If we knew that some sort of disastrous climate change was imminent, and if we had the means to prevent it, don't you think we should?
Herein lies the problem, with that word you used to start your sentence. I'm reasonably convinced that a global climate change of some sort is in progress, as are most people. But we are far from having proved that human beings had any significant amount to do with it. You can throw around figures of this much of x ppm is in the atmostphere and that the average temperture has changed over y number of years, but given our short lived observation of the planet's macro climate change cycle (read: millions of years), to make the assumption that we are causing whatever trend we currently are experiencing is the height of arrogance. We can and have taken polar ice core samples, cross-sections of ancient trees, done soil analysis and other such measurements to get a better picture of the system over time, but in essence we are still looking through keyholes at an elephant. We really not ought to be trying to influnece the system without having a greater understanding of it. And there is no one in the world who deserves the authority to be making such decisions for the whole world (least of all anyone at the UN).
To make an analogy about complex systems and influences on them, if you monkey around with various configuration settings on a UNIX system without understanding how they work, the result is undefined (not knowable). Considering how much more complex the global climate system is (arguably far too complex to understand at our current level of technology) compared to UNIX, and how much more critical it is for our survival, doing nothing is still a much better option than doing something for which the consequences are unforseeable. Earth has done a pretty good job of maintaining balance without us for the last several million years, give or take the occasional supervolcano or cometfall. Who the hell are these guys to think they can solve a problem that has not even been adequately defined?
'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'
This is exactly why I prefer it, especially for servers.
If you did, you'd realize the article is blatantly incorrect:
"In designing ASCI White and its predecessors, IBM technicians had to create a network of over 48 Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 shared memory multi-processor computers which they sold to the Department of Energy for $A110 million."
In the particular case of Scour, they didn't die because of "The Man". They died because of poor management, lack of direction, inflated egos, lack of preparation for the lawsuits, lack of money sense and because they treated their engineers like shit. They had 5 good programmers and completely squandered their talents. They hired dozens of people with questionable titles doing a dubious about of work rather than pay some good money for more engineers. I got to see all of this first hand (and get underpaid in the mean time.)
The Scour client was written in Dephi. The original was written in C++, but was shelved inexplicably after months of work in favor of the president's Delphi client.
They have made a series of bad business decisions and a series of bad technological decisions and they are now paying for them.
Explain how not writing code under the GPL can be legally used against you? As long as you follow all copyright laws (whether copyleft or not) and avoid software patents, how can any swarming unscrupulous corporate type do anything at all to you?
Creepy corporate types can sue you for software patents that they *claim* they have and you won't be able to pay the laywer's fees. They win, you lose.
Sendmail can indeed do the job, but as I have seen here just the other night, some bad mail or a down defered-to server can screw up the whole works.
I know it's yet another plug for an MTA, but I like the solution that Postfix proposes. It basically performs the same function as sendmail, but has a lot of design improvements that keep bottlenecks and weak points from stuffing it. These design decisions help with everything from reducing server load to keeping mail flowing past defered messages to added security with a modular approach. Read more: http://www.postfix.org/
This is great! I think I'm going to steal your idea and set up a server like this. Also, implement an upload through apache or ftp so people can add mp3s to the available list of songs. Then broadcast it on internet as well as feed it though the speakers so I can listen to some tunes with thousands of my closest friends:-)
It's not about proprietary software. It's about open source software being made closed. It's about free software being made proprietary. You attack the GPL because it seeks to defend the code against being used in proprietary software.
You either have a poor understanding of the dynamics of free software or you are interested in profiting by using someone elses code without paying for it. If it is the latter, then the GPL can be explained as a license that keeps people like you from ripping off people like me.
You say free software is more useful to you because you can fix the bugs and make modifications to your liking. If you make those changes, and intend to share those changes with the people developing the software and the users in general, the GPL does not hinder you from doing so. So what's the problem, too much Sunday school made you a little sensitive;-)
If there had been no GPL, then Linux would not be taking off like it is now, because MS and more likely Sun and others would have taken code from linux and improved their OSs and the community would have contributed to their success but recieved no benefit from it.
The free software community is it's own greatest resource, not the code. I don't recall the article, but someone said that if all the code disappeared overnight, but the community was still intact, it would rewrite the software in very short order. The GPL actually preserves the community more than it preserves the software itself. If that's religion, then I've never heard of such a religion. That's more like self-preservation.
Who decided that all of us want the corporate world to adopt Linux? I could care less.
Since Linux started getting attention from the mainstream press, this meme that "Linux must gain corporate acceptance to survive" has been propigating through the Linux community. Nothing could be more false.
Linux does not exist for the same reason that other OSs do. Linux exists because programmers decided to hack it and make it do stuff for them. As long as programmers have new needs for Linux, it will continue to thrive and grow, whether it recieves corporate interest or not.
Many of us, including myself, would prefer to deal with Linux machines at work, rather than NT or other less flexible versions of UNIX. This may happen, simply because Linux is the Right Thing to use, in many situations. This does not mean that Linux has to be picked up by the suits to survive. It will survive for as long as freelance programmers have interest in it.
If companies want to use it for servers or workstations, that's cool. If big hardware vendors decide to ship machines with Linux, that's cool too, particularly if it means we can get drivers more quickly. None of this will determine whether Linux survives or not.
The best Microsoft can hope for is that the Linux community turns this thing into a Linux vs Microsoft thing, because then we will be fighting on their turf. The trick is not to fight at all. The trick is to focus on making Linux the best operating system it can be (not in comparision to other OSs). Linux exists for itself, it has nothing to do with Microsoft.
If the corporate world chooses Linux, then good for them. If they don't choose Linux, that's ok, because we don't need them. Linux should not be changed to cater to the corporate world. Linux should just be itself.
