If the company was smart, they would say "show me the warrant". Then when the cops show up with the warrant, let just the cops in, 'cause the BSA won't be listed on the warrant, only the cops.
Of course, IANAL, and if you get busted I won't help in your defense...
The Apple Public Source License (APSL). This is not a free software license.
There are problems with the APSL. However it still meets every definition of Free Software. RMS might not think it is, but the definition he created says it is.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The APSL meets every point. I'm not saying it's the best license out there. Far from it. But the APSL does manage to squeak through the definitions set in place by RMS decades before the creation of the APSL.
The GNU System (notice the capitalization) is an operating system specifically described by RMS in the GNU Manifesto. It does not describe any Linux based system. A lot of the user environment of Linux is indeed based on GNU software, but that is insufficient to make it GNU.
If Linus and friends had taken The GNU System and merely added the missing kernel, then yes, it should properly be referred to as a GNU based system. But that is not what happened.
Using the ports system we are building our distribution quickly, and since it's Darwin, we can introduce many OSX users to free software in the process.
I'm still not sure I get you. Perhaps all the Independence Day beer has gone to my head:-)
I had assumed that Darwin was already a finished (although minimal) system. And coming from FreeBSD land, I had always envisioned the ports as being supplementary to the OS. Are you saying that GNU-Darwin is using the ports system to actually build the OS (as opposed to a buildworld)?
FreeBSD, from which Darwin was in part based, also contains all of the GNU stuff. I am assuming that GNU-Darwin is still using the Mach microkernel and the FreeBSD derived OS. Or have pieces of Darwin been replaced by their GNU equivalents?
Not at all! I said that every developer is different. By all means, do not do what I do!
However, I can offer one solution. If you are releasing net-snmp for use on FreeBSD, I can only assume that you test it on FreeBSD, and thus have a FreeBSD box somewhere to use. Why not become the port maintainer yourself?
He believes in SOMETHING, which is more than can be said for 99% of the people out there.
Merely believing in something isn't good enough. Bill Gates also believes about a lot of stuff. Quite passionately in fact.
I admire Stallman's tenacity and courage. I admire that he is unwavering in his goals. But that doesn't automatically make him right.
And of course, what you see as being your "rights" regarding software (apparently the ability to use it) isn't what RMS thinks of as the rights you should have (the ability to examine the code, and modify it if you choose, and so on).
RMS has mistaken utility for liberty. gcc has extraordinary amounts of utility but it doesn't give me any liberty that I don't already have. Pico does not have as much utility as it could, since I can't redistribute modifications of it, but it still doesn't take away any liberty that I possess. For a GNUphile, the previous won't make any sense. Let me clarify: Monday, no Pine, 75 points of liberty and 75 points of utility. Tuesday, installed pine, 75 points of liberty and 85 points of utility.
I prefer software with high utility. There are times when the utility of a program in some areas exceeds the lack of utility in another area. A Unix without Pine is like a Unix without vi. It has a utility that far outweighs amy warning the author of nano can summon.
I don't get this article at all. It's full of jargon, hyperbole and muddlethink. I'm sure there's a good idea buried in here somewhere, but I can't find it.
These ports have tens of thousands of interconnections, called dependencies, which must be satisfied in order to build the applications.
No port has tens of thousands of dependencies. And since you only build one port at a time, there is no need to take into account the dependencies of any unrelated port.
Such a large and complex network of software dependencies...
It's not a complex network. It's a simple tree.
an uber-system has been superposed on the ports system
Time to go back to English class!
...the naive user will not have to face a daunting tangle of dependency.
A) Give your users respect. They are not naive. B) Dependencies are not tangled.
Thus, the FreeBSD ports system, now as a cross-platform, globally distributed, cooperative development and distribution system could form a nexus of user freedom and empowerment.
It's nice to read that on the 4th of July, but what the fsck does it mean?!?
p.s. Why is he calling this version of Darwin "GNU-Darwin"? Is this a GNU project? Does he think that Darwin is really the GNU System?
