Well said. The whole point of the U.S. government is that it was set up to protect minority opinions, no matter how inane. It hasn't always worked, my ancestors got pushed clear across the United States in the 1800s by their neighbors because of their religious beliefs (so much for freedom of religion), but it has been a heck of a lot better than any other system the world has seen.
Even more importantly, most of the people that are now getting onto the Internet don't share the same values as Katz. Instead of being excited about the "sexual revolution" they are trying to find ways to keep their children from being immersed in pornography. And they certainly aren't interested in what gay teenagers are doing online (other than trying to make sure that they aren't trying to solicit sex from their sons).
Many of the caring, conscious, active, citizens that are using the Internet for information disagree with Katz and most everyting he stands for. For example, they see the fact that the U.S. government is a Republic (and not a pure democracy) as an important safeguard to their liberties. They believe that the government should take an active role in supporting morality. They support the First Ammendment, and would give their lives to defend it, but they are saddened that all too often the First Ammendment is used as a cover for pornographers instead of in support of actual political thought.
Katz has made the mistake of thinking that his definition of the perfect society is universal, but it isn't, not by a long shot.
What Katz doesn't understand is that for some people don't want to be a part of these "liberated" communities that he is so happy about. What he calls expression, I call pornography. And where he sees discussion, all too often all I see is pointless drivel aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator.
Now, I believe firmly that everyone has the right to think as they choose, but that does not mean that I want to participate in their idiocy with them. Katz sees filtering software as discriminatory, but I see filtering software as necessary for the survival of true open minded discussion. As we have seen on this very forum, without a way to filter out the background noise it is utterly impossible to have a rational conversation.
All mankind is created equal, but all opinions are not equal. Some people, no matter how passionately they hold their beliefs, are wrong.
The trick, of course, is to get users hooked on Free Software. Whether they do this by running Windows with some Free Software programs, or Linux with some proprietary software the point is that they are running Free Software.
The more exposure people have to Free Software the better. Once you start using one piece of Free Software you become more and more likely to experiment with other pieces of Free Software. After all, most Free Software packages rely on other Free Software packages for extended functionality. As users start realizing that there is an entire world of useful Free Software many of them will start to migrate in that direction.
The reason for this is quite simple. Free Software is a lot less expensive.
That's why porting Free Software to Windows has the potential to be a net win for Free Software advocates. It is advertising the entire GNU system to the people who would benefit most from a switch, end users.
I actually am generally opposed to solutions that make the computer less flexible for the end user. All too often the systems administrators simply don't have a good enough feel for what truly is useful. Fortunately, thin client does not preclude user installed software. The user simply has to know how to install the software in their home directory. Since nearly all software can be safely installed in this manner, you still end up with a solution that is the best of both worlds. End users can make sure that the computer does what they want and systems administrators end up with a system where no user can adversely affect another (no one has write access to system files).
That way if a user absolutely has to have a different Window Manager, or a beta version of some piece of software they can have it. If something goes wrong they can either have their configuration from yesterday's backup or a quick refresh of their important configuration files from/etc/skel.
Yes, some of your users will spend their time playing games, downloading MP3s, or reading Slashdot. But with all of the users on one machine these sort of abuses become fairly easy to spot. That way you can deal with those that misuse company time and resources without punishing those folks that need something other than "corporate approved" software for legitimate reasons.
The good news is that this sort of a setup is becoming more and more viable thanks mostly to Linux. X Windows has always been a useful model for rolling out applications, but until Linux came along the only way to develop X based apps was to purchase expensive UNIX based tools and then purchase even more expensive X Servers for your Windows desktops. Linux has allowed even hobbyist coders to develop X based applications, and an explosion of X Windows applications has been the direct result.
It's not. What the article was really replacing was MS Office. They could have just as easily simply installed the Windows version of StarOffice and the Gimp. They called it a Linux comparison because Linux still rakes in the hits.
The only real reason to run Linux desktops is if you are planning to leverage X Windows and use thin clients. Saving money on client licenses is good. Saving money by lowering administration costs is golden.
Since these boxes are going to be on a network anyhow, why not simply use underpowered machines as X terminals. Any machine with 16M of ram has enough oomph to be an X terminal, and one commodity server (with enough memory) can easily support hundreds of users.
As far as I am concerned the only real reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop is that it finally allows the systems administrators to move to a useable thin client arrangement. Imagine the joys of one box to administer and nothing but disposable machines on your users' dekstops. Linux has finally gotten to the point where it has enough applications to allow you to shift to this sort of a setup today. The fact that this sort of an arrangement will probably save you money on both software and hardware costs is nothing more than icing on the cake. The real potential for savings is in administration costs. All of a sudden you can get rid of all of your desktop support personnel and replace them with one Linux admin, and a monkey whose sole job would be to replace failed thin clients.
