Yes, without them Linux would have been a one semester project for Linus. It was the GPL that gave all kinds of coders all around the world the incentive to work for free on it.
Here's what I don't get. If the above is true, why is there such a depth of paranoia in needing to continually make sure that everyone knows about it? Surely if it was the case, the implications would be obvious; there wouldn't need to be a group of people repeating ad nauseum, as the FSF's fans around here do, I've noticed.
The difference that I've noticed between Linus and Larry Wall, on the one hand, and Stallman/the FSF's fans on the other, is that to a very large extent, the former two individuals are extremely self-deprecating. For the most part, they don't draw attention to their own work at all, and so as a result, it is all the more self-evident. Linus has told people in interviews that he doesn't like the amount of hype he's received.
Stallman and the FSF, by contrast, seem to be exactly the opposite. There is the insistence on the GNU prefix, and the continual need to make sure that everyone knows about the enormous degree that the GPL has supposedly saved them. The FSF, on a continual basis, tries to take as much credit as it can, for as many different things as it possibly can.
The contrast really is not pretty. On the one hand I'm seeing a fair amount of humility, (not total; Linus can also be arrogant on the mailing lists at times) but on the other, rank, spotlight-hogging narcissism.
[quote]Where does your hostility come from? Does it make you angry that the FSF wants software to be as Free as possible for the maximum number of people?[/quote]
Mostly just from the legions of myopic, condescending, cultic trolls who I keep encountering on this site, to be honest.
Also, some of us recognise Stallman's use of the word, "free" as a classic cultic redefinition. Version 3 of the GPL is probably the single most restrictive FOSS license in existence that can still claim compliance with the OSD.
With non-copyleft licenses, you can do whatever you want with something that uses them. The fear-based argument that copyleft is needed to preserve FOSS in general doesn't hold water either; because if it did, the BSDs, Apache, and other such projects which use non-copyleft licenses wouldn't continue to exist.
Pretty much the entirety of the FSF's ideology is based on fear and paranoia, and generally fairly hollow paranoia at that. DRM didn't end up going anywhere. Binary video card drivers haven't meant the end of FOSS in general, and nVidia are still one of very few companies in existence that offer closed source drivers for hardware.
Anyone who thinks that the FSF is in any way responsible for the above things being non-issues, is also delusional. Campaigns like Defective by Design are launched by and for the proverbial lunatic fringe; they don't register with those of us who live above ground.
Essentially, the FSF are, as I've said, a fairly textbook cult, and I'm tired of contending with people who haven't got the organisation's mind control out of their systems, on Slashdot.
Go and do some research on Stallman, and realise the extent to which you've been lied to. The single main reason why I have as much of an issue with the man as I do, is because I did that, and I realised just what a sham pretty much everything about the FSF really is.
If more people around here would do that, they might also stop parroting the FSF's propaganda literally word for word like broken records as well, and my general stress level would decrease accordingly.;)
Americans typically see Canadians as stoic and think we're passive. You see we're self-deprecating and think we lack confidence. You see we're polite and think we're weak. Then you come up against our hard limits and wonder what you were thinking.
As an Australian, this is what I've never been able to understand. America on the one hand appears continually as sociologically/culturally speaking, representing the proverbial mouth of Hell, and yet Canada is consistently depicted as the very paragon of civic responsibility, integrity, and harmony by comparison.
If it's true that you're so much more enlightened, why haven't they learned from your example? Also, do you think it would be possible for you to somehow teach them to stop making war on the rest of the planet? Some of the rest of us would really appreciate it.;)
If I had the requisite technical knowledge, I would.
As for why it's worth it; primarily so that I never have to listen to another GNU/drone smugly imply, "We have a giant monoculture, and our license governs everything, so if you don't like our terms, hit the road, Jack!"
I'd prefer to be able to tell the FSF to fuck off for once, rather than it always being the other way around.
I don't think RMS have GCC non-viral because of this reason. IMO, if he makes GCC more restrictive, he will lose his control because it will surely get replaced. And don't think this cannot happen, the other efforts in C compilers does not get any traction because GCC is good enough and it had a license you can live with.
Exactly the point. Stallman's use of the word "freedom," is doublespeak.
GCC also needs to be replaced; the FSF needs to be entirely routed around.
Some of your arguments sound like the arguments of a religious or political fanatic - sorry.
