I'm not 14 anymore so I couldn't care less who laughs at what. The only editor I've liked so far is ZED although I use more the one integrated in MC. And even it does not pay attention to all editing keys that any PC keyboard has.
I try not to laugh at people who use this or that. But I pity people who let software make them feel like octopuses and who choose programs depending on how many laughs they are expected to arouse.
Linux is a big annoyance to M$, and I don't mean just the server *playground*. The people there are not stupid, they are just confused because it's their move now and they begin to realize that they cannot win.
I suppose you don't follow the 'lousy boxed distributions' very close. Otherwise you'd be amazed by the speed with which they improve. The GUI is already here (in whatever flavour you prefer it). Next will come the office suit. And what will remain as a reason to install Windows (DTPs and some games for example) won't be something that is made by M$.
"...the more people who will soon be back recognizing what a good thing they have in Windows, where they don't have to poke around under the hood like a Harley rider to get the machine running (again)."
Working under Linux gets easier and easier every day. For the average guy solving a problem once in a while, boosts the self confidence, yet more of them would prefer to ride the bike than to poke under the hood day in, day out.
Perhaps Linux will never be as easy to work with as Windows or Mac but there's a reason for that. Linus would never say: 'Hey guys, I decided that from now on we'll swap to a file cause Joe Redmond finds partitioning too hard". In any case I believe it will soon be easy enough even for the average PC user to jump across the platforms.
Mmm, Jews... I think you're hiding something. Are you sure that Chinese and Indians are not involved as well?
Boy, I'd give much to live in America but certainly not in a world like yours.
Sorry, but there's only one communism
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 1
It just has two faces - its real one, and the propaganda.
People in my country that long for the old days make the same mistake as you do. They say that the communism is quite ok but somehow its brilliant ideas got distorted by party leaders.
GNU GPL resembles a bit the shiny part of the communism. But that doesn't necessarily mean that somewhere in it a monster is hiding.
I lived in a communist country for almost 30 years and I find that I often smile when I hear Americans talking about communism. Let me tell you a story. I'll try to be brief.
Some years ago, before the previous elections in the USA my girlfriend went to English language courses. These courses were quite cheap because the American lectors worked for free. That was because they were members of a prominent chirch in USA and took the opportunity of talking about their particular religion. It's completely ok with me - I'm all for free speech.
An American guy asked the class who would they vote for if they were American citizens - Bush or Clinton. His personal preferences were for Bush and he explained that was because that as a Democrat Clinton was closer to the socialists, therefore - closer to the communists. That guy believed that he was free just because he lived in a free country.
I really wouldn't like to hurt anyone's religious feelings here but I believe that this guy and his religion were much closer to the communists than even the party secretaries in my country. He believed that it was absolutely ok to ask his elders for a permission to marry a particular girl. I don't think anyone thought like that in Europe in the 20th century. In North Corea, maybe.
Now what exactly is my point after all those words.
Communism is to take away someone's freedom. RMS is one of the greatest anticommunists of our times because he is concerned with preserving the freedom of the software. How could anyone not see that?
Perhaps the mistake stems from the fact that people think that RMS is a communist because they perceive him as an anticapitalist (which he isn't either). He would be a communist if he were an antidemocrat.
Politically speaking Bill Gates is much more a communist because he's the one that takes away users' freedom. And beeing the richest capitalist doesn't change that fact at all. Lenin and Stalin owned a gigantic state for example which would dwarf M$.
Look, I don't think that the coders in M$ are idiots. But because they have to comply with decisions that are sound only from a marketing point of view the end result frequently is a technical idiocy.
First, let's take IE. Which is easier for you to admit: that it isn't part of the core or that it is a childish thing to do to incorporate an application in the OS every time you feel threatened by a competitor's product?
Second: registry! I won't even begin to describe the mass of instability that it creates. But when the code police come to this office, the registry file will be their biggest friend in finding every single app that was ever installed in Windows. OK, call me paranoid but don't tell me that even a designer with half a brain would dump such stuff for any other reason.