The Free Software Foundation isn't worried about the GPL brand. They simply aren't interested in making a GPL derivative an easy thing to do. The Free Software Foundation wants you to use the GPL (duh!) so they have copyrighted the GPL in order to prevent people from easily making clones. If you want your own GPL-like license then hire your own lawyers and hope that they are as well acquainted with software copyrights as the folks who have worked on the GPL (good luck).
This might seem like a contradiction, but the Free Software Foundation isn't the "Information Must Be Free As In Free Beer Foundation." They are specifically trying to make sure that software comes with source code (and documentation:). They are not trying to make it so that all information is free.
So while you are certainly right that the GPL copyright can't make license proliferation impossible, it certainly does make it more difficult (and more expensive), and that's a net win for the FSF.
LOL, I don't know if it has anything to do with being intelligent or not, but whatever it is we must be wired the same way. Every time I hear the word "right" I have to suppress the urge to put my hand over my heart (I learned which hand was my right one pledging allegiance to the flag:). Even worse, I spent quite a bit of my youth sailing and my friends would further complicate things by using the words "port" and "starboard." The only way I can remember which is left and right is to remember that port and left have the same amount of letters (and are the same thing if you are facing forward in the boat).
One of the major reasons that I got into computing is that I can't alphabetize for crap. Most people know intuitively whether W comes before or after T, but I actually have to think about it. However, after years of typing at a QWERTY keyboard QWERTY has become part of my subconscious. I can guarantee you that if they were to arrange the keys in alphabetical order I would quickly find myself singing the ABC song in order to find the 'M' key. That would be bad.
And don't give me any crap about how "learning another keyboard layout is easy." I have tried. Apparently my brain is miswired for this sort of thing.
VMS is the original anti-UNIX. It later added some general POSIXy behaviour simply because everyone was using UNIX. Windows NT also had the stated goal of becoming "a better UNIX than UNIX," but they certainly haven't spent much time actually trying to be Unix compatible. Their POSIX layer is a joke, and they don't even have a decent way to fork() for crying out loud.
Besides, while Microsoft almost certainly is looking into "borrowing" portions of BSD code (which will then magically become innovative), they aren't ever likely to actually release an OS that is Unix like. Part of the fun of the BSDs, Linux, and Commercial Unixen is that it usually isn't too much trouble to port your software from one of these platforms to a different one. This is precisely what Microsoft wants to avoid. Microsoft wants the equivalent of a one way valve when it comes to software portability. They want for it to be easy to port from Unix to Windows, but they want it to be impossible to port from Windows to Unix. Clearly shifting to a BSD based OS would work against them.
Fah, that's ridiculous. The truly dangerous license is the BSD style licenses. There is no charging money for BSD code, and there is nothing to stop your competitors from grabbing your BSDed source, adding some proprietary extensions and selling your software. That's why Microsoft likes the BSD license and hates the GPL. Even more telling is the fact that the very products that you mention (Mozilla and QT) are both available under the GPL. The trick is maintaining yourself as sole copyright owner so that you can also release the software under a commercial license.
If other developers are likely to contribute then the trick is to force these outside contributors to your source code base to sign over their copyrights to you before their code can be accepted. The funny thing is that it isn't the commercial software houses that started this trend. The FSF has been doing it for years so that they would be the clear copyright holder in case of copyright infringement (a very wise move). It used to be that you couldn't be a GNU maintainer unless you were willing to sign (with ink and pen in front of witnesses) your code over to the FSF.
So QT, OpenOffice, Mozilla, MySQL and other simply do exactly the same thing, and then they can release the source under the GPL and any other license that they wish. This allows them to sell commercial licenses, and prevents their competitors from using their source code against them.
A prime example is the MySQL/NuSphere debacle. When all is said and done MySQL is going to be able to sell proprietary licenses for use in commercial products, and NuSphere is going to be forced to release the source code on improvements they make. NuSphere's version will forever be GPL tainted, and will basically kill it for use in commercial products. If you are MySQL (the originators of the code) this is a good thing. If you happen to be NuSphere, however, it is a bad thing. This is why so many developers say that the BSD license is business friendly. What they really mean is that the BSD is friendly to companies that want to scoop up your hard work and use it to put you out of business.
Personally I am glad that Gnome and KDE are "borrowing" tried and true methods. If the people posting on this topic were left to "innovate" an interface we would almost certainly end up with a Windowing system that consisted entirely of round and triangle shaped Windows with pornographic themes. This interface would, of course, be voice enabled, but it would only accept commands in Klingon. Gnome hackers would be working on a patch that would also allow you to use High Elvish.
It would look cool, but it would be counter-intuitive as vi and as straightforward to learn as Emacs. Every time that Slashdot had a new story it would flash a painful succession of colors.