And with the official CDs, you get thousands of precompiled packages all ready to run with no download. It doesn't take a Kreskin to know that some people will grasp at any straw in an effort to bash someone else's OS.
Most patches (not all) in a port are only there to get the package to build on a specific system. They would be totally useless elsewhere. And most have nothing to do with the code itself.
Case in point: net-snmp on FreeBSD-4.3. The majority of patches are to makefiles. The majority of the rest only updated the FreeBSD version macros. Actual code changes are rare, and are only for the purpose of getting the software to build.
You are not like all other developers. We all work in different ways. I develop on FreeBSD and Slackware. If a patch came in for HPUX, I wouldn't accept it. It would be pointless to do so. I cannot test it, and cannot maintain it. Unless it were an actual bug fix, I would ignore it. If the HPUX maintainer is willing to do the work I'm more than happy. I'll add him to my update mailing list along with a thank you note and a virtual beer.
Another drawback to Redhat (and many other linuces) is that once you learn Redhat, they only thing you know is Redhat. Knowing Linuxconf inside and out won't help you on SuSE.
The trouble with shallow learning curves is that you end up with shallow knowledge. If a newbie came to me and wanted to know which Unix to start with, I would direct them to Slackware or FreeBSD. That way they will really learn Unix.
No, they are not making my decisions for me. But I never claimed that they did. But it irks me that they want to make it harder for me to choose Pico by urging distributors not to include it.
Let me offer up an analogy so you can see why some of us whine. Do you ever get upset when a Republicrat tells you not to vote for the Demopublican candidate because they want to take your freedom away? Do you ever get angry when a Demopublican says that if you really cared about freedom you shouldn't vote Republicrat? Now what if the Libocialist Party came along and said it cared about you so much that it had a plan to preserve your freedom by working towards the eventual elimination of the Demopublican and Republicrat parties? Would you be at least just a little miffed?
Every time there's an election in the US (maybe it's the same elsewhere in the world) everybody crawls out of the woodwork bitching about "negative campaigning". Well, those "few people who whine about GNU" do so because we're tired of all this negative campaigning about anything not bearing the imprimatur of RMS.
This Pico story could have been written without all that pseudo-morality rhetoric. We don't need to be told that only Debian is legal to distribute, or have to endure some mini-tirade on "perverts", or implications that users are so stupid they'll be "lulled" into losing their rights.
I have far more warm feelings towards the developers who have been giving away valuable software for a decade and a half, than I do for yet another FSF developer cloning their work, urging users to switch for ideological reasons and acting like he's saving the world from pure evil.
Yup, got to agree with you on that one. I may not like all of the licensing terms of Pine, but they're a hell of a lot better than Outlook Express's! It's quite ingenuous for the author of nano to come out with an article lambasting Pine as something worse than Outlook Express. I'm sorry, but I possess free will and the ability to excercise it. I don't need some drone from GNU telling me what software I should or should not use. Even if Pine is going to warp my mind and twist my spine, it's still my choice to use it or not, not GNU's.
Too many GNU advocates have forgotten what freedom is.
Freedom is the absence of restriction. There are many kinds of restrictions, but GNU and the FSF only focus on one kind. Specifically, they focus on licensing restrictions.
But there is one kind of restriction that I find particularly onerous, and one that GNU ignores. And that is a restriction on my ability to choose.
Pine's restriction against redistributing modifications is minor compared to not being able to choose to use Pine. No one is forcing me to use Pine. I do not suddenly lose my free will when I see "pine" in a list of packages to install. If I choose to use Pine, that is my personal choice and no one else's business!
I find it absurd that some people think that I can lose my freedom by having ten mail clients to choose from instead of nine.
You don't see people cleaning the window with "Kwindex" or wiping their noses with "Gnokleenex" do you?
That's because Windex and Kleenex are artificial words created specifically to be used as trademarks. "Illustrator" is an ordinary English word. There's a big difference.
