Third, a word on the 3.0. A few months ago we change our release process as to accomodate more and more community's input and patches; and so we switched to a fully incremental, quarterly release schedule. Which in turns, makes the famous 3.0 rather unpredictable as to what its feature set and characteristics could be. This is why it is useless to look for a weird prototype of it quietly sitting in a virtual Area-51. The only objective of the 3.0 will be to make it much more modular and running on tops of frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla's XUL.
One word: insanity (for any of those 3 perspectives).
Did they just wear a straight-jacket, or forgot some pills?
RHEL5 is still a few months away, and I believe that when he says...
"We don't feel that XenSource is stable enough to address banking, telco, or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it."
...he means precisely to create the mindset that when RHEL5 comes out RedHat will have made Xen ready for enterprise use.
I think they're trying to pour some "FUD" over current Xen distributions like, particularly, Novell's in order to make people wait for RH's version which will be "ready":)
Apple tried to do this with their new "MacIntels". Apparently they gave up making a real hard effort, at least for the time being. Maybe the tech isn't yet strong enough for them to really be able to control of what OS their costumers are allowed to run.
This is simply so wrong at so many levels that I find it interesting that Linus is ok with it. Let's face it: he doesn't care at all for your rights. I guess he hasn't read that poem, you know.... "first they came after the communists"?
First they took our freedom in Tivos, and I did not speak out--
because I would not buy a Tivo;
Then they took our freedom in XBox, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a gamer;
Then they came for the MacIntels, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Apple Fanboy;
Then they came for the Appliances, and I did not speak out--
because they either work better or I use "Open Source";
Then they came for the PCs--
and there was no one left to speak out for us "Linux" users.
No, that's not impossible. What's becomes impossible is what Tivo is doing: Tivo pretends it respects user's rights by fully complying with the GNU GPL, but effectively denies your rights by forbiding you to run your changes in the Tivo player through technological measures.
What the text tries to say is that you can't do that.
IT DOESN'T FORBID TIVO FROM USING GNU/Linux.
It mandates that TIVO MUST RESPECT USER's RIGHTS both in the letter and spirit of the license, not try to use "clever" workarounds.
Maybe if you're talking about software for such a critical thing as keeping an airplane safe, or controlling nuclear reactors and such. But what he says is lunacy for software in general.
It's just about the same as demanding guarantees that you will be satisfied by a book. It's idiotic.
No. They talk about the information. e.g. that I connected to http://politics.slashdot.org/ not the fact that I actually wrote this.
So you are a politically interested terrorist^Wcitizen, hmss? Slashdot... give us the user id corresponding to IP address w.x.y.z on 12:48 PM EST, CST or WST. Oh, here's the court order. How did we find the IP? Oh... we didn't need to tap anyone for that, ya... see... it's lawfull to snoop on all citizens, ya see?...
Before that, the Debian Project leader said someone apparently read the license, but not only was it definitly not analysed in public, but also apparently he did not think it proper to explain anything.
Debian's non-free is not for copyright violation, but for Freedom violation.
Why do people continually refuse to read the license? Ubuntu can't distribute under multiverse at all!
The Fine license says:
Sun also grants you a (...) limited license to reproduce and distribute the
Software, (...) provided that you do not combine, configure or distribute
the Software to run in conjunction with any additional software
that implements the same or similar functionality or APIs as the
Software;
So as long as there's libgcj in Ubuntu... Ubuntu can't distribute it.
Real "open sourcing" maybe, but they claim it's already "open source", but controlled "open source". Read The Brave New License. I wrote excerpts from it.
Did you bother to read the terms? Those are from the new license.
Sun's capitalizing on the confusion created by the "open source" term, which was created to put your focus away from your freedom rights.
Sun also grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free limited license to reproduce and distribute the Software, directly or indirectly through your licensees, distributors, resellers, or OEMs, electronically or in physical form or pre-installed with your Operating System on a general purpose desktop computer or server, provided that:
(...)
b) the Software is distributed with your Operating System, and such distribution is solely for the purposes of running Programs under the control of your Operating System and designing, developing and testing Programs to be run under the control of your Operating System;
So no Java for other software developemtn, Ubuntu can only distribute for software made that only works on Ubuntu.
c) you do not combine, configure or distribute the Software to run in conjunction with any additional software that implements the same or similar functionality or APIs as the Software;
So Ubuntu can't package it in such a way that gcj and java reside on the same system (forget alternatives)
you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees)
So Mark Shuttleworth must have been quoted before reading. Sorry Mark, Sun tried to fool you and the Free Software community!
