If it were just Mae West going down we could manage. That's how the internet was designed. We'll have some inconveniences and crap, but the internet will still operate just fine.
The problem are all of the servers that are colocated there. Stupid stupid stupid.
It was monday morning and my brain wasn't working too well to begin with. Then I logged in to spazdot and all remaining vestiges of rational thought evaporated. My apologies for the gross error of two centuries.
In any event, the oppression of slaves is in no way comparable to the oppression one receives at the hands of our corporate masters when they fail to offer us free anonymizer services.
At what level do you allow workers the freedom to use the internet for personal stuff?
Since the use of company owned computers for company use is such a hard idea for spazdots to grok, here is a simple ananogy:
Joe: "I'm here to fix your computer."
Ichimunki: "It's in the den."
Joe: "Right. Remember, I charge $50 an hour."
Ichimunki: "That's okay just as long as you fix it."
...
two hours later in the den
...
Ichimunki: "What the hell are you doing?"
Joe: "Check out the tits on that momma!"
Ichimunki: "You're supposed to be fixing the computer, not jerking to pr0n!"
Joe: "Hey relax, I got the computer fixed an hour ago."
Ichimunki: "You can't use my stuff to surf SlutDot damn you!"
Joe: "Hey, it's my freedom. Don't oppress me. Here's my bill for two hours of work."
are there any free services left for those suffering from corporate oppression?"
Let's put things in perspective. The women forced to wear bhurkas in Afghanistan are oppressed. The dissidents in the Gulag were oppressed. The Jews in the ghetto were oppressed. The African-americans forced into slavery two centuries ago were oppressed. You are not oppressed merely because you don't get automatic anonymity when you choose to disclose your public information to a corporation.
Now, if KDE or Gnome would come up with a totally radical and attractive GUI that made it easier to use a computer and isolated everyone from the OS, then we're-a-talking. But no, they're just copying the Windows shell. Yipeee!
Totally Radical
KDE: no
GNOME: no
Windows: no
Attractive GUI
KDE: yes
GNOME: yes
Windows: no!
Easier to Use
KDE: yes
GNOME: yes
Windows: no
Isolation From the OS
KDE: yes
GNOME: yes
Windows: no!
Doesn't Copy Windows Shell
KDE: yes
GNOME: yes
Windows: no
Well, except for "totally radical", both KDE and GNOME meet all of your requirements.
I am trying to make the point that documenting it the code (presumably with comments) is not the proper place to do it.
Every programming language I know has syntax for including comments. Presumably these comments are for more than just satisfying license requirements to document changes within the code.
Not all of your documentation needs to be in the form of comments. In the case of the buddy system, it would have been appropriate to include a reference to external docs. But not even this was done. As a professional software developer, my documentation is expected to include specifications and commented code at the bare minimum. A code review for uncommented code? Unthinkable!
Comment your code. Comment your code. Comment your code. It's standard practice in academia, industry, and yes, even volunteer open source projects.
Maybe it's just me, but KDE sure looks a lot like Windows.
Have you ever seen Windows? Have you ever used KDE? Comparing KDE to Windows is like comparing kumquaats to mangoes. I mean, sheesh, it's another fruit. Can't they do anything original? Here I am tired of kumquaat tarts and what's my alternative? Mangoes! I want something different. How about dead rats?
Most of the features of windows are copied verbatim (ie. taskbar, "start" button, same keyboard shortcuts).
taskbar: GNOME has a taskbar. IceWM has a taskbar. Even MacOSX has a taskbar. Kicker is different though. You get icons (launchers, menus, special), desktop switcher, tasks, applets, etc. You can make it growable. You can even choose not to run it at all (try that with winblowz).
"start" button: Ever see that funny footprint in GNOME? It's called a root menu. Every usable environment has a root menu. Sometimes this root menu is on the RMB on the root window, and sometimes it's on a panel. If you don't like it on the panel, remove it and remap it to the RMB.
keyboard shortcuts: If you don't like them, change them. Use the CDE shortcuts instead, or create your own. The last thing KDE needs is to create a whole new standard. I've been using these exact same shortcuts since OS/2 Warp, and I have absolutely no desire to learn a new set everytime I try a new windowmanager or desktop.
