What part of what you described would be made more difficult by having an offline program? Obviously you'd have to connect to the net to get updates or use a 'contact us' feature, but that's 95% of the functionality instead of 0%.
I take issue with "free" installs like Visual Studio Express that have an EULA listing things I'm not allowed to do with the software.
Besides, much of MS's required system components (Direct X, Visual Studio Express, etc) are hidden behind WGA download screens. It's possible to get the DX9 runtime, but only if you go looking.
I honestly can't imagine recommending software with termination switches that we don't control. What would your boss say if you couldn't install a new server just because someone else's site was down? What would your boss say if your server stopped serving because its quota of IP connections was full?
The last happened to me. Win2k Pro was hosting a Source Safe repository. When the developers stopped using it the connections would take ten minutes to time out. If enough of them used it in that time it'd start locking people out - not with sane error messages either, but random failures. We ripped it out and replaced it with Linux running Subversion. We could have paid $500 for an OS upgrade, but that would still have limits, just higher ones.
Ah twitter, I see your problem. You've got an AC trying to crawl up your ass. One dumb enough to think we need a link to your user page.
Seriously though AC, there's a difference between never using FOSS and using Windows for years, developing for it despite the crappy APIs, and supporting other users with it. One gives you *no* experience, the other gives you a great deal. Are you fucking daft?
Besides, the ultimate example of free software vs proprietary was Code Red. There were instructions for OSS (to block the infection) long before there were patches for Windows. The only safe way to use a Windows server then (all the time really) was to put it behind a non-windows machine and filter malformed requests. What more needs to be known about it?
Single-source proprietary crap. Does nobody understand the benefit of multiply-sourced commodity parts?
Why not use the GPLed code until you're ready to replace it? GPL code is free to use for development so you can just hack stuff together quickly.
Why not write your app as a stand-alone and not contain an FTP server at all. Regardless of what you've heard, shelling out and using another program isn't a derivative work.
If you write complex proprietary software you're reducing the freedom of users who get stuck using it. (Printer drivers, etc). Freedom for the users (other developers) overrides the freedom of the one person who'd choose to stick them without source code.
Consider a system based on BSD code for networking (Windows) and how free the users are. How enriched they are by the free exchange of ideas and source code in this product... Sure, basic networking is BSDLed to get everyone, even jerks, to use it. But we can see what these freedoms that BSDL is claimed to offer really get you. Proprietary lock-in and EULAs and code patents. For everyone.
We (Non BSDL supporters) get your point. The BSDL is requires less so it's more free. Most people however would agree that by surrendering a couple of rights (to shoot guns wildly in the air) we gain a safer society for all. You're slightly less free by having to find a safe place to fire your gun, I'm more free because I can walk down the streets without worrying about falling bullets. As a society, we're much freer. The restriction is balanced by you not needing for fear anyone else's falling bullets. In a similar way the GPL requires slightly more, but it actually takes steps to make the future nicer for everyone.
Why not just release your work into the public domain if you want no restrictions?
No, you aren't capable. You'd be doing it and releasing it under the BSDL if you could. You can't. Can NOT.
That's why you're pissed. GPL advocates are writing software you can't re-use without re-releasing.
If it wasn't that you wouldn't be bitching about licenses on Slashdot, you'd be using your obviously superior code. So go do it. Your problem is obviously that you can't have everything you want.
Remove the word numerical and you'll have what the GP poster said.
There's no numerical metric for "can find fstab and knows what it's for", but it is quantifiable.
If you can't think of any examples of how something you did is better than something else you or someone else could have done, are you just picking at random? If not, why can't you explain what a newbie sysadmin would do and how your experience led you to doing the right thing instead?
Do you know what all the values in the Windows registry mean?
Not all settings are exposed to the GUI, this is hard, slow, and usually unneeded. So when you dig deeper to find them do you want them to be
1) in a system-wide binary database you must read through a specific application 2) proprietary interfaces like Firefox's about:config 3) program specific text files
If the GUI works, all are identical. But, if it doesn't you can either have a straight forward file you can checkpoint with CVS tools, or you'll have a binary blob you can't find your changes in, let alone roll back from.