At this time, I stopped reading the license as it's irrelevant. gcj is turning proprietary java irrelevant by the day.
No, freedom of the press is useful to most people because it provides them with information about the world that does not have to be government-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other freedoms
No, software freedom is useful to most people because it provides them with abilities about software that does not have to be software-company-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other software related freedoms.
See?
who in spite of the liscensing, still would like to use the proprietary software. Is choice not what freedom is about? I would be staunchly opposed to any mechanism that forces people to use EITHER software.
Was choice (if they even had it) of slaver a good thing for the slaves? Choice is an inferior freedom than the 4 main freedoms. The 4 main freedoms ensure that there is choice. It doesn't make sense to choose a resctritive license that binds you to be a bad neighbour. What makes sense is choosing amongh technical features of several Free Software that does the same thing (GNOME vs KDE, etc...).
Proprietary software, specially those 99% that deal with proprietary documents or proprietary protocols, effectively force you to use that software, and to impose it on your neighbours in order to trade information with them. That is bad. Evil in the most subversive form since it actually makes you an agent of their power over users who are then unable to make changes to the software in order to improve their solutions.
you can't have a monopoly on a specific product, i.e. "GeForce 6800," for it to be a monopoly, you have to have a monopoly on a market, i.e. "graphics cards."
When you talk of physical objects, you're right. When you talk about Software, and copyright, that's another thing entirely. In copyright, to every copyright holder is given a monopoly on the distribution of his work. Yes. Copyright is an artificial and temporary monopoly power the government grants on a work.
So YES you have a monopoly for every proprietary software. Some are more effective than anothers (those that have captured mindshare if not market-share), binding people with proprietary document formats, proprietary protocols, licencsing deals that make it prohibitive to use software from different sources that compete with the main licensor, etc.. etc...
Who's freedom are you placing at the top? The users?
I'm starting to think you're deliberatly trying to confuse this discussion. All software writers are users, so User means users. The GNU GPL in particular aims to defend the 4 freedoms for all users.
If the users get all their software "free" (as in beer AND speach), the the market for software development will shrink as their is less money moving into development.
Again, why are you trying to deliberatly confuse Freedom with zero price? I'm advocating Free Software, not software that's available for free. Red Hat recently had a job opportunity for someone to be _paid_ to code in Evolution, a Free Software replacement for Microsoft Outlook.
A shrinking market LIMITS users' selection of options which definately reduces their Freedom.
Another reason for all software providing the 4 freedoms. Any proprietary software automatically shrinks the market to one entity.
Freedom for the original coders limits the freedom of derivative coders.
Completely bogus statement.
Freedom for the derivative coders limits the freedom of the original coders.
Completely bogus statement.
I'm not saying that Free (as in beer OR speach) is bad, I am saying that any SINGLE solution (non-free or free) is bad. The market will demand some of each and life will continue.
Who's talking about a _single_ solution? I'm talking about Free Software. You have many desktop environments to choose from (GNOME and KDE being the most popular right now), many MTA servers (email), office suites, MUA (email clients) etc... etc...
Please stop and think.
You really need to be more clear about whay YOU mean by Free.
There's one person in this discussion who's being deliberately pretending to "support Free Software but..." and that's who is in need of a clear dosage of clarity for he lacks it substatially.
first of all, the right to modify software is utterly useless to most people, because they don't have the skills.
Freedom of press is also utterly useless to most people because they're not journalists. Do you wish to remove Freedom of press?
as another poster already mentioned, if you mandate that software be free, you are sacrificing the freedom of one group of people "developers" for the freedom of another "users."
Well, As you should be able to understand since you write english, I'm not mandating but advocating. But I'll tell you one case where it should be mandated: government. Government should choose to use only Free Software because Government has specific obligations to the citizens that are utterly incompatible with proprietary software.
Like transparency. Like not benefitting illegaly one company in detriment of others, etc... etc...
use OS, (and before you jump at me for using the wrong term, I'd like to point out that they're exactly the same kind of software - free software is open source, and OSS is by definition free
Most of the time, Free Software and Open Souce means the same thing, but only technically. The focus of Free Software is freedom for users. The focus of Open Source is a better software development model.
Which do you think are more interesting to people? You said it yourself, most people don't even know what souce code is...
Eric Raymond actively advocates some proprietary software on fedora-devel-list. It is SICK!
don't tell a professional publisher to use GIMP instead of photoshop when he's told you a thousand times that having the source code does nothing for him, and he needs some functionality that photoshop has and GIMP doesn't.
