Why is this so difficult for people to comprehend?
It costs a lot of money to backport security/bug fixes to old releases for years on end. RedHat can't afford to be doing that for products that people download for free. So, you get your free community-supported Fedora and your $$ commercial-support-for-five-years RedHat Enterprise. Fedora will be the proving ground for things that end up in later Enterprise versions.
This was announced many months ago - first that the "consumer" RedHat distro would only be supported for 12 months, then that the "consumer" RedHat distro would no longer be sold as such and it would merge with Fedora instead. If this story caught you by surprise then you were asleep at the switch.
The problem with source escrow is that it is only useful in the same was as your tape backups - if it is tested.
Sure, your escrow agreement probably says the source tree plus everything required to build the product from scratch (build environment, 3rd party libraries). But how do you know that is being done? The escrowee typically would have no idea.
With an escrow agreement you are going somewhat on the good faith of the company to provide everything required to the escrowee in a timely manner. Depending on who the vendor is you may or may not be able to trust that.
This isn't to say that escrow is not a good idea, but from an end-user point of view it isn't nearly as good as a public CVS repository. However, for a closed-source product it is better than nothing.
but aren't "older" guys (and when I say older I'm talking twenties and thirties) the ones with the most disposable income and the time to actually play games?
No.
I might have the money, but I have work and family commitments now - I'm lucky to get in a few hours of gaming (GameCube or PC) each week. And I did grow up playing a lot of NES and SNES, so I'm partail to the big N.
Right now with my limited spare time I prefer the ability to play a few extremenly high quality titles then a lot of mediocre ones - so I own a GameCube rather than an XBox.
But what about a ballot with a little dash, or even a dot? Do you count that? What about if there are two boxes marked, but they are marked differently (maybe one looks like it's been scratched out)?
The ballots are pieces of paper with names and a circle beside them. If one (and only one) of the circles had been obviously marked then the ballot is counted in that fashion. It isn't rocket science - see here for an example of vaild ballots and here for invalid ones.
What if the pen is out of ink...
Actually, pencils are used, tethered to each polling booth. The people working the polling station have plenty of extras.
but when you have a frenzy like in Florida
There have been close elections in Canada before. Our system is different than the American one - you just vote for your local representative and then the leader of the party with the most representative is the Premier or Prime Minister (depending if you are talking Provincial or Federal politics). So, many times the voting for a local representative is very close.
See the Elections Canada website for all the information you could ever want.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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no.. you are wrong...
Go back and read where I said "North America" - high-end SonyEricsson and Nokia models are available in Canada anyway.
The fact that Sprint and Verison are split off into CDMA only networks really drives the last nail into the coffin for reasonably cost efficient cellular service and equipment in the US.
What is this obsession with GSM/GPRS that people have? I'll put a CDMA1X network up against GSM/GPRS any time. Faster data rates, supported by mobile phone environments (Symbian, etc.), good phones. Look at the CDMA1X deployments in Asia for an example.
North America has a different set of problems then those that fact European carriers, but I would hardly say that North American consumers are living in some sort of cell-phone dark age as compared to Europe. That is idiocy.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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This is just wrong.
First of all, most of the "good" phones you can get in Europe are available in North America. You can most certainly buy phones with Bluetooth support, SMS, push-to-talk and multimedia messaging. This may have taken longer to take off here, but it is coming along. "I could buy a phone in Europe that could do that X months ago!" Yeah, yeah.
Second, GSM is not a panacea. Many North American providers are have gone with CDMA1X which is arguably preferrable to GSM/GPRS.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
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I would have to agree. Bluetooth may not take off the way the designers intended, but in North America I am seeing it start to take off for mobile phones and handheld devices:
Wireless headsets for phones.
Connecting the phone to a handheld (Palm, etc.) to use as a GPRS/CDMA1X modem.
Synchronizing (shameless plug) your phone or handheld with another device.
It is way too soon to write off Bluetooth completely.
I'll go out on a limb and pretend you aren't trolling and that you are just ignorant.
So what happens to your competitive edge if you're forced to give out the secrets behind your product?
The FSF isn't asking Cisco to do anything that they didn't agree to up-front when they chose to base their product off of GPL software. They aren't being "forced" into anything - they are being asked to comply with the terms of the license they originally agreed to. If Cisco was shipping unlicensed copies of Windows CE in a router what do you think would happen?
Where's your proof?
Try some common sense. Do you think that if Linksys had to develop an operating system for their router from scratch that maybe it might have cost them more money and time to get it done? This is one of the tradeoffs that is looked at any time someone decides to base commercial software off of a GPLed codebase.