However, it would be nice to see something a little bit more revolutionary in it's design instead of rehashing the same old crap.
The WIMP interface is "windows, icons, menus, pointers." Okay, here's revolutionary: round windows, replace all text menus with animated images, replace all icons with new and improved keyboard shortcuts. We'll get rid of the mouse altogether and make everyone buy a touch screen.
how hard is it to select only the packages you want installed? Duh.
It's very hard. Select a package by mistake when all you're trying to do is read the description. So go unselect that package. No go find the 144 dependencies that got selected without telling you. Now go find all of their dependencies. All without going blind on their yellow/purple color scheme.
If you aren't able to understand it from the code alone, should you really be hacking it?
That's got to be the stupidest thing I've read all day. Unfortunately for the software industry it isn't orginal but in fact an unwritten policy.
Go look at the blueprints for a house. Fully documented. Look at the blueprints for nuclear reactor. Fully documented. Would YOU trust a nuclear reactor that was not documented? Software will not leave the dark ages until the developers start treating it as a professional discipline.
Freedom of speech means nothing if the government is not willing to provide its citizens with access to the predominant form of expression in the so-called "Information Age."
If taxpayer funded internet access is necessary for freedom of speech, then let's not stop at TCP/IP. I want my newspapers delivered for free. I want cable TV without having to pay for it. I want to be able to walk into any bookstore and not have to pay for anything. I want the latest music albumns delivered to my mailbox daily at no charge. Heck, I want the government to broadcast my every utterance for free on all radio and television stations.
Universal, unrestricted Internet access would work wonders for our society, promote competition and more efficient markets
Universal, unrestricted access to all print media would also work wonders for our society.
I agree with your assessment. He's whining about what everyone else in the industry has to put up with every day. I get the crap he's complaining about constantly.
He needs to decompress and get back to his studies.
There are more to comments than the educational value. You need comments to communicate with other developers. You need comments for maintenance purposes. And you need comments to prove that you know what you're doing.
It's perfectly fine to have highly technical comments of the sort that you or I would never understand. But it is NOT okay to have comments that say "you really aren't expected to understand this." If you are unable to explain something to someone else, you don't really understand it.
Who is this "we" he refers to? Did he have a mouse in his pocket? RMS is referring to Debian, but he is not a spokesman for Debian, so using the word "we" is bizarre.
Honestly, getting the hurd up 'n running has been not as important since we already have Linux.
And thus you get the biggest cop-out in all of free software history. GNU was founded to create a specific unix-like operating system called "The GNU System". They were getting really close to finishing it, when along comes Linux. So they decided not to complete The GNU System, but instead to rename Linux to GNU/Linux. They could have done the honorable thing and conceded that someone else beat them to the punch. But instead they have spent the better portion of a decade trying to convince everyone that they actually succeeded. Until HURD is stable there will be no stable GNU System.
RMS didn't want to use a BSD license because then there would be no "incentive" to contribute back to the project. I can imagine his thought processes now, "but if I accept this contribution from you under the BSD license, what's to prevent you from improving your contribution without contributing your improvement back to your contribution?"
Just what does "tainted" mean? Is is a euphemism for "politically incorrect"? Does it mean that you have violated the GPL, but that you really haven't violated the GPL since you are going this on your own private computer with no intent to distribute a RAM image?
I recall the time when installing Windows on top of DRDOS or OS/2 would give you bogus error message to discourage non-M$ products. Maybe this "taint" message has the similar purpose to discourage non-RMS-approved products.
I really want to hear his answer. There's only one thing worse than undocumented code, and that's comments like "you really aren't expected to understand this." What kind of stupid idiotic comment is that for *open* software?
Looking at the kernel code, there are spots that are nicely commented. But silly comments like this just sort of cancel them out.
Any law with any freedom of interpretation has the same problems.
Of course. But that is beside the point. Let's say Alice kills Betty in a fit of jealous rage. Is this murder? Maybe, maybe not. It's up to a jury to decide. Is murder illegal? OF COURSE IT IS! The law is very objective in this area, and states quite unequivocally that murder is forbidden.