I'm not saying also that Linux is perfect. But it's at least on the right path because it is driven by necessity, not by tycoons' visions.
Take AutoCAD for example. There's a possibility that there won't appear a free alternative of it in the comming millenium. But how many users it has and how many of them are geeks at the same time?
M$ on the other hand is concentrated on the mass consumer market. That was its greatest advantage and it will be the reason for their fast decline. And there isn't enough time now to place the eggs in another basket. The tide is coming.
...to see how a GUI should look. But then the hours at the office will begin to appear enormously long and you'll only think of the moment that you'll be home again to type the magic word 'startx'.
The last significant M$ fortress is the office suit. And if KOffice turns out to be what it promisses... Oh boy, I'm getting dizzy again.
I'm telling you, the ship is sinking. Go for the life boats fast!
As far as the years go I think that Linux came out in the open in 1991 which means 8 years exactly. But it became 1.0 in the spring of 1994 which gives 5 years actually. It depends how you look at it.
Thanks for your post but I was aware of the legal stuff.
What I was trying to say was that people here don't like to pay for commercial software because everyone else just copies it. At the same time I managed to convince the owner to buy Red Hat Linux just to help the movement a little bit. Because I really am impressed how much they return to the community.
What is more is that we already had the whole 1-st CD downloaded. The only drawback was that we didn't know how to burn a bootable one with it.
OK, people, I'm from Bulgaria and the results for the.bg domain show: Windowses - 41.9 % Linux - 41.7 %
OTOH I cannot help feeling like a pioneer because when I suggested to my boss to place the web server (www.protos.bg) on Linux I had 0 experience with any kind of Unix and I knew 0 people that could help me with that (the latter hasn't changed).
I was just lucky that the web server and the ftp server ran right out of the box. (I'm still struggling without any success to start up a mail server.)
And believe me - here people don't cough up 50 bucks for software every day (Red Hat 5.2). Most of them haven't bought any software even if they use a computer from like 10 or 15 years
Please borrow code and ideas from each other. Eventually one of the desktops will prevail and it will be pity that the other's features will be thrown away.
Personally I am a fan of KDE although GNOME has the best-written mission statement that I've ever read. I intend to run them both for a while.
You don't like RPM and that's ok with me. But it was put out there to be used by everyone. All the software that Red Hat produce is GPL-ed. They even pay to programmers involved in GNOME and KDE and not a single line of that code will be closed.
Corel OTOH develop only commercial software. They give WordPerfect free for personal use but they are yet to open the source of anything they produce. The fact they are the underdogs compared to M$ don't make them any fancier.
Many people obviously don't get it. They like to feel superior: 'Look what BS comes from Bill Gates. I'm not as rich as he is but I'm far cleverer than he is.'
The word processors and spreadsheets available for Linux definitely can't compete yet with the ease of use and the richness in features not to mention the consistency of the GUI of M$ ones.
It's neither a coincidence, nor a stupidity that he draws the attention on the weakest spot of Linux. Next thing you'll see are people talking: 'Bill Gates may like their apps but I'm back to MS Office.'
The stock market didn't buy Bill's words. MSFT stocks dropped more than 5.5% yesterday. I haven't seen anything like that lately. In the same day AAPL climbed almost 3% and SYMC - almost 8%.
Of course they won't collapse overnight. Their death will be slow and painful. But the market players are altogether easily frightened so it will be fun to watch how things are going to develop.
I'd prefer Linux any day of the week precisely because of it's own credit. I mean it doesn't need the FreeBSD's or any other *nix' one. Microsoft not using it's own NT proves its inferiority but it doesn't by itself prove Linux' superiority.
I would wholeheartedly agree with their letter if it weren't for the APSL. "half-measures" seam to be ok except when coming from M$.
