...always had thought the apache and lgpl licence schemes gave the most advantage to software companies in promoting/using said software
Yes, and no one is clamoring to change the Apache License to the LGPL. So why the clamour to move Wine to LGPL? Apache is under an X11 style license and Wine is under an X11 style license. If an unrestricted license works for Apache, why wouldn't it also work for Wine?
Hmm, your post makes it sound as if Wine is under the GPL and would be moving to LGPL. Yes, a lot of companies shy away from GPL licensed products, especially libraries. But Wine is not currently under the GPL. It is under an X11 style license. Moving to the LGPL would place greater restrictions upon Wine.
I'm an experienced Qt programmer, but I am giving serious thought into switching to Motif. Why? Because Qt is becoming a huge bloated monster. Compare the sizes of qt-1.0, qt-2.0 and qt-3.0. The trend is unmistakable. I'd switch to GTK+, but it's not that far behind Qt in the bloat race. There are other suitable toolkits, but only Motif is any sort of standard.
If you want to always have the latest chip, then get used to shelling out $400 bucks every other week. You wouldn't want to have an Inferior Card! Someone might find out and you would have to hand your head in shame!
But if you could care less what other people think about your hardware, then simply ignore them. It's your life, your computer, your software, so don't let anyone tell you what damn hardware you need in order to be cool.
I'm running a Matrox G450+ and I couldn't be happier.
That type of clause is Standard Operating Procedure for contests. Everyone from your local radio station to Publisher's Clearinghouse uses them.
Does the copyright for your logo get transferred to them? Not automatically. That can only be done via an explicit legal document signed by you. The entries that they own are the physical media they are on. If you send them a photograph, they own the photograph. This is a Good Thing, since they don't have to ask your permission after the contest end whether or not they can dump it in the trash.
I suspect that the submitter of the winning entry will be contacted as to transferal of copyrights, trademarks, or licensing that allows the foundation to use it for any purpose.
Yeah, a standard API that all applications will use is a good idea. Toss out all your crossplatform libraries, Win32 and POSIX books, CORBA and COM+ guides, C, C++, Java and VB manuals, and just use one common standard.
Two problems with it though. First, it's been tried. Java. Promoted as "write once run anywhere". Didn't work as hyped. Java did find its own niche, and fills it well, but it hasn't even come close to promises made. I don't expect.NET to deliver on a tenth of the promises made about it, but it will find some niche somewhere.
Second, the corporation promoting.NET the hardest and doing most of the work on it is the same corporation that subverts standards with an almost religous fervor. If.NET becomes any sort of a standard used on non-Microsoft platforms, there will be a not-quite-compatible.NET++ they'll promote instead.
(Microsoft can't even deliver a ISO Standard C++ compiler, what makes you think they'll deliver something that will run Miguel's code?)
Oh of course! But I see so many posts to the FreeBSD lists from people with one week old technology that I had to at least point it out. The problem is that people don't use the latest releases. They go to Fry's or CompUSA and pick up a shrinkwrapped box that will often be several releases behind.
I'm using FreeBSD as a desktop OS at home and as a workstation at work. It's simply great!
There are only two advantages I see to Linux that makes it a better "desktop" OS. First, they put DRI in the kernel. They're working on this now for FreeBSD, but there's a lot of resistance to keep userland stuff out of kernelland. If all you care about is running games, then FreeBSD is not it. Go get a PS2 or an XBox.
Second, the popularity of Linux gives it a greater pool of developers to draw from. So Linux gets new device drivers faster. But you still will *not* get Linux shoehorned into this week's premium super buy at CompUSA. With Linux you have to wait around three months to get a driver for brand new hardware. With FreeBSD you have to wait about six months. If you buy computers more often than once every six months, stick with Linux. As for myself, I had no problems with FreeBSD on a stock Dell Optiplex GX240.
In terms of desktop software, don't worry a bit about it. They're the same on both platforms. Identical. Staroffice, GNOME, KDE, Xmms, Gimp, Mozilla, etc.
A) Free Markets can exist in a society with laws. I suspect the overwhelming majority of societies, regardless of economic system, would regard Vinnie, his buddies, and the corps that paid them, to be criminals.
