Okay, just random ruminations without any cognizance behind them...
FreeBSD does not have a decent Java. That's because Sun won't approve a FreeBSD Java. All it takes is minor tweaks and a recompile of Blackdown. But they won't do it. Just being stubborn I guess.
Microsoft sees this situation and comes bearing C#. "Use this instead! It's better than Java!" I'm thinking they expect FreeBSD developers to roll over and beg.
I see you took that Microsoft bait hook, line and sinker. This announcement has absolutely NOTHING to do with the GPL, and everything to do with divide-and-conquer. In order to get.NET on Linux, there is no need to write any kernel modules, modify any GPL code, or link to any GPL libraries. They fed you shit and you enjoyed every bite of it.
Free Software is always Open Source, but the converse isn't always true.
Yes, the converse is always true. The two "movements" may be light years apart, but the things they are describing are identical.
Every Open Source license meets the definition of Free Software as stated by the FSF. It doesn't matter that RMS says that the APSL isn't Free, it meets the objective qualifications that he set. You are free "to run the program, for any purpose", "to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs", "to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor", and "to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public". It meets every point.
The GPL is only restrictive to those who would wish to further restrict others by proprietary relicensing.
Bzzzrt! Wrong!
The GPL is restrictive to ANYONE who doesn't use the GPL. I cannot legally create an application licensed under any other Free Software license that dynamically links to a GPL library. It doesn't matter that the license is *less* restrictive than the GPL, I still can't do it. Hell, I can't even link to a GPL library and place my own work into the public domain!
Yeah, I hear you. I was going to put one of my projects on SourceForge. Their info sheet and FAQ made it sound like the next best thing since cheese-whiz. Then I started looking at all the projects hosted on SourceForge, and got really cold feet...
Yeah, but can you use BSD and Win2K simultaneously? Can you pipe your WinY2K processes through a BSD filter? Can you configure your BSD through the control panel?
And FreeBSD is a direct descendant of the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. As I recall, 386BSD was the first usable BSD unencumbered by AT&T code, and FreeBSD 1.0 was merely a fork since Bill Jolitz stopped maintaining 386BSD. FreeBSD really is BSD.
Man, three replies to the same post. I must have really upset you on that one:-)
Actually, it is immoral.
In your definition, maybe. In RMS' definition, certainly. But so what? Simply saying that something is immoral does not make it so. You need to give reasons why it is immoral (as opposed to merely uncouth, odd or different).
It is immoral to put up imaginary boundaries between people.
Then why the fudge is RMS putting up imaginary boundaries around his software! That's what the GPL, or any other license, is. A set of restrictions that define an imaginary boundary around a piece of information.
It is immoral to place restrictions on sharing without good cause.
I am restricting no one from sharing of their own properties by restricting how my property is to be used. By using and encouraging the use of copyrights through the use of the GPL and other free software licenses, RMS is emphatically asserting that software can and should be owned. Fine. I own my software. It is mine to do with as I please, including letting other people use it under a restricted set of conditions.
However, some restrictions are immoral. The purchaser of software has indeed bought something, and that something is his property. But it isn't the information. It is the CD and the use of that information. I cannot restrict him from giving the CD to his friend and I cannot restrict him from using the information in ways that I disagree with. But that particular set of information that is my expression of speech does not belong to him.
I would find it immoral for me to purchase a lawnmower, and then come home and find that I can only use it on my lawn.
If you were not made aware of the restrictions on the use of that lawnmower at the time of purchase, then yes, it would definitely be immoral, because it would constitute fraud. But if you were aware of those restrictions, and bought it anyway, you first have to blame yourself before you blame the seller. The seller may or may not be immoral for selling you such a restricted lawnmower, but the blame still falls upon you.
If you don't like the terms of the software license, don't buy the software. Period. Don't buy CDs that you can only use on one computer if that's not what you want!
...especially when the agreement comes as a post-sale agreement (I've already bought it, but now I have to sign a contract to use it).