I call it freely distributing the technology behind your product's distinct characteristics directly to your competition.
Again, this a choice you make when you choose to extend GPLed software. It is a tradeoff, and it is worth it for some companies and not for others. Look at IBM - they consider the O/S a commodity and prefer to make money off other things like support, integration and hardware. For them "freely distributing the technology behind your product's distinct characteristics" was worth it. Someone at Linksys made that decision too. Cisco bought Linksys, so now it is their bed and they have to lie it it.
You don't like the GPL - that's fine. The author of the Forbes is free to dislike the GPL too. But don't go pretending that Linksys didn't make this decision with their eyes wide open; they made the decision to go with the GPL, they live with the consequences. If this was the case of a commercial license being violated I somehow doubt that the whole matter would be subjected to so much ignorant FUD.
there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows
That is a pretty piss-poor list. VA Software is hardly making money off of Linux - they are a software vendor that runs a few Linux related websites. Corel is not a Linux company in any way and hasn't been for quite some time. Loki is a dot-com bubble company that is long dead from mismanagement.
Besides RedHat and SuSE there companies like IBM and EDS that are making a lot of money off of Linux installations and support (and selling hardware to go with Linux). There are also many companies making money in the embedded Linux market. There are also lots of small private vendors like Transgaming the TheKompany.
Do you want me to start listing software vendors that make money off of Windows that are in bad financial shape or bankrupt too? A bad buisness plan isn't exclusive to some Linux companies.
RIAA members control CD prices illegally and have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar several times. What you pay retail for a CD today as compared to 10 years ago is meaningless.
Someone mod this down... it is a troll that has been posted before. These are some 2.5.X patches that will be in 2.6, nothing that is in 2.4.22. Read the real changelog that was linked from the article. Moderators... wake up!
I think you see the "dependency hell" thing persists for several reasons:
As you point out, things like up2date were not immediately obvious. However, newer RedHat distros put a notification applet in the gnome 2 tray that links to up2date - very hard to miss. And Red Carpet is immediately obvious to XD2 users.
People want to try out the latest software. The hundreds of maintainers putting packages into unstable make this a lot easier on Debian - RedHat users probably have to wait until the next release unless they want to put down RPMs outside of up2date (or try apt for RPM...)
Quite frankly, Gentoo users who have drank the koolaid and want to prove the superiority of their distro. Ignorance is alive and well.
I am tired or Debian or (help us) Gentoo users raving about "RPM hell" out of ignorance. Debian with apt has some nice things going for it, including the amount of software available in "testing" and "unstable" (as compared to what is offered by RedHat through up2date or Ximian through Red Carpet). The same is true of Gentoo and portage. But please, people, give up this tired "RPM hell" argument.
You are an idiot, and so are the moderators who got this up to +4.
News flash - you don't need to be a trial lawyer to be an expert in a legal issue. Maybe you should try reading his resume before you go off sounding like a moron. He is professor of law at Columbia University and the FSFs general counsel, but you would rather listen to some Lionel Hutz when it comes to a legal opinion about copyright issues. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
IANAL, but this just sounds like a lawyer talking out of their ass. You can tell by the term "intellectual property infringement claims" - that term is completely meaningless. I would suspect the context of that quote is that the license you purchased, say, RedHat under doesn't indeminfy you against "intellectual property infringement" claims from 3rd parties, in the general sense. Well, neither does Microsoft sometimes but you don't hear that from them do you?
Read Professor Moglen's paper - it is a carful examination of the issues, not some soundbite from Joe random lawyer.
I used to use Teleffect so I could share my mouse / keyboard between my PC and my SGI IRIX box. This looks exactly the same except it works with Linux too. Excellent.
I run Linux on my desktop at work, but I have an application that I need to do my job with that only runs under Windows (and doesn't work too well with WINE). So when I need that application I fire up VMWare and use it. Big deal.
They converted the code to compile in Visual C++.NET. If you run with managed extensions on, they hook in a class that does the radar using.NET APIs (Windows forms and such). By the way - look at their code for the radar - it is hideous. Everything in the.h file in true "lets make the users of our class import all sorts of useless dependencies" style. Ugh.
If you diff through the code, you'll notice about 800 lines in their radar implementation and only minor differences elsewhere (don't name variables after C++ reserved words, etc.).
It is a proof of concept, but a none too impressive one. It is made even less impressive by the MicroSoft cheerleading found all over their description of the port.