And I can't escape the feeling that if Steve Balmer perceived ESR as a *leader* he would have talked to him first (as others did) and maybe, just maybe, the tone of the letter would have been slightly different.
Because M$ are only expressing intentions after all. Apple's license is light years away from anything GNU-ish but was praised nevertheless.
After all in what way are Apple better than M$ except that they are worse businessmen (and women)? 'You do not even manufacture cases, Redmondites, let alone transparent ones!'
Most current keyboards have keys that traditional Unix editors simply ignore. I'm used to Home, End, Del, function keys, etc. and I much prefer pressing two keys to invoke a command than six.
Flame me as much as you like but vi(m) as well as emacs, joe, etc are predominantly for masochists, gurus or not.
But when you think about it it's not very surprising that the ease of porting depends most of all on how good your design is, even if you designed it with only one platform in mind.
One of the troubles with M$ products is that marketing reasons can take over pure technical ones. One such decision (I read it somewhere here) was to place the video driver in the kernel space to make the GUI run faster in NT 3.51. The other obvious example is the attempt to bury the web browser as deep as possible in the OS only to limit the market share of a rival product.
I am aware this is off topic but please post more examples if you know such. The Windows user lives with the undying hope that the next version will finally get rid of the bugs and will become stable. But it would be good Linux advocacy if we are able to prove that they are consistent in sacrificing reasonable solutions for the sake of greater revenue.
Linus talks about how Linux will inevitably be replaced by another OS once when the hardware evolves enough. But at the same time he tries to ensure that Linux is designed in such a way that it lasts as much as possible. M$ on the other hand don't need an OS which lasts more than 3 years because how else could they convince you to buy their next one if you are comfortable with the current. 'But please, try our new one. It's not only richer in features but we got rid of the bugs. Really! This time for sure!'
Lack of motivation in the individual brought down the socialism, and that's why it bankrupted. Lack of money was only the end result. And there was no motivation because there was no freedom - and I think that with Linux I have as much as I need.
Many people are motivated more by a noble cause than other by money. That's why the future is so bright for Linux.
Let's face it - M$ still have better working and more consistent GUI. But I'm not going back there, thank you very much.
I also think that the hippies DID change the world. Pity you fail to see that.
What else do you think M$ need Apple for? They only need them as an *evidence* (and a controlled one) that there's no monopoly.
M$ want TOTAL domination. They wouldn't settle for selling only an office suit no matter to how many users (in their case - the more, the worse) without the OS to be able to cut the oxygen off whomever they like.
Come on, they couldn't even tolerate an independent web browser, for heaven's sake!
And do you remember who added a third to their stock price in one day single-handedly? It was Bill Gates who announced that M$ are investing $150 Mln in Apple, there was to be new version of M$ Office (98), and Apple claims were negotiated out of the court.
Didn't it strike you back then that the fanaticism of the Mac users wasn't enough to keep Apple afloat? Isn't it evident that Apple continued to exist only on the mercy of M$ who needed a proof that there's a competition but don't need the competition itself. True, DOJ weren't on the stage yet, but you needn't be the greatest visionary to see what could come.
M$ are still holding Apple with two fingers above the water. They won't let them drawn but they won't let them out of the water either.
And I don't feel sorry for Apple because they are in no way better than M$. They only have smaller market share but they treat their users even worse than M$ do.
if you think of how many times the wheel and the fork were being reinvented in the software industry only to be burried again in another closed source code program?
One is left with the impression that Corel won't port their stuff if Wine gets 100% compatible. How would I copy from Quattro Pro and paste in Word Perfect if the first uses Linux' APIs and the second works through Wine? Or are they planning to spare themselves even the Word Perfect porting?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not 14 anymore so I couldn't care less who laughs at what. The only editor I've liked so far is ZED although I use more the one integrated in MC. And even it does not pay attention to all editing keys that any PC keyboard has.