I absolutely agree with you here. I think shrink-wrap licenses and other similar items are very immoral. They are immoral because they are fraudulent. But don't extend the immorality of a few software manufacturers to cover all of them.
"ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"
Certainly. As a Christian I wholeheartedly agree. But I still see no reason to go out and invent new sins.
RMS and the FSF have invented new sins. Yes, it is a sin not to share. But sharing does not mean giving everything you own away. And that's what RMS wants, for me to give away every single byte of software that I write. It's good to give money to the poor, but it is not a sin to fail to give every cent you own to the poor.
When I get home from work I write my own software on my own time. I do not need this software to live on. It is my "surplus" so I freely give it away. I use the BSD license so that there are as few restrictions as possible on it. But somehow that isn't good enough for many GPL advocates. They want me to place additional restrictions on my code.
It's very close to the intent of the LGPL, and many of the old GNU libraries that were GPL+exception.
I don't have much of a problem with the GPL for applications. But I have a real problem with it for libraries. For users of other free software licenses, those libraries are unusable. Use whatever license you would like, but extend that same courtesy to users of your library.
I've got Mac friends who are excited by OSX. But they don't plan to switch until all of the wrinkles get ironed out.
Dot-oh releases always suck. If the guys at your office didn't want to experiment they shouldn't have switched. That's no fault against OSX.
If Mac people don't want to have anything to do with Unix, they don't have to! It's like two operating systems in one, and you have the choice of using one, the other, or both. Let's see the Window guys do that...
Darwin *IS* substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2! There is not generic BSD to base it on!
So they had a choice of dragging out their ancient copy of 44BSD-Lite, or choosing amongst modern Free, Open or Net. The choice FreeBSD. All of the *BSDs have code from the others, so this is no slight against any of them.
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
A nonsense question, really. FreeBSD *is* BSD. So are OpenBSD and NetBSD.
They recognize that, and do the moral thing and don't charge you for extra copies that _you_ create.
It's neither moral nor immoral. There is no moral difference between selling a software license allowing unlimited copying and one that only allows ten copies. Or one. So long as the customer is fully informed as to the status of the software ownership, there is no problem. That I find much more utility in Free Software than in proprietary is beside the point. Utility is not morality.
As for GNU, RMS used to make all his money selling emacs for $150/tape.
Anyone buying that tape today who thinks they're not making a donation? Back then the internet was no where near as prevalent as today. But that was then and this is now. When you can download the entire works of GNU for free plus a little time, or on CD from a variety of sources for only $2, how can you consider spending $5000 for it anything less than a donation? Even considering that the Deluxe edition comes with printed manuals, that's still not worth price when I can get the very same manuals from fatbrain for a fraction of that.
You missed the point. You are allowed to make OpenBSD ISO images. But you are NOT allowed to redistribute the Official OpenBSD ISO image. Yes, it does exist.
The analogy with Caldera is similar (not exact, but similar). You can redistribute all of its parts. You just can redistribute the distribution as a whole.
...but RedHat was more open (if not quite as good) and so RedHat got the market share (and the sales).
Do you really believe that why Redhat got their marketshare? Really? Then why isn't Debian three times are big as Redhat? They're much more open than Redhat....
Ho hum. Do you know anyone who actually paid $5000 for the Deluxe GNU Package, who didn't think that they were making a donation?
Free Software is great! But it's not a salable item by itself. You can make people pay for the copies they get from you, but you can't make them pay for copies they get elsewhere.
Caldera is a good case of this. They are targeting their distro towards corporations. Why should a corporation pay for a thousand copies of Caldera for their thousand workstations? We have about one hundred Redhat installs at my work, but only one copy of Redhat was ever purchased. That doesn't bother Redhat, though, because the corporate buyer isn't their target market.
That's all well and good, but I'm not seeing any "freedom-restricting" practices here. Caldera is licensing their distribution _as_a_whole_ under per-seat terms, but every bit of free software included in the distribution is still under its own terms. This is no different than a free OS that restricts copying of ISO images (OpenBSD) or includes proprietary applications (SuSE, Redhat, etc).
