I wouldn't be surprised if the free software community feeds more than 30.000 mouths. On the other hand, there isn't any war between the free software community and Microsoft, or any company for that matter. What we're opposing is the practice that many companies use that takes away the users freedom to do what they want with software that they buy. It's not a natural scenario to be called a pirate, to be compared to a murderer and robber, just because you want to share what you have with your friends and neighbors.
I'd like to take this moment then to quote two parts from the book "Hackers - Heroes of the computer revolution" by author Steven Levy.
"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that composition. Females. Though some hackers led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much more/important/ than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."
"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?'"
While this award is for the Free Software Foundation in general, I'd like to make it a special point to congratulate all the people who have worked and is working in the FSF Distribution Office in Boston. Without their hard and dedicated work, we wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as we have.
Now, I'm biased in this area, but I wish VA all the best of luck in this. They might still have a few kinks to bum out of their system, but all in all, they're not a bad company, contrary to what some people have said here.
Now, if I could only NOT receive any special offers about buying stock, that'd be just great:-)
I'd recommend browsing Slashdot with Lynx and using Emacs or some other such editor to edit text inputs. It's all very sweet because using an external editor makes it so much easier to run ispell.
If I understand the situation correctly, pgcc is basically a set of patches against egcs/gcc. A lot of the code from pgcc should make its way into gcc eventually, although I believe that some parts can't be included, such as those written by Intel. That's because the copyright for changes to GCC must be assigned to the FSF, and Intel seems unwilling to do so.
Now then, before anyone comes bursting in saying that we havn't updated the web pages: look again. I just updated the web pages on www.gnu.org and I hope that the steering committee will update their web pages on gcc.gnu.org soon too. It's the idea that eventually the web pages from gcc.gnu.org will magically appear att www.gnu.org, possibly with some small stylistic changes, but we havn't gotten around to this yet.
As a blatant plug I'd also like to say that the GNU Webmasters need more help. Do write me if you want to help out.
Well, I always prefer english comedy to american. If thats because I'm from europe or not might perhaps be best left unsaid. Perhaps it's just something in the water?:-)
When I first got this message I was somewhat mad with Red Hat because I consider such messages spam. So I sent them a message and asked them for an explanation, hoping that they would atleast tell me where they got my Email from. They didn't respond, and yesterday I got another email. This time from E*Trade saying that they were sorry for the trouble that many people have had. This message was -also- spam. So I sent another message asking them where they got my email from.
I sent both these messages to postmaster at both E*Trade and Red Hat and I would have expected that atleast Red Hat would be sensible enough to actually respond to their postmaster mail. I'm glad to say though that Red Hat DID reply today, but only after I threatened to block their computers from sending any messages to my computers.
Both E*Trade and Red Hat has expressed how sorry they are and assured me that I won't receive any such messages in the future, so they're safe. For now. But I'd still like to point a finger in Red Hats direction. Sending spam is one thing, I get enough spam so one mail more is no big problem, but not answering the postmaster mail, or answering a week after having received the message.. That's a whole other story.
Free software is already being used to develop some games for these game consoles. Even if you have an extremely powerful game console, you still need a platform on which to develop the games.
I don't know how they created their list either. I'm both an FSF volunteer and Debian volunteer, but they sent to jonas@coyote.org, which is my mostly personal address. Ah well.
There is nothing wrong with selling free software. If selling free software raises enough money for you so that you can work on the programs you develop fulltime, then by all means, go ahead and do it. You can also work as a teacher or consultant for free software if you like.
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 2
I just had to reply to this because I think this is such a funny story. There are people out there who claim that if you allow anyone to redistribute the programs you sell for a lower price, then you will always only sell one copy. Someone will buy a copy and then everyone will buy from him because he's selling it 10% cheaper than you are.
That has proved itself to be a faulty conclusion because the FSF keeps selling copy after copy after copy of manuals and CD-ROMs, even if we try to be the highest price distributor of everything we sell because we're doing this to raise money to develop free software.
