RMS isn't against commercial software, he's only against proprietary software.
Look at his responses to the MandrakeSoft and TrollTech questions. He's not just okay with, but happy with, their selling of software. As long as they don't sell software that locks people into a proprietary solution, there's no harm in it. If you want to spend your money on software, you're welcome to it. He just wants a world where you can never be required to do so, just to interoperate with someone else.
He may hold himself to different standards, such as never buying even open sourced commercial software, but that's a far cry from hating and trying to abolish it.
As far as other rewards go, I'd love to be able to legally play DVDs in Linux. The law doesn't stop me from doing it for myself, but it does make it potentially illegal for me to sell Linux systems pre-configured to play DVDs. In RMS's ideal world that would never happen, which makes me thing it's not a bad ideal.
Instead, people who wish to hurt Microsoft must post on Slashdot and other forums that they are buying many XBoxes for the purpose of hurting Microsoft and not buying any games for them. This hurts MS because they don't actually get any money for a console and yet the developers see that a significant number of consoles are bought for non-gaming uses.:)
One of the biggest problems with consoles and DVDs these days is that companies put region coding in them. If you live in a certain area of the world you get to play the games and watch the movies that they want you to, and no others.
This is a hideous practice and we must all publicly flaunt our disobedience of it at every opportunity. Otherwise they'll sneak it beneath the radar of the masses and make it part of the international copyright agreements.
Currently, region coding has no legal weight, though dishonest laws like the DMCA might have make bypassing it illegal in some jurisdictions.
If you believe you have the right to use your possessions however and whereever you wish, fight dishonest companies who do this!
The remapping data moves, along with the actual data. The last thing you write is a translation table saying which virtual sectors the last so many sectors are pretending to be. Each remap sector points to the previous ones. You follow these back, reconstructing an idea of which sectors are which. Then you have enough information to return the sectors the OS really wants.
It takes a bit of CPU, and more reads than if the directory structure was always in the same place, but you can keep writes to a minimum, especially on any one area.
Then there's the idea of making the flash device with 5% more storage than advertised, using that to map into areas that die before the rest.
Depending on what you're serving, it might not even be CPU limited (well, these days when a 1.8Ghz CPU is $75...)
A lot of companies are going the cluster route, especially with things like web servers that work so well this way, many independent and fairly expensive transactions.
Is the project is to build an IIS server, you're probably in trouble from the start. Proper projects start out as "Build a web server", where the hardware and software are assessed based on performance.
I've seen so many reports of incorrect data on credit reports that I wouldn't be suprised if most records contained some bad data. Parents and children have been confused, people with the same name in the same state, etc. People report incorrect entries about them, but from companies they haven't dealt with before.
There's simply no oversight process and no incentive to clean up all the data that's out there. As long as false negatives (giving a recently bankrupt person credit) are less common than false positives (credit denied) the system has worked to the satisfaction of the creditors and the agency who got paid to provide the data.
As for the resolution process, they make you provide proof, even if no proof was given when the incorrect entry was made.
Company X says you owe $100. You say "I don't!". Credit agency wants proof that you don't owe Company X $100. If you dealt with Company X this might be possible if you save bills, to show a chain of paid bills till account termination. If you don't deal with Company X, how are you supposed to prove this? It's like the domain-name resolution process, cumbersome and designed to help the large companies, not the individuals they target.
At the end of all of this you can get bad data removed if you can prove it doesn't belong, but no matter how obviously wrong the data was, there are no penalties for the agency, as long as they "Received the data in good faith", which basically means that a company they deal with reported it. The data could be incredibly outlandish (person failed to pay $9M credit card bill) and they have no obligation to question it.
Look at this like the terrorist-information databases. As long as they might catch a terrorist they don't care about all of the grandmothers who now undergo intensive screening every time they fly and are flagged as possible terrorists for simply having a name that's the same as an alias once used by a terrorist. Nevermind that aliases are just that, a fake name you take to avoid detection, and the terrorist could make a new one up. But those flaws don't matter to the people who think they'll catch a terrorist this way. Neither to life-destroying incorrect credit results matter to a bank who denied you a loan, as long as they also deny a loan to someone who was bankrupt. There's no incentive for anyone in the system to give a shit and they don't.
I wasn't meaning QT specifically, I mean gui libraries in general. That's why it's important to know how they're licenses and who owns/controls them.
And if you're wondering where I came up with the patent topic, I recommend that you read Slashdot. It's an interesting site where the talk about abuse of the patent system and similar things.
You know that the companies hate it when people look at their own credit reports. Otherwise why would there be a penalty for checking it?
It's obvious that they know credit reports are frequently (usually?) based on incorrect data and they don't want people to find out.
