It is surprising that this decision seems to exclude other free licenses such as the BSD. Does this mean that they wont use things like Mozilla (isnt it the NPL?) and FreeBSD? What did they find objectionable about the other licenses?
....but the slick installer has definitely arrived. I am a Debian kind of guy but I recently had the opportunity to install Redhat 7.3. I must say that its polish took my breath away.
Of course, once my install was complete, I discovered that a simple thing like locking the desktop was not visible on the desktop (annoying - it was in the desktop menu) and didnt work anyway (grrr! I guess I'll have to see which package needs to get installed. Even more annoying was the fact that it didnt let me know that it failed due to a missing package - it just did nothing.)
I also looked at the Debian Woody instaler. The fact that I could select from so many locales had me impressed too (I'm sure this will win points with multinational corporations), but a graphics mode install like Redhat's would definitely impress the unitiated more.
"Perhaps not, but it certainly sets a pattern. Security is not so much an added feature as it is a mentality. Security needs to be incorperated in to a design from the bottom up, not just as an extra bonus. This is where M$ historically fails, they use poor designs, and then try to patch over security design flaws later."
You may be right. However, lets look at things a bit more favourably. The previous inattention to a ground up secure design could be because they were designing products whose main focus wasnt security. Lets say the product was a web server. The main thrust there is to serve up web pages. The old Microsoft probably would consider the goal of securely serving up web pages an after though. That is not the case with Palladium : the main thrust here is security. It is somewhat hard to believe that even Microsoft would not design in security from the ground up when designing security infrastructure.
You also state (implicitly) that Microsoft hires smart people but doesnt give them freedom to design and innovate. It is my contention that given the recent shift in attitude at Microsoft towards security, I dont think this is true anymore. I imagine that in today's Microsoft, if the choice came down to a tradeoff between security and features, especially in the case of something like Palladium, Microsoft would choose security. But thats just my opinion - I could be wrong.
To quote : "3. Like everything else Microsoft produces, Pd will have security holes large enough to drive a truck through. Lots of them. And the ones that are in hardware will be much harder to fix. Be sure to separate the Microsoft PR hype about the promise of Pd from the actual reality of Pd 1.0."
Sure, Microsoft has to date produced lots of software with security holes "large enough to drive a truck through". However bear in mind that the holes have usually been a consequence of the overriding principle of wanting to keep things user-friendly at all costs. Their past history doesnt imply anything about how secure they can make their stuff. Certainly, Microsoft hires a lot of smart people and I'm sure that if they were given the mandate to design and implement a secure infrastructure, they could do it - something that Bruce seems to think is impossible.
Its possible (too little is known about intelligence to be definitive about this) that the laws of information processing / physics / nature or what have you, impose a tradeoff here. It may not be possible to get human / animal type intelligence without also making it error prone. Certainly, in the hundreds of millions of years that nature evolved, that is the solution that nature arrived at. Before you make statements like "why try and make them think like people", you should think about whether there is any evidence to show that any other path to intelligence will work. I am not saying that it wont - just that there doesnt seem to be any research pointing out that the alternative (your way) will work.
One of the implicit goals of current AI research is to understand the nature of intelligence. This is currently very poorly understood. Certainly there is an intense disagreement / debate between the AI proponents and the researchers who claim that AI has set itself a fundamentally unattainable goal. Maybe the only attainable goal is a low - IQ but completely reliable automaton. But unless you understand intelligence itself, finding out whats attainable and whats not is a like finding a needle in a haystack in pitch dark.
You claim that your site isnt targetted towards the Linux / Mozilla user, so you dont care anyway. The fallacy in your assumption is that your target audience could be Linux / Mozilla users too - and then imagine their estimate of your company when they find your website doesnt work with their browser. When I use a non-IE browser to visit websites (100% of the time when I'm not at work - which is also the time when I have purchasing power), my expectations arent too high. Basically, I need a site thats usable. The bells and whistles might be nice, but I can live without that. Sadly, I find that there are people like you out there who dont even provide that.