No, you can't burn a copy of the Caldera CD and give it to your friends. But you can give them all of the free parts inside...
This EULA is legally unenforcible. But so what? Most EULAs are unenforcible pieces of pseudo-legalese.
Microsoft, nor any other company or private concern, can take away the rights that copyright gives you WITHOUT a contract that you have explicitly agreed to. In the real world, contracts require your signature. Merely using the software is not good enough. Opening the shrink-wrap is not good enough. Clicking "ok" on an install screen is not good enough.
The whole computer industry is under the delusion that they get to unilaterally create agreements. This is bogus.
You're showing your ignorance. Go build a working Linux system sometime. I don't mean using Redsplat's gooey installer, I mean build everything from source code, and write your own init scripts.
I did that once. I came away with a much better appreciation of just what Linux is. It ain't merely a kernel. There's an entire infrastructure that it has to reside in. And that's before you even get to the GNU stuff. It's a hell of a lot more than merely the GNU System with the kernel swapped out. Much more.
If reducing the speed to 55MPH saved so many lives, then why not reduce it even further? What if the speed limit on I-5 were 25 miles per hour? Boy, that would save a lot of lives! If the Bush Administration wasn't so Evil, they would deny highway funds to any state that doesn't lower the speed limit to 15MPH. Because they don't they must intend for people to die.
When a corporation wants to charge you something you can refuse. When the government wants to charge you something, and you refuse, you go to jail. If you resist going to jail you will be shot.
I didn't like what Microsoft was selling, so I didn't buy it. I didn't like what the government was selling, but they sent their goons to collect anyway.
Everyone in Canada got a phone connection because our telcos were guaranteed monopoly control *in return for* universal service.
It wasn't much different in the US. You had a single phone company, AT&T, and everyone had exactly the same phone.
Then AT&T got broke up into clones. That was a huge mess. The proper way to do it would have been to simply open up the market. But eventually it straightened out. You have your choice for long distance. What would AT&T's 1950's rate look like today adjusted for inflation? A hell of a lot more than 10 cents a minute, which is what I'm paying now.
Unfortunately, the local phone services are still monopolies. I don't have a legal choice but to use Pacific Bell. And their zone calling is horrendously expensive.
I don't mind owning my own phone. I bought mine for $19.95 fifteen years ago. Under AT&T's monopoly I would still be leasing the same damn phone. And paying for repairs doesn't bother me either. You didn't get it for free under the monopolies. Your rates were a tiny bit higher each month because they knew that sometime you might need a repair. I've only needed a repair once. It cost two hundred dollars. Considering I've had my phone for fifteen years, that's around a mere one dollar a month.
We all know the story about how Noble Clinton was going to give a little girl on th Navajo reservation phone service and internet access. And we all know that Evil Bush become president and stopped that. Oh how cruel!
But this simple story goes much deeper. And the root of the problem still lies within government. Namely, the BIA. Shove all the indians onto remote reservations, make them dependent on welfare, stop them when they try to be self-sufficient with casinos, and when they complain about a lack of phone service say "it's not our problem". The solution is to abolish the BIA, give the deeds of the reservations to the tribes, and let them earn their own living. There are people with access to phones and high-speed internet access in places every bit as remote as the Navajo reservation.
Alaska is a problem, and very apropos to this story, since in many ways it resembles the problems that much of Canada faces. Unlike my grandparents, whose nearest town was fifty miles away, in Alaska it could be two hundred miles away. Or more. The question to ask is whether it is worth spending millions of taxpayers' dollars to run out and maintain a line for 50 residents in Moosepit, Alaska.
First off, folks in rural Alaska (which is REALLY rural) should not be expecting the same level of service as folks in urban New York or even Anchorage. You must reasonably expect to spend more for phone charges. At ten cents a minute long distance, no free market phone company in the world is going to spend one million dollars laying out and maintaing phone lines for a town of twenty. In a free market economy, you guys are going to have to either pay more for service, or look for alternatives.