If "illustrator", the word, is indeed trademarked by Adobe for vector drawing software, then Killustrator will have to go. But "illustrator" is a stupid trademark nonetheless. That's like trademarking "window cleaner" or "tissue paper" instead of Windex and Kleenex.
Re:FreeBSD + Broadband != Need for DVD Distro
on
FreeBSD on DVD
·
· Score: 2
Yup, I tend to agree. But...
Not everyone has a fast connection to the internet. And not everyone wants to spend time compiling the ports. Prebuilt packages all in one place (CD or DVD) is very convenient to a lot of people.
They're not that different. He just managed to "get it" for Unix while using FreeBSD. Come on now, we all know of Redhat users who think Debian is lame, and vice versa. It usually boils down to which the distro this grokked first.
Wow! It looks like you haven't seen Slackware for a very long time then!
modern graphical interfaces
KDE-2.1.2, GNOME-1.4, XFree86-4.1.0. How much more modern can you get than that?
an easy way to install
The second easiest install I have ever done was Slackware-7.1. The first was DOS-3.3. The worst was Corel LinuxOS-1.0. Second worst was Mandrake-7.0.
An easy install is much, much more than pretty pictures and icons to click on. An easy install is organized, minimal, fast and error free. If all you can do is one-finger hunt-and-peck typing, and on a mouse at that, then perhaps you should simply stay away from any variety of Unix.
and configure devices
Okay, configuring ISA-PNP soundcards on Slackware requires a few brain cells to do.
I'll grant you this one. But may I suggest, at least, that you learn how to configure those devices by hand anyway? A little bit of knowledge never hurt anyone, but saved quite a few butts along the way.
a package system to install/uninstall softwares
installpkg, removepkg, pkgtool. And if you want a GUI, use kpackage.
Please inform me as to how RedHat is less secure than Slackware?
Compare the length of the Redhat-7.1 errata to the Slackware-7.1 errata. For a REAL eye opener, compare the Redhat-7.0 errata to the Slackware-7.0 errata.
I dearly love Open Source, but there's two major bad habits most Open Source developers have. First, they treat their customer base as their own personal SQA department. Second, they think that an entry in an errata counts as security.
Did you even *READ* the previous post?!? cp and tar are NOT package installers. They do NOT keep track of what's installed. They do NOT uninstall packages for you. The only think Slackware lacks in way of package management is dependency tracking.
Do you really believe that installpkg is merely an alias for 'tar xvfz'? Go check again.
Case in point. I just finished compiling FreeBSD 4.3 and all my favorite packages. It has a very *nice* ports/packages systems.
But it's still a package manager deep down. And has all of the disadvantages of a package manager. I installed XFree86-4.1, which includes freetype-2. But that's not good enough for other ports that need freetype-2. They want the freetype-2 port, and not the XFree86-2 port. So I eventually ended up with 2 freetype-2 installations that are identical in everyway except that one is under/usr/X11R6 and the other under/usr/local.
The useless dependencies are still there. Yes, they're useless. You get much, much fewer dependencies building my hand than building through a package manager.
For instance, Dia requires GNOME... Huh? Since when? If I used GNOME then I would like it compiled with extra GNOME flash built in, but if I don't use GNOME, that's 3 digits of megabytes I don't need.
And why does Qt need mng when I've never seen an mng file in my life?
(okay, enough ranting...)
Yes, like Debian, I can tweak the sources and makefiles before building. But I'm building the entire system. I don't have the time to tweak fifty packages and get this all done over the weekend. So I ended up building a few of them directly from source, bypassing the ports system.
I use both Slack and FreeBSD. I like the ports system, but I still find lots going for Patrick's simple tarballs and build scripts.
Slashdot Mirror
If the company was smart, they would say "show me the warrant". Then when the cops show up with the warrant, let just the cops in, 'cause the BSA won't be listed on the warrant, only the cops.
Of course, IANAL, and if you get busted I won't help in your defense...