Which is better, a stripped down Linux that runs on my PDA, or a full-featured kitchen-sink distro that comes with everything pre-selected?
That's not just a hard question, it's a trick question. My PDA won't run with a desktop distro, my desktop would be crippled with a PDA distro. Neither one should be replaced with the other.
That's precisely why Windows is a lame server. Try turning the GUI off for more speed/ram.
KDE and Gnome are filling different niches. To you they're only eye-candy. So use a KDE theme in Gnome or vice-versa. But behind the scenes they're coded in a different fashion to meet different goals.
How many systems are you recommending people switch between? My mom's been using Gnome since I installed Ubuntu, KDE might be a bit confusing out of the blue, so I *don't* have her system configured to randomly switch GUIs... Vista or OS X would be a bit of a surprise too.
Besides, if you think the Mac is consistent, look at iTunes. Most of Apple's UI guidelines tossed out the window. Quicktime player for Windows was another laughably bad example.
It's funny how to authoritarians everything seems like a good excuse for a dictator to tell everyone what to do.
Why should we strive to beat MS at some ridiculous game someone else thought of?
Either there's a simple installer (no buttons for advanced mode) and it wipes partitions without asking, or there's a complex one that asks too many questions. This is why there are multiple distros - not every one needs to be installed onto a bare metal machine by a newb without instructions.
Besides, Linux has *far* exceeded every MS windows installer. Boot Knoppix and install Debian or RedHat on a partition, while browsing the web, SSHed into your servers, watching a movie, using the included development tools.
Windows on the other hand, if you don't get it pre-installed on the machine requires you to reboot, answer a bunch of questions without help available, makes your machine unusable until finished, requires you to go find the patches, requires multiple reboots or an admin to make a slipstreamed install CD, etc...
Besides, if your parents need a machine they can drool over, buy a Mac, or at least pre-installed Ubuntu. They've turned off the fancy stuff to keep people from hurting themselves.
To the contrary, I know a few people who believe they have chosen their faith and are fairly well read, familiar with some of the basic philosophical arguments, etc.
But when it comes to their own belief they let drop all shreds of rational examination and simply go on a gut feeling. They're well spoken and otherwise intelligent people, but a little "3am high" or other bliss moment and they immediately latch onto religion as an answer.
The standards of proof go completely out the window. In no other area can people just choose what to believe without any shred of proof or plausibility and be treated with respect as an intellectual equal.
I shared a suite with a Baptist minister who was a biblical scholar, he spent years in school studying the bible and yet when asked why he's religious, simply is "because it just makes so much sense".
And I've never met a rational religious person who had actually examined their beliefs.
The farthest they can get is that is seems lonely without something, or it "all seems too magnificent" to not have a creator, or some other jibber-jabber nonsense about wish fulfillment. 2 + 2 might as well equal 5 in a world with a space ghost who created everything. It removes the requirement for anything to make sense.
"Why is X?"
"'Cause god made it that way!"
If someone actually believed 2+2=5 you could write out other formulas and see what else they thought. Maybe you'd discover that 5 was their symbol for 4. But religion isn't that kind of thing, all the answers are god. You can't really examine it for anything. Reading the bible/etc is as meaningful as looking for answers in drugs and alcohol. Anything you do come up with will merely seem profound but will crumble under the light of day unless you can get a whole cult to support you in it.
Because nobody insists on equal time for the '3' side in the '1+1' debate. Nobody really believes the FSM exists. But god, any god, will get you an unending stream of crap. First about why it's reasonable, then why it's a lifestyle choice, then because it's a freedom issue, but then they'll insist right after they've fought for their right to believe whatever they want, they'll insist on stuffing it down their children's throats.
Nothing else other than homeopathic medicine brings so many idiots out of the woodwork, loudly arguing that their invisible friend deserves equal time with things they don't understand.
Theoretically, the treatment of company executives should be the same. Either they're found guilty and not protected, or they aren't found guilty and there's nothing to protect them from.