People often have the idea that if it's free software, if you are going to charge something for it, you should charge as little as possible. We think this is completely wrong. You should try to raise as much money as possible. Some of it for yourself, and some of it to donate to free software development.
We don't want people to expect that the price will be small. We want people to expect that the price will be substantial, but there will also be a substantial donation to free software. And when someone sells a copy of something and DON'T donate money to free software development, then they should think that there is something wrong.
Ofcourse, all GNU software and most other free software, you can also get from FTP sites for free, but we hope that people will also buy things from us. Because when they do, they help to improve the software by making it possible for us to pay programmers to work on free software.
If there is an OSD-compliant logo, business types can be trained to start equating that logo with "plays well with others", "our IS guys can customize/improve it", and "we can choose our support contract".
Yes, thats exactly the kind of attitude that we don't want. Having people blindly trust a product because of a certification mark is what got us into this trouble in the first place.
Yes, but you can do that without a certificate mark. If you use a license that conforms to the open source definition, you can put that on the product and say "This product conforms with the Open Source Definition" and there would be nothing wrong with doing so. The OSI Certification is very much like going over the the river to get water.
Have you ever been in a position where you have to decide what you should do with your life? It might be after you graduate, and you have to consider what jobs to apply for, or after you've lost a job and need to find a new one. It's one of the many cross-roads in life where we all have to stop and ask us that very question.
I'm at such a cross-road now and I've been thinking a lot about what I should do, even if I now know that the path I set out to follow several years ago made the choice I'm making now painfully obvious.
Let me tell you something about myself. I'm 21 years old. I've spent most of my life in school, except for the last three years during which I first jumped between jobs and then started my own company together with some friends. The first thing I had to find out is why I couldn't go on with what I was doing. Simply put, I'm not happy with the work I do. There's more, deeper issues involved too, but they are not very important. The important part is that I can't go on doing what I do today.
So what are the options available to me? I could prostitute myself enough to apply for jobs at proprietary software vendors, but that wouldn't make me very happy because I would be refused the right to share information and software with my friends. I can also do one thing which has occured to me fairly recently; I can give up computers as a profession. I could probably get a job as some sort of technician or janitor and be happy doing that job and work on free software in my spare time. This is an option thats very tempting at some times, but I feel as if that option would be very much like give up the hope on free software. If I choosed that path, people would tell me that free software authors can't get paid, and I'd have no way to refute that because in my experience, they'd be right.
So giving up on computers as a profession is not an option for me if I want to continue volunteering for the free software community. The last option available to me is to try to create a job which I like, and that is what I'll try to do. At some point within the next few months, I'll quit my job and dedicate all my time to the free software community. It won't be easy because I don't have much money to work with, but I'm exploring a few options that will give me enough money so I can do this (if you have any suggestions, feel free to mail me).
I don't think you understand the full extent of this though. Perhaps noone does. What I'm telling you is that I'm willing to sacrifice my life, my computers, my books, my appartment and everything else that I own because I think that in doing so, I can make this world a slightly better place to live in.
I don't go around banging on everyones door, because I think that I can be of better use in front of a computer, hacking at free software, and this is what I do, and to this end, I give my life.
I guess I should jump ten feet up in the air and clap my heels together and shout "oh, my what a good idea!" But that wouldn't be very honest. So I won't.
It should be said from the beginning that I'm not a big follower of the "open source" name. I think that the issue has divided the community in ways that I can not even begin to comprehend.
But let's look at Eric's letter. I don't know Eric personally, so I don't know if this is what he intended. But what I'm moderately worried about is that when he explains what the OSI does, he talks about promoting "open source code" and "open standards". Not once does he talks about freedom. What good is sourcecode if I don't have the freedoms associated with it? This is nit-picking, but I'd like to agree with Bruce Perens; "It's time to talk about free software again."