Since the code is up there with no attempt at protection, I can only assume that this counts as "published" source code.
But mistake on Microsoft's part.
There are problems with the APSL. However it still meets every definition of Free Software. RMS might not think it is, but the definition he created says it is.
The APSL meets every point. I'm not saying it's the best license out there. Far from it. But the APSL does manage to squeak through the definitions set in place by RMS decades before the creation of the APSL.
Sigh...
The GNU System (notice the capitalization) is an operating system specifically described by RMS in the GNU Manifesto. It does not describe any Linux based system. A lot of the user environment of Linux is indeed based on GNU software, but that is insufficient to make it GNU.
If Linus and friends had taken The GNU System and merely added the missing kernel, then yes, it should properly be referred to as a GNU based system. But that is not what happened.
Using the ports system we are building our distribution quickly, and since it's Darwin, we can introduce many OSX users to free software in the process.
:-)
I'm still not sure I get you. Perhaps all the Independence Day beer has gone to my head
I had assumed that Darwin was already a finished (although minimal) system. And coming from FreeBSD land, I had always envisioned the ports as being supplementary to the OS. Are you saying that GNU-Darwin is using the ports system to actually build the OS (as opposed to a buildworld)?
It's Darwin plus all the GNU stuff.
FreeBSD, from which Darwin was in part based, also contains all of the GNU stuff. I am assuming that GNU-Darwin is still using the Mach microkernel and the FreeBSD derived OS. Or have pieces of Darwin been replaced by their GNU equivalents?
Not at all! I said that every developer is different. By all means, do not do what I do!
However, I can offer one solution. If you are releasing net-snmp for use on FreeBSD, I can only assume that you test it on FreeBSD, and thus have a FreeBSD box somewhere to use. Why not become the port maintainer yourself?
He believes in SOMETHING, which is more than can be said for 99% of the people out there.
Merely believing in something isn't good enough. Bill Gates also believes about a lot of stuff. Quite passionately in fact.
I admire Stallman's tenacity and courage. I admire that he is unwavering in his goals. But that doesn't automatically make him right.
And of course, what you see as being your "rights" regarding software (apparently the ability to use it) isn't what RMS thinks of as the rights you should have (the ability to examine the code, and modify it if you choose, and so on).
RMS has mistaken utility for liberty. gcc has extraordinary amounts of utility but it doesn't give me any liberty that I don't already have. Pico does not have as much utility as it could, since I can't redistribute modifications of it, but it still doesn't take away any liberty that I possess. For a GNUphile, the previous won't make any sense. Let me clarify: Monday, no Pine, 75 points of liberty and 75 points of utility. Tuesday, installed pine, 75 points of liberty and 85 points of utility.
I prefer software with high utility. There are times when the utility of a program in some areas exceeds the lack of utility in another area. A Unix without Pine is like a Unix without vi. It has a utility that far outweighs amy warning the author of nano can summon.
I don't get this article at all. It's full of jargon, hyperbole and muddlethink. I'm sure there's a good idea buried in here somewhere, but I can't find it.
...the naive user will not have to face a daunting tangle of dependency.
These ports have tens of thousands of interconnections, called dependencies, which must be satisfied in order to build the applications.
No port has tens of thousands of dependencies. And since you only build one port at a time, there is no need to take into account the dependencies of any unrelated port.
Such a large and complex network of software dependencies...
It's not a complex network. It's a simple tree.
an uber-system has been superposed on the ports system
Time to go back to English class!
A) Give your users respect. They are not naive. B) Dependencies are not tangled.
Thus, the FreeBSD ports system, now as a cross-platform, globally distributed, cooperative development and distribution system could form a nexus of user freedom and empowerment.
It's nice to read that on the 4th of July, but what the fsck does it mean?!?
p.s. Why is he calling this version of Darwin "GNU-Darwin"? Is this a GNU project? Does he think that Darwin is really the GNU System?