But, the government passed a law saying they aren't liable for any damages caused by their data, no matter how incorrect it was. Must rock to work in an industry where you can make up numbers, charge people to correct them, and have legal immunity.
Considering that companies are keeping data that could, if incorrect, unfairly and through no fault of your own, cost you a ton of money, I think they should bear the full cost of making sure that the data is correct.
Sure it'd cost more, but I'd rather have a working solution than a slightly cheaper but mostly useless one.
Consider a $3500 used car. Chance are you can get a used Toyota or something reliable for that price. New cars lose their value almost as quickly as new computers. Let some other schmuck soak up the loss.
Pissing off customers isn't smart, but if the MPAA offered to force the DVDCA to agree to never license DVD players under a non-windows OS, for security reasons of course, Microsoft would shoot it's own collective mother.
They wouldn't force customers into DRM measures, unless they stood to gain from it. But, it's trivially easy to imagine competitors of theirs having trouble getting certified, or having their code signed, so that Media Player was the only viable alternative for most people, and DRM measures didn't let any non-DRM "enabled" player play the media. They'd love this and it's precisely the type of anti-competitive thing they've done before.
Data poisoning. It's a good way of making data useless. If you can't count on it 5% of the time, it's not good for basing important decisions off of.
I remember some people were doing this when CueCat was threatening to sue people for repurposing their barcode scanners. The idea was that CueCat would build a database of users and things that they scanned, then sell the data. The poisoners wrote perl scripts to submit thousands of fake scans, using ISBN numbers (or whatever is on a barcode) spidered from Amazon, from fake user IDs. Then let potential customers know that the data was worthless. (Seemed like good payback for threatening lawsuits against people decoding their rot13 encryption.)
If Redhat charged $1500 for people to deploy packages on Debian, or Windows, using the RPM package format, they'd be looked at suspiciously too.
QT is trying to build a standard gui library, but that library isn't freely available anywhere as a standard should be. I think it's really important to know where libraries are available, and if it's just because they haven't been ported yet, or because they're charging for it and it'll likely never be free.
The GPL also says you can't release code under the GPL if it's patent encumbered, so if a company releases GPLed code that uses their patents it's likely that a judge would interpret that as an offer for royalty-free use of those patents by anyone who accepts the GPL on the code. If something isn't GPLed and they don't guarantee the code to be patent-unencumbered you're opening yourself up for a Unisys/LZW problem a few years down the road.
What they'd do, if they did it, would be to convert the mp3s to WMA, so that you didn't lose anything... And hey, your music is now more secure against hackers, isn't that great!?
The point though, is that you can't trust MS to remain impartial when they've got business interests in that area. They aren't above sabotaging a competitors product so why would you possibly trust them to automatically install updates?
I agree. GCC and the GNU utils are the only things that make most commercial unixes livable. If those weren't available there'd be a large barrier of entry to new versions of SCO (the current versions can just use already released GCC versions).
If SCO is trying to kill Linux, and claim ownership of everything that so many people have worked so hard for, we should fight back as best we can. SCO has no claim, even one as bullshit as their claim on the 2.4 kernel, on GCC so they don't have any leverage, and Stallman isn't the kind to buckle to corporate pressure. If they try to kill Linux, make their platform the least viable on the market... not that they haven't already made good headway on that themselves.
What's is it with all of the "Poor Trolltech" sentiment in this thread? If their GUI library isn't available on Windows without paying money for a development kit and a license it's not as useful as free cross-platform libraries.
If I write some neat program for myself and friends in Linux, it'd be nice to do it with a GUI library that'd let me, with a minimum of porting hassles, release it for friends in Windows as well. Not worth the $1500 dev kit, but still handy.
Or perhaps if I was starting as a shareware developer. $1500 isn't much when the money starts coming in, but it's a lot up front.
Being that portability to Windows is a handy thing, I think the issue of QT being a business and charging for that ability is directly on topic.
Yes, we know, for the trillionth time, that the job of a company is to make money, yada, yada, yada... That doesn't mean that our job is to supply a company with money.
That last thing you ever want is to give real power to most people. They suck up and play nice, but as soon as they get power they're worse than Idi Amin. If you think the game is unfair and unbalanced now, wait until you join a MMORPG server where one of the elected admins is a guy you beat in a quake game a year ago...
The only way around that is to have many admins that must reach consensus, but we all know that rule by committee doesn't work.
People have a hard enough time being fair and impartial when they aren't involved. When it influences a world they and their friends play in the courts would just be the next exploit waiting to happen. "Yeah, sit as a judge for a day, have your friends out ticketing people, and fine both parties the max. You can make a million plat!!" Of course there'd have to be a recall process, but it'd always be used by everyone whose friends didn't get elected...
