The media loves to make a big deal out of things like that. In actual fact, the discussion was fairly amicable. And Linus' stance seems to be supported by the maintainers of the various subsystems.
All Rob was suggesting was a formalisation of a de facto practise. Hardly a fundamental paradigm shift in kernel development.
It did unearth a number of gripes people had; eg. Linus dropping maintainer patches. The thrust seems to be that Linus wants to trust ten or so people, and only accept patches from them. So if Linus is dropping your patches, push them on to a 'trusted' maintainer instead.
IMHO Linus needs to step forward and deal with this a little more assertively. But everyone loves a good bit of controversy, and the Linux kernel is the tall poppy of the open-source community that everyone wants to chop down...
I will eat my hat if Linux distros like Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE hard fork.
The difference between the fork types is easy to comprehend. A soft fork remains loyal to the original code and strives for compatibility. The hard fork throws compatibility out the window, and serves its own goals completely.
All distros that I know of would fall into the soft fork category. Nobody will strike out on their own, unless they have an army of hackers behind them to maintain the momentum required to keep the project running.
That's also why the Linux kernel will not hard fork in the forseeable future. There would have to be grassroots dissent to encourage enough hackers to jump on the new fork and maintain it.
That's not forking, that's diversity. There is a massive amount of compatibility between those Linux distros. If one of the distros dumped gcc as a compiler and tweaked all of the Linux system calls - that's a hard fork.
Most of the 'forks' seem to actually be marshalling grounds for maintainers to prove the reliability of their work to the kernel community in general. Once things gain some faith in the community and in Linus' head, they get incorporated in the main tree. The process needs work, but it has gotten the community this far...
Can you provide some high profile forking examples that have occured in the recent history of Open Source, out of interest? Or evidence of similar forks in Linux. Not, to coin a phrase(?), "soft forks" as I have mentioned here, but "hard forks". Fundemental changes in ideology or personality clashes that have seriously caused a split in the community?
Most of those 'forks' are going to be maintained by kernel hackers to marshall patches for eventual inclusion in Linus' tree. I wouldn't put them anywhere near a production server.
There are various patches like the Robert Love's preempt patch which might be considered production quality. And perhaps some collections of production quality patches exist out there. But I wouldn't say -ac or -dj are in that category.
Or any of the patches marked 'preXYZ'. They're 'pre' for a reason you know. I'd be thrashing them on test servers, then giving feedback to the maintainer of that series. Let the maintainer declare them stable first.
You'll find in environments ambivalent to Linux that you really need to prove its stability to management first. Trying a new whiz bang kernel can have unforeseen side effects, in meetings that you'll never be invited to; and whose outcome you will only learn when it's too late to change it. "We let Bill convert server X to Linux and then it corrupted the filesystem. Clearly Linux carries more business risk than expected."
I couldn't help but be distracted by the author's tendancy to introduce people, then refer to them as Mr Surname, as if we've stepped into some Charles Dickens novel:
As has been stated, the issue has nothing to do with what you (Michael) think is confusing or not, or even with what Microsoft thinks is confusing. The issue that will be decided by the courts is whether your average bloke walking down the street will be confused between the two trademarks.
My personal guess would be that most people would not be confused between the names. The confusion would most likely lie in the discovery that you can have a PC without 'Microsoft' installed on it. The distinction between the terms is a bit more clear than say, a softdrink called 'Koke', vs. 'Coke'.
And I must also say: don't whine when you butt heads with Microsoft and they subsequently fire up their legal department. Yes, it may seem unfair, but don't act so bitter. You knew it was coming.
Given a clean slate, why develop on NT then migrate to *nix? What is the logic behind that? Or should you blindly be ass-banged by your customer without asking questions? I would start to ask questions if the customer was sending me on a wild goose chase for cross platform libraries.
There is a very real risk that your 'Real World' is populated with morons, and that you may be one of them.
Perhaps you should take a step back and ask "Why is this needing to be cross platform in the first place?"
There are cross platform libraries around. You may wish to just roll your own, but I would suggest constantly testing against your *nix machines throughout development to ensure compatibility.
One thing you *don't* want to do is start testing against other OSs six months into development. Do it every day, and develop a regression test suite.
... how similar this is to the whole "Say no to drugs" campaigning that was sanctioned by the government for the longest time. Lots of kids programs featured episodes based around it - and did they work? No!
Have you seen Traffic? We all know that the drug problem is complex and non-trivial to solve. File swapping is the same. The solution is not to try and stop people from swapping digital content, but to figure out how free digital content can integrate with our lives.
The whole disney thing is 'spooky' of course (the contrast between disney's lovely family face and this underhanded propaganda is just fabulous), but perhaps not something to worry about.
Oh I see... it's consuming about 40% cpu just sitting there.
I would have thought it would run a lot faster, after being unencumbered by all those calls to Win32RatherLongFunctionsThatTakeAboutFourMillionPa rameters(LPVOID foo, BLAHCHAR unknown, VPPOIDPTRTODATAMEMBER bong, EXTRASPECIALDBLBYTECHAR goodVariableName, WIN32DOUBLE(TM) wang)
I announce a completely off topic contest: the longest Win32 function name. Let the idiocy begin!