And with the official CDs, you get thousands of precompiled packages all ready to run with no download. It doesn't take a Kreskin to know that some people will grasp at any straw in an effort to bash someone else's OS.
Most patches (not all) in a port are only there to get the package to build on a specific system. They would be totally useless elsewhere. And most have nothing to do with the code itself.
Case in point: net-snmp on FreeBSD-4.3. The majority of patches are to makefiles. The majority of the rest only updated the FreeBSD version macros. Actual code changes are rare, and are only for the purpose of getting the software to build.
You are not like all other developers. We all work in different ways. I develop on FreeBSD and Slackware. If a patch came in for HPUX, I wouldn't accept it. It would be pointless to do so. I cannot test it, and cannot maintain it. Unless it were an actual bug fix, I would ignore it. If the HPUX maintainer is willing to do the work I'm more than happy. I'll add him to my update mailing list along with a thank you note and a virtual beer.
Another drawback to Redhat (and many other linuces) is that once you learn Redhat, they only thing you know is Redhat. Knowing Linuxconf inside and out won't help you on SuSE.
The trouble with shallow learning curves is that you end up with shallow knowledge. If a newbie came to me and wanted to know which Unix to start with, I would direct them to Slackware or FreeBSD. That way they will really learn Unix.
No, they are not making my decisions for me. But I never claimed that they did. But it irks me that they want to make it harder for me to choose Pico by urging distributors not to include it.
Let me offer up an analogy so you can see why some of us whine. Do you ever get upset when a Republicrat tells you not to vote for the Demopublican candidate because they want to take your freedom away? Do you ever get angry when a Demopublican says that if you really cared about freedom you shouldn't vote Republicrat? Now what if the Libocialist Party came along and said it cared about you so much that it had a plan to preserve your freedom by working towards the eventual elimination of the Demopublican and Republicrat parties? Would you be at least just a little miffed?
Every time there's an election in the US (maybe it's the same elsewhere in the world) everybody crawls out of the woodwork bitching about "negative campaigning". Well, those "few people who whine about GNU" do so because we're tired of all this negative campaigning about anything not bearing the imprimatur of RMS.
This Pico story could have been written without all that pseudo-morality rhetoric. We don't need to be told that only Debian is legal to distribute, or have to endure some mini-tirade on "perverts", or implications that users are so stupid they'll be "lulled" into losing their rights.
I have far more warm feelings towards the developers who have been giving away valuable software for a decade and a half, than I do for yet another FSF developer cloning their work, urging users to switch for ideological reasons and acting like he's saving the world from pure evil.
Yup, got to agree with you on that one. I may not like all of the licensing terms of Pine, but they're a hell of a lot better than Outlook Express's! It's quite ingenuous for the author of nano to come out with an article lambasting Pine as something worse than Outlook Express. I'm sorry, but I possess free will and the ability to excercise it. I don't need some drone from GNU telling me what software I should or should not use. Even if Pine is going to warp my mind and twist my spine, it's still my choice to use it or not, not GNU's.
Too many GNU advocates have forgotten what freedom is.
Freedom is the absence of restriction. There are many kinds of restrictions, but GNU and the FSF only focus on one kind. Specifically, they focus on licensing restrictions.
But there is one kind of restriction that I find particularly onerous, and one that GNU ignores. And that is a restriction on my ability to choose.
Pine's restriction against redistributing modifications is minor compared to not being able to choose to use Pine. No one is forcing me to use Pine. I do not suddenly lose my free will when I see "pine" in a list of packages to install. If I choose to use Pine, that is my personal choice and no one else's business!
I find it absurd that some people think that I can lose my freedom by having ten mail clients to choose from instead of nine.
You don't see people cleaning the window with "Kwindex" or wiping their noses with "Gnokleenex" do you?
That's because Windex and Kleenex are artificial words created specifically to be used as trademarks. "Illustrator" is an ordinary English word. There's a big difference.