Getting C code to compile with a C++ compiler is hardly a difficult task. QuakeII compiles with Visual C++ out of the box for starters.
Should make it pretty easy to add new features.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how getting this to compile under the bastardized piece of crud that is "managed C++" would make it easier to add new features.
All this does is show you can port a C app to C++ on.NET. Yay. What are their supposed advantages to having Quake II run under.NET?
* Manage memory allocations yourself or use CLR garbage collection. * Call Window APIs directly or use.NET methods. * Use existing libraries or.NET classes. * Easily expose or consume other.NET assemblies written in different languages.
All while losing 15% performance and throwing the portability of the code out the window. Wow, sure sounds persuasive to me! </sarcasm>
The Soviet Union is generaly dated from November or October of 1917 depending on the callender you're using.
Incorrect. What happened in the October revolution was the overthrow of the Czar by the Bolsheviks. While they might have claimed to be new Russian government, the only area they had control over was central Russia - not the Ukraine, not Murmansk, not Siberia, not the Baltic states, not Sevastpol, etc. etc. Most of the country was not under Bolshevik control. The USSR (i.e. Soviet Union) is generally regarded to have been founded in 1922, after the Civil war had been won by the Bolsheviks and Soviet republics had been established in the Balkans, Georgia, etc.
when you say The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false you get 0 points for accuracy
It is the use of the disengenous phrase "invaded the Soviet Union" that I take objection to. The Americans were minor participants in the Russian Civil war. If you want to say that they "invaded" Russia then I guess we can also say that Australia and South Korea "invaded" Vietnam in the 1960s. The author of the orignal post deliberately misstated American involvement in order to augment his rather ridiculous argument.
I can go on for days, but I think we've conclusively proven that the events following WWI had dramatic impact on Soviet foreign policy both during WWII and after.
No kidding. Your point is wasted since I never claimed events after WWI didn't affect Soviet foreign policy. Of course they did. What I claimed is that American actions after WWI did not directly lead to Russian animosity towards the US and the legthening of the cold war. End of story.
Slashdot Mirror
+5 Insightful? Free RedHat == Fedora
Why is this so difficult for people to comprehend?
It costs a lot of money to backport security/bug fixes to old releases for years on end. RedHat can't afford to be doing that for products that people download for free. So, you get your free community-supported Fedora and your $$ commercial-support-for-five-years RedHat Enterprise. Fedora will be the proving ground for things that end up in later Enterprise versions.
This was announced many months ago - first that the "consumer" RedHat distro would only be supported for 12 months, then that the "consumer" RedHat distro would no longer be sold as such and it would merge with Fedora instead. If this story caught you by surprise then you were asleep at the switch.
The problem with source escrow is that it is only useful in the same was as your tape backups - if it is tested.
Sure, your escrow agreement probably says the source tree plus everything required to build the product from scratch (build environment, 3rd party libraries). But how do you know that is being done? The escrowee typically would have no idea.
With an escrow agreement you are going somewhat on the good faith of the company to provide everything required to the escrowee in a timely manner. Depending on who the vendor is you may or may not be able to trust that.
This isn't to say that escrow is not a good idea, but from an end-user point of view it isn't nearly as good as a public CVS repository. However, for a closed-source product it is better than nothing.
but aren't "older" guys (and when I say older I'm talking twenties and thirties) the ones with the most disposable income and the time to actually play games?
No.
I might have the money, but I have work and family commitments now - I'm lucky to get in a few hours of gaming (GameCube or PC) each week. And I did grow up playing a lot of NES and SNES, so I'm partail to the big N.
Right now with my limited spare time I prefer the ability to play a few extremenly high quality titles then a lot of mediocre ones - so I own a GameCube rather than an XBox.
Yes, most certainly they are making another stupid investment. However, as this atricle points out, we need to be politely letting them know about it.
Was it on /. or a newsgroup that somebody told Christiansen "you obviously know nothing about Perl"?
Finally ... a moment where my .sig is on topic! ;-)
That post (it was a few years ago) was one of the funniest things I ever read on Slashdot, and it has been entrenched in my .sig ever since...
But what about a ballot with a little dash, or even a dot? Do you count that? What about if there are two boxes marked, but they are marked differently (maybe one looks like it's been scratched out)?
The ballots are pieces of paper with names and a circle beside them. If one (and only one) of the circles had been obviously marked then the ballot is counted in that fashion. It isn't rocket science - see here for an example of vaild ballots and here for invalid ones.
What if the pen is out of ink...