Okay. Judging from the pictures, it doesn't look like it seats a great many people. How competitive is it going to be when placed against a 747? Obviously not with respect to speed, but it has to have at least a few advantages, otherwise people won't take to it.
Oh yeah - NT? New Technology? I'm told that's the same expansion as the NT in Windows NT. *sniff sniff* I think I smell a lawsuit.
"People may buy your Zeppelin NT instead of Windows NT by mistake, so we're launching this lawsuit." Don't laugh - they'll do it.
This guy just sounds bitter about his flopped webzine.
I mean really - if Microsoft comes along with a bunch of NC like services and tries to shove them into clients, the clients are going to make *intelligent decisions* with respect to whether they meet their companies requirements.
I work for an investment bank, and we use Lotus Notes here. I would like to right now register my utter disgust at Lotus Notes. But on we go - the point is that at some stage the IT people made an assessment - Outlook or Notes? Notes did more of the stuff they wanted, hence that is what we have.
We engage, with respect to Microsoft, in a kind of FUD campaign. We convince ourselves they are a threat, always. We automatically assume they are omnipotent, very threatening, and unstoppable, without considering "Hey, is this idea of theirs actually going to work?"
IMHO - micropayment services and storing data off location, using NCs to access it, will not take off. Why? Because companies are just peachy with how everything works currently. My company still uses Office 97. MS will have to cook up something *damn* good to counteract natural corporate inertia. And if they do? Well done MS. They will have proved themselves worthy of the market share they gain.
In my experience, the university owns your stuff. By writing software for their courses as a student (solicited by them!), you are handing the rights over to them.
Think of it as the university being your employer - you wouldn't expect your employer to allow you to GPL software they asked you to write?
Yes, the distinction between public and private domain is important here, and if it seriously *mattered* (does it *really* matter?) then you could probably argue a good case for public funding resulting what it produces being publicly available.
Then again, the quality of the work a uni produces can dictate the government funding it receives, and if other unis can just pilfer software that a postgrad has written...
Lots of food for thought, anyway.
Luke.
Could you possibly spend this kind of money on a computing rig?
I challenge someone here to rough up some specs for a US$140,000 general purpose PC rig, running whatever OS is appropriate for its purpose.
Speculating on why audiophiles spend so much - I guess it's a question of standards. Even your granny would not be happy working on a 286 with Windows 2.x (she'd have a shit of a time connecting to the net...), whereas she probably wouldn't mind if you gave her a $100 CD player (assuming she can still hear).
Slashdot Mirror
All Rob was suggesting was a formalisation of a de facto practise. Hardly a fundamental paradigm shift in kernel development.
It did unearth a number of gripes people had; eg. Linus dropping maintainer patches. The thrust seems to be that Linus wants to trust ten or so people, and only accept patches from them. So if Linus is dropping your patches, push them on to a 'trusted' maintainer instead.
IMHO Linus needs to step forward and deal with this a little more assertively. But everyone loves a good bit of controversy, and the Linux kernel is the tall poppy of the open-source community that everyone wants to chop down ...
The difference between the fork types is easy to comprehend. A soft fork remains loyal to the original code and strives for compatibility. The hard fork throws compatibility out the window, and serves its own goals completely.
All distros that I know of would fall into the soft fork category. Nobody will strike out on their own, unless they have an army of hackers behind them to maintain the momentum required to keep the project running.
That's also why the Linux kernel will not hard fork in the forseeable future. There would have to be grassroots dissent to encourage enough hackers to jump on the new fork and maintain it.
Can you provide some high profile forking examples that have occured in the recent history of Open Source, out of interest? Or evidence of similar forks in Linux. Not, to coin a phrase(?), "soft forks" as I have mentioned here, but "hard forks". Fundemental changes in ideology or personality clashes that have seriously caused a split in the community?
There are various patches like the Robert Love's preempt patch which might be considered production quality. And perhaps some collections of production quality patches exist out there. But I wouldn't say -ac or -dj are in that category.
Or any of the patches marked 'preXYZ'. They're 'pre' for a reason you know. I'd be thrashing them on test servers, then giving feedback to the maintainer of that series. Let the maintainer declare them stable first.
You'll find in environments ambivalent to Linux that you really need to prove its stability to management first. Trying a new whiz bang kernel can have unforeseen side effects, in meetings that you'll never be invited to; and whose outcome you will only learn when it's too late to change it. "We let Bill convert server X to Linux and then it corrupted the filesystem. Clearly Linux carries more business risk than expected."
In the land of MS where shadows lie :)
It sounds really good when you say it. Tolkien really made Orcish quite noisome.
I couldn't help but be distracted by the author's tendancy to introduce people, then refer to them as Mr Surname, as if we've stepped into some Charles Dickens novel:
..
Mr Carmack, Mr Spock, Mr Jobs, Mr Gates, Mr Hollenshead, Mr Steed, Mr Cloud.
They forgot Mr Ego, but then he has been missing from Id for a little while now
rep-gtk-gnome2 seems to be screwed when I try and build it. There are PKG_CHECK_MODULES tokens in the configure script which make it barf.