I try not to laugh at people who use this or that. But I pity people who let software make them feel like octopuses and who choose programs depending on how many laughs they are expected to arouse.
I suppose you don't follow the 'lousy boxed distributions' very close. Otherwise you'd be amazed by the speed with which they improve. The GUI is already here (in whatever flavour you prefer it). Next will come the office suit. And what will remain as a reason to install Windows (DTPs and some games for example) won't be something that is made by M$.
"...the more people who will soon be back recognizing what a good thing they have in Windows, where they don't have to poke around under the hood like a Harley rider to get the machine running (again)."
Working under Linux gets easier and easier every day. For the average guy solving a problem once in a while, boosts the self confidence, yet more of them would prefer to ride the bike than to poke under the hood day in, day out.
Perhaps Linux will never be as easy to work with as Windows or Mac but there's a reason for that. Linus would never say: 'Hey guys, I decided that from now on we'll swap to a file cause Joe Redmond finds partitioning too hard". In any case I believe it will soon be easy enough even for the average PC user to jump across the platforms.
Hey, this isn't funny anymore!
Mmm, Jews... I think you're hiding something. Are you sure that Chinese and Indians are not involved as well?
Boy, I'd give much to live in America but certainly not in a world like yours.
It just has two faces - its real one, and the propaganda.
People in my country that long for the old days make the same mistake as you do. They say that the communism is quite ok but somehow its brilliant ideas got distorted by party leaders.
GNU GPL resembles a bit the shiny part of the communism. But that doesn't necessarily mean that somewhere in it a monster is hiding.
I lived in a communist country for almost 30 years and I find that I often smile when I hear Americans talking about communism. Let me tell you a story. I'll try to be brief.
Some years ago, before the previous elections in the USA my girlfriend went to English language courses. These courses were quite cheap because the American lectors worked for free. That was because they were members of a prominent chirch in USA and took the opportunity of talking about their particular religion. It's completely ok with me - I'm all for free speech.
An American guy asked the class who would they vote for if they were American citizens - Bush or Clinton. His personal preferences were for Bush and he explained that was because that as a Democrat Clinton was closer to the socialists, therefore - closer to the communists. That guy believed that he was free just because he lived in a free country.
I really wouldn't like to hurt anyone's religious feelings here but I believe that this guy and his religion were much closer to the communists than even the party secretaries in my country. He believed that it was absolutely ok to ask his elders for a permission to marry a particular girl. I don't think anyone thought like that in Europe in the 20th century. In North Corea, maybe.
Now what exactly is my point after all those words.
Communism is to take away someone's freedom. RMS is one of the greatest anticommunists of our times because he is concerned with preserving the freedom of the software. How could anyone not see that?
Perhaps the mistake stems from the fact that people think that RMS is a communist because they perceive him as an anticapitalist (which he isn't either). He would be a communist if he were an antidemocrat.
Politically speaking Bill Gates is much more a communist because he's the one that takes away users' freedom. And beeing the richest capitalist doesn't change that fact at all. Lenin and Stalin owned a gigantic state for example which would dwarf M$.
Look, I don't think that the coders in M$ are idiots. But because they have to comply with decisions that are sound only from a marketing point of view the end result frequently is a technical idiocy.
First, let's take IE. Which is easier for you to admit: that it isn't part of the core or that it is a childish thing to do to incorporate an application in the OS every time you feel threatened by a competitor's product?
Second: registry! I won't even begin to describe the mass of instability that it creates. But when the code police come to this office, the registry file will be their biggest friend in finding every single app that was ever installed in Windows. OK, call me paranoid but don't tell me that even a designer with half a brain would dump such stuff for any other reason.
I'm not saying also that Linux is perfect. But it's at least on the right path because it is driven by necessity, not by tycoons' visions.
Take AutoCAD for example. There's a possibility that there won't appear a free alternative of it in the comming millenium. But how many users it has and how many of them are geeks at the same time?