A case in point : Ikea - the furniture store. Just last week, I was ready to spend good chunk of money on buying a really good quality bookshelf. The site was unusable with Netscape on Linux. I spent my money at Walmart. Later, at work, I went to the Ikea site and looked at their catalog. There was a bookcase priced at $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
The GPL doesnt ask for any of which you are demanding from businesses. Indeed, some of the other Open source licenses (notably, the BSD license) are even less demanding than the GPL. Noone forced the authors of open-source software to pick a specific license - they did so of their own volition. One of the consequences of that choice is that other companies can make money off of that work. How is this immoral?
Redhat (and some other companies) have done more than what is required off them by the license. I wont go into their motivation - which is irrelevant to the point I am trying to make - that is : just because some companies may not go the extra mile, doesnt make them immoral. If you cant stand the consequences of the open-source licenses, dont pick them to license your code in.
I'm constantly surprised by how few people who have heard of AIX have heard of the Linux compatibility that IBM has been stressing on ever since AIX 4.3.3 . Their repackaging of the Linux applications is referred to as the AIX Toolbox for (sic) Linux. Indeed, AIX v5 is called AIX5L, and the 'L' in it is to emphasize Linux compatibility. 'rpm' runs natively on AIX5L. So in that sense, IBM has already determined that AIX is going the Redhat way.
Of course, this is a packaging choice - rather than a full fledged subscription to whatever standards that Redhat follows. But it does make it more difficult for IBM to consider any standards that conflict with Redhats standards.
Solaris was not really a sci-fi movie. Yes, visually and superficially it had all the characteristics of a sci-fi movie : space travel, aliens, technology from the future, etc, but that wasnt the point of the movie. The director was really exploring the boundaries between perception and reality. If your mind is convinced that something is real, is that reality distinguishable in any way from a "reality" that exists outside of your mind?
Solaris falls into the category of "art" movies - movies that incorporate an artistic vision rather than offering entertainment value. Since the vast majority of movie goers watch movies for entertainment rather than art appreciation, I can understand how Solaris doesnt come up in any of the movie lists. But as a movie - it is magnificient! (So are so some of the other movies by the director (Andrei Tarkovsky)).
In response to another poster in this same thread about how it is slow paced - not really. Generally art movies are slower paced only to folks who lack the training to appreciate the genre. If you know what to watch for, a higher tempo in an art film can cause one to miss the zillion different nuances that art movie directors incorporate into their vision. Like paintings, these movies are painstakingly crafted - not filmed.
True, but companies dont get to take out the space shuttle for a spin either. In the case is this software, there is an inequity in the availability of the software for the taxpayer who paid for it and the corporations who didnt. Why should they get it cheaper? If anything, the pricing should be the other way around.
The US constitution was indeed written by Americans. However, it applies to everyone on US soil. Including non-citizens. It even applies to illegal immigrants. Do you think that an arresting officer can arrest even an illegal immigrant without a Miranda warning? Think again.
Of course, you probably meant that the US constitution was intended to protect the interests of US citizens. That would be a true statement, but is not what you wrote.
As a programmer of Indian origin, I feel somewhat qualified to comment. Before I get to my main point, I need to provide a bit of a preface. Programmers from India that come with an engineering degree typically are much better at the problem solving and analysis that are required in IT than are folks from a sciences and the arts. The reason for this is that engineering and medicine are typically the higher (far higher in the case of compute related stuff) paying professions and the competition for admissions to these courses are fierce. In a process of evolutionary selection, typically the candidates better suited to problem solving and analysis are the ones that make it through to even getting admission to the professional schools.
Granted, as in every other field, a percentage of those admitted to egineering are duds. But statistically speaking, the odds are really good that someone from an engineering background in India is Good at IT. Conversely, the people who dont get into engineering and medicine are typically less suited to IT.
And now onto my point....