If "illustrator", the word, is indeed trademarked by Adobe for vector drawing software, then Killustrator will have to go. But "illustrator" is a stupid trademark nonetheless. That's like trademarking "window cleaner" or "tissue paper" instead of Windex and Kleenex.
Yup, I tend to agree. But...
Not everyone has a fast connection to the internet. And not everyone wants to spend time compiling the ports. Prebuilt packages all in one place (CD or DVD) is very convenient to a lot of people.
They're not that different. He just managed to "get it" for Unix while using FreeBSD. Come on now, we all know of Redhat users who think Debian is lame, and vice versa. It usually boils down to which the distro this grokked first.
In this case, he grokked BSD first.
Not according to RMS.
For those of you fellow Slak people, I strongly reccommend that you check out FreeBSD.
Yeah, I checked it out. And that's what I'm using now!
But I still have Slackware around. And when 8.0 comes in on the autoship, I'll be upgrading to that. I dual boot, but I don't dual boot Windows.
Wow! It looks like you haven't seen Slackware for a very long time then!
modern graphical interfaces
KDE-2.1.2, GNOME-1.4, XFree86-4.1.0. How much more modern can you get than that?
an easy way to install
The second easiest install I have ever done was Slackware-7.1. The first was DOS-3.3. The worst was Corel LinuxOS-1.0. Second worst was Mandrake-7.0.
An easy install is much, much more than pretty pictures and icons to click on. An easy install is organized, minimal, fast and error free. If all you can do is one-finger hunt-and-peck typing, and on a mouse at that, then perhaps you should simply stay away from any variety of Unix.
and configure devices
Okay, configuring ISA-PNP soundcards on Slackware requires a few brain cells to do.
I'll grant you this one. But may I suggest, at least, that you learn how to configure those devices by hand anyway? A little bit of knowledge never hurt anyone, but saved quite a few butts along the way.
a package system to install/uninstall softwares
installpkg, removepkg, pkgtool. And if you want a GUI, use kpackage.
Please inform me as to how RedHat is less secure than Slackware?
Compare the length of the Redhat-7.1 errata to the Slackware-7.1 errata. For a REAL eye opener, compare the Redhat-7.0 errata to the Slackware-7.0 errata.
I dearly love Open Source, but there's two major bad habits most Open Source developers have. First, they treat their customer base as their own personal SQA department. Second, they think that an entry in an errata counts as security.
Did you even *READ* the previous post?!? cp and tar are NOT package installers. They do NOT keep track of what's installed. They do NOT uninstall packages for you. The only think Slackware lacks in way of package management is dependency tracking.
Do you really believe that installpkg is merely an alias for 'tar xvfz'? Go check again.
Case in point. I just finished compiling FreeBSD 4.3 and all my favorite packages. It has a very *nice* ports/packages systems.
/usr/X11R6 and the other under /usr/local.
But it's still a package manager deep down. And has all of the disadvantages of a package manager. I installed XFree86-4.1, which includes freetype-2. But that's not good enough for other ports that need freetype-2. They want the freetype-2 port, and not the XFree86-2 port. So I eventually ended up with 2 freetype-2 installations that are identical in everyway except that one is under
The useless dependencies are still there. Yes, they're useless. You get much, much fewer dependencies building my hand than building through a package manager.
For instance, Dia requires GNOME... Huh? Since when? If I used GNOME then I would like it compiled with extra GNOME flash built in, but if I don't use GNOME, that's 3 digits of megabytes I don't need.
And why does Qt need mng when I've never seen an mng file in my life?
(okay, enough ranting...)
Yes, like Debian, I can tweak the sources and makefiles before building. But I'm building the entire system. I don't have the time to tweak fifty packages and get this all done over the weekend. So I ended up building a few of them directly from source, bypassing the ports system.
I use both Slack and FreeBSD. I like the ports system, but I still find lots going for Patrick's simple tarballs and build scripts.
Yes I have. And once you link LGPL code to GPL code, it magically transforms into the GPL.
But who want's to license their *application* under the LGPL?