If there aren't a lot of copies of your work already in circulation, or you're worried about someone making a product out of your work and then removing all trace of the master copy, (which I have seen done in the case of some public domain books, for instance) a copyleft license can be an appropriate choice.
It depends also on what your motivations are. If you have no intention of making money from your work yourself, and simply want to try and ensure that it survives in some form, the GPL is fine. If you want to develop it economically, however, it really isn't the best license.
Red Hat found that out when Oracle started a Linux distribution which included some of Red Hat's own code, which due to the GPL, they legally had to allow. Red Hat are now using the Apache License for JBoss; they got burned, and have learned from the experience.
and the communism jibe shows your colours as a true blue american.
Take another look. A quote here from Leon Trotsky, a reference to Anarchism (if not outright Anarcho-Communism) here, and information about research claiming that economic reward is not a motivator for work.
The Debian Project and the FSF are both demonstrably Anarcho-Communist; it isn't simply a baseless stereotype. I can find you more references if you'd like.
You don't like the GPL, but why that is exactly you do not tell.
You could have a look at one of the responses I had to the GP; but to explain it myself, the GPL v2 dictates downstream use. Other licenses do not. The GPL v3 goes further than merely dictating downstream use of the software, and attempts to dictate patent issues as well.
The MIT and or BSD licenses you prefer have been a brake on the uptake/development of all the BSD's.
Given the amount of heat and noise which Stallman and his aforementioned cultists have a tendency to generate, it was predictable that, for a while, the GPL would hold sway. It's never really been used, by business at least, due to genuine economic viability, but more primarily because of the amount of social pressure which the cult has tried to exert on people.
However, the GPL was specifically designed and intended to be an anti-commercial license, and as we've seen reported in a couple of articles here on Slashdot recently, vendors are slowly figuring that out, and gradually beginning to move to non-copyleft licenses, particularly the Apache license. The GPL v2 fell below 50% usage for the first time, recently; and indications are that that isn't because of uptake of v3, either.
That is in part thanks to it's license, that prevented leeches from exploiting the work of contributors. It is those contributors that make Linux what it is, and they like the GPL just fine.
This is standard pro-FSF rhetoric; and I've written about reciprocity paranoia being expressed by such individuals before. It's fear based and mean spirited, and apart from anything else, it's also scarcity-based thinking, which illustrates that the speaker is not thinking from the vantage point of a genuine gift culture.
You seem to like your precious opinion very much, but luckily that does not make a difference at all. Or should I have not fed the troll?;)
Smug condescension, and an attempt to minimise the percieved credibility of dissenting opinions, are also extremely commonly observed tactics among FSF/GPL advocates.
I wish I wasn't so late to this article, because this comment is probably going to get buried, but anyway...
"Good Enough," syndrome is exactly the reason why Ubuntu is taking over the world, while even though poor old Patrick Volkerding is still churning out a distro which, by virtually any technical or engineering measure, is infinitely better quality, Slackware by comparison is probably only barely managing to continue to exist.
This is also why Debian fanboys need to stop defending their distribution on the basis of quality, as well. Again, in terms of actual engineering, Debian is unmitigated garbage of the lowest order. It is the single worst Linux distribution ever created, bar none.
However, that is exactly the reason why the only Linux distro less popular than Ubuntu is Debian itself. It isn't because these two distributions are good, at all; it's actually entirely because they're so appallingly bad.
Look at Microsoft. In engineering terms, Windows has always been an absolute train wreck. Again, in design terms it is the worst operating system ever devised; it's absolutely rock bottom. As far as robustness or security was concerned, literally anything is or was better than it; AmigaOS, MacOS Classic, Linux, commercial UNIX, you name it. Yet in terms of sales, usage, or popularity, it obliterated the competition.
The same thing actually happened with UNIX itself. If you read the UNIX Hater's Handbook, it lists other mainframe operating systems which were supposedly infinitely more elegant; RiscOS I think was one, and something else of which Lisp was more native than UNIX apparently, which the name of escapes me now. Yet UNIX wiped those and several others off the map.
People love crap, as long as said crap lets them perform single, rote tasks in less than a minute.
Although I might be rooting more for Patrick Volkerding myself, Mark Shuttleworth knows something that Patrick apparently doesn't. Namely, that where popularity at least is concerned, the inferior product always wins.