M$ on the other hand is concentrated on the mass consumer market. That was its greatest advantage and it will be the reason for their fast decline. And there isn't enough time now to place the eggs in another basket. The tide is coming.
Smart people won't invest in M$ anymore.
...to see how a GUI should look. But then the hours at the office will begin to appear enormously long and you'll only think of the moment that you'll be home again to type the magic word 'startx'.
The last significant M$ fortress is the office suit. And if KOffice turns out to be what it promisses... Oh boy, I'm getting dizzy again.
I'm telling you, the ship is sinking. Go for the life boats fast!
As far as the years go I think that Linux came out in the open in 1991 which means 8 years exactly. But it became 1.0 in the spring of 1994 which gives 5 years actually. It depends how you look at it.
Guys, why do you think only of hacking when you hear 'computers'? I seem to be the only one that would add these names:
Alexei Pozhitnov
Syd Meier
John Carmack
Thanks for your post but I was aware of the legal stuff.
What I was trying to say was that people here don't like to pay for commercial software because everyone else just copies it. At the same time I managed to convince the owner to buy Red Hat Linux just to help the movement a little bit. Because I really am impressed how much they return to the community.
What is more is that we already had the whole 1-st CD downloaded. The only drawback was that we didn't know how to burn a bootable one with it.
OK, people, I'm from Bulgaria and the results for the .bg domain show:
Windowses - 41.9 %
Linux - 41.7 %
OTOH I cannot help feeling like a pioneer because when I suggested to my boss to place the web server (www.protos.bg) on Linux I had 0 experience with any kind of Unix and I knew 0 people that could help me with that (the latter hasn't changed).
I was just lucky that the web server and the ftp server ran right out of the box. (I'm still struggling without any success to start up a mail server.)
And believe me - here people don't cough up 50 bucks for software every day (Red Hat 5.2). Most of them haven't bought any software even if they use a computer from like 10 or 15 years
Please borrow code and ideas from each other. Eventually one of the desktops will prevail and it will be pity that the other's features will be thrown away.
Personally I am a fan of KDE although GNOME has the best-written mission statement that I've ever read. I intend to run them both for a while.
You don't like RPM and that's ok with me. But it was put out there to be used by everyone. All the software that Red Hat produce is GPL-ed. They even pay to programmers involved in GNOME and KDE and not a single line of that code will be closed.
Corel OTOH develop only commercial software. They give WordPerfect free for personal use but they are yet to open the source of anything they produce. The fact they are the underdogs compared to M$ don't make them any fancier.
Many people obviously don't get it. They like to feel superior: 'Look what BS comes from Bill Gates. I'm not as rich as he is but I'm far cleverer than he is.'
The word processors and spreadsheets available for Linux definitely can't compete yet with the ease of use and the richness in features not to mention the consistency of the GUI of M$ ones.
It's neither a coincidence, nor a stupidity that he draws the attention on the weakest spot of Linux. Next thing you'll see are people talking: 'Bill Gates may like their apps but I'm back to MS Office.'
The stock market didn't buy Bill's words. MSFT stocks dropped more than 5.5% yesterday. I haven't seen anything like that lately. In the same day AAPL climbed almost 3% and SYMC - almost 8%.
Of course they won't collapse overnight. Their death will be slow and painful. But the market players are altogether easily frightened so it will be fun to watch how things are going to develop.
I'd prefer Linux any day of the week precisely because of it's own credit. I mean it doesn't need the FreeBSD's or any other *nix' one. Microsoft not using it's own NT proves its inferiority but it doesn't by itself prove Linux' superiority.
It's evident though whose side you aren't on.
They still have to make the transition from one mouse button to two, and you ask them to start using THREE buttons.
Please treat this as a joke, not as a flame bait. OK, treat it as you like.
I would wholeheartedly agree with their letter if it weren't for the APSL. "half-measures" seam to be ok except when coming from M$.