In his letter, Eric introduces an OSI Certified mark which he sugests all software vendors should get and put on their products. I guess it's only a matter of time before we'll see "SuSE Certified", "RedHat Certified", "Linus Certified" or whatever certifications people can come up with. The fear I have is that people will put too much trust in these certifications; so much that they won't bother to investigate the matter further.
There's a psykosocial harm which happens when you tell people everything they need to know. Thus with every certification, you're depriving people of the will to investigate themselves and with time, they'll tend to think that if such and such program is so and so certified, then it must be a good program. Ofcourse, we who know about this also knows that even if something is so and so certified, that doesn't necessarily make it a good program. But thats what some people will think and they will buy this program because it is so and so certified.
If someone comes to me and asks me to get an OSI Certified mark for some piece of software which I have written, I will tell them "thank you for informing me, but I don't use that mark because I think that you're capable of deciding for yourself if this product is good for you or not."
For what it's worth; I've been using Exim now for quite a few months and has found it very capable of doing everything that sendmail once did for me. In fact; Exim provides quite a few methods that gives functionality which I would only have dreamed of in Sendmail. Exim is also released mostly under the GPL (three pieces of code exists which is not GPLed, but I think it would be possible to leave them out if one is a purist).
Can I have one too please?
on
Digital VCRs
·
· Score: 2
This sounds like an environment where Linux can be a really nice thing. Imaging being able to debug your VCR if it crashes! I've never had much success debuging a normal VCR.
I've read about Sony using a modified gcc with some added targets to compile code for their game machines so it's not that surprising though that free software is taken into the world of embedded system.
Often, when developing an embedded system, you can spend weeks or months just building the first stages of an embedded system that can support some application. If you instead choose to port the Linux kernel or make gcc able to compile native code for the CPU of your choice, they you have already gained several months of development.
Unfortunately, I have been in the situation recently where I have had to deal with Windows CE and I can say for a fact that I didn't very much like the experience. I'd honestly rather spend some time porting gcc so I can compile native code.
How would you feel about readline support on your remote control? Alan Cox recently wrote in his diary that he couldn't believe how Unix vendors can ship ancient shells without cursor control or job control with their systems. Well, I can't believe my stereo remote control still won't let me schedule playlists!
The Debian Project History is good for general history of Debian. The name Debian though is a combination of the creators name, Ian Murdock, and his wife Debra.
There's certainly things to spend money on that benefits the community. Here's a list for you:
Hire programmers to write free software
Paying for booths at tradeshows
Travelling to other places to talk about free software
Software distribution (bandwidth, domain names etc)
Hire lawyers to defend free software in court
I don't know if the SPI will hire any programmers, that seems an unlikely event to me (FSF does this though), but they will most probably pay for Debian booths at different tradeshows and pay the travel fees for some Debian volunteers to staff the booths.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be surprised if the free software community feeds more than 30.000 mouths.
On the other hand, there isn't any war between the free software community and Microsoft, or any company for that matter.
What we're opposing is the practice that many companies use that takes away the users freedom to do what they want with software that they buy.
It's not a natural scenario to be called a pirate, to be compared to a murderer and robber, just because you want to share what you have with your friends and neighbors.
"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that composition. Females. Though some hackers led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much more /important/ than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."
"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?'"
Yes, just replace the 4 in the URL with 3, 2 or 1. ;-)
Thats Geeks #1, Geeks #2, and Geeks #3.
While this award is for the Free Software Foundation in general, I'd like to make it a special point to congratulate all the people who have worked and is working in the FSF Distribution Office in Boston.
Without their hard and dedicated work, we wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as we have.
Now, if I could only NOT receive any special offers about buying stock, that'd be just great :-)
Good luck.
I stand corrected then; than you for the information.
I'd recommend browsing Slashdot with Lynx and using Emacs or some other
such editor to edit text inputs. It's all very sweet because using an
external editor makes it so much easier to run ispell.