Congratulations, Debian. I'm serious. You've earned it. Your distribution is a turd of genuinely Herculean proportions.
I fully expect it to become the universal Linux standard.
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
So I take it, that that means that we don't need to bother cleaning it up at all. Maybe filling the ocean up with more garbage would actually be a better idea?
All through these comments I repeatedly see twice the surface are of texas, and 1/3 a percentage point. Yet these numbers really are for less then what is imagined.
The idea that it's minor in comparison to the total size of the ocean isn't the point. The point is that even something of its' current size should not exist at all.
I don't understand why people keep trying to claim that environmental damage isn't as severe as we're continually discovering. The only reason I can think of is that said people want to be able to keep making money from commercial activities which generate chronic pollution.
Thank Kali that the parent is modded +5, Insightful, as it richly deserves to be.
There are times when I still fear that Stallman's legion of cultists have completely overrun Slashdot. It is extremely heartening to occasionally see indications that that is not the case.
PyQt is open source. Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?
Version 2 I consider borderline. Version 3 isn't. It's a legal minefield; a poison pill in exactly the same sense that Microsoft's "Shared Source," was when Eric Raymond called it that.
Stallman corrupts everything he touches. The MIT/BSD license, without restriction or bias, entirely perpetuate the type of gift culture described here. With the GPL, Stallman created a mean spirited, twisted mockery of that, and version 3 has only made it worse. The other disastrous effect that Stallman has had, is to further muddying the waters by entangling the political doctrine(s) of Trotskyite Communism with software development.
The GPL's (and FSF's) influence on the Linux user and development community is plain to see. Its' most vocal members are avaricious, paranoid, howling fanatics who are terrified beyond all reason of Microsoft, and who spend far more of their time engaging in further paranoia about the amount that other people, "give back," than they devote to their own programming efforts.
The GPL and the organisation that spawned it are an infernal scourge; a pestilence on the face of Linux and greater UNIX, and it would do the world good if we could entirely get rid of both.
Sorry to shatter your masturbatory fantasies, but the GPL is still the most popular license among open source projects.
The standard calling card of a member of the Stallmanite demographic; lashings of ad hominem, bookending a diatribe of raw, unadulterated mind control.
Last time I looked at/proc/config.gz for a 2.6 kernel it had over 3000 options. I have better things to do with my life these days I'm afraid. 2.4 kernel building at home was just about do-able.
From memory, 'make config' has the ability to set all options to No by default. Do that first, then use the resulting config file with 'make menuconfig,' and then you won't have to go through all 3k options; only the ones you need.
I generally need:-
a) Processor arch type. (And a few flags there, including scheduler) b) Bus arch. (PCI, generally) c) Keyboard, mouse. USB_HID also for mouse support, and possibly USB_MASS I think it is for a flash stick. d) Sound. Generally ALSA these days, but I'd probably get the new OSS myself. e) Maybe a printer, scanner, or camera, if you've got one of those. I don't, so I'm in the clear there.
So that's eight pieces of hardware. The categories are a bit of a mess, it's true, but I was able to Google the name of the driver my mouse needed in about a minute. You're looking at maybe three hours work, tops, and I estimate that on the basis that my system takes probably 45 minutes to compile a FreeBSD kernel; not sure on the exact compile time for Linux, but from memory it wasn't more than that.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about it, but my main point was "If grandma doesn't recognize Slackware as being a unix-like OS, then grandma doesn't need to know."
No, I do understand that that is what you were saying.
My perspective is that what I'd say to Grandma is, "Slackware is a Linux distribution, which more closely resembles the older UNIX (from which it is descended) than other Linux distributions do. You probably didn't need to know that, but I'm telling you that on the off-chance that if you do need or want to know about it, you have the option to learn."
For those who would protest that Grandma's eyes would most likely glaze over after the third word of that explanation, that's fine. You're possibly right, and if that's true, then no harm, no foul. She can still have the user friendly option, and never need know that the dreaded command line exists at all.;)
I like giving people the choice, is all. Isn't that supposed to be one of the things which Linux is all about?
I've used DistroWatch since the first time someone told me to try out Debian in college and it turned out I needed a different distribution because Debian was for me to start out on. Very memorable learning experience.
Yeah, I'll bet it was. Even more memorable likely would have been installing virtually any other Linux distro on the planet, and discovering just how different something actually standard is.