Personally I tend to use minimalist window managers. The eye candy only gets in my way. On the other hand, both KDE and Gnome should be commended for building a component platform that brings Unix desktop development to the next level. That's the truly interesting stuff. The fact that it looks like Windows is immaterial. The really important fact is that it is becoming possible to script together applications from ready built components (like Windows, except without the myriad downsides).
Think about this for a moment. Why exactly is it that Microsoft is getting into the console business? The answer to that is elementary. Up until now the PC gaming industry has been small potatoes compared to the console gaming industry. This despite the fact that PCs are generally more powerful, and more flexible than consoles, and the fact that PCs are useful for stuff besides playing games (even stodgy accounts have a computer, and are therefore part of the potential market).
You might consider getting a DSL connection and hooking it up to your X-Box so you can play some WAN games, but I can guarantee you that most people are not interested in adding another $40/month to their budget so that they can play games on-line. Even worse, most of the people that are willing to play games online already have a computer outfitted to do precisely that!
It's no wonder the number of projected games for the X-Box is positively anemic. Why should software developers pay Microsoft for the privilege of making games for the X-Box when they can target the (currently) larger PC gamer market for free. The $500 that I would spend on an X-Box package would actually buy a fairly decent PC (or at least a significant upgrade to an existing PC), and there are lots of PC games coming down the pike. I know that I personally would much rather have a more powerful general purpose PC than a toy that plays PC games.
Microsoft's X-Box's one true advantage is that it is supposedly easy to develop for. Well that's neat, but it's only easy to develop for because it is a PC. If you simply develop your game for the PC, then you will likely target a bigger market, and you won't have to pay a development fee to Microsoft to help them recover their losses selling the X-Box hardware.
In other words, Microsoft is aiming their console squarely at an absolutely tiny market, one that is probably even smaller than the PC gaming market they are trying to escape. If it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft has money to burn on talented developers they wouldn't have a chance.
Dselect is the devil, pure and simple. Unfortunately most Debian newbies, especially the ones that RTFM, get stuck in it's clutches. The best way to install Debian is to install the base system, and then skip over the dselect garbage and go straight to using apt.
Heck, at first Mandrake was nothing more than RedHat with KDE. They happily took RedHat's GPLed installer (and other features) and put Mandrake in where RedHat had been.
That's Free Software.
Now, it sounds to me like the people that these groups that were actually selling copies of this software should have been a little more careful about giving credit where credit was due if for no other reason than ticking off the primary developer is a bad deal.
Now, the fact that forked.net wasn't providing source code along with their binaries, is a different story all together. The GPL does not guarantee that the original author will get credit, instead it guarantees that the end user gets source code. If you want credit then use a different license. Just remember that advertising clauses and the GPL don't mix, so you won't be able to use any GPLed source in your new product.
And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.
Exactly, how many of us get a copy of Infoworld every week? Now, how many of us actually fork out money for said issue of Infoworld?
If advertising can pay to deliver a paper based magazine to nearly every information worker in America for "free" then you can bet that it can pay for a web site if your audience is large enough. And if your audience is small, then you can easily afford to host the site yourself.
Don't worry my friend, this is not likely to happen. It's what some of the content driven sites would like to see happen, but it's a pie-in-the-sky type of dream.
The reason for this is quite simple, web site owners do not have a direct billing relationship with their customers. Web site owners can wish that they could wave their magic wands and get the ISPs to bill their customers for them, but it isn't likely to happen. And if it did happen the bulk of the money raised wouldn't go to the web sites and the content creators, it would go to the ISPs. Many ISPs like AOL or MSN host "special" proprietary content that they use as one of their major draws. As far as they are concerned useful public websites are bad for their bottom line. After all, why pay a premium for AOL and their content when all of the good stuff is on the web for free.
If the ISPs did build such a thing then web sites would "sign up" for this ISP built billing monstrosity, and the ISP would retain 90% of the monies generated. These web sites would also probably not be available to the customers from other ISPs. That would leave the content creators with the same dilemna that they face today. Either they can sign on with the publishing company and get 10% of the proceeds from a smaller market, or give content away and live off what they can make advertising to a broader market.
The beautty of the web is that it allows normal people the opportunity to publish information to a very large audience at a very reasonable price. For a lot of people that is precisely what they want.
Many webmasters with popular sites would love to be able to charge serious money (and believe me, a penny a page is serious money, I make considerably more than you do, but I wouldn't spend much time on a web site that charged a penny a page), but by doing so they are completely overlooking how it was that they became popular. These sites became popular because they were free. For pay sites have largely failed. The only exceptions are those sites that allow someone to access critical information that is even more expensive via other means, and even these sites have not reached any kind of broad appeal.
