share those changes. Otherwise, you'd be in violation of the license the instant you inserted a single space into the source code and recompiled it on an non-networked computer.
However, it is unclear to me whether or not internal distribution is considered distribution. In other words, if a corporation, which legally is a single individual, puts a modified version of GNU/Linux on all their computers, are they then required to let their employees have the source code and redistribute it? Would installing GNU/Linux on a system that another individual will use be considered distributing it? I don't think so, but the license isn't clear.
MS is tryin to move NT into the embedded systems market. That has me scared spitless, because in that market, an OS failure CAN kill people.
Wouldn't it be funny if Solaris refunded all of Microsoft's money and then revoked the licenses on all Sun's software running on the Hotmail servers? Give them something like an hour to comply, and then prosecute them for civil and criminal copyright violations if Hotmail is still up when the time is up.
Systems management features refers to the ability to remotely manage other machines - he's probably referring to their SMS (Systems management Server) software. The idea is that an IT guy can sit at a server and completely manage all client systems - take inventory of their hardware and software, install new software, see if someone has opened the case, reboot the machine, that sort of thing. You can also do mass software upgrades over the network - upgrade everyone to Windows 98 or Office 97 or whatever.
If you've got Linux for a server and Windows 95 for clients, gates is basically correct. But if you've got Linux for clients, then what he says is total FUD. i'm no linux expert, but (correct me if I'm wrong) all configuration is based on text files, which are easy to manipulate across the network. You can telnet into a Linux box and make all the changes you need without leaving your chair. You can write scripts to make mass changes on all clients across the network. In fact, anything you can do while sitting at a Linux system, you can do remotely.
The only thing that may be lacking in Linux(again, correct me if I'm wrong) is the ability to do a network broadcast to update the software on multiple machines simultaneously. I don't know if SMS can do this, but there are packages for Windows NT that can do this.
Does Bill Gates really believe this? I know many attribute statements like this to the FUD machine, but remember that Bill has a family now, so he's got less time to devote to ruling the world. He is surrounded by executives whose jobs and stock options depend on Mr. Gates' good will. They've got every reason in the world to feed him lies to keep him happy. It's entirely possible that Bill's arguments aren't based entirely on maliciousness; they may be based on stupidity and ignorance. I think stockholders would forgive their CEO for spreading FUD and lying (it's part of the job description), but there is no way in the world that I would ever invest in a company led by a man so out of touch with reality as to believe that a product which had better market penetration and a higher growth rate was a hobbyist system that posed no threat.
I hope someone is archiving all these quotes by Bill and company so that we can laugh about them in five years when Linux rules the OS world and Microsoft is one of many application developers for the Linux platform.
Regardless of what you think, people will call it what they want. That is the nature of language. Stallman was (apparently) trying to control people, which is rude at best.
/g'nu/ or /nu/? And /lin-uks/ or /lIn-uks/?
And do you call it
I think RMS's and GNU's contributions are well-known in the hacker community. If Mr. Stallman were as easy-going as Mr. Torvalds, people would readily acknowledge him. Most people respond well to facts. But saying "You MUST acknowledge me! You MUST use my words!" encourages people to marginalize you. Mr. Stallman's own actions will cause the world at large to ignore his contributions.
Yeah, I read the post, and the response from Mr. Mettler. I even read his web site. We'll see if ZDNN posts my response, in which I completely debunked him, and in two paragraphs, no less! Sumary:
To make your own security holes, you need physical access (which is root access), or the ability to recompile the kernel (which is root access). So, if you've got root access, you can get root access!
I know this is vastly oversimplified, but it's essentially true.
The GPL places NO limitations on further distribution. Nothing in there says I can't distribute the code without crediting the author. In fact, if there were credits, I could change them all to my name and redistribute the software.
However, while the GPL would let me get away with it (and rightly so - free is free; there are no partial freedoms), the hacker community wouldn't. Anyone who became aware of my actions would shun me. I would gain no recognition from them - and who else cares about what was in the source code?
Why does this (and the comment that follows) have a score of two? Did some moderator do this? Did Cmdrtaco increase the score of this response to test some feature? Does CmdrTaco automatically have a score of two?
Regardless, somebody is responsible for annoying me, and that person shall PAY!