Okay, somehow has to offer up the standard libertarian opposition to this proposal...
Freedom means the absence of coercion. The non-initiation of force. In order for this proposal to be implemented, there has to be a hell of a lot of coercion going on, namely in the acquisition of taxes. You will give us your money or you will go to court, and possibly jail, and if you resist going to jail we will shoot you. You do not have a choice. You will do what we say.
Now how does internet access work in the rest of the world? The same way the internet itself works. Through the free market. I don't know what's happening in southern North Dakota, but in *rural* California high-speed internet access is popping up everywhere. A friend in the middle of nowhere gets megabit connection speeds over Sprint Wireless. DSL, cable, wireless. It's all happening without anyone needing to be taxed.
I have no idea how everyone in Canada got a phone connection. But everyone in the US living in a community of over 500 has one. My grandparents got hooked up in 1930 when their nearest neighbor was two miles away and the nearest town was fifty miles away. Granted, this is dense suburbia compared to Canada's Yukon, but it still happened without the government creating a national phone service initiative.
If I haven't pissed all of the geeks off yet by not proclaiming my allegience to socialism, the following statement will. Not everyone needs high speed internet access. Hell. No one needs high speed internet access. They may want it but they don't *need* it. No one died last year for not having it, and I seriously doubt anyone will die next year for not having it. It's so nice to know that Canada has solved all of its problems except for this last little thing...
Excellent question. If your only goal is speed, then Tux 2.0 is the way to go. If, however, your goal is stability, then this article does nothing whatsoever to help you with a solution. Maybe Tux 2.0 is ultra stable. Maybe not. Who knows?
Thus the falacy of benchmarks.
Like the recent benchmark pitting Linux, WinY2K and FreeBSD against each other for serving speed. FreeBSD wasn't designed for speed. So what was the point? That Linux was better for a print server than FreeBSD? There is no way to know, because no one but an anal tech reporter cares how fast a print server serves up print jobs!
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Okay, just random ruminations without any cognizance behind them...
FreeBSD does not have a decent Java. That's because Sun won't approve a FreeBSD Java. All it takes is minor tweaks and a recompile of Blackdown. But they won't do it. Just being stubborn I guess.
Microsoft sees this situation and comes bearing C#. "Use this instead! It's better than Java!" I'm thinking they expect FreeBSD developers to roll over and beg.
They get instant allies from the *BSD folks.
.NET on Linux, there is no need to write any kernel modules, modify any GPL code, or link to any GPL libraries. They fed you shit and you enjoyed every bite of it.
They ain't getting any allies from us! Get real!
But for the GPL, there goes Linux!
I see you took that Microsoft bait hook, line and sinker. This announcement has absolutely NOTHING to do with the GPL, and everything to do with divide-and-conquer. In order to get
Free Software is always Open Source, but the converse isn't always true.
Yes, the converse is always true. The two "movements" may be light years apart, but the things they are describing are identical.
Every Open Source license meets the definition of Free Software as stated by the FSF. It doesn't matter that RMS says that the APSL isn't Free, it meets the objective qualifications that he set. You are free "to run the program, for any purpose", "to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs", "to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor", and "to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public". It meets every point.
The GPL is only restrictive to those who would wish to further restrict others by proprietary relicensing.
Bzzzrt! Wrong!
The GPL is restrictive to ANYONE who doesn't use the GPL. I cannot legally create an application licensed under any other Free Software license that dynamically links to a GPL library. It doesn't matter that the license is *less* restrictive than the GPL, I still can't do it. Hell, I can't even link to a GPL library and place my own work into the public domain!
Yeah, I hear you. I was going to put one of my projects on SourceForge. Their info sheet and FAQ made it sound like the next best thing since cheese-whiz. Then I started looking at all the projects hosted on SourceForge, and got really cold feet...
Yeah, but can you use BSD and Win2K simultaneously? Can you pipe your WinY2K processes through a BSD filter? Can you configure your BSD through the control panel?