Coming from an enginering background myself, and having worked for one of the companies that do offshore development, I noticed a curious phenomenon amongst my (then) colleagues. The vast majority of them had scorn for the skills and capabilities of the average IT worker. I didnt understand this until I came to the US myself. Then I realized that the average IT worker in the US is more likely to be a former third grade teacher who sought a better paying profession than a graduate of engineering. My (then) colleagues were falling into the trap of comparing apples to oranges. They were comparing themselves and their colleagues (who were mainly with engineering backgrounds) to people who werent, and of course, in that comparison, the US worker came out short.
The correct way of comparing things would have been to look at where the people with engineering backgrounds (and in the US, this is only a rough indicator of problem solving and analytical skills, I know) went, and then, comparing themselves to the skill and efficiency of those workers. When I did that comparison myself, I found that there really was no inequity between the US and the Indian worker.
You (and many others) seem to have fallen into a similar trap : you are equating all Indian offshore companies without recognizing quality differences. This would be something like comparing IBM to Poppa and Momma IT Inc. The company that I had worked for hired really good people. There are companies from India in the same field that hire predominantly from the Arts and Sciences fields and because of the competition I mentioned before, the people that they get arent (statistically speaking) as good as the really good ones. So, the conclusion is, you can get really good work done at really cheap prices, provided you pick the right company!
1. So that Sun (and IBM) can sell more hardware in order that Java developers can even run a "Hello World" type program.
2. This is human nature. The Catholic church behaved the same way when Galileo pointed out the error in their doctrine.
3. Everyone has their own reasons. I like picking on the unthinking masses.
4. Thats a bit like asking "If you could make a perpetual motion machine...."?
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
How about applying Occam's razor and concluding that they simply dont exist? Yes, you may find it hard to believe in your uniqueness, but what does your faith / belief have to do with cold hard facts?
As a sysadmin, I have to state that the 2.4 kernels have ruined whatever reputation that existed before about the 2.2n series kernels being stable. Atleast in the 2.0 and the 2.2 series, you had islands of stability where really careful distributions could pick a kernel version as their default kernel. One of the main problems with Debian not finalizing a 2.4 kernel has been due to the fact that there hasnt been an island of stability so far in the 2.4 series.
And I've been waiting a long time now. The early 2.4 series didnt really work out on my SMP servers. The 2.4.6 onwards kernels broke Tulip support for me. Then came the VM switch. Then just when I decide, ok, 2.4.16 seems stable enough, we have the OOM problem. And I also keep hearing statements being made about the new VM being more friendly to desktop systems than servers.....
But if GM did something stupid like make thousands of car locks openable by the same key, that would make them fail the "reasonable" test, and they should then be held accountable for the break in.
I do speak Malayalam. Colloquially speaking, it translates to : "Move along. Stop quarreling for fun.". The "fun" bit is added only because there isnt an exact translation of the idiom. Quarelling for the sake of quarelling is more like it.
The function of a kernel maintainer should be to make the best possible technical decisions for the kernl. It doesnt matter that he is terse in his communication with other developers. As long as the core of the technical ideas are communicated, it shouldnt be a problem. He is not being expected to deal with management types - just the technical ones.
Now, it wouldnt hurt if he also had an extroverted character to supplement his technical capabilities. But this is not essential for doing what he has to do.
...they die. I had recently gone to have my wisdom teeth extracted, and there, in the same complex as the oral surgeon, was the Zilog offices in Austin. I remember thinking at that time : "Are they still around?". Then I blinked, and next thing I know I am reading of their demise on/. .
Technically speaking, token-ring has had the ability to do 100Mb speeds for some time now. There is even a spec in existence for Gb token ring, though I dont know if anyone makes equipment implementing that spec. The technical shortcomings that you cite dont exist. The marketing shortcomings, on the other hand are very real. With no-one wanting to invest in token-ring because it is percieved (and rightly so) as losing share to ethernet, the manufacturers are less and less willing to invest in new research in that area.
You are equating the word "success" to mean financial success. By that definition, yes, Microsoft has been extremely successful. However, the vast majority of the free software community defines "success" rather differently : success implies useful, reliable, secure, free software. By that definition, Microsoft has not been very successful. Upto now, I would say GNOME has been successful in this matter, but I am disheartened at the way things are going. I think Stallman is the right person to put GNOME back on the success track.