As an example, if Slashdot became a subscription only site it wouldn't be too long before most of Slashdot's users migrated to some other site. There is plenty of competition in this space. And creating a Slashdot clone (even without the Slash source code) would be a fairly trivial undertaking. After all, the original Slashdot was written as a computer science student's hobby. Sure, Slashdot is bigger now, but there is also a lot more software available that has nearly the same features as Slashdot. Scoop, Squishdot, PHPNuke, Fingerless, and a whole host of other software products fit this niche nicely.
Information, especially news, has become a commodity. People that base their business on selling a commodity, whether they are farmers or webmasters, have to learn to live within the profit margins that the public is willing to pay. After all, they can't really raise the price. There are always others who are willing to accept less. If webmasters can't get by with advertising returns, then they had better think about cutting costs (or they had better leverage their popularity into some other money generating venue).
The good news, for sites like Slashdot, is that they allow advertisers to sell their wares to a very precise audience. I have found that nearly all of Slashdot's advertisements are at least somewhat interesting to me, and I have actually clicked on their "advertisers" link several times looking for a particular ad that I had seen earlier. That sort of targetted advertising, especially to a large audience, is worth quite a bit of money, and eventually the advertising agencies will realize this. Heck, here in the United States magazines like Computerworld and Infoworld (and a whole host of others) are given away to anyone that has even the slightest connection with Information Systems. If advertisers can pay enough so that the publishers can go to the expense of delivering paper based magazines, then they definitely can pay enough to support a popular web site.
Eventually good sites with large audiences (especially targetted audiences like here on Slashdot) will be able to pay for themselves and even return a bit of a profit. And smaller sites cost so little that there is little need to justify them. There are several sites that I visit regularly that are hosted on DSL lines. These folks don't need a penny per page view to pay their overhead.
It's not censorship unless you have the power to force people to follow your edicts. RMS believes that Free Software shouldn't promote proprietary software. That's all. He isn't saying that we should shut down www.staroffice.com, or that people who use WordPerfect should have their hands cut off. He is simply saying that the GNU project shouldn't be telling it's users, "Hey, look at this neat proprietary software. Who cares if it is not free it runs on Linux so it must be good."
Personally, I am much more of a pragmatist than RMS, but I can understand where he is coming from. It is much harder to get a community together to build a truly free piece of software if all of the end users and developers simply give in and use a proprietary one. It's only common sense if you are the head of the FSF to only want to promote Free Software.
Microsoft doesn't go out of it's way to promote the GPLed software that they distribute (yes they do distribute some GPLed software). After all, they don't really want you to use those particular tools. Likewise RMS doesn't want GNU to promote the proprietary software that just happens to work with Gnome. He would rather promote the Free Software equivalent even if it wasn't as good. This is no different than Microsoft promoting SQL Server even though Oracle and DB2 both run on Windows (and are better databases).
Basically it is ludicrous to think that the average Gnome user doesn't know about StarOffice. RMS knows that all of us are aware of Sun's proprietary version of OpenOffice. He just feels that the Gnome Foundation should use their resources to promote StarOffice.
I believe you mean 'cojones.' 'Cajones' is Spanish for either 'large boxes' or 'coffins' depending on the context. Unless, of course you think that Bill Gates has some coffins stashed in his Armani trousers, in which case, you are certainly right, he must have one heck of a tailor.
That being said, Bill Gates neatly overlooks the fact that Free Unix got it's start providing commodity software for decidely proprietary midrange computers like the DEC VAX. Unix came late to the commodity hardware party. Commoditization is something that happens, Microsoft did it to the hardware makers, and now Linux and the Internet is doing it to Microsoft.
Not quite, I personally still prefer Emacs/Gnus to Evolution. Gnus flat slices and dices mail (yes Evolution's got some good stuff too), but more importantly I like editting text in Emacs. After all, there's nothing quite as cool as firing up artist mode for some cool ASCII art in your email (or a quick text based diagram), or being able to actually use your coding Emacs tricks when you send code samples in an email.
And a million other reasons. Besides, once you start down the Emacs trail you will soon find that Emacs does everything. I use it to keep track of appointments and contacts too.
So Evolution isn't quite the Emacs of email clients. Emacs is still the Emacs of email clients. And it even has an excellent vi emulation mode!
That's just stupid. First of all, I don't care who you are if you spend $5 billion on a piece of equipment you are going to secure it properly. Contrary to popular belief corporations that risk billion dollar assets do not last long. I guarantee you that the space shuttle is not going to be guarded by $5 rent-a-cops anytime soon.
Secondly, if terrorists did get on board the space shuttle what makes you think that they will have any idea how to lauch or fly that bad boy. It's not like the space shuttle is equipped with a "crash into New York" auto-pilot button.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. The whole point of the U.S. government is that it was set up to protect minority opinions, no matter how inane. It hasn't always worked, my ancestors got pushed clear across the United States in the 1800s by their neighbors because of their religious beliefs (so much for freedom of religion), but it has been a heck of a lot better than any other system the world has seen.