And FreeBSD is a direct descendant of the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. As I recall, 386BSD was the first usable BSD unencumbered by AT&T code, and FreeBSD 1.0 was merely a fork since Bill Jolitz stopped maintaining 386BSD. FreeBSD really is BSD.
Man, three replies to the same post. I must have really upset you on that one :-)
...especially when the agreement comes as a post-sale agreement (I've already bought it, but now I have to sign a contract to use it).
Actually, it is immoral.
In your definition, maybe. In RMS' definition, certainly. But so what? Simply saying that something is immoral does not make it so. You need to give reasons why it is immoral (as opposed to merely uncouth, odd or different).
It is immoral to put up imaginary boundaries between people.
Then why the fudge is RMS putting up imaginary boundaries around his software! That's what the GPL, or any other license, is. A set of restrictions that define an imaginary boundary around a piece of information.
It is immoral to place restrictions on sharing without good cause.
I am restricting no one from sharing of their own properties by restricting how my property is to be used. By using and encouraging the use of copyrights through the use of the GPL and other free software licenses, RMS is emphatically asserting that software can and should be owned. Fine. I own my software. It is mine to do with as I please, including letting other people use it under a restricted set of conditions.
However, some restrictions are immoral. The purchaser of software has indeed bought something, and that something is his property. But it isn't the information. It is the CD and the use of that information. I cannot restrict him from giving the CD to his friend and I cannot restrict him from using the information in ways that I disagree with. But that particular set of information that is my expression of speech does not belong to him.
I would find it immoral for me to purchase a lawnmower, and then come home and find that I can only use it on my lawn.
If you were not made aware of the restrictions on the use of that lawnmower at the time of purchase, then yes, it would definitely be immoral, because it would constitute fraud. But if you were aware of those restrictions, and bought it anyway, you first have to blame yourself before you blame the seller. The seller may or may not be immoral for selling you such a restricted lawnmower, but the blame still falls upon you.
If you don't like the terms of the software license, don't buy the software. Period. Don't buy CDs that you can only use on one computer if that's not what you want!
I absolutely agree with you here. I think shrink-wrap licenses and other similar items are very immoral. They are immoral because they are fraudulent. But don't extend the immorality of a few software manufacturers to cover all of them.
"ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"
Certainly. As a Christian I wholeheartedly agree. But I still see no reason to go out and invent new sins.
RMS and the FSF have invented new sins. Yes, it is a sin not to share. But sharing does not mean giving everything you own away. And that's what RMS wants, for me to give away every single byte of software that I write. It's good to give money to the poor, but it is not a sin to fail to give every cent you own to the poor.
When I get home from work I write my own software on my own time. I do not need this software to live on. It is my "surplus" so I freely give it away. I use the BSD license so that there are as few restrictions as possible on it. But somehow that isn't good enough for many GPL advocates. They want me to place additional restrictions on my code.
What about the Scheme license?
It's very close to the intent of the LGPL, and many of the old GNU libraries that were GPL+exception.
I don't have much of a problem with the GPL for applications. But I have a real problem with it for libraries. For users of other free software licenses, those libraries are unusable. Use whatever license you would like, but extend that same courtesy to users of your library.
I've got Mac friends who are excited by OSX. But they don't plan to switch until all of the wrinkles get ironed out.
Dot-oh releases always suck. If the guys at your office didn't want to experiment they shouldn't have switched. That's no fault against OSX.
If Mac people don't want to have anything to do with Unix, they don't have to! It's like two operating systems in one, and you have the choice of using one, the other, or both. Let's see the Window guys do that...
Darwin *IS* substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2! There is not generic BSD to base it on!
So they had a choice of dragging out their ancient copy of 44BSD-Lite, or choosing amongst modern Free, Open or Net. The choice FreeBSD. All of the *BSDs have code from the others, so this is no slight against any of them.
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
A nonsense question, really. FreeBSD *is* BSD. So are OpenBSD and NetBSD.
They recognize that, and do the moral thing and don't charge you for extra copies that _you_ create.