I highly doubt anything that relies on the honesty and good intentions of a bunch of gamers could ever work. Five or more years ago, when the communities were small and social penalties could work, maybe. Now, not a chance.
Formula 1 cars are superior to consumer cars, for some things. Doesn't mean everyone should run out and get them.
People whining that developers don't cater to them is like whining that F1 cars aren't made user-friendly so that you can drive them to the store, oh yeah, and make a free retrofit for my '89 Civic...
Ugh, I really wish people like you would go away. It's all about what you want and why that obligates a developer to write it for you. My goal for open source is making a system that everyone *could* use, not one that everyone must use. If you don't like it, don't whine, help out or go elsewhere.
It's not hypocritical to argue with facts. Apache has beaten IIS in every test I've seen. It's simply better software. Is it for developers only? Nope, I don't develop it and am still able to put it to good use.
The difference between us? I'm thankful that someone wrote this cool software for me to use, even if it's not perfect. You have the attitude that you're entitled to perfect software, for free. You won't help, you won't pay, and yet you expect people to jump for the chance to help you or you'll complain about them. Most people grow out of this behaviour eventually.
Personally, I'm happy that most small open source products sit at v0.9x for quite a while. A v1.0 implies certain quality and ease of use, they don't need to lie about this to sell a product so they're honestly telling the users where they consider it to be on a quality scale. I'd much rather a tool that was 90% what I wanted than one that claimed to be everything I wanted and wasn't.
It doesn't require a clean-room, you just probably shouldn't depend on the drive after opening it.
You know those case-mod stories on/. a while back where someone replaced the metal case on their HD with a plexiglass one? They reported that the drive worked well enough to use (though I wouldn't trust it).
Anyways, for just long enough to grab the data off the drive, you'd probably be okay.
The problem is moving the arms and head out of the way of the platters and putting them back without mangling the heads.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS isn't against commercial software, he's only against proprietary software.
Look at his responses to the MandrakeSoft and TrollTech questions. He's not just okay with, but happy with, their selling of software. As long as they don't sell software that locks people into a proprietary solution, there's no harm in it. If you want to spend your money on software, you're welcome to it. He just wants a world where you can never be required to do so, just to interoperate with someone else.
He may hold himself to different standards, such as never buying even open sourced commercial software, but that's a far cry from hating and trying to abolish it.
As far as other rewards go, I'd love to be able to legally play DVDs in Linux. The law doesn't stop me from doing it for myself, but it does make it potentially illegal for me to sell Linux systems pre-configured to play DVDs. In RMS's ideal world that would never happen, which makes me thing it's not a bad ideal.
Instead, people who wish to hurt Microsoft must post on Slashdot and other forums that they are buying many XBoxes for the purpose of hurting Microsoft and not buying any games for them. This hurts MS because they don't actually get any money for a console and yet the developers see that a significant number of consoles are bought for non-gaming uses. :)
"An agreement of law", Are you drunk?
One of the biggest problems with consoles and DVDs these days is that companies put region coding in them. If you live in a certain area of the world you get to play the games and watch the movies that they want you to, and no others.
This is a hideous practice and we must all publicly flaunt our disobedience of it at every opportunity. Otherwise they'll sneak it beneath the radar of the masses and make it part of the international copyright agreements.
Currently, region coding has no legal weight, though dishonest laws like the DMCA might have make bypassing it illegal in some jurisdictions.
If you believe you have the right to use your possessions however and whereever you wish, fight dishonest companies who do this!
Actually, yes, the remap sectors are free.
The remapping data moves, along with the actual data. The last thing you write is a translation table saying which virtual sectors the last so many sectors are pretending to be. Each remap sector points to the previous ones. You follow these back, reconstructing an idea of which sectors are which. Then you have enough information to return the sectors the OS really wants.
It takes a bit of CPU, and more reads than if the directory structure was always in the same place, but you can keep writes to a minimum, especially on any one area.
Then there's the idea of making the flash device with 5% more storage than advertised, using that to map into areas that die before the rest.
No it isn't. He published the entire algorithm.
Depending on what you're serving, it might not even be CPU limited (well, these days when a 1.8Ghz CPU is $75...)
A lot of companies are going the cluster route, especially with things like web servers that work so well this way, many independent and fairly expensive transactions.
Is the project is to build an IIS server, you're probably in trouble from the start. Proper projects start out as "Build a web server", where the hardware and software are assessed based on performance.
Depends. Babies tend to be chubby and fat is lighter than water, so they'd probably float. Now, if you starved them to death...