And of course it's the dominant business pattern, it's the best for those who run businesses. But if it weren't available, 100% of businesses would have a different charter. Society has benefited during this time, as well as the business owners, but that doesn't mean that limited liability is *the* reason. Liability is carried somewhere, if not on the people that caused it, then on society as a whole.
Essentially, limited liability is non-capitalist. It's corporate welfare, externalizing the costs of business by letting society as a whole bear them.
However, we've found that a small reduction in absolute capitalism (helping losers to avoid debtors prisons and starvation, etc) increases willingness to participate in risk and thus provides a healthier economy. It's not the investors that deserve the pat on the back for their investments, after all, the rest of society is carrying all of the risk of failure, leaving investors to only cover their opportunity cost.
So people shouldn't be able to write their liability off on the chance of there being someone else to pass the buck to later. These hospitals are now discovering where the liability stops...
If the hospitals had thought they were on the hook for the results of these systems they'd have demanded far simpler ones they could audit. Instead they buy a more complex system because of lies about its safety. This makes it almost impossible for honest firms to compete. If you discuss security issues you sound like more of a risk than the people who hand-wave them away.
Well, companies that haven't been burned don't realize the value of proper design. Just like people who've never witnessed a bridge collapse are reluctant to spend more for a sturdier design.
It doesn't take name dropping to understand that the only value of gold over money are that it has some innate value and the supply is relatively known. It's still a fiat currency. Who can eat gold?
Better if you realize that currency, gold or otherwise, isn't a good store of value. Productive land is. Means of production are. Currency is just what lets you trade one for another at some moment in time. The relative stability of currency has led people to try to hold value in it alone, then getting mad at the government when an arbitrary relationship of numbers to stuff doesn't remain constant for multiple lifetimes...
It is taking over. Just more slowly than the others.:)
But eventually it will be on more desktops/hand-helds/phones than Windows was when the statement was first made.
Windows is in a market position sort of like id software, with Quake. They released a popular product at the right time (founding of the WWW, public internet access for the masses, etc) and it took off by simple virtue of being the best thing in people's faces. They quickly gained nearly 100% of their relevant markets and held that for so long it looked to some like we should stop writing games, Quake-likes were forever. Then the market fragmented and you couldn't find more than a handful of people on anything, any of the 900 Quake 1 mods, the 100 Q2 mods, the 40 Half-Life mods, etc... Then that started to reverse a bit when more games had multi-mod browsers in-game. The second wave hit, and there are more games with more people playing that Q1 had in its prime, but because no one game achieves the absolute platform, technology, and design stranglehold, it'll never be quite the same.
Microsoft is here. They're still the strong tech in many ways - it's id's engines and Microsoft's OSes that you don't get fired for buying. But they were so big just because of their positioning, and now everyone is writing their own OSes and their own apps. Even if Open Office isn't much of a threat to MS Office (as Duke Nukem 3d wasn't to Quake) it's still yet another split in the developer and user bases.
So yes, this combines to make this (and every) year, the year of more Linux on the desktop. But also, of everything else on the desktop. Mac, Windows, BSD, Linux via OLPC, various embedded OSes in pdas and phones, Firefox on X, the iPhone, etc. Some of everything, monopoly of nothing.
To me, Microsoft *is* falling. They were able to make me pay the MS tax on laptops, they were all I could use for many tasks. Their patent nonsense is just their panicked flailing at realizing they no-longer control the market. Dominate it like a while in a shark tank, but not control per-se. And that's good enough for me. I've always said "just watch when they have to compete on merit", if they actually do an about-face like IBM seems to have, then Bill's old obsessive MS will have lost, and we will all have won.
I have heard that question a lot, but I question if it ever comes from anyone other than astroturfers.
Yes, the GPL is a license, and it could be confusing. But, only to someone who found it and read it, and who also had never seen an EULA or worse.
Commercial software requires you to click past legal agreements, but these same "honest doubters" never seem to have a problem with the EULAs on their OS, Applications, Trivial Extensions, Patches, Updates, etc.
The GPL is buried. You'd never see it unless you were poking around in the contents of a CD or downloaded, which isn't likely unless you've been exposed to those EULAs I mention above.
And finally, the GPL specifically says that you maintain full ownership (and no GPL requirements) on everything you create.