If someone had recommended Debian as my first distribution, at a future date I would have punched their lights out.;)
Yes, Eris knows you don't even need to be a SubGenius to appreciate the benefits, one can never have too much Slack. Please excuse me, I just got run over by a Fnord.
Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in Slackware, I haven't seen one but I could of missed it.
From what I've seen, Arch is similar to Slack, but simply has a slightly greater degree of automation. Slackware is somewhat Amish.;)
Hence, Arch is likely to be fine. Gentoo I'm not sure about, as I keep reading reports of its' death or fragmentation every few months, it seems. I think they're both similar to Slack though, but just as I said, not quite so bare metal.
Did Patrick ever get over his irrational hatred of PAM and HAL? Or are these still left as an exercise for the student?
There's nothing irrational about HAL hatred, at all. Have you seen some of the error messages the HAL/Dbus combo can produce on Ubuntu?
Irrespective of whether or not HAL/Dbus are evil, however, the simple fact is that they're also unnecessary. I don't understand for the life of me why people don't simply use udev rules and the kernel's own hardware notification system for hotpluggable hardware. Is it because HAL apparently comes with a database of most hotpluggable software as well, so you poor babies don't have to look up device names in order to write said udev rules?
The bottom line is that most of you want to be morons. You crave indolence, stupidity, and ignorance. You want whatever system you're using to feed you, burp you, and change your nappies...and then, as often as not, you're the same people who show up in the Ubuntu forums crying about how your machine won't function, and simply stops at a black screen.
Slackware doesn't facilitate wilful ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. You want something that does, and so Slackware gets abused whenever it is mentioned in front of you.
It isn't Slackware that's the problem; it's your desperate craving to avoid having to think.
"To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"
You'll note the word, "generic," there. "Generic," implies that the kernel is attempting to load drivers for everything including the kitchen sink, because the user hasn't recompiled a kernel with support for only the specific hardware he actually owns in his machine.
Compile a kernel to support only the devices you've got, and don't load anything as modules, and I'll be surprised if you still need an initrd. If you need to add support for additional hardware down the line, keep a copy of your original kernel config file as a baseline, add the drivers for that specific hardware, and then recompile.
Kernel compilation doesn't take long, and although the config file is a lot bigger than FreeBSD's, the process isn't anywhere near as intimidating as most people seem to think. Don't tell me you haven't got time, either; you will have spent more time on the toilet before than that will take.
Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.
I've got mod points again, but they never get spent, because I consider it to be a sign of greater integrity, to refute posts I disagree with, rather than simply down modding them.
Slackware was my first Linux distribution, during the mid 1990s. At the time, I'd only previously had exposure to UNIX at all via an ISP's FreeBSD shell account, and so I barely knew what it was at all.
A newcomer who is willing to learn is actually going to be far better off with Slack than with Ubuntu or Debian.
There is a much greater degree of simplicity within Slackware's overall design. Less complexity means less potential opportunities for things to break due to random, uncontrolled interactions of the various parts, and even more importantly, it also means that when something does break, it's a lot easier to find the source of the problem and fix it.
Using a system like Slackware is also going to give a user good mental habits as well, and teach them how to recognise a genuinely sound distribution design when they see one. Debian's greatest problem isn't so much that it's a terrible design, but more that the people who design and use it actually think that it's great.
Slack is great but overweight. I'd rather have a more minimal distribution, preferably something that fits on a a single CD. That said, it lives up to expectations -- everything plus the kitchen sink.
The cause of distro bloat these days is upstream laziness, particularly on the part of X and the DE (Gnome/KDE) developers. It's a running joke about how you can forget any hope of getting a clean X install without having to hack various bits into shape yourself.
So distro makers have to ship everything themselves, if they want to be sure that everything is going to work with their distro. With something like Debian that changes everything possible purely because they can, upstream shouldn't necessarily be blamed so much, but I suspect Patrick probably tries hard to be as standard as he can, and still has problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, without them Linux would have been a one semester project for Linus. It was the GPL that gave all kinds of coders all around the world the incentive to work for free on it.
Here's what I don't get. If the above is true, why is there such a depth of paranoia in needing to continually make sure that everyone knows about it? Surely if it was the case, the implications would be obvious; there wouldn't need to be a group of people repeating ad nauseum, as the FSF's fans around here do, I've noticed.