GNOME or the FSF is not a "company" in the sense that their primary goal is not to make money - their primary goal is to produce software. If you wish to make money off of this, more power to you. But sacrificing the ideals of a free software project just so that you can make money is a bargain with the devil IMHO. Yes, RMS would drive the board of directors of a commercial minded corporation crazy - that is exactly why he is so emminently qualified for the GNOME position.
The last I heard, Debian was waiting for a stable kernel to appear. And please dont tell me that the 2.4 kernels were announced a while back by Linus - I have any number of machines (of varying hardware) on which 2.2 kernels run fine but the 2.4 kernels are unstable. Granted, 2.4.13 is billed as the stable kernel we've all been waiting for. However, given that it made its appearance only last week, I think we should excercise some patience. It will take a while to test all the OS packages with the new kernel.
Quoting from the Halloween doc : "The biggest roadblock for OSS projects is dealing with exponential growth of management costs as a project is scaled up in terms of rate of innovation and size. This implies a limit to the rate at which an OSS project can innovate." To this, LWN responds in a totally tangentially way that is more commonly used by politicians ducking the question.
Indeed, Microsoft has made a spot on judgment of the management problem in open source : things eventually happen in open source projects, but not at a pace that anyone can control. Indeed, the management techniques that can be applied to closed source projects can allow people to define deadlines - whereas no such deadlines can be imposed (if one is honest) in the open source world.
LWN has attempted to distract one from this fact by throwing in the red herring that closed source project management is not perfect and can have problems meeting deadlines. (1) The Halloween document is not addressing deadlines - just the rate at which a project can be planned to proceed at (2) While I have observed the slippage of deadlines first hand in closed source projects, mostly they arent very serious slippages. Maybe a few days here or there, but hardly the three month delay quoted by LWN ("2.5 will...").
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It is surprising that this decision seems to exclude other free licenses such as the BSD. Does this mean that they wont use things like Mozilla (isnt it the NPL?) and FreeBSD? What did they find objectionable about the other licenses?
....but the slick installer has definitely arrived. I am a Debian kind of guy but I recently had the opportunity to install Redhat 7.3. I must say that its polish took my breath away.
Of course, once my install was complete, I discovered that a simple thing like locking the desktop was not visible on the desktop (annoying - it was in the desktop menu) and didnt work anyway (grrr! I guess I'll have to see which package needs to get installed. Even more annoying was the fact that it didnt let me know that it failed due to a missing package - it just did nothing.)
I also looked at the Debian Woody instaler. The fact that I could select from so many locales had me impressed too (I'm sure this will win points with multinational corporations), but a graphics mode install like Redhat's would definitely impress the unitiated more.
"Perhaps not, but it certainly sets a pattern. Security is not so much an added feature as it is a mentality. Security needs to be incorperated in to a design from the bottom up, not just as an extra bonus. This is where M$ historically fails, they use poor designs, and then try to patch over security design flaws later."
You may be right. However, lets look at things a bit more favourably. The previous inattention to a ground up secure design could be because they were designing products whose main focus wasnt security. Lets say the product was a web server. The main thrust there is to serve up web pages. The old Microsoft probably would consider the goal of securely serving up web pages an after though. That is not the case with Palladium : the main thrust here is security. It is somewhat hard to believe that even Microsoft would not design in security from the ground up when designing security infrastructure.
You also state (implicitly) that Microsoft hires smart people but doesnt give them freedom to design and innovate. It is my contention that given the recent shift in attitude at Microsoft towards security, I dont think this is true anymore. I imagine that in today's Microsoft, if the choice came down to a tradeoff between security and features, especially in the case of something like Palladium, Microsoft would choose security. But thats just my opinion - I could be wrong.
To quote : "3. Like everything else Microsoft produces, Pd will have security holes large enough to drive a truck through. Lots of them. And the ones that are in hardware will be much harder to fix. Be sure to separate the Microsoft PR hype about the promise of Pd from the actual reality of Pd 1.0."
