Even though I think that it IS a violation of the GPL, I also think its cool they decided that GPL was a good idea to license their software.
Let the big fat corporate guys slowly grow into the movement. This is just a mistake and will be surely fixed soon.......
But if it CompaQ doesnt fix it.....oh boy.... I dont think their "strategic" e-commerce sites will have a good uptime... things fall around and stuff.....
Or maybe there wont be a need for that....maybe fsf will take a crack at them and sue them to the wall.
But lets just wait on them. Their lawyers have to understand that the company went open source and thus has new rules for software downloads.
Here in my country, the whole school system is very influenced by the United States view of higher education. This leads to many good things like a bunch of good administrators with a lot of drive and capacity to create enterprises and stuff.
The problem comes when the same pedagogic and educational ideas try to be applied to I.T. as a whole.
Granted that some areas in the field require lots of administrative skills, but all the core technologies of any kind of I.T. require mathematics and engineering...it just needs nerds.
My roomate worked at Redmond for M$ for a while and he told me that it was very impressive to him how asians and hindus where so much more "in" to math and engineering. My friend is an American exception to the rule, he wants to become a mathematician but he knows that -even though he could easyly get a schollarship- its no good going to the United States for his phd and thats because of America's educational values. They are no good for science in general, let alone math.
So dont be surprised that the amazingly fast growing economy of the United States needs better engineers than what it's schools can provide...
I mean, face it, nothing in America compares to Grenoble or Cambridge in mathemathics, physics and such scientific stuff that has no potential revenue at all. And the point is that this scientific research -off the hands of corporations- is critical in building good schools for good engineers with great mathemathical background which is what you need to develop with quality anything that requires more than VBscript knowledge.
I have a dual ppro box with 200 mhz on each procesor and 500 megs ram....
I tried this:
Did a netbios copy of a 1000 meg directory from the win2k (the dual ppro) server box to my laptop over a 100 mps ethernet.
Played a Pink Floyd mp3 at the same time....
The mp3 actually started going like a scrached LP disk. The damn files came from an ntfs partition on the win2k and were being copied to a fat32 partition on the laptop... so why did the final copy had fat16 names on it? (explorer did something funny with the filenames because I copyed win2k to win32??).
Since windows is a must for my roomate we just went back to nt4.0 sp5 that does the job much better than win2k....exept being able to serve webpages and databases at the same time....
And on and on.....
All in favor of making a www.cryaboutmicrosoft.com slashdot backed site especially made for reporting stupid bugs on stupid software from $tupid MS say YAY.
Ill even host the damned thing.
Yeah...that does not sound bad at all.... MS uses this scheme for their driver stuff under windows and that is one area where win. kicks tux's butt pretty bad..... The thing here is that even a VM will show to much of a driver. Manufacturers (not without reason) are pretty much paranoid about their technology... take the lucent winmodem for example (which is binary only and "supported" for an incredebly old version of the kernel), modems and computer exchange data with a given protocol that would go on top of the VM in code....this means that it would show some of the extensions that lucent doesnt want to show.... The only way to solve this stupid thing about drivers is standards. Until we have a good standard architecture -that takes autoconfigureability in mind and off-hands plug and play- for binary-only drivers this system is going nowhere near the desktop. Now idealy, its stupid to close a driver's code. Thats not where the value is. If manufacturers planned ahead they would find that competition is not bad. Intel business model comes to mind in that it releases everything to be cloned and they can actually use this as an advantage. Manufacturers should plan ahead and think about where is their device going, what is its future...if they cant be leaders then closing driver code does make some sense.
Look man: 1.- Do you want to SUPPORT the linux market? Are you sure? Is your company sure?
Do a market study to determine the potential gain of going into the Linux market.
2.- Once you have (1)...plan ahead and determine the cost of mantaining a binary distribution of Linux. Your market study should have told you which distros give you the most value.
3.- Now think about it. Plan ahead and determine the cost of releasing an open source version of the driver.
What would be the oportunity cost of having somebody clone your device?
Does being the first to use it gives you enough lever to crush the upcomming competition if you do release a GPL show-all driver?
The binary release (if you are thinking about giving true professional support) will be more costly than the OS release. Thats a fact. So compare costs and choose the most convenient solution.
Remember to take into account the reduced cost of mantaining an OS driver (it can be merely an accept/refuse patches job with OS). Compare it with the cost of mantaining a sun-like, look-dont-touch license (it can reduce beta testing costs)....and so on.
In my enterprise we custom configure debian boxes for our customers. We think your new NOW stuff looks pretty hot as far as your world class team goes -some of the best out there including...well... you!. (Im a fan, so what) Still, could you ellaborate on this "Changeing the way network computing works" stuff? I mean what's the new great idea in NOW. Will I be able to distribute tiers or threads across de networks (I can do that now, though).... Bottom line is... I dont get it...whats this stuff (I read the page). Does it bring a new and innovative engineering concept? Would you elaborate on it? Alex
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I think that it IS a violation of the GPL, I also think its cool they decided that GPL was a good idea to license their software.