It's neither moral nor immoral. There is no moral difference between selling a software license allowing unlimited copying and one that only allows ten copies. Or one. So long as the customer is fully informed as to the status of the software ownership, there is no problem. That I find much more utility in Free Software than in proprietary is beside the point. Utility is not morality.
As for GNU, RMS used to make all his money selling emacs for $150/tape.
Anyone buying that tape today who thinks they're not making a donation? Back then the internet was no where near as prevalent as today. But that was then and this is now. When you can download the entire works of GNU for free plus a little time, or on CD from a variety of sources for only $2, how can you consider spending $5000 for it anything less than a donation? Even considering that the Deluxe edition comes with printed manuals, that's still not worth price when I can get the very same manuals from fatbrain for a fraction of that.
You missed the point. You are allowed to make OpenBSD ISO images. But you are NOT allowed to redistribute the Official OpenBSD ISO image. Yes, it does exist.
The analogy with Caldera is similar (not exact, but similar). You can redistribute all of its parts. You just can redistribute the distribution as a whole.
...but RedHat was more open (if not quite as good) and so RedHat got the market share (and the sales).
Do you really believe that why Redhat got their marketshare? Really? Then why isn't Debian three times are big as Redhat? They're much more open than Redhat....
Ho hum. Do you know anyone who actually paid $5000 for the Deluxe GNU Package, who didn't think that they were making a donation?
Free Software is great! But it's not a salable item by itself. You can make people pay for the copies they get from you, but you can't make them pay for copies they get elsewhere.
Caldera is a good case of this. They are targeting their distro towards corporations. Why should a corporation pay for a thousand copies of Caldera for their thousand workstations? We have about one hundred Redhat installs at my work, but only one copy of Redhat was ever purchased. That doesn't bother Redhat, though, because the corporate buyer isn't their target market.
That's all well and good, but I'm not seeing any "freedom-restricting" practices here. Caldera is licensing their distribution _as_a_whole_ under per-seat terms, but every bit of free software included in the distribution is still under its own terms. This is no different than a free OS that restricts copying of ISO images (OpenBSD) or includes proprietary applications (SuSE, Redhat, etc).
No, you can't burn a copy of the Caldera CD and give it to your friends. But you can give them all of the free parts inside...
This EULA is legally unenforcible. But so what? Most EULAs are unenforcible pieces of pseudo-legalese.
Microsoft, nor any other company or private concern, can take away the rights that copyright gives you WITHOUT a contract that you have explicitly agreed to. In the real world, contracts require your signature. Merely using the software is not good enough. Opening the shrink-wrap is not good enough. Clicking "ok" on an install screen is not good enough.
The whole computer industry is under the delusion that they get to unilaterally create agreements. This is bogus.
You're showing your ignorance. Go build a working Linux system sometime. I don't mean using Redsplat's gooey installer, I mean build everything from source code, and write your own init scripts.
I did that once. I came away with a much better appreciation of just what Linux is. It ain't merely a kernel. There's an entire infrastructure that it has to reside in. And that's before you even get to the GNU stuff. It's a hell of a lot more than merely the GNU System with the kernel swapped out. Much more.
If reducing the speed to 55MPH saved so many lives, then why not reduce it even further? What if the speed limit on I-5 were 25 miles per hour? Boy, that would save a lot of lives! If the Bush Administration wasn't so Evil, they would deny highway funds to any state that doesn't lower the speed limit to 15MPH. Because they don't they must intend for people to die.
When a corporation wants to charge you something you can refuse. When the government wants to charge you something, and you refuse, you go to jail. If you resist going to jail you will be shot.
I didn't like what Microsoft was selling, so I didn't buy it. I didn't like what the government was selling, but they sent their goons to collect anyway.
Everyone in Canada got a phone connection because our telcos were guaranteed monopoly control *in return for* universal service.
It wasn't much different in the US. You had a single phone company, AT&T, and everyone had exactly the same phone.
Then AT&T got broke up into clones. That was a huge mess. The proper way to do it would have been to simply open up the market. But eventually it straightened out. You have your choice for long distance. What would AT&T's 1950's rate look like today adjusted for inflation? A hell of a lot more than 10 cents a minute, which is what I'm paying now.