Even more importantly, most of the people that are now getting onto the Internet don't share the same values as Katz. Instead of being excited about the "sexual revolution" they are trying to find ways to keep their children from being immersed in pornography. And they certainly aren't interested in what gay teenagers are doing online (other than trying to make sure that they aren't trying to solicit sex from their sons).
Many of the caring, conscious, active, citizens that are using the Internet for information disagree with Katz and most everyting he stands for. For example, they see the fact that the U.S. government is a Republic (and not a pure democracy) as an important safeguard to their liberties. They believe that the government should take an active role in supporting morality. They support the First Ammendment, and would give their lives to defend it, but they are saddened that all too often the First Ammendment is used as a cover for pornographers instead of in support of actual political thought.
Katz has made the mistake of thinking that his definition of the perfect society is universal, but it isn't, not by a long shot.
What Katz doesn't understand is that for some people don't want to be a part of these "liberated" communities that he is so happy about. What he calls expression, I call pornography. And where he sees discussion, all too often all I see is pointless drivel aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator.
Now, I believe firmly that everyone has the right to think as they choose, but that does not mean that I want to participate in their idiocy with them. Katz sees filtering software as discriminatory, but I see filtering software as necessary for the survival of true open minded discussion. As we have seen on this very forum, without a way to filter out the background noise it is utterly impossible to have a rational conversation.
All mankind is created equal, but all opinions are not equal. Some people, no matter how passionately they hold their beliefs, are wrong.
The trick, of course, is to get users hooked on Free Software. Whether they do this by running Windows with some Free Software programs, or Linux with some proprietary software the point is that they are running Free Software.
The more exposure people have to Free Software the better. Once you start using one piece of Free Software you become more and more likely to experiment with other pieces of Free Software. After all, most Free Software packages rely on other Free Software packages for extended functionality. As users start realizing that there is an entire world of useful Free Software many of them will start to migrate in that direction.
The reason for this is quite simple. Free Software is a lot less expensive.
That's why porting Free Software to Windows has the potential to be a net win for Free Software advocates. It is advertising the entire GNU system to the people who would benefit most from a switch, end users.
HP OpenMail has been bought by Samsung. Apparently they are less intimidated by Microsoft.
I actually am generally opposed to solutions that make the computer less flexible for the end user. All too often the systems administrators simply don't have a good enough feel for what truly is useful. Fortunately, thin client does not preclude user installed software. The user simply has to know how to install the software in their home directory. Since nearly all software can be safely installed in this manner, you still end up with a solution that is the best of both worlds. End users can make sure that the computer does what they want and systems administrators end up with a system where no user can adversely affect another (no one has write access to system files).
That way if a user absolutely has to have a different Window Manager, or a beta version of some piece of software they can have it. If something goes wrong they can either have their configuration from yesterday's backup or a quick refresh of their important configuration files from /etc/skel.
Yes, some of your users will spend their time playing games, downloading MP3s, or reading Slashdot. But with all of the users on one machine these sort of abuses become fairly easy to spot. That way you can deal with those that misuse company time and resources without punishing those folks that need something other than "corporate approved" software for legitimate reasons.
The good news is that this sort of a setup is becoming more and more viable thanks mostly to Linux. X Windows has always been a useful model for rolling out applications, but until Linux came along the only way to develop X based apps was to purchase expensive UNIX based tools and then purchase even more expensive X Servers for your Windows desktops. Linux has allowed even hobbyist coders to develop X based applications, and an explosion of X Windows applications has been the direct result.
It's not. What the article was really replacing was MS Office. They could have just as easily simply installed the Windows version of StarOffice and the Gimp. They called it a Linux comparison because Linux still rakes in the hits.
The only real reason to run Linux desktops is if you are planning to leverage X Windows and use thin clients. Saving money on client licenses is good. Saving money by lowering administration costs is golden.
Since these boxes are going to be on a network anyhow, why not simply use underpowered machines as X terminals. Any machine with 16M of ram has enough oomph to be an X terminal, and one commodity server (with enough memory) can easily support hundreds of users.
As far as I am concerned the only real reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop is that it finally allows the systems administrators to move to a useable thin client arrangement. Imagine the joys of one box to administer and nothing but disposable machines on your users' dekstops. Linux has finally gotten to the point where it has enough applications to allow you to shift to this sort of a setup today. The fact that this sort of an arrangement will probably save you money on both software and hardware costs is nothing more than icing on the cake. The real potential for savings is in administration costs. All of a sudden you can get rid of all of your desktop support personnel and replace them with one Linux admin, and a monkey whose sole job would be to replace failed thin clients.