B) Go study up on anarcho-capitalism. The literature is far from devoid of articles and books on free market law. Your choice is between state imposed laws or a naturally occuring law, either way you get a legal system that will hinder Vinnie and his cohorts.
It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.
I remember one movie (Mission Impossible?) where two people where discussing things at an English pub. They had amber colored beer in their English pub styled nonik glasses. You know exactly what they're drinking: the pub's extra special bitters. But the glasses where labeled Budweiser. Huh?
The problem with product placements is that the product companies get their placements *after* the story has been written. Well, in the movie above, the pub scene had probably already been written, and some numbnut who couldn't tell the difference between bitters and piss thought it would be an appropriate spot for Bud.
So in other words, they would not be in favor of Free Software. Free Software means that you can make copies of the software, fold mangle and mutilate it, give it away, post it online, and even sell it for a profit.
The classic game of rogue is not considered free software. Most Linux distros won't even distribute it. All because its very simple and otherwise unrestricted license has a clause saying not for commercial use.
I smell a whiff of hypocrisy emanating from the land of Slashdot...
In a truly free market, the government would not grant monopolies to corporations which allow them to own ideas.
In a truly free market, corporations would not need government grants of monopoly to protect their ideas. Free market replacements for copyrights and patents have been discussed in the literature. For one sample, see the Free Nation archives (freenation.org, seems to be down right now), which had a mini-debate on the subject. One of these papers is included on the FSF's page, but it fails to mention any of the counterarguments.
In essence, basing on intellectual property rights on contract law instead of copyrights is practical and doable. You can't guarantee perfect compliance, (such as your kid who's not under contractual compliance giving you copy of software to neighbor who isn't a member of any contractual association, etc), but then again, I hear that copyright doesn't have perfect compliance either, only the legal semblence of one.
Do you remember why Microsoft started C# to begin with? Because the courts said they couldn't embrace and extend Java. So they create C#, give it to some quasi-standards committee. What makes you think they won't embrace and extend it? From my vantagepoint, that's Microsoft's ultimate goal.
bash isn't in the "core" OS of Linux either. All but one Linux distro has allowed me to deselect it. Now getting rid of fileutils and binutils may be rather difficult, but most of the GNU stuff is entirely optional.
But it's those companies that are in the business of selling computer software that are leery of the GPL. Your banks, grocers and auto manufacturers could care less.
Yeah, like its that friggn difficult for them to recompile on freebsd;)
Recompiling is a snap. Any commercial Unix program can be ported to FreeBSD in about a day. The developers at these companies know this. But that not the roadblock. The management at these companies don't want to support another platform. Simple. They don't want to write another help script for the techsupport crew. They'll have to invest in people who know FreeBSD inside and out so that when a customer calls with a tough support question they can handle it.
Well, you can't blame him. Everyone from ESR to RMS was telling him how he could make billions by giving away the software. So he dumped his hardware business and started giving away his software.
I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm.
RPM has been able to do this for quite a while. The capabilities of RPM is not the problem, the idiots who write the RPM specs are the problem.
Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
Under FreeBSD, the latest kernel in -STABLE has been tested on production systems.
Package management is not a good argument. If that were the case I think windows installer is better.
The Windows installer (or rather, the numerous Windows installers) has one good feature. You typically get to choose between full, minimal and custom installs. Other than that, FreeBSD ports, Debian apt-get and RPM urpmi are vastly superior. Most Windows installers can't handle dependencies very well (if at all) so the typical solution is to bundle all the dependencies with the package. The user ends up with dll hell and duplicate libraries scattered across the system. Neither are they any good at updating. The only reliable way of upgrading to uninstall the old then install the new.
they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible.
I've never had a problem with the Linux layer. I've been able to run everything from Loki games to StarOffice under it. Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries.
Of course, I wasn't expecting them to do an exhaustive search of all 10,000+ packages available for SuSE just to find the 100 that won't work, and the 10 inside that list that you might actually want to use. So I'll give you the only one I have ever found: the Flash plugin. Actually the flash plugin works, but since it is a linux library, you can't link it at runtime to a FreeBSD application. So it won't work under a natively built Konqueror or Mozilla. But it *will* work under a Linux Konqueror or Mozilla running under FreeBSD.