That professional publisher is an extreme minority that doesn't need tending. They could very well band together, pay one hundredth of what they pay for Photoshop and in that way collect enough money to put GIMP right where they would need it to be useful for them.
But that is an extreme minority. GIMP is actually perfectly fine for 99.9% of the people, who (surprise) are not professional publishers.
right now I'm advocating linux because I believe even to someone who can't program at all, it's a great option for an OS, and also because I do want more people using it, so that we can hopefully break the monopoly, and be closer to that ideal free market I mentioned.
Great. So you don't know what Linux is, you're confusing it with a variant of GNU/Linux, and you're confusing Operating System with Open Source, and you think WinZip doesn't have a monopoly over the source code of WinZip.
I don't think, nor do I want all software to become free software.
Why do you think people don't deserve freedom? Advocate that all software should be Free Software: that way not only you don't force anyone, but you may help achieving the nice end result that all software eventually becomes Free Software.
Remember, saying you don't want all software to be Free Software is like saying you don't want all humans to have freedom (I'm excluding criminals doing time for obvious reasons).
Contrary to (supposed) popular believe, software, in and of itself, has no desire to be 'free.'
Software has no desire. Software is a set of specific rules that results in a specific and predictable effect. The code of such software, as was written, is covered by copyright, and software has copyright licenses.
Free Software, contrary to what you seem to believe, is about providing users with certain freedoms:
0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
1. the freedom to study the program and modify it according to your needs
2. the freedom to distribute copies
3. the freedom to publish modified versions
So who has desire for theses Freedoms? Software? Don't be laughable. It's PEOPLE who desire it!
Any software license that removes theses freedoms from users is disrespecting them. It's a license written with control in mind. Control of the user and what he may or may not be able to do.
I for one, only use Free Software (for quite a long time, now), but in the beggining I thought only the quality of "open source" mattered. Then I learned better...
Anyway you don't see any such discussion any more. To my knowledge, there are no longer any unix-like systems that have such a limit. At least I haven't encountered one for the last 8 or 10 years. Not even OS X has a login limit. (Anyone know of a system that does?)
The problem I have here is with your rhetoric: You can't call 80% of the population an "extreme minority" on the theory that they may soon be only 10%. They're still a majority. Honestly, I don't see that sort of switch happening overnight, though I suspect it will happen slowly over the next five to ten years. But then, I tend to be a pessimist.
Somehow I feel we're not communicating. I said two things: ONE) the extreme minority are those who have some special needs not satisfied yet; TWO) the "share" in the desktop space of Microsoft can turn upside down suddenly. 5 to 10, can fit on "suddenly". Just take a look at what a slow pace the world evolves at...
1-5) Which "extreme minority" was that? The one that uses Windows? The one that wants software that works without having to figure out how to compile it? Or was it the one that simply chooses to use whatever is most convenient, without worrying about ideology?
In parts:
a) the extreme minority that needs a feature set not available on a certain app that impedes their switch
b) "Windows user" runs the risk of going from 80% to 10% overnight (those 80% are of less that 10% of the world, and the remaining 90% are waking up to Free Software as they come out of "wars" and need economic growth whilst respecting international deals.
c) I haven't had to figure out how to compile anything for a long time. What I had wasn't even packaged in that platform, and what do you do if a program isn't packaged for Windows? Build it from source? Welcome to hell, if you even have source. Compiling on GNU/Linux is way easier and needs not extra licensing agreements.
d) given the ammount of Free Software available, I haven't really had to think about moral reasons for my choices. So much to choose from in the Free Software world... I don't need the extra hassle of dealing with restrictive licensing agreements.
As to the "death incarnate" stuff, that's because we live in a Free World, and you can contact your politicians and it may make a hell of a difference (think Software Patent Directive of the EU, which was shutdown due to a large amount of people saying _NO_).
At the company I work in, we've been buying 1 CD set since 3.4, and two CD sets since 3.8. I hope to be able to increase the ratio in the future, now that I read this sad news.
Look, I'm not out to bash the Gimp, but do you have any real evidence that the majority is actually using the Gimp?
Who said the majority is using The GIMP? I said that the majority doesn't need anything The GIMP doesn't provide. There a few exceptions, but those come from a very rich area which could help fund the project in order to solve that problem, or put pressure on the owners of patents who prejudice The GIMP.