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If we knew that some sort of disastrous climate change was imminent, and if we had the means to prevent it, don't you think we should?
Herein lies the problem, with that word you used to start your sentence. I'm reasonably convinced that a global climate change of some sort is in progress, as are most people. But we are far from having proved that human beings had any significant amount to do with it. You can throw around figures of this much of x ppm is in the atmostphere and that the average temperture has changed over y number of years, but given our short lived observation of the planet's macro climate change cycle (read: millions of years), to make the assumption that we are causing whatever trend we currently are experiencing is the height of arrogance. We can and have taken polar ice core samples, cross-sections of ancient trees, done soil analysis and other such measurements to get a better picture of the system over time, but in essence we are still looking through keyholes at an elephant. We really not ought to be trying to influnece the system without having a greater understanding of it. And there is no one in the world who deserves the authority to be making such decisions for the whole world (least of all anyone at the UN).
To make an analogy about complex systems and influences on them, if you monkey around with various configuration settings on a UNIX system without understanding how they work, the result is undefined (not knowable). Considering how much more complex the global climate system is (arguably far too complex to understand at our current level of technology) compared to UNIX, and how much more critical it is for our survival, doing nothing is still a much better option than doing something for which the consequences are unforseeable. Earth has done a pretty good job of maintaining balance without us for the last several million years, give or take the occasional supervolcano or cometfall. Who the hell are these guys to think they can solve a problem that has not even been adequately defined?
'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'
This is exactly why I prefer it, especially for servers.
If you did, you'd realize the article is blatantly incorrect:
"In designing ASCI White and its predecessors, IBM technicians had to create a network of over 48 Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 shared memory multi-processor computers which they sold to the Department of Energy for $A110 million."
Undoubtedly, those are RS/6000s.
In the particular case of Scour, they didn't die because of "The Man". They died because of poor management, lack of direction, inflated egos, lack of preparation for the lawsuits, lack of money sense and because they treated their engineers like shit. They had 5 good programmers and completely squandered their talents. They hired dozens of people with questionable titles doing a dubious about of work rather than pay some good money for more engineers. I got to see all of this first hand (and get underpaid in the mean time.)
The Scour client was written in Dephi. The original was written in C++, but was shelved inexplicably after months of work in favor of the president's Delphi client.
They have made a series of bad business decisions and a series of bad technological decisions and they are now paying for them.
Creepy corporate types can sue you for software patents that they *claim* they have and you won't be able to pay the laywer's fees. They win, you lose.
Sendmail can indeed do the job, but as I have seen here just the other night, some bad mail or a down defered-to server can screw up the whole works.
I know it's yet another plug for an MTA, but I like the solution that Postfix proposes. It basically performs the same function as sendmail, but has a lot of design improvements that keep bottlenecks and weak points from stuffing it. These design decisions help with everything from reducing server load to keeping mail flowing past defered messages to added security with a modular approach. Read more: http://www.postfix.org/
This is great! I think I'm going to steal your idea and set up a server like this. Also, implement an upload through apache or ftp so people can add mp3s to the available list of songs. Then broadcast it on internet as well as feed it though the speakers so I can listen to some tunes with thousands of my closest friends :-)
It's not about proprietary software. It's about open source software being made closed. It's about free software being made proprietary. You attack the GPL because it seeks to defend the code against being used in proprietary software.
;-)
You either have a poor understanding of the dynamics of free software or you are interested in profiting by using someone elses code without paying for it. If it is the latter, then the GPL can be explained as a license that keeps people like you from ripping off people like me.
You say free software is more useful to you because you can fix the bugs and make modifications to your liking. If you make those changes, and intend to share those changes with the people developing the software and the users in general, the GPL does not hinder you from doing so. So what's the problem, too much Sunday school made you a little sensitive
If there had been no GPL, then Linux would not be taking off like it is now, because MS and more likely Sun and others would have taken code from linux and improved their OSs and the community would have contributed to their success but recieved no benefit from it.
The free software community is it's own greatest resource, not the code. I don't recall the article, but someone said that if all the code disappeared overnight, but the community was still intact, it would rewrite the software in very short order. The GPL actually preserves the community more than it preserves the software itself. If that's religion, then I've never heard of such a religion. That's more like self-preservation.
Who decided that all of us want the corporate world to adopt Linux? I could care less.
Since Linux started getting attention from the mainstream press, this meme that "Linux must gain corporate acceptance to survive" has been propigating through the Linux community. Nothing could be more false.
Linux does not exist for the same reason that other OSs do. Linux exists because programmers decided to hack it and make it do stuff for them. As long as programmers have new needs for Linux, it will continue to thrive and grow, whether it recieves corporate interest or not.
Many of us, including myself, would prefer to deal with Linux machines at work, rather than NT or other less flexible versions of UNIX. This may happen, simply because Linux is the Right Thing to use, in many situations. This does not mean that Linux has to be picked up by the suits to survive. It will survive for as long as freelance programmers have interest in it.
If companies want to use it for servers or workstations, that's cool. If big hardware vendors decide to ship machines with Linux, that's cool too, particularly if it means we can get drivers more quickly. None of this will determine whether Linux survives or not.
The best Microsoft can hope for is that the Linux community turns this thing into a Linux vs Microsoft thing, because then we will be fighting on their turf. The trick is not to fight at all. The trick is to focus on making Linux the best operating system it can be (not in comparision to other OSs). Linux exists for itself, it has nothing to do with Microsoft.
If the corporate world chooses Linux, then good for them. If they don't choose Linux, that's ok, because we don't need them. Linux should not be changed to cater to the corporate world. Linux should just be itself.