Any suggestions to fix this? Removing the tokens makes the problem go away, but the build subsequently fails as well. What's the deal?
As has been stated, the issue has nothing to do with what you (Michael) think is confusing or not, or even with what Microsoft thinks is confusing. The issue that will be decided by the courts is whether your average bloke walking down the street will be confused between the two trademarks.
My personal guess would be that most people would not be confused between the names. The confusion would most likely lie in the discovery that you can have a PC without 'Microsoft' installed on it. The distinction between the terms is a bit more clear than say, a softdrink called 'Koke', vs. 'Coke'.
And I must also say: don't whine when you butt heads with Microsoft and they subsequently fire up their legal department. Yes, it may seem unfair, but don't act so bitter. You knew it was coming.
Given a clean slate, why develop on NT then migrate to *nix? What is the logic behind that? Or should you blindly be ass-banged by your customer without asking questions? I would start to ask questions if the customer was sending me on a wild goose chase for cross platform libraries.
There is a very real risk that your 'Real World' is populated with morons, and that you may be one of them.
Hmm, Rogue Wave's STL classes, which I have used with SUNWspro 5.0, blew dogs. I'd be interested to see if SourcePro was as bad as the STL stuff ...
Perhaps you should take a step back and ask "Why is this needing to be cross platform in the first place?"
There are cross platform libraries around. You may wish to just roll your own, but I would suggest constantly testing against your *nix machines throughout development to ensure compatibility.
One thing you *don't* want to do is start testing against other OSs six months into development. Do it every day, and develop a regression test suite.
... how similar this is to the whole "Say no to drugs" campaigning that was sanctioned by the government for the longest time. Lots of kids programs featured episodes based around it - and did they work? No!
Have you seen Traffic? We all know that the drug problem is complex and non-trivial to solve. File swapping is the same. The solution is not to try and stop people from swapping digital content, but to figure out how free digital content can integrate with our lives.
The whole disney thing is 'spooky' of course (the contrast between disney's lovely family face and this underhanded propaganda is just fabulous), but perhaps not something to worry about.
Runs like a dog.
... it's consuming about 40% cpu just sitting there.
a rameters(LPVOID foo, BLAHCHAR unknown, VPPOIDPTRTODATAMEMBER bong, EXTRASPECIALDBLBYTECHAR goodVariableName, WIN32DOUBLE(TM) wang)
Oh I see
I would have thought it would run a lot faster, after being unencumbered by all those calls to Win32RatherLongFunctionsThatTakeAboutFourMillionP
I announce a completely off topic contest: the longest Win32 function name. Let the idiocy begin!
Oh yeah - NT? New Technology? I'm told that's the same expansion as the NT in Windows NT. *sniff sniff* I think I smell a lawsuit.
"People may buy your Zeppelin NT instead of Windows NT by mistake, so we're launching this lawsuit." Don't laugh - they'll do it.
export PS1="\[\033[1;33m\]\[\033[0m\] "
Ends up something like:
Except all coloured and stuff.
This guy just sounds bitter about his flopped webzine.
I mean really - if Microsoft comes along with a bunch of NC like services and tries to shove them into clients, the clients are going to make *intelligent decisions* with respect to whether they meet their companies requirements.
I work for an investment bank, and we use Lotus Notes here. I would like to right now register my utter disgust at Lotus Notes. But on we go - the point is that at some stage the IT people made an assessment - Outlook or Notes? Notes did more of the stuff they wanted, hence that is what we have.
We engage, with respect to Microsoft, in a kind of FUD campaign. We convince ourselves they are a threat, always. We automatically assume they are omnipotent, very threatening, and unstoppable, without considering "Hey, is this idea of theirs actually going to work?"
IMHO - micropayment services and storing data off location, using NCs to access it, will not take off. Why? Because companies are just peachy with how everything works currently. My company still uses Office 97. MS will have to cook up something *damn* good to counteract natural corporate inertia. And if they do? Well done MS. They will have proved themselves worthy of the market share they gain.
My 2c.
Luke.
In my experience, the university owns your stuff. By writing software for their courses as a student (solicited by them!), you are handing the rights over to them. Think of it as the university being your employer - you wouldn't expect your employer to allow you to GPL software they asked you to write? Yes, the distinction between public and private domain is important here, and if it seriously *mattered* (does it *really* matter?) then you could probably argue a good case for public funding resulting what it produces being publicly available. Then again, the quality of the work a uni produces can dictate the government funding it receives, and if other unis can just pilfer software that a postgrad has written ...
Lots of food for thought, anyway.
Luke.
Could you possibly spend this kind of money on a computing rig?
...), whereas she probably wouldn't mind if you gave her a $100 CD player (assuming she can still hear).
I challenge someone here to rough up some specs for a US$140,000 general purpose PC rig, running whatever OS is appropriate for its purpose.
Speculating on why audiophiles spend so much - I guess it's a question of standards. Even your granny would not be happy working on a 286 with Windows 2.x (she'd have a shit of a time connecting to the net
Luke.
I just thought I'd take advantage of this obscure thread to try posting for the first time in awhile.
Hi Mum!