I can grab the law books and easily determine what actions are forbidden to me as an individual, or as representative of a corporation. But if I am a company that has been legally declared a monopoly, then I cannot determine this. Any specific action may or may not be illegal, and I cannot determine the difference beforehand.
Microsoft can have a fair idea. The law bans abuse of monopoly power.
A more vague and nebulous law I have never seen. This is subjective and arbitrary. What constitute "abuse"? What consitutes "monopoly power"? The whole point of the DOJ case was to define these terms as applied to Microsoft.
Let me give you an example not related to Microsoft. In my area Pacific Bell has a monopoly on local telephone service. Pacific Bell also provides DSL services which it does not have a monopoly in. It's easy to determine that Pacific Bell is a monopoly, since it acquired that status through direct government charter. But what constitutes abuse? Is charging $25 for DSL while everyone else charges $50 abuse? You don't know and you won't know until some court at some time says either yes or no. Maybe it's abuse if some companies go out of business because of it, in which case it can not be determined whether that action is abusive until after the fact.
Leveraging one monopoly (an OS monopoly) to create a monopoly in another area where you currently do not have one (say, a Browser monopoly) is illegal.
This is still vague, and even more subjective. Consider that Microsoft was developing Internet Explorer before they gained a monopoly with Windows. What is substantially different between distributing IExplorer for no charge while not a monopoly, and including it for no charge with the OS while you are a monopoly?
And here's the arbitrariness: what if cost-less Netscape had managed to successfully compete with cost-less IExplorer? Would a crime have then been committed or not? Or what if IExplorer were NOT bundled with Windows and Netscape still lost market share?
The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software.
I believe that this is merely a holdover from the old non-free Qt of yore. The new free Qt is under the QPL and GPL, neither of which make any distinction between the development, distribution and deployment stages. Neither of these licenses compels the user to distribute their software. The old non-free license did forbid this, because Trolltech didn't want people using the 'free' edition for internal commercial use.
Consider the evidence: "The Free Edition license" mentioned above is the dual QPL/GPL. There is nothing else it can be. Trolltech is asserting that the QPL or GPL is saying something which they do not. Trolltech is NOT claiming that the professional license is saying this. I can only conclude that this is a holdover from a FAQ explaing the old non-free 1.x license.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were just Mae West going down we could manage. That's how the internet was designed. We'll have some inconveniences and crap, but the internet will still operate just fine.
The problem are all of the servers that are colocated there. Stupid stupid stupid.
Yeah, I feel much better now that I used my empoyer's resources to post that :-)
It was monday morning and my brain wasn't working too well to begin with. Then I logged in to spazdot and all remaining vestiges of rational thought evaporated. My apologies for the gross error of two centuries.
In any event, the oppression of slaves is in no way comparable to the oppression one receives at the hands of our corporate masters when they fail to offer us free anonymizer services.
Real slimeballs huh? And in Dallas of all places!
But what the hell does this have to do with corporate oppression as it relates to "anonymous internet services"?
At what level do you allow workers the freedom to use the internet for personal stuff?
Since the use of company owned computers for company use is such a hard idea for spazdots to grok, here is a simple ananogy:
Joe: "I'm here to fix your computer."
Ichimunki: "It's in the den."
Joe: "Right. Remember, I charge $50 an hour."
Ichimunki: "That's okay just as long as you fix it."
...
two hours later in the den
...
Ichimunki: "What the hell are you doing?"
Joe: "Check out the tits on that momma!"
Ichimunki: "You're supposed to be fixing the computer, not jerking to pr0n!"
Joe: "Hey relax, I got the computer fixed an hour ago."
Ichimunki: "You can't use my stuff to surf SlutDot damn you!"
Joe: "Hey, it's my freedom. Don't oppress me. Here's my bill for two hours of work."
are there any free services left for those suffering from corporate oppression?"
Let's put things in perspective. The women forced to wear bhurkas in Afghanistan are oppressed. The dissidents in the Gulag were oppressed. The Jews in the ghetto were oppressed. The African-americans forced into slavery two centuries ago were oppressed. You are not oppressed merely because you don't get automatic anonymity when you choose to disclose your public information to a corporation.
High cuisine! I remember when they put pizza sauce on giant eel!
Well, except for "totally radical", both KDE and GNOME meet all of your requirements.