And I can't escape the feeling that if Steve Balmer perceived ESR as a *leader* he would have talked to him first (as others did) and maybe, just maybe, the tone of the letter would have been slightly different.
Because M$ are only expressing intentions after all. Apple's license is light years away from anything GNU-ish but was praised nevertheless.
After all in what way are Apple better than M$ except that they are worse businessmen (and women)? 'You do not even manufacture cases, Redmondites, let alone transparent ones!'
That's his point and he proves it well. But he couldn't possibly expect people not to argue with him when they think he's made a mistake (APSL).
Why would anyone not express what they think only because ESR's feelings will get hurt? He's not a little child after all. He's a carate blackbelt!
Most current keyboards have keys that traditional Unix editors simply ignore. I'm used to Home, End, Del, function keys, etc. and I much prefer pressing two keys to invoke a command than six.
Flame me as much as you like but vi(m) as well as emacs, joe, etc are predominantly for masochists, gurus or not.
But when you think about it it's not very surprising that the ease of porting depends most of all on how good your design is, even if you designed it with only one platform in mind.
One of the troubles with M$ products is that marketing reasons can take over pure technical ones. One such decision (I read it somewhere here) was to place the video driver in the kernel space to make the GUI run faster in NT 3.51. The other obvious example is the attempt to bury the web browser as deep as possible in the OS only to limit the market share of a rival product.
I am aware this is off topic but please post more examples if you know such. The Windows user lives with the undying hope that the next version will finally get rid of the bugs and will become stable. But it would be good Linux advocacy if we are able to prove that they are consistent in sacrificing reasonable solutions for the sake of greater revenue.
Linus talks about how Linux will inevitably be replaced by another OS once when the hardware evolves enough. But at the same time he tries to ensure that Linux is designed in such a way that it lasts as much as possible. M$ on the other hand don't need an OS which lasts more than 3 years because how else could they convince you to buy their next one if you are comfortable with the current. 'But please, try our new one. It's not only richer in features but we got rid of the bugs. Really! This time for sure!'
Lack of motivation in the individual brought down the socialism, and that's why it bankrupted. Lack of money was only the end result. And there was no motivation because there was no freedom - and I think that with Linux I have as much as I need.
Many people are motivated more by a noble cause than other by money. That's why the future is so bright for Linux.
Let's face it - M$ still have better working and more consistent GUI. But I'm not going back there, thank you very much.
I also think that the hippies DID change the world. Pity you fail to see that.
What else do you think M$ need Apple for? They only need them as an *evidence* (and a controlled one) that there's no monopoly.
M$ want TOTAL domination. They wouldn't settle for selling only an office suit no matter to how many users (in their case - the more, the worse) without the OS to be able to cut the oxygen off whomever they like.
Come on, they couldn't even tolerate an independent web browser, for heaven's sake!
And do you remember who added a third to their stock price in one day single-handedly? It was Bill Gates who announced that M$ are investing $150 Mln in Apple, there was to be new version of M$ Office (98), and Apple claims were negotiated out of the court.
Didn't it strike you back then that the fanaticism of the Mac users wasn't enough to keep Apple afloat? Isn't it evident that Apple continued to exist only on the mercy of M$ who needed a proof that there's a competition but don't need the competition itself. True, DOJ weren't on the stage yet, but you needn't be the greatest visionary to see what could come.
M$ are still holding Apple with two fingers above the water. They won't let them drawn but they won't let them out of the water either.
And I don't feel sorry for Apple because they are in no way better than M$. They only have smaller market share but they treat their users even worse than M$ do.
if you think of how many times the wheel and the fork were being reinvented in the software industry only to be burried again in another closed source code program?
One is left with the impression that Corel won't port their stuff if Wine gets 100% compatible.
How would I copy from Quattro Pro and paste in Word Perfect if the first uses Linux' APIs and the second works through Wine? Or are they planning to spare themselves even the Word Perfect porting?