I've seen so many reports of incorrect data on credit reports that I wouldn't be suprised if most records contained some bad data. Parents and children have been confused, people with the same name in the same state, etc. People report incorrect entries about them, but from companies they haven't dealt with before.
There's simply no oversight process and no incentive to clean up all the data that's out there. As long as false negatives (giving a recently bankrupt person credit) are less common than false positives (credit denied) the system has worked to the satisfaction of the creditors and the agency who got paid to provide the data.
As for the resolution process, they make you provide proof, even if no proof was given when the incorrect entry was made.
Company X says you owe $100. You say "I don't!". Credit agency wants proof that you don't owe Company X $100. If you dealt with Company X this might be possible if you save bills, to show a chain of paid bills till account termination. If you don't deal with Company X, how are you supposed to prove this? It's like the domain-name resolution process, cumbersome and designed to help the large companies, not the individuals they target.
At the end of all of this you can get bad data removed if you can prove it doesn't belong, but no matter how obviously wrong the data was, there are no penalties for the agency, as long as they "Received the data in good faith", which basically means that a company they deal with reported it. The data could be incredibly outlandish (person failed to pay $9M credit card bill) and they have no obligation to question it.
Look at this like the terrorist-information databases. As long as they might catch a terrorist they don't care about all of the grandmothers who now undergo intensive screening every time they fly and are flagged as possible terrorists for simply having a name that's the same as an alias once used by a terrorist. Nevermind that aliases are just that, a fake name you take to avoid detection, and the terrorist could make a new one up. But those flaws don't matter to the people who think they'll catch a terrorist this way. Neither to life-destroying incorrect credit results matter to a bank who denied you a loan, as long as they also deny a loan to someone who was bankrupt. There's no incentive for anyone in the system to give a shit and they don't.
I wasn't meaning QT specifically, I mean gui libraries in general. That's why it's important to know how they're licenses and who owns/controls them.
And if you're wondering where I came up with the patent topic, I recommend that you read Slashdot. It's an interesting site where the talk about abuse of the patent system and similar things.
You know that the companies hate it when people look at their own credit reports. Otherwise why would there be a penalty for checking it?
It's obvious that they know credit reports are frequently (usually?) based on incorrect data and they don't want people to find out.
But, the government passed a law saying they aren't liable for any damages caused by their data, no matter how incorrect it was. Must rock to work in an industry where you can make up numbers, charge people to correct them, and have legal immunity.
Considering that companies are keeping data that could, if incorrect, unfairly and through no fault of your own, cost you a ton of money, I think they should bear the full cost of making sure that the data is correct.
Sure it'd cost more, but I'd rather have a working solution than a slightly cheaper but mostly useless one.
Consider a $3500 used car. Chance are you can get a used Toyota or something reliable for that price. New cars lose their value almost as quickly as new computers. Let some other schmuck soak up the loss.
Pissing off customers isn't smart, but if the MPAA offered to force the DVDCA to agree to never license DVD players under a non-windows OS, for security reasons of course, Microsoft would shoot it's own collective mother.
They wouldn't force customers into DRM measures, unless they stood to gain from it. But, it's trivially easy to imagine competitors of theirs having trouble getting certified, or having their code signed, so that Media Player was the only viable alternative for most people, and DRM measures didn't let any non-DRM "enabled" player play the media. They'd love this and it's precisely the type of anti-competitive thing they've done before.
Data poisoning. It's a good way of making data useless. If you can't count on it 5% of the time, it's not good for basing important decisions off of.
I remember some people were doing this when CueCat was threatening to sue people for repurposing their barcode scanners. The idea was that CueCat would build a database of users and things that they scanned, then sell the data. The poisoners wrote perl scripts to submit thousands of fake scans, using ISBN numbers (or whatever is on a barcode) spidered from Amazon, from fake user IDs. Then let potential customers know that the data was worthless. (Seemed like good payback for threatening lawsuits against people decoding their rot13 encryption.)
If Redhat charged $1500 for people to deploy packages on Debian, or Windows, using the RPM package format, they'd be looked at suspiciously too.
QT is trying to build a standard gui library, but that library isn't freely available anywhere as a standard should be. I think it's really important to know where libraries are available, and if it's just because they haven't been ported yet, or because they're charging for it and it'll likely never be free.
The GPL also says you can't release code under the GPL if it's patent encumbered, so if a company releases GPLed code that uses their patents it's likely that a judge would interpret that as an offer for royalty-free use of those patents by anyone who accepts the GPL on the code. If something isn't GPLed and they don't guarantee the code to be patent-unencumbered you're opening yourself up for a Unisys/LZW problem a few years down the road.