Actually, pencils are used, tethered to each polling booth. The people working the polling station have plenty of extras.
but when you have a frenzy like in Florida
There have been close elections in Canada before. Our system is different than the American one - you just vote for your local representative and then the leader of the party with the most representative is the Premier or Prime Minister (depending if you are talking Provincial or Federal politics). So, many times the voting for a local representative is very close.
See the Elections Canada website for all the information you could ever want.
no.. you are wrong...
Go back and read where I said "North America" - high-end SonyEricsson and Nokia models are available in Canada anyway.
The fact that Sprint and Verison are split off into CDMA only networks really drives the last nail into the coffin for reasonably cost efficient cellular service and equipment in the US.
What is this obsession with GSM/GPRS that people have? I'll put a CDMA1X network up against GSM/GPRS any time. Faster data rates, supported by mobile phone environments (Symbian, etc.), good phones. Look at the CDMA1X deployments in Asia for an example.
North America has a different set of problems then those that fact European carriers, but I would hardly say that North American consumers are living in some sort of cell-phone dark age as compared to Europe. That is idiocy.
This is just wrong.
First of all, most of the "good" phones you can get in Europe are available in North America. You can most certainly buy phones with Bluetooth support, SMS, push-to-talk and multimedia messaging. This may have taken longer to take off here, but it is coming along. "I could buy a phone in Europe that could do that X months ago!" Yeah, yeah.
Second, GSM is not a panacea. Many North American providers are have gone with CDMA1X which is arguably preferrable to GSM/GPRS.
I would have to agree. Bluetooth may not take off the way the designers intended, but in North America I am seeing it start to take off for mobile phones and handheld devices:
It is way too soon to write off Bluetooth completely.
I'll go out on a limb and pretend you aren't trolling and that you are just ignorant.
So what happens to your competitive edge if you're forced to give out the secrets behind your product?
The FSF isn't asking Cisco to do anything that they didn't agree to up-front when they chose to base their product off of GPL software. They aren't being "forced" into anything - they are being asked to comply with the terms of the license they originally agreed to. If Cisco was shipping unlicensed copies of Windows CE in a router what do you think would happen?
Where's your proof?
Try some common sense. Do you think that if Linksys had to develop an operating system for their router from scratch that maybe it might have cost them more money and time to get it done? This is one of the tradeoffs that is looked at any time someone decides to base commercial software off of a GPLed codebase.
I call it freely distributing the technology behind your product's distinct characteristics directly to your competition.
Again, this a choice you make when you choose to extend GPLed software. It is a tradeoff, and it is worth it for some companies and not for others. Look at IBM - they consider the O/S a commodity and prefer to make money off other things like support, integration and hardware. For them "freely distributing the technology behind your product's distinct characteristics" was worth it. Someone at Linksys made that decision too. Cisco bought Linksys, so now it is their bed and they have to lie it it.
You don't like the GPL - that's fine. The author of the Forbes is free to dislike the GPL too. But don't go pretending that Linksys didn't make this decision with their eyes wide open; they made the decision to go with the GPL, they live with the consequences. If this was the case of a commercial license being violated I somehow doubt that the whole matter would be subjected to so much ignorant FUD.
there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows
That is a pretty piss-poor list. VA Software is hardly making money off of Linux - they are a software vendor that runs a few Linux related websites. Corel is not a Linux company in any way and hasn't been for quite some time. Loki is a dot-com bubble company that is long dead from mismanagement.
Besides RedHat and SuSE there companies like IBM and EDS that are making a lot of money off of Linux installations and support (and selling hardware to go with Linux). There are also many companies making money in the embedded Linux market. There are also lots of small private vendors like Transgaming the TheKompany.
Do you want me to start listing software vendors that make money off of Windows that are in bad financial shape or bankrupt too? A bad buisness plan isn't exclusive to some Linux companies.
We are working on it.
Somehow I doubt that syncing with Linux will be critical to the commercial success of a PDA, but the ability to do so is nice for us Linux users.
I'm sorry, but I call BS.
Yeah, right - not like they would be taken to court for price fixing and settle for $65 million or violate anti-trust laws by price fixing, would they?
RIAA members control CD prices illegally and have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar several times. What you pay retail for a CD today as compared to 10 years ago is meaningless.
Someone mod this down ... it is a troll that has been posted before. These are some 2.5.X patches that will be in 2.6, nothing that is in 2.4.22. Read the real changelog that was linked from the article. Moderators ... wake up!
I think you see the "dependency hell" thing persists for several reasons:
How many times does it have to be said that RPM is not comparable to apt?