The Free Software Foundation isn't worried about the GPL brand. They simply aren't interested in making a GPL derivative an easy thing to do. The Free Software Foundation wants you to use the GPL (duh!) so they have copyrighted the GPL in order to prevent people from easily making clones. If you want your own GPL-like license then hire your own lawyers and hope that they are as well acquainted with software copyrights as the folks who have worked on the GPL (good luck).
This might seem like a contradiction, but the Free Software Foundation isn't the "Information Must Be Free As In Free Beer Foundation." They are specifically trying to make sure that software comes with source code (and documentation :). They are not trying to make it so that all information is free.
So while you are certainly right that the GPL copyright can't make license proliferation impossible, it certainly does make it more difficult (and more expensive), and that's a net win for the FSF.
LOL, I don't know if it has anything to do with being intelligent or not, but whatever it is we must be wired the same way. Every time I hear the word "right" I have to suppress the urge to put my hand over my heart (I learned which hand was my right one pledging allegiance to the flag :). Even worse, I spent quite a bit of my youth sailing and my friends would further complicate things by using the words "port" and "starboard." The only way I can remember which is left and right is to remember that port and left have the same amount of letters (and are the same thing if you are facing forward in the boat).
No wonder I have such an aversion to directions.
That's it, I am reporting you to Star Command.
One of the major reasons that I got into computing is that I can't alphabetize for crap. Most people know intuitively whether W comes before or after T, but I actually have to think about it. However, after years of typing at a QWERTY keyboard QWERTY has become part of my subconscious. I can guarantee you that if they were to arrange the keys in alphabetical order I would quickly find myself singing the ABC song in order to find the 'M' key. That would be bad.
And don't give me any crap about how "learning another keyboard layout is easy." I have tried. Apparently my brain is miswired for this sort of thing.
Someone please MOD THIS UP!
VMS is the original anti-UNIX. It later added some general POSIXy behaviour simply because everyone was using UNIX. Windows NT also had the stated goal of becoming "a better UNIX than UNIX," but they certainly haven't spent much time actually trying to be Unix compatible. Their POSIX layer is a joke, and they don't even have a decent way to fork() for crying out loud.
Besides, while Microsoft almost certainly is looking into "borrowing" portions of BSD code (which will then magically become innovative), they aren't ever likely to actually release an OS that is Unix like. Part of the fun of the BSDs, Linux, and Commercial Unixen is that it usually isn't too much trouble to port your software from one of these platforms to a different one. This is precisely what Microsoft wants to avoid. Microsoft wants the equivalent of a one way valve when it comes to software portability. They want for it to be easy to port from Unix to Windows, but they want it to be impossible to port from Windows to Unix. Clearly shifting to a BSD based OS would work against them.
Fah, that's ridiculous. The truly dangerous license is the BSD style licenses. There is no charging money for BSD code, and there is nothing to stop your competitors from grabbing your BSDed source, adding some proprietary extensions and selling your software. That's why Microsoft likes the BSD license and hates the GPL. Even more telling is the fact that the very products that you mention (Mozilla and QT) are both available under the GPL. The trick is maintaining yourself as sole copyright owner so that you can also release the software under a commercial license.
If other developers are likely to contribute then the trick is to force these outside contributors to your source code base to sign over their copyrights to you before their code can be accepted. The funny thing is that it isn't the commercial software houses that started this trend. The FSF has been doing it for years so that they would be the clear copyright holder in case of copyright infringement (a very wise move). It used to be that you couldn't be a GNU maintainer unless you were willing to sign (with ink and pen in front of witnesses) your code over to the FSF.
So QT, OpenOffice, Mozilla, MySQL and other simply do exactly the same thing, and then they can release the source under the GPL and any other license that they wish. This allows them to sell commercial licenses, and prevents their competitors from using their source code against them.
A prime example is the MySQL/NuSphere debacle. When all is said and done MySQL is going to be able to sell proprietary licenses for use in commercial products, and NuSphere is going to be forced to release the source code on improvements they make. NuSphere's version will forever be GPL tainted, and will basically kill it for use in commercial products. If you are MySQL (the originators of the code) this is a good thing. If you happen to be NuSphere, however, it is a bad thing. This is why so many developers say that the BSD license is business friendly. What they really mean is that the BSD is friendly to companies that want to scoop up your hard work and use it to put you out of business.
Personally I am glad that Gnome and KDE are "borrowing" tried and true methods. If the people posting on this topic were left to "innovate" an interface we would almost certainly end up with a Windowing system that consisted entirely of round and triangle shaped Windows with pornographic themes. This interface would, of course, be voice enabled, but it would only accept commands in Klingon. Gnome hackers would be working on a patch that would also allow you to use High Elvish.
It would look cool, but it would be counter-intuitive as vi and as straightforward to learn as Emacs. Every time that Slashdot had a new story it would flash a painful succession of colors.