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
Yup. Been there, done that. An awful lot of software is shipped ONLY in RPM format. Even the source code. So when you go to ports to install such software, ports will see that it needs RPM and go install that first.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system? If so how many? How do they compare to ext3 or JFS?
This is the debate that will never end because no one can ever win. People smarter than both you and I have weighed in on both sides of the issue. In my opinion, I think transaction atomicity at the filesystem level is simply not needed for the vast majority of users. For them softupdates might be a better solution. One thing I do know though, if you need the kind of stability that only a jfs can provide, then you also want the stability of the 2.0 Linux kernel, which doesn't provide it.
Does it support all the same audio hardware that Linux does?
This was addressed in the article. There are more users using Linux than FreeBSD, consequently there is a larger pool of developers working on last weeks latest and greatest hardware. Linux will always have better hardware support so long as it has a larger user base. In the same way, Windows has better hardware support than Linux.
In practical terms, if your hardware is newer than six months old, Linux may be your only option for a free software OS. Otherwise FreeBSD will be just fine.
You can boot FreeBSD from the NT bootloader, but be careful. There's instructions in the FAQ how to do it. The way the FreeBSD bootloader works, that boot sector needs to be from the root partition, not the MBR. I goofed, didn't read closely enough, and hosed my system.
If you have a choice, just bypass the NT loader alltogether and use Grub, Lilo or the FreeBSD bootloader.
...it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks...
No, it is not the normal way. It is the DOS way. FreeBSD isn't DOS, so there is no compelling reason for it to abandon the BSD way in favor of the Bill Gates way.
Keep DOS logical drives inside of DOS partitions, and let FreeBSD have BSD slices inside of BSD partitions. That sounds fair to me.
Slashdot Mirror
...always had thought the apache and lgpl licence schemes gave the most advantage to software companies in promoting/using said software
Yes, and no one is clamoring to change the Apache License to the LGPL. So why the clamour to move Wine to LGPL? Apache is under an X11 style license and Wine is under an X11 style license. If an unrestricted license works for Apache, why wouldn't it also work for Wine?
Hmm, your post makes it sound as if Wine is under the GPL and would be moving to LGPL. Yes, a lot of companies shy away from GPL licensed products, especially libraries. But Wine is not currently under the GPL. It is under an X11 style license. Moving to the LGPL would place greater restrictions upon Wine.
There's a good slogan in there somewhere. How about "FreeBSD: We Get Around"?
I'm an experienced Qt programmer, but I am giving serious thought into switching to Motif. Why? Because Qt is becoming a huge bloated monster. Compare the sizes of qt-1.0, qt-2.0 and qt-3.0. The trend is unmistakable. I'd switch to GTK+, but it's not that far behind Qt in the bloat race. There are other suitable toolkits, but only Motif is any sort of standard.
If you want to always have the latest chip, then get used to shelling out $400 bucks every other week. You wouldn't want to have an Inferior Card! Someone might find out and you would have to hand your head in shame!
But if you could care less what other people think about your hardware, then simply ignore them. It's your life, your computer, your software, so don't let anyone tell you what damn hardware you need in order to be cool.
I'm running a Matrox G450+ and I couldn't be happier.
That type of clause is Standard Operating Procedure for contests. Everyone from your local radio station to Publisher's Clearinghouse uses them.
Does the copyright for your logo get transferred to them? Not automatically. That can only be done via an explicit legal document signed by you. The entries that they own are the physical media they are on. If you send them a photograph, they own the photograph. This is a Good Thing, since they don't have to ask your permission after the contest end whether or not they can dump it in the trash.
I suspect that the submitter of the winning entry will be contacted as to transferal of copyrights, trademarks, or licensing that allows the foundation to use it for any purpose.
Yeah, a standard API that all applications will use is a good idea. Toss out all your crossplatform libraries, Win32 and POSIX books, CORBA and COM+ guides, C, C++, Java and VB manuals, and just use one common standard.
.NET to deliver on a tenth of the promises made about it, but it will find some niche somewhere.