RPM is the package format, like dpkg (.deb). You should compare apt on Debian to up2date, Red Carpet, YaST, URPMI or even apt for RPM.
I am tired or Debian or (help us) Gentoo users raving about "RPM hell" out of ignorance. Debian with apt has some nice things going for it, including the amount of software available in "testing" and "unstable" (as compared to what is offered by RedHat through up2date or Ximian through Red Carpet). The same is true of Gentoo and portage. But please, people, give up this tired "RPM hell" argument.
Someone already mentioned it, but as the developer of the Opie sync plugin for MultiSync I just thought I'd plug it again :)
If you want to sync Opie with Evolution, MultiSync is probably your best bet.
You are an idiot, and so are the moderators who got this up to +4.
News flash - you don't need to be a trial lawyer to be an expert in a legal issue. Maybe you should try reading his resume before you go off sounding like a moron. He is professor of law at Columbia University and the FSFs general counsel, but you would rather listen to some Lionel Hutz when it comes to a legal opinion about copyright issues. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
IANAL, but this just sounds like a lawyer talking out of their ass. You can tell by the term "intellectual property infringement claims" - that term is completely meaningless. I would suspect the context of that quote is that the license you purchased, say, RedHat under doesn't indeminfy you against "intellectual property infringement" claims from 3rd parties, in the general sense. Well, neither does Microsoft sometimes but you don't hear that from them do you?
Read Professor Moglen's paper - it is a carful examination of the issues, not some soundbite from Joe random lawyer.
Thank You
I used to use Teleffect so I could share my mouse / keyboard between my PC and my SGI IRIX box. This looks exactly the same except it works with Linux too. Excellent.
Exactly.
I run Linux on my desktop at work, but I have an application that I need to do my job with that only runs under Windows (and doesn't work too well with WINE). So when I need that application I fire up VMWare and use it. Big deal.
Ahhh.. the old Magic Bus.
I helped write some software for a 3rd party vendor that was on display in the Magic Bus when it was here in Canada.
However, any time I was on the bus I played the airplane/helicopter flight sim on the Onyx with the pile of monitors hooked up to it. Much more fun :)
it looks like a complete conversion
They converted the code to compile in Visual C++ .NET. If you run with managed extensions on, they hook in a class that does the radar using .NET APIs (Windows forms and such). By the way - look at their code for the radar - it is hideous. Everything in the .h file in true "lets make the users of our class import all sorts of useless dependencies" style. Ugh.
If you diff through the code, you'll notice about 800 lines in their radar implementation and only minor differences elsewhere (don't name variables after C++ reserved words, etc.).
It is a proof of concept, but a none too impressive one. It is made even less impressive by the MicroSoft cheerleading found all over their description of the port.
looks like they ported the code to C++
Getting C code to compile with a C++ compiler is hardly a difficult task. QuakeII compiles with Visual C++ out of the box for starters.
Should make it pretty easy to add new features.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how getting this to compile under the bastardized piece of crud that is "managed C++" would make it easier to add new features.
All this does is show you can port a C app to C++ on .NET. Yay. What are their supposed advantages to having Quake II run under .NET?
All while losing 15% performance and throwing the portability of the code out the window. Wow, sure sounds persuasive to me! </sarcasm>
The Soviet Union is generaly dated from November or October of 1917 depending on the callender you're using.
Incorrect. What happened in the October revolution was the overthrow of the Czar by the Bolsheviks. While they might have claimed to be new Russian government, the only area they had control over was central Russia - not the Ukraine, not Murmansk, not Siberia, not the Baltic states, not Sevastpol, etc. etc. Most of the country was not under Bolshevik control. The USSR (i.e. Soviet Union) is generally regarded to have been founded in 1922, after the Civil war had been won by the Bolsheviks and Soviet republics had been established in the Balkans, Georgia, etc.
when you say The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false you get 0 points for accuracy
It is the use of the disengenous phrase "invaded the Soviet Union" that I take objection to. The Americans were minor participants in the Russian Civil war. If you want to say that they "invaded" Russia then I guess we can also say that Australia and South Korea "invaded" Vietnam in the 1960s. The author of the orignal post deliberately misstated American involvement in order to augment his rather ridiculous argument.
I can go on for days, but I think we've conclusively proven that the events following WWI had dramatic impact on Soviet foreign policy both during WWII and after.
No kidding. Your point is wasted since I never claimed events after WWI didn't affect Soviet foreign policy. Of course they did. What I claimed is that American actions after WWI did not directly lead to Russian animosity towards the US and the legthening of the cold war. End of story.