Personally I tend to use minimalist window managers. The eye candy only gets in my way. On the other hand, both KDE and Gnome should be commended for building a component platform that brings Unix desktop development to the next level. That's the truly interesting stuff. The fact that it looks like Windows is immaterial. The really important fact is that it is becoming possible to script together applications from ready built components (like Windows, except without the myriad downsides).
Think about this for a moment. Why exactly is it that Microsoft is getting into the console business? The answer to that is elementary. Up until now the PC gaming industry has been small potatoes compared to the console gaming industry. This despite the fact that PCs are generally more powerful, and more flexible than consoles, and the fact that PCs are useful for stuff besides playing games (even stodgy accounts have a computer, and are therefore part of the potential market).
You might consider getting a DSL connection and hooking it up to your X-Box so you can play some WAN games, but I can guarantee you that most people are not interested in adding another $40/month to their budget so that they can play games on-line. Even worse, most of the people that are willing to play games online already have a computer outfitted to do precisely that!
It's no wonder the number of projected games for the X-Box is positively anemic. Why should software developers pay Microsoft for the privilege of making games for the X-Box when they can target the (currently) larger PC gamer market for free. The $500 that I would spend on an X-Box package would actually buy a fairly decent PC (or at least a significant upgrade to an existing PC), and there are lots of PC games coming down the pike. I know that I personally would much rather have a more powerful general purpose PC than a toy that plays PC games.
Microsoft's X-Box's one true advantage is that it is supposedly easy to develop for. Well that's neat, but it's only easy to develop for because it is a PC. If you simply develop your game for the PC, then you will likely target a bigger market, and you won't have to pay a development fee to Microsoft to help them recover their losses selling the X-Box hardware.
In other words, Microsoft is aiming their console squarely at an absolutely tiny market, one that is probably even smaller than the PC gaming market they are trying to escape. If it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft has money to burn on talented developers they wouldn't have a chance.
Dselect is the devil, pure and simple. Unfortunately most Debian newbies, especially the ones that RTFM, get stuck in it's clutches. The best way to install Debian is to install the base system, and then skip over the dselect garbage and go straight to using apt.
Heck, at first Mandrake was nothing more than RedHat with KDE. They happily took RedHat's GPLed installer (and other features) and put Mandrake in where RedHat had been.
That's Free Software.
Now, it sounds to me like the people that these groups that were actually selling copies of this software should have been a little more careful about giving credit where credit was due if for no other reason than ticking off the primary developer is a bad deal.
Now, the fact that forked.net wasn't providing source code along with their binaries, is a different story all together. The GPL does not guarantee that the original author will get credit, instead it guarantees that the end user gets source code. If you want credit then use a different license. Just remember that advertising clauses and the GPL don't mix, so you won't be able to use any GPLed source in your new product.
Exactly, how many of us get a copy of Infoworld every week? Now, how many of us actually fork out money for said issue of Infoworld?
If advertising can pay to deliver a paper based magazine to nearly every information worker in America for "free" then you can bet that it can pay for a web site if your audience is large enough. And if your audience is small, then you can easily afford to host the site yourself.
Don't worry my friend, this is not likely to happen. It's what some of the content driven sites would like to see happen, but it's a pie-in-the-sky type of dream.
The reason for this is quite simple, web site owners do not have a direct billing relationship with their customers. Web site owners can wish that they could wave their magic wands and get the ISPs to bill their customers for them, but it isn't likely to happen. And if it did happen the bulk of the money raised wouldn't go to the web sites and the content creators, it would go to the ISPs. Many ISPs like AOL or MSN host "special" proprietary content that they use as one of their major draws. As far as they are concerned useful public websites are bad for their bottom line. After all, why pay a premium for AOL and their content when all of the good stuff is on the web for free.
If the ISPs did build such a thing then web sites would "sign up" for this ISP built billing monstrosity, and the ISP would retain 90% of the monies generated. These web sites would also probably not be available to the customers from other ISPs. That would leave the content creators with the same dilemna that they face today. Either they can sign on with the publishing company and get 10% of the proceeds from a smaller market, or give content away and live off what they can make advertising to a broader market.
The beautty of the web is that it allows normal people the opportunity to publish information to a very large audience at a very reasonable price. For a lot of people that is precisely what they want.
Many webmasters with popular sites would love to be able to charge serious money (and believe me, a penny a page is serious money, I make considerably more than you do, but I wouldn't spend much time on a web site that charged a penny a page), but by doing so they are completely overlooking how it was that they became popular. These sites became popular because they were free. For pay sites have largely failed. The only exceptions are those sites that allow someone to access critical information that is even more expensive via other means, and even these sites have not reached any kind of broad appeal.