If I understand the situation correctly, pgcc is basically a set of patches against egcs/gcc. A lot of the code from pgcc should make its way into gcc eventually, although I believe that some parts can't be included, such as those written by Intel. That's because the copyright for changes to GCC must be assigned to the FSF, and Intel seems unwilling to do so.
As a blatant plug I'd also like to say that the GNU Webmasters need more help. Do write me if you want to help out.
Guvf vf onq. V'ir whfg tbggra cnegf bs gur Fjrqvfu tbireazrag gb yvfgra gb gur nethzragf ba jul fbsgjner cngragf vf onq, naq abj V unir gb tb nsgre gurz nobhg rapelcgvba gbb? Bu jryy.
Well, I always prefer english comedy to american. If thats because I'm from europe or not might perhaps be best left unsaid. Perhaps it's just something in the water? :-)
I sent both these messages to postmaster at both E*Trade and Red Hat and I would have expected that atleast Red Hat would be sensible enough to actually respond to their postmaster mail. I'm glad to say though that Red Hat DID reply today, but only after I threatened to block their computers from sending any messages to my computers.
Both E*Trade and Red Hat has expressed how sorry they are and assured me that I won't receive any such messages in the future, so they're safe. For now. But I'd still like to point a finger in Red Hats direction. Sending spam is one thing, I get enough spam so one mail more is no big problem, but not answering the postmaster mail, or answering a week after having received the message.. That's a whole other story.
I don't seem to remember having seen RMS with such a big beard as Alan though.
Free software is already being used to develop some games for these game consoles. Even if you have an extremely powerful game console, you still need a platform on which to develop the games.
I don't know how they created their list either. I'm both an FSF volunteer and Debian volunteer, but they sent to jonas@coyote.org, which is my mostly personal address. Ah well.
There is nothing wrong with selling free software. If selling free software raises enough money for you so that you can work on the programs you develop fulltime, then by all means, go ahead and do it. You can also work as a teacher or consultant for free software if you like.
That has proved itself to be a faulty conclusion because the FSF keeps selling copy after copy after copy of manuals and CD-ROMs, even if we try to be the highest price distributor of everything we sell because we're doing this to raise money to develop free software.
People often have the idea that if it's free software, if you are going to charge something for it, you should charge as little as possible. We think this is completely wrong. You should try to raise as much money as possible. Some of it for yourself, and some of it to donate to free software development.
We don't want people to expect that the price will be small. We want people to expect that the price will be substantial, but there will also be a substantial donation to free software. And when someone sells a copy of something and DON'T donate money to free software development, then they should think that there is something wrong.
Ofcourse, all GNU software and most other free software, you can also get from FTP sites for free, but we hope that people will also buy things from us. Because when they do, they help to improve the software by making it possible for us to pay programmers to work on free software.
Yes, thats exactly the kind of attitude that we don't want. Having people blindly trust a product because of a certification mark is what got us into this trouble in the first place.
Yes, but you can do that without a certificate mark. If you use a license that conforms to the open source definition, you can put that on the product and say "This product conforms with the Open Source Definition" and there would be nothing wrong with doing so. The OSI Certification is very much like going over the the river to get water.
I'm at such a cross-road now and I've been thinking a lot about what I should do, even if I now know that the path I set out to follow several years ago made the choice I'm making now painfully obvious.
Let me tell you something about myself. I'm 21 years old. I've spent most of my life in school, except for the last three years during which I first jumped between jobs and then started my own company together with some friends. The first thing I had to find out is why I couldn't go on with what I was doing. Simply put, I'm not happy with the work I do. There's more, deeper issues involved too, but they are not very important. The important part is that I can't go on doing what I do today.