1) welcome to the extreme minority I mentioned. We don't care about your complaints, you're the ones who are more empowered to help improve and choose not to
2) Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw, indeed. Or even Scribus. But again, welcome to the extreme minority that doesn't count. Years ago Pagemaker was as "featureful" as Draw and was considered more than enough.
3) Dia is good for many other things. It has a series of objects, and even exports to c++ and Java (UML models) as well as SQL. It has many other interesting features.
4) PostgreSQL and MySQL *also* run on Windows.
5) Many do, and enterprises buy software for making PDFs because Microsoft Office won't do that. With OpenOffice.org it's as simple as a button on the toolbar.
6) Maybe you'd rather a system where you can't even write your politician of choice without fearing death incarnate?
Slashdot Mirror
One word: insanity (for any of those 3 perspectives).
Did they just wear a straight-jacket, or forgot some pills?
I think they're trying to pour some "FUD" over current Xen distributions like, particularly, Novell's in order to make people wait for RH's version which will be "ready"
This is simply so wrong at so many levels that I find it interesting that Linus is ok with it. Let's face it: he doesn't care at all for your rights. I guess he hasn't read that poem, you know.... "first they came after the communists"?
No, that's not impossible. What's becomes impossible is what Tivo is doing:
Tivo pretends it respects user's rights by fully complying with the GNU GPL, but effectively denies your rights by forbiding you to run your changes in the Tivo player through technological measures.
What the text tries to say is that you can't do that.
IT DOESN'T FORBID TIVO FROM USING GNU/Linux.
It mandates that TIVO MUST RESPECT USER's RIGHTS both in the letter and spirit of the license, not try to use "clever" workarounds.
Of course the book author should never be liable. To build houses you can't buy books. You must follow due academic education _and_ pass.
Maybe if you're talking about software for such a critical thing as keeping an airplane safe, or controlling nuclear reactors and such. But what he says is lunacy for software in general.
It's just about the same as demanding guarantees that you will be satisfied by a book. It's idiotic.
Before that, the Debian Project leader said someone apparently read the license, but not only was it definitly not analysed in public, but also apparently he did not think it proper to explain anything.
Debian's non-free is not for copyright violation, but for Freedom violation.
The Fine license says: So as long as there's libgcj in Ubuntu... Ubuntu can't distribute it.
Are people just daft in english skills?
Real "open sourcing" maybe, but they claim it's already "open source", but controlled "open source". Read The Brave New License. I wrote excerpts from it.
Did you bother to read the terms? Those are from the new license. Sun's capitalizing on the confusion created by the "open source" term, which was created to put your focus away from your freedom rights.
So Ubuntu can't package it in such a way that gcj and java reside on the same system (forget alternatives)
So Mark Shuttleworth must have been quoted before reading. Sorry Mark, Sun tried to fool you and the Free Software community!
At this time, I stopped reading the license as it's irrelevant. gcj is turning proprietary java irrelevant by the day.
See?
Was choice (if they even had it) of slaver a good thing for the slaves? Choice is an inferior freedom than the 4 main freedoms. The 4 main freedoms ensure that there is choice. It doesn't make sense to choose a resctritive license that binds you to be a bad neighbour. What makes sense is choosing amongh technical features of several Free Software that does the same thing (GNOME vs KDE, etc...).
Proprietary software, specially those 99% that deal with proprietary documents or proprietary protocols, effectively force you to use that software, and to impose it on your neighbours in order to trade information with them. That is bad. Evil in the most subversive form since it actually makes you an agent of their power over users who are then unable to make changes to the software in order to improve their solutions.
When you talk of physical objects, you're right. When you talk about Software, and copyright, that's another thing entirely. In copyright, to every copyright holder is given a monopoly on the distribution of his work. Yes. Copyright is an artificial and temporary monopoly power the government grants on a work.
So YES you have a monopoly for every proprietary software. Some are more effective than anothers (those that have captured mindshare if not market-share), binding people with proprietary document formats, proprietary protocols, licencsing deals that make it prohibitive to use software from different sources that compete with the main licensor, etc.. etc...
I'm starting to think you're deliberatly trying to confuse this discussion. All software writers are users, so User means users. The GNU GPL in particular aims to defend the 4 freedoms for all users.
Again, why are you trying to deliberatly confuse Freedom with zero price? I'm advocating Free Software, not software that's available for free. Red Hat recently had a job opportunity for someone to be _paid_ to code in Evolution, a Free Software replacement for Microsoft Outlook.