I am trying to make the point that documenting it the code (presumably with comments) is not the proper place to do it.
Every programming language I know has syntax for including comments. Presumably these comments are for more than just satisfying license requirements to document changes within the code.
Not all of your documentation needs to be in the form of comments. In the case of the buddy system, it would have been appropriate to include a reference to external docs. But not even this was done. As a professional software developer, my documentation is expected to include specifications and commented code at the bare minimum. A code review for uncommented code? Unthinkable!
Comment your code. Comment your code. Comment your code. It's standard practice in academia, industry, and yes, even volunteer open source projects.
Maybe it's just me, but KDE sure looks a lot like Windows.
Have you ever seen Windows? Have you ever used KDE? Comparing KDE to Windows is like comparing kumquaats to mangoes. I mean, sheesh, it's another fruit. Can't they do anything original? Here I am tired of kumquaat tarts and what's my alternative? Mangoes! I want something different. How about dead rats?
Most of the features of windows are copied verbatim (ie. taskbar, "start" button, same keyboard shortcuts).
taskbar: GNOME has a taskbar. IceWM has a taskbar. Even MacOSX has a taskbar. Kicker is different though. You get icons (launchers, menus, special), desktop switcher, tasks, applets, etc. You can make it growable. You can even choose not to run it at all (try that with winblowz).
"start" button: Ever see that funny footprint in GNOME? It's called a root menu. Every usable environment has a root menu. Sometimes this root menu is on the RMB on the root window, and sometimes it's on a panel. If you don't like it on the panel, remove it and remap it to the RMB.
keyboard shortcuts: If you don't like them, change them. Use the CDE shortcuts instead, or create your own. The last thing KDE needs is to create a whole new standard. I've been using these exact same shortcuts since OS/2 Warp, and I have absolutely no desire to learn a new set everytime I try a new windowmanager or desktop.
However, it would be nice to see something a little bit more revolutionary in it's design instead of rehashing the same old crap.
The WIMP interface is "windows, icons, menus, pointers." Okay, here's revolutionary: round windows, replace all text menus with animated images, replace all icons with new and improved keyboard shortcuts. We'll get rid of the mouse altogether and make everyone buy a touch screen.
how hard is it to select only the packages you want installed? Duh.
It's very hard. Select a package by mistake when all you're trying to do is read the description. So go unselect that package. No go find the 144 dependencies that got selected without telling you. Now go find all of their dependencies. All without going blind on their yellow/purple color scheme.
A Republican is someone who just got mugged.
A Democrat is someone who just got busted.
A Libertarian is someone who just got busted for pot.
If you aren't able to understand it from the code alone, should you really be hacking it?
That's got to be the stupidest thing I've read all day. Unfortunately for the software industry it isn't orginal but in fact an unwritten policy.
Go look at the blueprints for a house. Fully documented. Look at the blueprints for nuclear reactor. Fully documented. Would YOU trust a nuclear reactor that was not documented? Software will not leave the dark ages until the developers start treating it as a professional discipline.
Freedom of speech means nothing if the government is not willing to provide its citizens with access to the predominant form of expression in the so-called "Information Age."
If taxpayer funded internet access is necessary for freedom of speech, then let's not stop at TCP/IP. I want my newspapers delivered for free. I want cable TV without having to pay for it. I want to be able to walk into any bookstore and not have to pay for anything. I want the latest music albumns delivered to my mailbox daily at no charge. Heck, I want the government to broadcast my every utterance for free on all radio and television stations.
Universal, unrestricted Internet access would work wonders for our society, promote competition and more efficient markets
Universal, unrestricted access to all print media would also work wonders for our society.
I agree with your assessment. He's whining about what everyone else in the industry has to put up with every day. I get the crap he's complaining about constantly.
He needs to decompress and get back to his studies.
There are more to comments than the educational value. You need comments to communicate with other developers. You need comments for maintenance purposes. And you need comments to prove that you know what you're doing.
It's perfectly fine to have highly technical comments of the sort that you or I would never understand. But it is NOT okay to have comments that say "you really aren't expected to understand this." If you are unable to explain something to someone else, you don't really understand it.
How does Hurd compare to xMach?
In this context, we want to make that emphasis.