The difference that I've noticed between Linus and Larry Wall, on the one hand, and Stallman/the FSF's fans on the other, is that to a very large extent, the former two individuals are extremely self-deprecating. For the most part, they don't draw attention to their own work at all, and so as a result, it is all the more self-evident. Linus has told people in interviews that he doesn't like the amount of hype he's received.
Stallman and the FSF, by contrast, seem to be exactly the opposite. There is the insistence on the GNU prefix, and the continual need to make sure that everyone knows about the enormous degree that the GPL has supposedly saved them. The FSF, on a continual basis, tries to take as much credit as it can, for as many different things as it possibly can.
The contrast really is not pretty. On the one hand I'm seeing a fair amount of humility, (not total; Linus can also be arrogant on the mailing lists at times) but on the other, rank, spotlight-hogging narcissism.
[quote]Where does your hostility come from? Does it make you angry that the FSF wants software to be
as Free as possible for the maximum number of people?[/quote]
Mostly just from the legions of myopic, condescending, cultic trolls who I keep encountering on this
site, to be honest.
Also, some of us recognise Stallman's use of the word, "free" as a classic cultic redefinition.
Version 3 of the GPL is probably the single most restrictive FOSS license in existence that can
still claim compliance with the OSD.
With non-copyleft licenses, you can do whatever you want with something that uses them. The
fear-based argument that copyleft is needed to preserve FOSS in general doesn't hold water either;
because if it did, the BSDs, Apache, and other such projects which use non-copyleft licenses
wouldn't continue to exist.
Pretty much the entirety of the FSF's ideology is based on fear and paranoia, and generally fairly
hollow paranoia at that. DRM didn't end up going anywhere. Binary video card drivers haven't meant
the end of FOSS in general, and nVidia are still one of very few companies in existence that offer
closed source drivers for hardware.
Anyone who thinks that the FSF is in any way responsible for the above things being non-issues, is
also delusional. Campaigns like Defective by Design are launched by and for the proverbial lunatic
fringe; they don't register with those of us who live above ground.
Essentially, the FSF are, as I've said, a fairly textbook cult, and I'm tired of contending with
people who haven't got the organisation's mind control out of their systems, on Slashdot.
Go and do some research on Stallman, and realise the extent to which you've been lied to. The
single main reason why I have as much of an issue with the man as I do, is because I did that, and I
realised just what a sham pretty much everything about the FSF really is.
If more people around here would do that, they might also stop parroting the FSF's propaganda ;)
literally word for word like broken records as well, and my general stress level would decrease
accordingly.
Hear the cry of the freeloader!
I'm hearing the cry of scarcity thinking a lot around here recently, and I'm wondering why.
Someone being a freeloader is only a problem if software is somehow a finite resource, and you're scared of there eventually not being any left.
Are you scared of that?
Americans typically see Canadians as stoic and think we're passive. You see we're self-deprecating and think we lack confidence. You see we're polite and think we're weak. Then you come up against our hard limits and wonder what you were thinking.
As an Australian, this is what I've never been able to understand. America on the one hand appears continually as sociologically/culturally speaking, representing the proverbial mouth of Hell, and yet Canada is consistently depicted as the very paragon of civic responsibility, integrity, and harmony by comparison.
If it's true that you're so much more enlightened, why haven't they learned from your example? Also, do you think it would be possible for you to somehow teach them to stop making war on the rest of the planet? Some of the rest of us would really appreciate it. ;)
If I had the requisite technical knowledge, I would.
As for why it's worth it; primarily so that I never have to listen to another GNU/drone smugly imply, "We have a giant monoculture, and our license governs everything, so if you don't like our terms, hit the road, Jack!"
I'd prefer to be able to tell the FSF to fuck off for once, rather than it always being the other way around.
I don't think RMS have GCC non-viral because of this reason. IMO, if he makes GCC more restrictive, he will lose his control because it will surely get replaced. And don't think this cannot happen, the other efforts in C compilers does not get any traction because GCC is good enough and it had a license you can live with.
Exactly the point. Stallman's use of the word "freedom," is doublespeak.
GCC also needs to be replaced; the FSF needs to be entirely routed around.
Some of your arguments sound like the arguments of a religious or political fanatic - sorry.