Another reason for all software providing the 4 freedoms. Any proprietary software automatically shrinks the market to one entity.
Completely bogus statement.
Completely bogus statement.
Who's talking about a _single_ solution? I'm talking about Free Software. You have many desktop environments to choose from (GNOME and KDE being the most popular right now), many MTA servers (email), office suites, MUA (email clients) etc... etc...
Please stop and think.
There's one person in this discussion who's being deliberately pretending to "support Free Software but..." and that's who is in need of a clear dosage of clarity for he lacks it substatially.
Well, As you should be able to understand since you write english, I'm not mandating but advocating. But I'll tell you one case where it should be mandated: government. Government should choose to use only Free Software because Government has specific obligations to the citizens that are utterly incompatible with proprietary software.
Like transparency. Like not benefitting illegaly one company in detriment of others, etc... etc...
Most of the time, Free Software and Open Souce means the same thing, but only technically. The focus of Free Software is freedom for users. The focus of Open Source is a better software development model.
Which do you think are more interesting to people? You said it yourself, most people don't even know what souce code is...
Eric Raymond actively advocates some proprietary software on fedora-devel-list. It is SICK!
That professional publisher is an extreme minority that doesn't need tending. They could very well band together, pay one hundredth of what they pay for Photoshop and in that way collect enough money to put GIMP right where they would need it to be useful for them.
But that is an extreme minority. GIMP is actually perfectly fine for 99.9% of the people, who (surprise) are not professional publishers.
Great. So you don't know what Linux is, you're confusing it with a variant of GNU/Linux, and you're confusing Operating System with Open Source, and you think WinZip doesn't have a monopoly over the source code of WinZip.
Why do you keep confusing free beer with free speech? It does seem borderline intentional.
I'm explicitly talking about freedom and not about price or being paid to develop Free Software.
You do seem to want to remove freedoms from users... at least on some software... do you have a special undisclosed interest?
Remember, saying you don't want all software to be Free Software is like saying you don't want all humans to have freedom (I'm excluding criminals doing time for obvious reasons).
Free Software, contrary to what you seem to believe, is about providing users with certain freedoms:
0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
1. the freedom to study the program and modify it according to your needs
2. the freedom to distribute copies
3. the freedom to publish modified versions
So who has desire for theses Freedoms? Software? Don't be laughable. It's PEOPLE who desire it!
Any software license that removes theses freedoms from users is disrespecting them. It's a license written with control in mind. Control of the user and what he may or may not be able to do.
I for one, only use Free Software (for quite a long time, now), but in the beggining I thought only the quality of "open source" mattered. Then I learned better...
a) the extreme minority that needs a feature set not available on a certain app that impedes their switch
b) "Windows user" runs the risk of going from 80% to 10% overnight (those 80% are of less that 10% of the world, and the remaining 90% are waking up to Free Software as they come out of "wars" and need economic growth whilst respecting international deals.
c) I haven't had to figure out how to compile anything for a long time. What I had wasn't even packaged in that platform, and what do you do if a program isn't packaged for Windows? Build it from source? Welcome to hell, if you even have source. Compiling on GNU/Linux is way easier and needs not extra licensing agreements.
d) given the ammount of Free Software available, I haven't really had to think about moral reasons for my choices. So much to choose from in the Free Software world... I don't need the extra hassle of dealing with restrictive licensing agreements.
As to the "death incarnate" stuff, that's because we live in a Free World, and you can contact your politicians and it may make a hell of a difference (think Software Patent Directive of the EU, which was shutdown due to a large amount of people saying _NO_).
At the company I work in, we've been buying 1 CD set since 3.4, and two CD sets since 3.8. I hope to be able to increase the ratio in the future, now that I read this sad news.
Like I said in another post, welcome to the extreme minority The Gimp isn't useful for.
1) welcome to the extreme minority I mentioned. We don't care about your complaints, you're the ones who are more empowered to help improve and choose not to
2) Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw, indeed. Or even Scribus. But again, welcome to the extreme minority that doesn't count. Years ago Pagemaker was as "featureful" as Draw and was considered more than enough.
3) Dia is good for many other things. It has a series of objects, and even exports to c++ and Java (UML models) as well as SQL. It has many other interesting features.
4) PostgreSQL and MySQL *also* run on Windows.
5) Many do, and enterprises buy software for making PDFs because Microsoft Office won't do that. With OpenOffice.org it's as simple as a button on the toolbar.
6) Maybe you'd rather a system where you can't even write your politician of choice without fearing death incarnate?