As an example, if Slashdot became a subscription only site it wouldn't be too long before most of Slashdot's users migrated to some other site. There is plenty of competition in this space. And creating a Slashdot clone (even without the Slash source code) would be a fairly trivial undertaking. After all, the original Slashdot was written as a computer science student's hobby. Sure, Slashdot is bigger now, but there is also a lot more software available that has nearly the same features as Slashdot. Scoop, Squishdot, PHPNuke, Fingerless, and a whole host of other software products fit this niche nicely.
Information, especially news, has become a commodity. People that base their business on selling a commodity, whether they are farmers or webmasters, have to learn to live within the profit margins that the public is willing to pay. After all, they can't really raise the price. There are always others who are willing to accept less. If webmasters can't get by with advertising returns, then they had better think about cutting costs (or they had better leverage their popularity into some other money generating venue).
The good news, for sites like Slashdot, is that they allow advertisers to sell their wares to a very precise audience. I have found that nearly all of Slashdot's advertisements are at least somewhat interesting to me, and I have actually clicked on their "advertisers" link several times looking for a particular ad that I had seen earlier. That sort of targetted advertising, especially to a large audience, is worth quite a bit of money, and eventually the advertising agencies will realize this. Heck, here in the United States magazines like Computerworld and Infoworld (and a whole host of others) are given away to anyone that has even the slightest connection with Information Systems. If advertisers can pay enough so that the publishers can go to the expense of delivering paper based magazines, then they definitely can pay enough to support a popular web site.
Eventually good sites with large audiences (especially targetted audiences like here on Slashdot) will be able to pay for themselves and even return a bit of a profit. And smaller sites cost so little that there is little need to justify them. There are several sites that I visit regularly that are hosted on DSL lines. These folks don't need a penny per page view to pay their overhead.
So don't worry, economics are on your side.
It's not censorship unless you have the power to force people to follow your edicts. RMS believes that Free Software shouldn't promote proprietary software. That's all. He isn't saying that we should shut down www.staroffice.com, or that people who use WordPerfect should have their hands cut off. He is simply saying that the GNU project shouldn't be telling it's users, "Hey, look at this neat proprietary software. Who cares if it is not free it runs on Linux so it must be good."
Personally, I am much more of a pragmatist than RMS, but I can understand where he is coming from. It is much harder to get a community together to build a truly free piece of software if all of the end users and developers simply give in and use a proprietary one. It's only common sense if you are the head of the FSF to only want to promote Free Software.
Microsoft doesn't go out of it's way to promote the GPLed software that they distribute (yes they do distribute some GPLed software). After all, they don't really want you to use those particular tools. Likewise RMS doesn't want GNU to promote the proprietary software that just happens to work with Gnome. He would rather promote the Free Software equivalent even if it wasn't as good. This is no different than Microsoft promoting SQL Server even though Oracle and DB2 both run on Windows (and are better databases).
Basically it is ludicrous to think that the average Gnome user doesn't know about StarOffice. RMS knows that all of us are aware of Sun's proprietary version of OpenOffice. He just feels that the Gnome Foundation should use their resources to promote StarOffice.
I believe you mean 'cojones.' 'Cajones' is Spanish for either 'large boxes' or 'coffins' depending on the context. Unless, of course you think that Bill Gates has some coffins stashed in his Armani trousers, in which case, you are certainly right, he must have one heck of a tailor.
That being said, Bill Gates neatly overlooks the fact that Free Unix got it's start providing commodity software for decidely proprietary midrange computers like the DEC VAX. Unix came late to the commodity hardware party. Commoditization is something that happens, Microsoft did it to the hardware makers, and now Linux and the Internet is doing it to Microsoft.
The OS is becoming a commodity.
Not quite, I personally still prefer Emacs/Gnus to Evolution. Gnus flat slices and dices mail (yes Evolution's got some good stuff too), but more importantly I like editting text in Emacs. After all, there's nothing quite as cool as firing up artist mode for some cool ASCII art in your email (or a quick text based diagram), or being able to actually use your coding Emacs tricks when you send code samples in an email.
And a million other reasons. Besides, once you start down the Emacs trail you will soon find that Emacs does everything. I use it to keep track of appointments and contacts too.
So Evolution isn't quite the Emacs of email clients. Emacs is still the Emacs of email clients. And it even has an excellent vi emulation mode!
That's just stupid. First of all, I don't care who you are if you spend $5 billion on a piece of equipment you are going to secure it properly. Contrary to popular belief corporations that risk billion dollar assets do not last long. I guarantee you that the space shuttle is not going to be guarded by $5 rent-a-cops anytime soon.
Secondly, if terrorists did get on board the space shuttle what makes you think that they will have any idea how to lauch or fly that bad boy. It's not like the space shuttle is equipped with a "crash into New York" auto-pilot button.