So who, honestly, is going to find it, and read enough to get scared, have never seen an EULA (thus realizing that they've clicked-through far worse) and either have taken the whole issue to a lawyer, or have realized that post-sale contracts couldn't possibly be binding and aren't worried.
Other than that, there are a few businesses who want to link things to GPLed or LGPLed software and have question on exactly how to best do this without having problems, how to handle community concerns, etc. But the difference is that these people aren't scared of the GPL, they merely want to exploit every bit of it (like tax laws, the speed limit, etc) possible and want advice on how to not go too far.
Show me the mythical "scared of the GPL, thus avoiding Linux" people who refuse to use a Linux/SMB file-server because they might lose control of the licensing of the data stored on it. Or the people afraid to use X, or vi/Emacs/OpenOffice/whatever because they won't own the documents they write.
I don't doubt that one or two exist, but I'll just show them discussions of how Oracle's EULA forbids critical discussion of their product, or how various MMOGs claim to own screenshots, how Microsoft Windows XP will artificially limit the number of connections (for market separation reasons) even though bugs in MS's own product like SourceSafe mean that the server often locks developers out of their own resources and how Microsoft threatened legal action and criminal charges against those discussing a registry tweak to disable this mal-feature.
The GPL is a little big, but compared to the EULAs (which it clearly differentiates itself from early on, when giving the reader all kinds of assurances about having no obligations or liabilities...) it's a pretty easy read.
To obtain without permission shouldn't be a crime. Only to deprive someone of something unfairly, perhaps by taking it away.
Whose permission do I need to obtain sunlight, fresh air, a good idea, a smile from a pretty flower, or girl, a catchy rhyme, or a better understanding of physics?
If I see a flower you have grown I achieve almost as much gain as you for no effort at all. Yet, this is totally legal, even if you order me not to look at your flower.
If you want to control the viewing of your flower you need to build walls, as the law gives you no way to force others not to look at something.
This all stems from the mistaken belief that if you have a good idea you deserve the uninterrupted right to milk it, forever. At that, the first flower grower should have the right not only to tell everyone not to look at their flower (unless you've paid) but also to prevent their intellectual property (the idea of charging to look at something) being used by anyone else. This might impact the free market a little bit.
Once you start using RMS's name as a blind reason to support one side over another, you've crossed a line that I doubt even ESR would respect.
If the GFDL means that you can't take a document and treat it like everything else on the Debian disk, that's a serious liability. They'd have to issue an exception to how they do everything just because someone wanted more control over derivative work than the GPL provides.
The whole point of the GPL is so that there are no restrictions on what people do. The GFDL might be good for some things, but in that is contains more restrictions, it isn't the GPL...
My bitch is that companies don't have to. "Free shipping" doesn't have to mean anything. Normal rights to dispute something in court - taken away by unseen licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of what you described would be made more difficult by having an offline program? Obviously you'd have to connect to the net to get updates or use a 'contact us' feature, but that's 95% of the functionality instead of 0%.
I take issue with "free" installs like Visual Studio Express that have an EULA listing things I'm not allowed to do with the software.
Besides, much of MS's required system components (Direct X, Visual Studio Express, etc) are hidden behind WGA download screens. It's possible to get the DX9 runtime, but only if you go looking.
I honestly can't imagine recommending software with termination switches that we don't control. What would your boss say if you couldn't install a new server just because someone else's site was down? What would your boss say if your server stopped serving because its quota of IP connections was full?
The last happened to me. Win2k Pro was hosting a Source Safe repository. When the developers stopped using it the connections would take ten minutes to time out. If enough of them used it in that time it'd start locking people out - not with sane error messages either, but random failures. We ripped it out and replaced it with Linux running Subversion. We could have paid $500 for an OS upgrade, but that would still have limits, just higher ones.
Ah twitter, I see your problem. You've got an AC trying to crawl up your ass. One dumb enough to think we need a link to your user page.
Seriously though AC, there's a difference between never using FOSS and using Windows for years, developing for it despite the crappy APIs, and supporting other users with it. One gives you *no* experience, the other gives you a great deal. Are you fucking daft?