If there aren't a lot of copies of your work already in circulation, or you're worried about someone making a product out of your work and then removing all trace of the master copy, (which I have seen done in the case of some public domain books, for instance) a copyleft license can be an appropriate choice.
It depends also on what your motivations are. If you have no intention of making money from your work yourself, and simply want to try and ensure that it survives in some form, the GPL is fine. If you want to develop it economically, however, it really isn't the best license.
Red Hat found that out when Oracle started a Linux distribution which included some of Red Hat's own code, which due to the GPL, they legally had to allow. Red Hat are now using the Apache License for JBoss; they got burned, and have learned from the experience.
and the communism jibe shows your colours as a true blue american.
Take another look. A quote here
from Leon Trotsky, a reference to Anarchism (if not outright Anarcho-Communism) here, and information about research claiming that
economic reward is not a motivator for work.
The Debian Project and the FSF are both demonstrably Anarcho-Communist; it isn't simply a baseless stereotype. I
can find you more references if you'd like.
You don't like the GPL, but why that is exactly you do not tell.
You could have a look at one of the responses I had to the GP; but to explain it myself, the GPL v2 dictates downstream
use. Other licenses do not. The GPL v3 goes further than merely dictating downstream use of the software, and attempts
to dictate patent issues as well.
The MIT and or BSD licenses you prefer have been a brake on the uptake/development of all the BSD's.
Given the amount of heat and noise which Stallman and his aforementioned cultists have a tendency to generate, it was
predictable that, for a while, the GPL would hold sway. It's never really been used, by business at least, due to
genuine economic viability, but more primarily because of the amount of social pressure which the cult has tried to
exert on people.
However, the GPL was specifically designed and intended to be an anti-commercial license, and as we've seen reported in
a couple of articles here on Slashdot recently, vendors are slowly figuring that out, and gradually beginning to move to
non-copyleft licenses, particularly the Apache license. The GPL v2 fell below 50% usage for the first time, recently;
and indications are that that isn't because of uptake of v3, either.
That is in part thanks to it's license, that prevented leeches from exploiting the work of contributors. It is
those contributors that make Linux what it is, and they like the GPL just fine.
This is standard pro-FSF rhetoric; and I've written about reciprocity paranoia being expressed by such individuals
before. It's fear based and mean spirited, and apart from anything else, it's also scarcity-based thinking, which
illustrates that the speaker is not thinking from the vantage point of a genuine gift culture.
You seem to like your precious opinion very much, but luckily that does not make a difference at all. Or should I ;)
have not fed the troll?
Smug condescension, and an attempt to minimise the percieved credibility of dissenting opinions, are also extremely commonly observed tactics among FSF/GPL advocates.
I wish I wasn't so late to this article, because this comment is probably going to get buried, but anyway...
"Good Enough," syndrome is exactly the reason why Ubuntu is taking over the world, while even though poor old Patrick Volkerding is still churning out a distro which, by virtually any technical or engineering measure, is infinitely better quality, Slackware by comparison is probably only barely managing to continue to exist.
This is also why Debian fanboys need to stop defending their distribution on the basis of quality, as well. Again, in terms of actual engineering, Debian is unmitigated garbage of the lowest order. It is the single worst Linux distribution ever created, bar none.
However, that is exactly the reason why the only Linux distro less popular than Ubuntu is Debian itself. It isn't because these two distributions are good, at all; it's actually entirely because they're so appallingly bad.
Look at Microsoft. In engineering terms, Windows has always been an absolute train wreck. Again, in design terms it is the worst operating system ever devised; it's absolutely rock bottom. As far as robustness or security was concerned, literally anything is or was better than it; AmigaOS, MacOS Classic, Linux, commercial UNIX, you name it. Yet in terms of sales, usage, or popularity, it obliterated the competition.
The same thing actually happened with UNIX itself. If you read the UNIX Hater's Handbook, it lists other mainframe operating systems which were supposedly infinitely more elegant; RiscOS I think was one, and something else of which Lisp was more native than UNIX apparently, which the name of escapes me now. Yet UNIX wiped those and several others off the map.
People love crap, as long as said crap lets them perform single, rote tasks in less than a minute.
Although I might be rooting more for Patrick Volkerding myself, Mark Shuttleworth knows something that Patrick apparently doesn't. Namely, that where popularity at least is concerned, the inferior product always wins.