.NET the hardest and doing most of the work on it is the same corporation that subverts standards with an almost religous fervor. If .NET becomes any sort of a standard used on non-Microsoft platforms, there will be a not-quite-compatible .NET++ they'll promote instead.
Two problems with it though. First, it's been tried. Java. Promoted as "write once run anywhere". Didn't work as hyped. Java did find its own niche, and fills it well, but it hasn't even come close to promises made. I don't expect
Second, the corporation promoting
(Microsoft can't even deliver a ISO Standard C++ compiler, what makes you think they'll deliver something that will run Miguel's code?)
Well, except that you can release drivers ... as kernel modules
Ditto for FreeBSD. Unless of course that is what you meant.
Oh of course! But I see so many posts to the FreeBSD lists from people with one week old technology that I had to at least point it out. The problem is that people don't use the latest releases. They go to Fry's or CompUSA and pick up a shrinkwrapped box that will often be several releases behind.
I'm using FreeBSD as a desktop OS at home and as a workstation at work. It's simply great!
There are only two advantages I see to Linux that makes it a better "desktop" OS. First, they put DRI in the kernel. They're working on this now for FreeBSD, but there's a lot of resistance to keep userland stuff out of kernelland. If all you care about is running games, then FreeBSD is not it. Go get a PS2 or an XBox.
Second, the popularity of Linux gives it a greater pool of developers to draw from. So Linux gets new device drivers faster. But you still will *not* get Linux shoehorned into this week's premium super buy at CompUSA. With Linux you have to wait around three months to get a driver for brand new hardware. With FreeBSD you have to wait about six months. If you buy computers more often than once every six months, stick with Linux. As for myself, I had no problems with FreeBSD on a stock Dell Optiplex GX240.
In terms of desktop software, don't worry a bit about it. They're the same on both platforms. Identical. Staroffice, GNOME, KDE, Xmms, Gimp, Mozilla, etc.
Well at least Ireland reciprocates by exporting Harp and Guinness. I think we're getting the better end of the deal :-)
But do English pubs even serve Bud? They've got there own industrial swill, so why bother advertising the yankee industrial swill?
If they do, then that's yet another preconception blown out of the water.
Okay, that came straight out of left field.
A) Free Markets can exist in a society with laws. I suspect the overwhelming majority of societies, regardless of economic system, would regard Vinnie, his buddies, and the corps that paid them, to be criminals.
B) Go study up on anarcho-capitalism. The literature is far from devoid of articles and books on free market law. Your choice is between state imposed laws or a naturally occuring law, either way you get a legal system that will hinder Vinnie and his cohorts.
It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.
I remember one movie (Mission Impossible?) where two people where discussing things at an English pub. They had amber colored beer in their English pub styled nonik glasses. You know exactly what they're drinking: the pub's extra special bitters. But the glasses where labeled Budweiser. Huh?
The problem with product placements is that the product companies get their placements *after* the story has been written. Well, in the movie above, the pub scene had probably already been written, and some numbnut who couldn't tell the difference between bitters and piss thought it would be an appropriate spot for Bud.
So in other words, they would not be in favor of Free Software. Free Software means that you can make copies of the software, fold mangle and mutilate it, give it away, post it online, and even sell it for a profit.
The classic game of rogue is not considered free software. Most Linux distros won't even distribute it. All because its very simple and otherwise unrestricted license has a clause saying not for commercial use.
I smell a whiff of hypocrisy emanating from the land of Slashdot...
In a truly free market, the government would not grant monopolies to corporations which allow them to own ideas.
In a truly free market, corporations would not need government grants of monopoly to protect their ideas. Free market replacements for copyrights and patents have been discussed in the literature. For one sample, see the Free Nation archives (freenation.org, seems to be down right now), which had a mini-debate on the subject. One of these papers is included on the FSF's page, but it fails to mention any of the counterarguments.
In essence, basing on intellectual property rights on contract law instead of copyrights is practical and doable. You can't guarantee perfect compliance, (such as your kid who's not under contractual compliance giving you copy of software to neighbor who isn't a member of any contractual association, etc), but then again, I hear that copyright doesn't have perfect compliance either, only the legal semblence of one.