Wow! This article about something Estra Special for the moderators has been moderated up to the top of the list!!! Clearly, the moderators thought this would be of interest to us all!!! Not a selfish bone in their bodies, those moderators!!!
Diplomats don't call things stupid or horrible or say that they hate them. Linus does that throughout the article. Not that he's wrong :)
My diplomatic replacment for "stupid" etc. is "non-optimal". Unfortunately, my co-workers seem to have caught on. Bunch of cow-orkers...
Hey, Bone Crusher. I'm the guy who had to take over your project after you left. You talk about a "final product". That's a mythical beast; there will always be a 1.01, a 1.2, a 2.0 and so on - unless you're writing code for a space probe that will never again be touched by human hand (and even then, they're likely to tinker via radio).
Without the documentation that you so kindly glossed over, I had to make guesses about what your code was supposed to do. Don't kid yourself - there were bugs in your code. I could tell what your code was actually doing, but sometimes it was hard to tell what it was supposed to do. But I did the best I could. And because you didn't document what you had done in your 45,000 lines of code, I had to go over every single line, trying to find where you had implemented that function they wanted changed RIGHT NOW. Don't get me wrong - it was fun to have half the organization breathing down my neck, wanting to know why I couldn't just read the specs, find the function, and change it. And your reasons for choosing the original architecture were doubtless sound, but a month or so after you left, the Big Boss came back from a seminar and said we should have done it as a intranet-based centralized client-server structured object-oriented module. And I didn't have the time to analyze the entire application and tell him why he was wrong, and you hadn't left any record of WHY your architecture was better, so I had to capitulate.
This probably pleases you. You probably feel like Mel, the real programmer, whose code was fast, functional, and incomprehensible. You think if I was only as good as you are, I wouldn't have these problems - I'd be writing my own 1.0s instead of maintaining your code. You may be right, and I hope it gives you warm fuzzies. I hope you enjoy feeling like an artist. But I hope you realize that there is nothing left of your art. By the time we hit version 6.24.06a, not a single line of your code was left. It was like you had painted this beautiful vision of the Mandelbrot set on the wall of the Louvre, only they changed their mind and asked me for a surrealist landscape, so I sandblasted it a bit at a time and transformed your vision into mine.
I'll be leaving the project pretty soon now - going to work for Microsoft. Bill says it's important - something about how they're going to be the next Red Hat. Anyway, I know that whoever takes my place won't be as good as me, and won't have my experience on this project, but at least they will be able to understand my thought-processes while developing the program. I bit the bullet, sucked it up, and followed the documentation procedures.
I don't really disagree with your points on freedom or one-size-fits-all templates. But don't skimp on documentation. Those who have to maintain your code thank you.
Looking at the picture on the main page (a someone's claw-like hand pressing the keypad against their palm) makes my wrist ache. Using this thing for an extended period of time can't be good for you - although I suppose you might be able to switch it between hands from time to time. Has anyone seen any studies on the ergonomic benefits/costs of these devices?
"Abortions for some, small American for others!"
There was a story on NPR about this a few months back; the idea was that they would use chip fabrication technologies, but instead of making transistors and traces, they would make microscopic compartments and tubes to connect them, so you could have the equivalent of thousands of flasks on a chip to do complicated chemical analysis.
On a different note, there are currently some really interesting cancer treatments being researched which use an individual's cancer cells to create antibodies which attack the cancer cells.
So imagine this - you go see the doctor and he suspects cancer. He pulls out his tricorder, attaches a sterile hollow needle and pokes it into the suspected tumor. It sucks a few cells up into the chemchip. It analyzes them, determines they are malignant, creates antibodies for the cancer cells, and injects them through the needle. All in a few seconds. A red light comes on the tricorder, and the doctor tells you "Yes, that lump was cancerous, but it has been inoculated. You will notice some soreness and swelling in the area for a few days as the tumor subsides."
IBM lost its dominance in the PC market in the early 80s but is still an $80 billion/yr company. They make more money than most other PC manufacturers combined. For comparison - Dell: $7 billion/yr. Gateway: $5 billion/yr.
If the vendor lets you see the source but doesn't let you do anything with it but try to grok it, they're not hiding it, they're not opening it, but they are revealing it. Perhaps a good thing to call it would be "revealed source"