Unfortunately, the local phone services are still monopolies. I don't have a legal choice but to use Pacific Bell. And their zone calling is horrendously expensive.
I don't mind owning my own phone. I bought mine for $19.95 fifteen years ago. Under AT&T's monopoly I would still be leasing the same damn phone. And paying for repairs doesn't bother me either. You didn't get it for free under the monopolies. Your rates were a tiny bit higher each month because they knew that sometime you might need a repair. I've only needed a repair once. It cost two hundred dollars. Considering I've had my phone for fifteen years, that's around a mere one dollar a month.
We all know the story about how Noble Clinton was going to give a little girl on th Navajo reservation phone service and internet access. And we all know that Evil Bush become president and stopped that. Oh how cruel!
But this simple story goes much deeper. And the root of the problem still lies within government. Namely, the BIA. Shove all the indians onto remote reservations, make them dependent on welfare, stop them when they try to be self-sufficient with casinos, and when they complain about a lack of phone service say "it's not our problem". The solution is to abolish the BIA, give the deeds of the reservations to the tribes, and let them earn their own living. There are people with access to phones and high-speed internet access in places every bit as remote as the Navajo reservation.
Alaska is a problem, and very apropos to this story, since in many ways it resembles the problems that much of Canada faces. Unlike my grandparents, whose nearest town was fifty miles away, in Alaska it could be two hundred miles away. Or more. The question to ask is whether it is worth spending millions of taxpayers' dollars to run out and maintain a line for 50 residents in Moosepit, Alaska.
First off, folks in rural Alaska (which is REALLY rural) should not be expecting the same level of service as folks in urban New York or even Anchorage. You must reasonably expect to spend more for phone charges. At ten cents a minute long distance, no free market phone company in the world is going to spend one million dollars laying out and maintaing phone lines for a town of twenty. In a free market economy, you guys are going to have to either pay more for service, or look for alternatives.
Yup. The unintended consequences still haunt us today.
Okay, somehow has to offer up the standard libertarian opposition to this proposal...
Freedom means the absence of coercion. The non-initiation of force. In order for this proposal to be implemented, there has to be a hell of a lot of coercion going on, namely in the acquisition of taxes. You will give us your money or you will go to court, and possibly jail, and if you resist going to jail we will shoot you. You do not have a choice. You will do what we say.
Now how does internet access work in the rest of the world? The same way the internet itself works. Through the free market. I don't know what's happening in southern North Dakota, but in *rural* California high-speed internet access is popping up everywhere. A friend in the middle of nowhere gets megabit connection speeds over Sprint Wireless. DSL, cable, wireless. It's all happening without anyone needing to be taxed.
I have no idea how everyone in Canada got a phone connection. But everyone in the US living in a community of over 500 has one. My grandparents got hooked up in 1930 when their nearest neighbor was two miles away and the nearest town was fifty miles away. Granted, this is dense suburbia compared to Canada's Yukon, but it still happened without the government creating a national phone service initiative.
If I haven't pissed all of the geeks off yet by not proclaiming my allegience to socialism, the following statement will. Not everyone needs high speed internet access. Hell. No one needs high speed internet access. They may want it but they don't *need* it. No one died last year for not having it, and I seriously doubt anyone will die next year for not having it. It's so nice to know that Canada has solved all of its problems except for this last little thing...
Excellent question. If your only goal is speed, then Tux 2.0 is the way to go. If, however, your goal is stability, then this article does nothing whatsoever to help you with a solution. Maybe Tux 2.0 is ultra stable. Maybe not. Who knows?
Thus the falacy of benchmarks.
Like the recent benchmark pitting Linux, WinY2K and FreeBSD against each other for serving speed. FreeBSD wasn't designed for speed. So what was the point? That Linux was better for a print server than FreeBSD? There is no way to know, because no one but an anal tech reporter cares how fast a print server serves up print jobs!