Do you remember why Microsoft started C# to begin with? Because the courts said they couldn't embrace and extend Java. So they create C#, give it to some quasi-standards committee. What makes you think they won't embrace and extend it? From my vantagepoint, that's Microsoft's ultimate goal.
bash isn't in the "core" OS of Linux either. All but one Linux distro has allowed me to deselect it. Now getting rid of fileutils and binutils may be rather difficult, but most of the GNU stuff is entirely optional.
But it's those companies that are in the business of selling computer software that are leery of the GPL. Your banks, grocers and auto manufacturers could care less.
Yeah, like its that friggn difficult for them to recompile on freebsd ;)
Recompiling is a snap. Any commercial Unix program can be ported to FreeBSD in about a day. The developers at these companies know this. But that not the roadblock. The management at these companies don't want to support another platform. Simple. They don't want to write another help script for the techsupport crew. They'll have to invest in people who know FreeBSD inside and out so that when a customer calls with a tough support question they can handle it.
Well, you can't blame him. Everyone from ESR to RMS was telling him how he could make billions by giving away the software. So he dumped his hardware business and started giving away his software.
This thing reads like it was written by a C.S. major for a 200 level English course. /. is not the intended audience.
:-)
Well, it *was* written for OSNews
I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm.
RPM has been able to do this for quite a while. The capabilities of RPM is not the problem, the idiots who write the RPM specs are the problem.
Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
Under FreeBSD, the latest kernel in -STABLE has been tested on production systems.
Package management is not a good argument. If that were the case I think windows installer is better.
The Windows installer (or rather, the numerous Windows installers) has one good feature. You typically get to choose between full, minimal and custom installs. Other than that, FreeBSD ports, Debian apt-get and RPM urpmi are vastly superior. Most Windows installers can't handle dependencies very well (if at all) so the typical solution is to bundle all the dependencies with the package. The user ends up with dll hell and duplicate libraries scattered across the system. Neither are they any good at updating. The only reliable way of upgrading to uninstall the old then install the new.
they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible.
I've never had a problem with the Linux layer. I've been able to run everything from Loki games to StarOffice under it. Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries.
Of course, I wasn't expecting them to do an exhaustive search of all 10,000+ packages available for SuSE just to find the 100 that won't work, and the 10 inside that list that you might actually want to use. So I'll give you the only one I have ever found: the Flash plugin. Actually the flash plugin works, but since it is a linux library, you can't link it at runtime to a FreeBSD application. So it won't work under a natively built Konqueror or Mozilla. But it *will* work under a Linux Konqueror or Mozilla running under FreeBSD.
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
Yup. Been there, done that. An awful lot of software is shipped ONLY in RPM format. Even the source code. So when you go to ports to install such software, ports will see that it needs RPM and go install that first.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system? If so how many? How do they compare to ext3 or JFS?
This is the debate that will never end because no one can ever win. People smarter than both you and I have weighed in on both sides of the issue. In my opinion, I think transaction atomicity at the filesystem level is simply not needed for the vast majority of users. For them softupdates might be a better solution. One thing I do know though, if you need the kind of stability that only a jfs can provide, then you also want the stability of the 2.0 Linux kernel, which doesn't provide it.
Does it support all the same audio hardware that Linux does?
This was addressed in the article. There are more users using Linux than FreeBSD, consequently there is a larger pool of developers working on last weeks latest and greatest hardware. Linux will always have better hardware support so long as it has a larger user base. In the same way, Windows has better hardware support than Linux.
In practical terms, if your hardware is newer than six months old, Linux may be your only option for a free software OS. Otherwise FreeBSD will be just fine.
You can boot FreeBSD from the NT bootloader, but be careful. There's instructions in the FAQ how to do it. The way the FreeBSD bootloader works, that boot sector needs to be from the root partition, not the MBR. I goofed, didn't read closely enough, and hosed my system.
If you have a choice, just bypass the NT loader alltogether and use Grub, Lilo or the FreeBSD bootloader.
...it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks...
No, it is not the normal way. It is the DOS way. FreeBSD isn't DOS, so there is no compelling reason for it to abandon the BSD way in favor of the Bill Gates way.
Keep DOS logical drives inside of DOS partitions, and let FreeBSD have BSD slices inside of BSD partitions. That sounds fair to me.