Sure, Microsoft has to date produced lots of software with security holes "large enough to drive a truck through". However bear in mind that the holes have usually been a consequence of the overriding principle of wanting to keep things user-friendly at all costs. Their past history doesnt imply anything about how secure they can make their stuff. Certainly, Microsoft hires a lot of smart people and I'm sure that if they were given the mandate to design and implement a secure infrastructure, they could do it - something that Bruce seems to think is impossible.
Its possible (too little is known about intelligence to be definitive about this) that the laws of information processing / physics / nature or what have you, impose a tradeoff here. It may not be possible to get human / animal type intelligence without also making it error prone. Certainly, in the hundreds of millions of years that nature evolved, that is the solution that nature arrived at. Before you make statements like "why try and make them think like people", you should think about whether there is any evidence to show that any other path to intelligence will work. I am not saying that it wont - just that there doesnt seem to be any research pointing out that the alternative (your way) will work.
One of the implicit goals of current AI research is to understand the nature of intelligence. This is currently very poorly understood. Certainly there is an intense disagreement / debate between the AI proponents and the researchers who claim that AI has set itself a fundamentally unattainable goal. Maybe the only attainable goal is a low - IQ but completely reliable automaton. But unless you understand intelligence itself, finding out whats attainable and whats not is a like finding a needle in a haystack in pitch dark.
You claim that your site isnt targetted towards the Linux / Mozilla user, so you dont care anyway. The fallacy in your assumption is that your target audience could be Linux / Mozilla users too - and then imagine their estimate of your company when they find your website doesnt work with their browser. When I use a non-IE browser to visit websites (100% of the time when I'm not at work - which is also the time when I have purchasing power), my expectations arent too high. Basically, I need a site thats usable. The bells and whistles might be nice, but I can live without that. Sadly, I find that there are people like you out there who dont even provide that.
A case in point : Ikea - the furniture store. Just last week, I was ready to spend good chunk of money on buying a really good quality bookshelf. The site was unusable with Netscape on Linux. I spent my money at Walmart. Later, at work, I went to the Ikea site and looked at their catalog. There was a bookcase priced at $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
The GPL doesnt ask for any of which you are demanding from businesses. Indeed, some of the other Open source licenses (notably, the BSD license) are even less demanding than the GPL. Noone forced the authors of open-source software to pick a specific license - they did so of their own volition. One of the consequences of that choice is that other companies can make money off of that work. How is this immoral?
Redhat (and some other companies) have done more than what is required off them by the license. I wont go into their motivation - which is irrelevant to the point I am trying to make - that is : just because some companies may not go the extra mile, doesnt make them immoral. If you cant stand the consequences of the open-source licenses, dont pick them to license your code in.
I'm constantly surprised by how few people who have heard of AIX have heard of the Linux compatibility that IBM has been stressing on ever since AIX 4.3.3 . Their repackaging of the Linux applications is referred to as the AIX Toolbox for (sic) Linux. Indeed, AIX v5 is called AIX5L, and the 'L' in it is to emphasize Linux compatibility. 'rpm' runs natively on AIX5L. So in that sense, IBM has already determined that AIX is going the Redhat way.
Of course, this is a packaging choice - rather than a full fledged subscription to whatever standards that Redhat follows. But it does make it more difficult for IBM to consider any standards that conflict with Redhats standards.
Solaris was not really a sci-fi movie. Yes, visually and superficially it had all the characteristics of a sci-fi movie : space travel, aliens, technology from the future, etc, but that wasnt the point of the movie. The director was really exploring the boundaries between perception and reality. If your mind is convinced that something is real, is that reality distinguishable in any way from a "reality" that exists outside of your mind?
Solaris falls into the category of "art" movies - movies that incorporate an artistic vision rather than offering entertainment value. Since the vast majority of movie goers watch movies for entertainment rather than art appreciation, I can understand how Solaris doesnt come up in any of the movie lists. But as a movie - it is magnificient! (So are so some of the other movies by the director (Andrei Tarkovsky)).