Congratulations, Debian. I'm serious. You've earned it. Your distribution is a turd of genuinely Herculean proportions.
I fully expect it to become the universal Linux standard.
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
So I take it, that that means that we don't need to bother cleaning it up at all. Maybe filling the ocean up with more garbage would actually be a better idea?
All through these comments I repeatedly see twice the surface are of texas, and 1/3 a percentage point. Yet these numbers really are for less then what is imagined.
The idea that it's minor in comparison to the total size of the ocean isn't the point. The point is that even something of its' current size should not exist at all.
I don't understand why people keep trying to claim that environmental damage isn't as severe as we're continually discovering. The only reason I can think of is that said people want to be able to keep making money from commercial activities which generate chronic pollution.
Thank Kali that the parent is modded +5, Insightful, as it richly deserves to be.
There are times when I still fear that Stallman's legion of cultists have completely overrun Slashdot. It is extremely heartening to occasionally see indications that that is not the case.
PyQt is open source. Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?
Version 2 I consider borderline. Version 3 isn't. It's a legal minefield; a poison pill in exactly the same sense that Microsoft's "Shared Source," was when Eric Raymond called it that.
Stallman corrupts everything he touches. The MIT/BSD license, without restriction or bias, entirely perpetuate the type of gift culture described here. With the GPL, Stallman created a mean spirited, twisted mockery of that, and version 3 has only made it worse. The other disastrous effect that Stallman has had, is to further muddying the waters by entangling the political doctrine(s) of Trotskyite Communism with software development.
The GPL's (and FSF's) influence on the Linux user and development community is plain to see. Its' most vocal members are avaricious, paranoid, howling fanatics who are terrified beyond all reason of Microsoft, and who spend far more of their time engaging in further paranoia about the amount that other people, "give back," than they devote to their own programming efforts.
The GPL and the organisation that spawned it are an infernal scourge; a pestilence on the face of Linux and greater UNIX, and it would do the world good if we could entirely get rid of both.
Sorry to shatter your masturbatory fantasies, but the GPL is still the most popular license among open source projects.
The standard calling card of a member of the Stallmanite demographic; lashings of ad hominem, bookending a diatribe of raw, unadulterated mind control.
Last time I looked at /proc/config.gz for a 2.6 kernel it had over 3000 options. I have better things to do with my life these days I'm afraid. 2.4 kernel building at home was just about do-able.
From memory, 'make config' has the ability to set all options to No by default. Do that first, then use the resulting config file with 'make menuconfig,' and then you won't have to go through all 3k options; only the ones you need.
I generally need:-
a) Processor arch type. (And a few flags there, including scheduler)
b) Bus arch. (PCI, generally)
c) Keyboard, mouse. USB_HID also for mouse support, and possibly USB_MASS I think it is for a flash stick.
d) Sound. Generally ALSA these days, but I'd probably get the new OSS myself.
e) Maybe a printer, scanner, or camera, if you've got one of those. I don't, so I'm in the clear there.
So that's eight pieces of hardware. The categories are a bit of a mess, it's true, but I was able to Google the name of the driver my mouse needed in about a minute. You're looking at maybe three hours work, tops, and I estimate that on the basis that my system takes probably 45 minutes to compile a FreeBSD kernel; not sure on the exact compile time for Linux, but from memory it wasn't more than that.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about it, but my main point was "If grandma doesn't recognize Slackware as being a unix-like OS, then grandma doesn't need to know."
No, I do understand that that is what you were saying.
My perspective is that what I'd say to Grandma is, "Slackware is a Linux distribution, which more closely resembles the older UNIX (from which it is descended) than other Linux distributions do. You probably didn't need to know that, but I'm telling you that on the off-chance that if you do need or want to know about it, you have the option to learn."
For those who would protest that Grandma's eyes would most likely glaze over after the third word of that explanation, that's fine. You're possibly right, and if that's true, then no harm, no foul. She can still have the user friendly option, and never need know that the dreaded command line exists at all. ;)
I like giving people the choice, is all. Isn't that supposed to be one of the things which Linux is all about?
Thanks. It's just too bad I still got modded Flamebait.
I suspect the moderator was the usual moronic Debian fanboy who recognised himself in my words, and became understandably upset as a result.
I've used DistroWatch since the first time someone told me to try out Debian in college and it turned out I needed a different distribution because Debian was for me to start out on. Very memorable learning experience.