Let the big fat corporate guys slowly grow into the movement. This is just a mistake and will be surely fixed soon.......
But if it CompaQ doesnt fix it.....oh boy.... I dont think their "strategic" e-commerce sites will have a good uptime... things fall around and stuff.....
Or maybe there wont be a need for that....maybe fsf will take a crack at them and sue them to the wall.
But lets just wait on them. Their lawyers have to understand that the company went open source and thus has new rules for software downloads.
People WORKING in North America.... That mostly did not study there......
I mean by America the whole continent.
Here in my country, the whole school system is very influenced by the United States view of higher education. This leads to many good things like a bunch of good administrators with a lot of drive and capacity to create enterprises and stuff.
The problem comes when the same pedagogic and educational ideas try to be applied to I.T. as a whole.
Granted that some areas in the field require lots of administrative skills, but all the core technologies of any kind of I.T. require mathematics and engineering...it just needs nerds.
My roomate worked at Redmond for M$ for a while and he told me that it was very impressive to him how asians and hindus where so much more "in" to math and engineering. My friend is an American exception to the rule, he wants to become a mathematician but he knows that -even though he could easyly get a schollarship- its no good going to the United States for his phd and thats because of America's educational values. They are no good for science in general, let alone math.
So dont be surprised that the amazingly fast growing economy of the United States needs better engineers than what it's schools can provide...
I mean, face it, nothing in America compares to Grenoble or Cambridge in mathemathics, physics and such scientific stuff that has no potential revenue at all. And the point is that this scientific research -off the hands of corporations- is critical in building good schools for good engineers with great mathemathical background which is what you need to develop with quality anything that requires more than VBscript knowledge.
Alex
I have a dual ppro box with 200 mhz on each procesor and 500 megs ram....
I tried this:
Did a netbios copy of a 1000 meg directory from the win2k (the dual ppro) server box to my laptop over a 100 mps ethernet.
Played a Pink Floyd mp3 at the same time....
The mp3 actually started going like a scrached LP disk. The damn files came from an ntfs partition on the win2k and were being copied to a fat32 partition on the laptop... so why did the final copy had fat16 names on it? (explorer did something funny with the filenames because I copyed win2k to win32??).
Since windows is a must for my roomate we just went back to nt4.0 sp5 that does the job much better than win2k....exept being able to serve webpages and databases at the same time....
And on and on.....
All in favor of making a www.cryaboutmicrosoft.com slashdot backed site especially made for reporting stupid bugs on stupid software from $tupid MS say YAY.
Ill even host the damned thing.
Alex.
Kiss My Butt
Yeah...that does not sound bad at all.... MS uses this scheme for their driver stuff under windows and that is one area where win. kicks tux's butt pretty bad..... The thing here is that even a VM will show to much of a driver. Manufacturers (not without reason) are pretty much paranoid about their technology... take the lucent winmodem for example (which is binary only and "supported" for an incredebly old version of the kernel), modems and computer exchange data with a given protocol that would go on top of the VM in code ....this means that it would show some of the extensions that lucent doesnt want to show.... The only way to solve this stupid thing about drivers is standards. Until we have a good standard architecture -that takes autoconfigureability in mind and off-hands plug and play- for binary-only drivers this system is going nowhere near the desktop. Now idealy, its stupid to close a driver's code. Thats not where the value is. If manufacturers planned ahead they would find that competition is not bad. Intel business model comes to mind in that it releases everything to be cloned and they can actually use this as an advantage. Manufacturers should plan ahead and think about where is their device going, what is its future...if they cant be leaders then closing driver code does make some sense.
Look man:
1.- Do you want to SUPPORT the linux market?
Are you sure?
Is your company sure?
Do a market study to determine the
potential gain of going into the Linux
market.
2.- Once you have (1)...plan ahead and determine the cost of mantaining a binary distribution of Linux. Your market study should have told you which distros give you the most value.
3.- Now think about it. Plan ahead and determine the cost of releasing an open source version of the driver.
What would be the oportunity cost of having somebody clone your device?
Does being the first to use it gives you enough lever to crush the upcomming competition if you do release a GPL show-all driver?
The binary release (if you are thinking about giving true professional support) will be more costly than the OS release. Thats a fact. So compare costs and choose the most convenient solution.
Remember to take into account the reduced cost of mantaining an OS driver (it can be merely an accept/refuse patches job with OS). Compare it with the cost of mantaining a sun-like, look-dont-touch license (it can reduce beta testing costs)....and so on.
Alex
I can get Redhat for free and I have nothing good to say about it....its just plain stupid ... now if they are getting free service thats different...
In my enterprise we custom configure debian boxes for our customers. We think your new NOW stuff looks pretty hot as far as your world class team goes -some of the best out there including ...well... you!. (Im a fan, so what) ... I dont get it...whats this stuff (I read the page). Does it bring a new and innovative engineering concept? Would you elaborate on it?
Still, could you ellaborate on this "Changeing the way network computing works" stuff? I mean what's the new great idea in NOW. Will I be able to distribute tiers or threads across de networks (I can do that now, though).... Bottom line is
Alex