In response to another poster in this same thread about how it is slow paced - not really. Generally art movies are slower paced only to folks who lack the training to appreciate the genre. If you know what to watch for, a higher tempo in an art film can cause one to miss the zillion different nuances that art movie directors incorporate into their vision. Like paintings, these movies are painstakingly crafted - not filmed.
True, but companies dont get to take out the space shuttle for a spin either. In the case is this software, there is an inequity in the availability of the software for the taxpayer who paid for it and the corporations who didnt. Why should they get it cheaper? If anything, the pricing should be the other way around.
Nope.
The US constitution was indeed written by Americans. However, it applies to everyone on US soil. Including non-citizens. It even applies to illegal immigrants. Do you think that an arresting officer can arrest even an illegal immigrant without a Miranda warning? Think again.
Of course, you probably meant that the US constitution was intended to protect the interests of US citizens. That would be a true statement, but is not what you wrote.
As a programmer of Indian origin, I feel somewhat qualified to comment. Before I get to my main point, I need to provide a bit of a preface. Programmers from India that come with an engineering degree typically are much better at the problem solving and analysis that are required in IT than are folks from a sciences and the arts. The reason for this is that engineering and medicine are typically the higher (far higher in the case of compute related stuff) paying professions and the competition for admissions to these courses are fierce. In a process of evolutionary selection, typically the candidates better suited to problem solving and analysis are the ones that make it through to even getting admission to the professional schools.
Granted, as in every other field, a percentage of those admitted to egineering are duds. But statistically speaking, the odds are really good that someone from an engineering background in India is Good at IT. Conversely, the people who dont get into engineering and medicine are typically less suited to IT.
And now onto my point....
Coming from an enginering background myself, and having worked for one of the companies that do offshore development, I noticed a curious phenomenon amongst my (then) colleagues. The vast majority of them had scorn for the skills and capabilities of the average IT worker. I didnt understand this until I came to the US myself. Then I realized that the average IT worker in the US is more likely to be a former third grade teacher who sought a better paying profession than a graduate of engineering. My (then) colleagues were falling into the trap of comparing apples to oranges. They were comparing themselves and their colleagues (who were mainly with engineering backgrounds) to people who werent, and of course, in that comparison, the US worker came out short.
The correct way of comparing things would have been to look at where the people with engineering backgrounds (and in the US, this is only a rough indicator of problem solving and analytical skills, I know) went, and then, comparing themselves to the skill and efficiency of those workers. When I did that comparison myself, I found that there really was no inequity between the US and the Indian worker.
You (and many others) seem to have fallen into a similar trap : you are equating all Indian offshore companies without recognizing quality differences. This would be something like comparing IBM to Poppa and Momma IT Inc. The company that I had worked for hired really good people. There are companies from India in the same field that hire predominantly from the Arts and Sciences fields and because of the competition I mentioned before, the people that they get arent (statistically speaking) as good as the really good ones. So, the conclusion is, you can get really good work done at really cheap prices, provided you pick the right company!
The real answers are :
1. So that Sun (and IBM) can sell more hardware in order that Java developers can even run a "Hello World" type program.
2. This is human nature. The Catholic church behaved the same way when Galileo pointed out the error in their doctrine.
3. Everyone has their own reasons. I like picking on the unthinking masses.
4. Thats a bit like asking "If you could make a perpetual motion machine...."?
How about applying Occam's razor and concluding that they simply dont exist? Yes, you may find it hard to believe in your uniqueness, but what does your faith / belief have to do with cold hard facts?
The Domino SNMP agent was vulnerable to the recent SNMP problem.
As a sysadmin, I have to state that the 2.4 kernels have ruined whatever reputation that existed before about the 2.2n series kernels being stable. Atleast in the 2.0 and the 2.2 series, you had islands of stability where really careful distributions could pick a kernel version as their default kernel. One of the main problems with Debian not finalizing a 2.4 kernel has been due to the fact that there hasnt been an island of stability so far in the 2.4 series.