Yeah, I'll bet it was. Even more memorable likely would have been installing virtually any other Linux distro on the planet, and discovering just how different something actually standard is.
If someone had recommended Debian as my first distribution, at a future date I would have punched their lights out. ;)
If you lost, that's to say, if you set the refresh rate above what you monitor could take, you got a smoking monitor.
I've often thought it; Jim Gettys needs to change his name to Dr. Frankenstein. ;)
Yes, Eris knows you don't even need to be a SubGenius to appreciate the benefits, one can never have too much Slack. Please excuse me, I just got run over by a Fnord.
ROFL. That pretty much entirely covers it.
Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in Slackware, I haven't seen one but I could of missed it.
From what I've seen, Arch is similar to Slack, but simply has a slightly greater degree of automation. Slackware is somewhat Amish. ;)
Hence, Arch is likely to be fine. Gentoo I'm not sure about, as I keep reading reports of its' death or fragmentation every few months, it seems. I think they're both similar to Slack though, but just as I said, not quite so bare metal.
Did Patrick ever get over his irrational hatred of PAM and HAL? Or are these still left as an exercise for the student?
There's nothing irrational about HAL hatred, at all. Have you seen some of the error messages the HAL/Dbus combo can produce on Ubuntu?
Irrespective of whether or not HAL/Dbus are evil, however, the simple fact is that they're also unnecessary. I don't understand for the life of me why people don't simply use udev rules and the kernel's own hardware notification system for hotpluggable hardware. Is it because HAL apparently comes with a database of most hotpluggable software as well, so you poor babies don't have to look up device names in order to write said udev rules?
The bottom line is that most of you want to be morons. You crave indolence, stupidity, and ignorance. You want whatever system you're using to feed you, burp you, and change your nappies...and then, as often as not, you're the same people who show up in the Ubuntu forums crying about how your machine won't function, and simply stops at a black screen.
Slackware doesn't facilitate wilful ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. You want something that does, and so Slackware gets abused whenever it is mentioned in front of you.
It isn't Slackware that's the problem; it's your desperate craving to avoid having to think.
"To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"
You'll note the word, "generic," there. "Generic," implies that the kernel is attempting to load drivers for everything including the kitchen sink, because the user hasn't recompiled a kernel with support for only the specific hardware he actually owns in his machine.
Compile a kernel to support only the devices you've got, and don't load anything as modules, and I'll be surprised if you still need an initrd. If you need to add support for additional hardware down the line, keep a copy of your original kernel config file as a baseline, add the drivers for that specific hardware, and then recompile.
Kernel compilation doesn't take long, and although the config file is a lot bigger than FreeBSD's, the process isn't anywhere near as intimidating as most people seem to think. Don't tell me you haven't got time, either; you will have spent more time on the toilet before than that will take.
Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.
I've got mod points again, but they never get spent, because I consider it to be a sign of greater integrity, to refute posts I disagree with, rather than simply down modding them.
Slackware was my first Linux distribution, during the mid 1990s. At the time, I'd only previously had exposure to UNIX at all via an ISP's FreeBSD shell account, and so I barely knew what it was at all.
A newcomer who is willing to learn is actually going to be far better off with Slack than with Ubuntu or Debian.
There is a much greater degree of simplicity within Slackware's overall design. Less complexity means less potential opportunities for things to break due to random, uncontrolled interactions of the various parts, and even more importantly, it also means that when something does break, it's a lot easier to find the source of the problem and fix it.
Using a system like Slackware is also going to give a user good mental habits as well, and teach them how to recognise a genuinely sound distribution design when they see one. Debian's greatest problem isn't so much that it's a terrible design, but more that the people who design and use it actually think that it's great.
Slack is great but overweight. I'd rather have a more minimal distribution, preferably something that fits on a a single CD. That said, it lives up to expectations -- everything plus the kitchen sink.
The cause of distro bloat these days is upstream laziness, particularly on the part of X and the DE (Gnome/KDE) developers. It's a running joke about how you can forget any hope of getting a clean X install without having to hack various bits into shape yourself.
So distro makers have to ship everything themselves, if they want to be sure that everything is going to work with their distro. With something like Debian that changes everything possible purely because they can, upstream shouldn't necessarily be blamed so much, but I suspect Patrick probably tries hard to be as standard as he can, and still has problems.