What they'd do, if they did it, would be to convert the mp3s to WMA, so that you didn't lose anything... And hey, your music is now more secure against hackers, isn't that great!?
The point though, is that you can't trust MS to remain impartial when they've got business interests in that area. They aren't above sabotaging a competitors product so why would you possibly trust them to automatically install updates?
I agree. GCC and the GNU utils are the only things that make most commercial unixes livable. If those weren't available there'd be a large barrier of entry to new versions of SCO (the current versions can just use already released GCC versions).
If SCO is trying to kill Linux, and claim ownership of everything that so many people have worked so hard for, we should fight back as best we can. SCO has no claim, even one as bullshit as their claim on the 2.4 kernel, on GCC so they don't have any leverage, and Stallman isn't the kind to buckle to corporate pressure. If they try to kill Linux, make their platform the least viable on the market... not that they haven't already made good headway on that themselves.
Because you have to program in Java.
With GTK or QT you can write wrappers for any language. Want GUI functionality from LISP, or Haskell, or Perl?
Java's not a bad language, for what it is, but anyone trapped into dealing with a single language is missing out.
What's is it with all of the "Poor Trolltech" sentiment in this thread? If their GUI library isn't available on Windows without paying money for a development kit and a license it's not as useful as free cross-platform libraries.
If I write some neat program for myself and friends in Linux, it'd be nice to do it with a GUI library that'd let me, with a minimum of porting hassles, release it for friends in Windows as well. Not worth the $1500 dev kit, but still handy.
Or perhaps if I was starting as a shareware developer. $1500 isn't much when the money starts coming in, but it's a lot up front.
Being that portability to Windows is a handy thing, I think the issue of QT being a business and charging for that ability is directly on topic.
Yes, we know, for the trillionth time, that the job of a company is to make money, yada, yada, yada... That doesn't mean that our job is to supply a company with money.
That's the legacy of MS policies like "DOS ain't done till Lotus don't run!"
You just know you'll let auto-update run and one day it'll "disable" your MP3s because WMV offer so much more security, or something similar.
Oh god, NO!
That last thing you ever want is to give real power to most people. They suck up and play nice, but as soon as they get power they're worse than Idi Amin. If you think the game is unfair and unbalanced now, wait until you join a MMORPG server where one of the elected admins is a guy you beat in a quake game a year ago...
The only way around that is to have many admins that must reach consensus, but we all know that rule by committee doesn't work.
People have a hard enough time being fair and impartial when they aren't involved. When it influences a world they and their friends play in the courts would just be the next exploit waiting to happen. "Yeah, sit as a judge for a day, have your friends out ticketing people, and fine both parties the max. You can make a million plat!!" Of course there'd have to be a recall process, but it'd always be used by everyone whose friends didn't get elected...
I highly doubt anything that relies on the honesty and good intentions of a bunch of gamers could ever work. Five or more years ago, when the communities were small and social penalties could work, maybe. Now, not a chance.
Formula 1 cars are superior to consumer cars, for some things. Doesn't mean everyone should run out and get them.
People whining that developers don't cater to them is like whining that F1 cars aren't made user-friendly so that you can drive them to the store, oh yeah, and make a free retrofit for my '89 Civic...
Ugh, I really wish people like you would go away. It's all about what you want and why that obligates a developer to write it for you. My goal for open source is making a system that everyone *could* use, not one that everyone must use. If you don't like it, don't whine, help out or go elsewhere.
It's not hypocritical to argue with facts. Apache has beaten IIS in every test I've seen. It's simply better software. Is it for developers only? Nope, I don't develop it and am still able to put it to good use.
The difference between us? I'm thankful that someone wrote this cool software for me to use, even if it's not perfect. You have the attitude that you're entitled to perfect software, for free. You won't help, you won't pay, and yet you expect people to jump for the chance to help you or you'll complain about them. Most people grow out of this behaviour eventually.
Personally, I'm happy that most small open source products sit at v0.9x for quite a while. A v1.0 implies certain quality and ease of use, they don't need to lie about this to sell a product so they're honestly telling the users where they consider it to be on a quality scale. I'd much rather a tool that was 90% what I wanted than one that claimed to be everything I wanted and wasn't.
It doesn't require a clean-room, you just probably shouldn't depend on the drive after opening it.
/. a while back where someone replaced the metal case on their HD with a plexiglass one? They reported that the drive worked well enough to use (though I wouldn't trust it).
You know those case-mod stories on
Anyways, for just long enough to grab the data off the drive, you'd probably be okay.
The problem is moving the arms and head out of the way of the platters and putting them back without mangling the heads.