And I've been waiting a long time now. The early 2.4 series didnt really work out on my SMP servers. The 2.4.6 onwards kernels broke Tulip support for me. Then came the VM switch. Then just when I decide, ok, 2.4.16 seems stable enough, we have the OOM problem. And I also keep hearing statements being made about the new VM being more friendly to desktop systems than servers.....
Now if only 2.2 offered iptables.....
But if GM did something stupid like make thousands of car locks openable by the same key, that would make them fail the "reasonable" test, and they should then be held accountable for the break in.
I do speak Malayalam. Colloquially speaking, it translates to : "Move along. Stop quarreling for fun.". The "fun" bit is added only because there isnt an exact translation of the idiom. Quarelling for the sake of quarelling is more like it.
The function of a kernel maintainer should be to make the best possible technical decisions for the kernl. It doesnt matter that he is terse in his communication with other developers. As long as the core of the technical ideas are communicated, it shouldnt be a problem. He is not being expected to deal with management types - just the technical ones.
Now, it wouldnt hurt if he also had an extroverted character to supplement his technical capabilities. But this is not essential for doing what he has to do.
...they die. I had recently gone to have my wisdom teeth extracted, and there, in the same complex as the oral surgeon, was the Zilog offices in Austin. I remember thinking at that time : "Are they still around?". Then I blinked, and next thing I know I am reading of their demise on /. .
Sigh. The older you get, the faster time flies.
Technically speaking, token-ring has had the ability to do 100Mb speeds for some time now. There is even a spec in existence for Gb token ring, though I dont know if anyone makes equipment implementing that spec. The technical shortcomings that you cite dont exist. The marketing shortcomings, on the other hand are very real. With no-one wanting to invest in token-ring because it is percieved (and rightly so) as losing share to ethernet, the manufacturers are less and less willing to invest in new research in that area.
You are equating the word "success" to mean financial success. By that definition, yes, Microsoft has been extremely successful. However, the vast majority of the free software community defines "success" rather differently : success implies useful, reliable, secure, free software. By that definition, Microsoft has not been very successful. Upto now, I would say GNOME has been successful in this matter, but I am disheartened at the way things are going. I think Stallman is the right person to put GNOME back on the success track.
GNOME or the FSF is not a "company" in the sense that their primary goal is not to make money - their primary goal is to produce software. If you wish to make money off of this, more power to you. But sacrificing the ideals of a free software project just so that you can make money is a bargain with the devil IMHO. Yes, RMS would drive the board of directors of a commercial minded corporation crazy - that is exactly why he is so emminently qualified for the GNOME position.
The last I heard, Debian was waiting for a stable kernel to appear. And please dont tell me that the 2.4 kernels were announced a while back by Linus - I have any number of machines (of varying hardware) on which 2.2 kernels run fine but the 2.4 kernels are unstable. Granted, 2.4.13 is billed as the stable kernel we've all been waiting for. However, given that it made its appearance only last week, I think we should excercise some patience. It will take a while to test all the OS packages with the new kernel.
Yes it does. Look at it from the perspective of a closed source proponent. The LWN statements are FUD directed at such folks.
Quoting from the Halloween doc : "The biggest roadblock for OSS projects is dealing with exponential growth of management costs as a project is scaled up in terms of rate of innovation and size. This implies a limit to the rate at which an OSS project can innovate." To this, LWN responds in a totally tangentially way that is more commonly used by politicians ducking the question.
Indeed, Microsoft has made a spot on judgment of the management problem in open source : things eventually happen in open source projects, but not at a pace that anyone can control. Indeed, the management techniques that can be applied to closed source projects can allow people to define deadlines - whereas no such deadlines can be imposed (if one is honest) in the open source world.
LWN has attempted to distract one from this fact by throwing in the red herring that closed source project management is not perfect and can have problems meeting deadlines. (1) The Halloween document is not addressing deadlines - just the rate at which a project can be planned to proceed at (2) While I have observed the slippage of deadlines first hand in closed source projects, mostly they arent very serious slippages. Maybe a few days here or there, but hardly the three month delay quoted by LWN ("2.5 will ...").