Who is this "we" he refers to? Did he have a mouse in his pocket? RMS is referring to Debian, but he is not a spokesman for Debian, so using the word "we" is bizarre.
But the kernel is the operating system!
Honestly, getting the hurd up 'n running has been not as important since we already have Linux.
And thus you get the biggest cop-out in all of free software history. GNU was founded to create a specific unix-like operating system called "The GNU System". They were getting really close to finishing it, when along comes Linux. So they decided not to complete The GNU System, but instead to rename Linux to GNU/Linux. They could have done the honorable thing and conceded that someone else beat them to the punch. But instead they have spent the better portion of a decade trying to convince everyone that they actually succeeded. Until HURD is stable there will be no stable GNU System.
RMS didn't want to use a BSD license because then there would be no "incentive" to contribute back to the project. I can imagine his thought processes now, "but if I accept this contribution from you under the BSD license, what's to prevent you from improving your contribution without contributing your improvement back to your contribution?"
Just what does "tainted" mean? Is is a euphemism for "politically incorrect"? Does it mean that you have violated the GPL, but that you really haven't violated the GPL since you are going this on your own private computer with no intent to distribute a RAM image?
I recall the time when installing Windows on top of DRDOS or OS/2 would give you bogus error message to discourage non-M$ products. Maybe this "taint" message has the similar purpose to discourage non-RMS-approved products.
I really want to hear his answer. There's only one thing worse than undocumented code, and that's comments like "you really aren't expected to understand this." What kind of stupid idiotic comment is that for *open* software?
Looking at the kernel code, there are spots that are nicely commented. But silly comments like this just sort of cancel them out.
Any law with any freedom of interpretation has the same problems.
Of course. But that is beside the point. Let's say Alice kills Betty in a fit of jealous rage. Is this murder? Maybe, maybe not. It's up to a jury to decide. Is murder illegal? OF COURSE IT IS! The law is very objective in this area, and states quite unequivocally that murder is forbidden.
I can grab the law books and easily determine what actions are forbidden to me as an individual, or as representative of a corporation. But if I am a company that has been legally declared a monopoly, then I cannot determine this. Any specific action may or may not be illegal, and I cannot determine the difference beforehand.
Microsoft can have a fair idea. The law bans abuse of monopoly power.
A more vague and nebulous law I have never seen. This is subjective and arbitrary. What constitute "abuse"? What consitutes "monopoly power"? The whole point of the DOJ case was to define these terms as applied to Microsoft.
Let me give you an example not related to Microsoft. In my area Pacific Bell has a monopoly on local telephone service. Pacific Bell also provides DSL services which it does not have a monopoly in. It's easy to determine that Pacific Bell is a monopoly, since it acquired that status through direct government charter. But what constitutes abuse? Is charging $25 for DSL while everyone else charges $50 abuse? You don't know and you won't know until some court at some time says either yes or no. Maybe it's abuse if some companies go out of business because of it, in which case it can not be determined whether that action is abusive until after the fact.
Leveraging one monopoly (an OS monopoly) to create a monopoly in another area where you currently do not have one (say, a Browser monopoly) is illegal.
This is still vague, and even more subjective. Consider that Microsoft was developing Internet Explorer before they gained a monopoly with Windows. What is substantially different between distributing IExplorer for no charge while not a monopoly, and including it for no charge with the OS while you are a monopoly?
And here's the arbitrariness: what if cost-less Netscape had managed to successfully compete with cost-less IExplorer? Would a crime have then been committed or not? Or what if IExplorer were NOT bundled with Windows and Netscape still lost market share?
The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software.
I believe that this is merely a holdover from the old non-free Qt of yore. The new free Qt is under the QPL and GPL, neither of which make any distinction between the development, distribution and deployment stages. Neither of these licenses compels the user to distribute their software. The old non-free license did forbid this, because Trolltech didn't want people using the 'free' edition for internal commercial use.
Consider the evidence: "The Free Edition license" mentioned above is the dual QPL/GPL. There is nothing else it can be. Trolltech is asserting that the QPL or GPL is saying something which they do not. Trolltech is NOT claiming that the professional license is saying this. I can only conclude that this is a holdover from a FAQ explaing the old non-free 1.x license.