So what are the options available to me? I could prostitute myself enough to apply for jobs at proprietary software vendors, but that wouldn't make me very happy because I would be refused the right to share information and software with my friends. I can also do one thing which has occured to me fairly recently; I can give up computers as a profession. I could probably get a job as some sort of technician or janitor and be happy doing that job and work on free software in my spare time. This is an option thats very tempting at some times, but I feel as if that option would be very much like give up the hope on free software. If I choosed that path, people would tell me that free software authors can't get paid, and I'd have no way to refute that because in my experience, they'd be right.
So giving up on computers as a profession is not an option for me if I want to continue volunteering for the free software community. The last option available to me is to try to create a job which I like, and that is what I'll try to do. At some point within the next few months, I'll quit my job and dedicate all my time to the free software community. It won't be easy because I don't have much money to work with, but I'm exploring a few options that will give me enough money so I can do this (if you have any suggestions, feel free to mail me).
I don't think you understand the full extent of this though. Perhaps noone does. What I'm telling you is that I'm willing to sacrifice my life, my computers, my books, my appartment and everything else that I own because I think that in doing so, I can make this world a slightly better place to live in.
I don't go around banging on everyones door, because I think that I can be of better use in front of a computer, hacking at free software, and this is what I do, and to this end, I give my life.
It should be said from the beginning that I'm not a big follower of the "open source" name. I think that the issue has divided the community in ways that I can not even begin to comprehend.
But let's look at Eric's letter. I don't know Eric personally, so I don't know if this is what he intended. But what I'm moderately worried about is that when he explains what the OSI does, he talks about promoting "open source code" and "open standards". Not once does he talks about freedom. What good is sourcecode if I don't have the freedoms associated with it? This is nit-picking, but I'd like to agree with Bruce Perens; "It's time to talk about free software again."
In his letter, Eric introduces an OSI Certified mark which he sugests all software vendors should get and put on their products. I guess it's only a matter of time before we'll see "SuSE Certified", "RedHat Certified", "Linus Certified" or whatever certifications people can come up with. The fear I have is that people will put too much trust in these certifications; so much that they won't bother to investigate the matter further.
There's a psykosocial harm which happens when you tell people everything they need to know. Thus with every certification, you're depriving people of the will to investigate themselves and with time, they'll tend to think that if such and such program is so and so certified, then it must be a good program. Ofcourse, we who know about this also knows that even if something is so and so certified, that doesn't necessarily make it a good program. But thats what some people will think and they will buy this program because it is so and so certified.
If someone comes to me and asks me to get an OSI Certified mark for some piece of software which I have written, I will tell them "thank you for informing me, but I don't use that mark because I think that you're capable of deciding for yourself if this product is good for you or not."
For what it's worth; I've been using Exim now for quite a few months and has found it very capable of doing everything that sendmail once did for me. In fact; Exim provides quite a few methods that gives functionality which I would only have dreamed of in Sendmail. Exim is also released mostly under the GPL (three pieces of code exists which is not GPLed, but I think it would be possible to leave them out if one is a purist).
I've read about Sony using a modified gcc with some added targets to compile code for their game machines so it's not that surprising though that free software is taken into the world of embedded system.
Often, when developing an embedded system, you can spend weeks or months just building the first stages of an embedded system that can support some application. If you instead choose to port the Linux kernel or make gcc able to compile native code for the CPU of your choice, they you have already gained several months of development.
Unfortunately, I have been in the situation recently where I have had to deal with Windows CE and I can say for a fact that I didn't very much like the experience. I'd honestly rather spend some time porting gcc so I can compile native code.
How would you feel about readline support on your remote control? Alan Cox recently wrote in his diary that he couldn't believe how Unix vendors can ship ancient shells without cursor control or job control with their systems. Well, I can't believe my stereo remote control still won't let me schedule playlists!
The Debian Project History is good for general history of Debian. The name Debian though is a combination of the creators name, Ian Murdock, and his wife Debra.
I don't know if the SPI will hire any programmers, that seems an unlikely event to me (FSF does this though), but they will most probably pay for Debian booths at different tradeshows and pay the travel fees for some Debian volunteers to staff the booths.