Besides, the ultimate example of free software vs proprietary was Code Red. There were instructions for OSS (to block the infection) long before there were patches for Windows. The only safe way to use a Windows server then (all the time really) was to put it behind a non-windows machine and filter malformed requests. What more needs to be known about it?
Single-source proprietary crap. Does nobody understand the benefit of multiply-sourced commodity parts?
Why not use the GPLed code until you're ready to replace it? GPL code is free to use for development so you can just hack stuff together quickly.
Why not write your app as a stand-alone and not contain an FTP server at all. Regardless of what you've heard, shelling out and using another program isn't a derivative work.
If you write complex proprietary software you're reducing the freedom of users who get stuck using it. (Printer drivers, etc). Freedom for the users (other developers) overrides the freedom of the one person who'd choose to stick them without source code.
Consider a system based on BSD code for networking (Windows) and how free the users are. How enriched they are by the free exchange of ideas and source code in this product... Sure, basic networking is BSDLed to get everyone, even jerks, to use it. But we can see what these freedoms that BSDL is claimed to offer really get you. Proprietary lock-in and EULAs and code patents. For everyone.
We (Non BSDL supporters) get your point. The BSDL is requires less so it's more free. Most people however would agree that by surrendering a couple of rights (to shoot guns wildly in the air) we gain a safer society for all. You're slightly less free by having to find a safe place to fire your gun, I'm more free because I can walk down the streets without worrying about falling bullets. As a society, we're much freer. The restriction is balanced by you not needing for fear anyone else's falling bullets. In a similar way the GPL requires slightly more, but it actually takes steps to make the future nicer for everyone.
Why not just release your work into the public domain if you want no restrictions?
No, you aren't capable. You'd be doing it and releasing it under the BSDL if you could. You can't. Can NOT.
That's why you're pissed. GPL advocates are writing software you can't re-use without re-releasing.
If it wasn't that you wouldn't be bitching about licenses on Slashdot, you'd be using your obviously superior code. So go do it. Your problem is obviously that you can't have everything you want.
Remove the word numerical and you'll have what the GP poster said.
There's no numerical metric for "can find fstab and knows what it's for", but it is quantifiable.
If you can't think of any examples of how something you did is better than something else you or someone else could have done, are you just picking at random? If not, why can't you explain what a newbie sysadmin would do and how your experience led you to doing the right thing instead?
Do you know what all the values in the Windows registry mean?
Not all settings are exposed to the GUI, this is hard, slow, and usually unneeded. So when you dig deeper to find them do you want them to be
1) in a system-wide binary database you must read through a specific application
2) proprietary interfaces like Firefox's about:config
3) program specific text files
If the GUI works, all are identical. But, if it doesn't you can either have a straight forward file you can checkpoint with CVS tools, or you'll have a binary blob you can't find your changes in, let alone roll back from.
Which is better, Kittens or Apples?
Which is better, a stripped down Linux that runs on my PDA, or a full-featured kitchen-sink distro that comes with everything pre-selected?
That's not just a hard question, it's a trick question. My PDA won't run with a desktop distro, my desktop would be crippled with a PDA distro. Neither one should be replaced with the other.
That's precisely why Windows is a lame server. Try turning the GUI off for more speed/ram.
KDE and Gnome are filling different niches. To you they're only eye-candy. So use a KDE theme in Gnome or vice-versa. But behind the scenes they're coded in a different fashion to meet different goals.
How many systems are you recommending people switch between? My mom's been using Gnome since I installed Ubuntu, KDE might be a bit confusing out of the blue, so I *don't* have her system configured to randomly switch GUIs... Vista or OS X would be a bit of a surprise too.
Besides, if you think the Mac is consistent, look at iTunes. Most of Apple's UI guidelines tossed out the window. Quicktime player for Windows was another laughably bad example.
It's funny how to authoritarians everything seems like a good excuse for a dictator to tell everyone what to do.
Why should we strive to beat MS at some ridiculous game someone else thought of?
Either there's a simple installer (no buttons for advanced mode) and it wipes partitions without asking, or there's a complex one that asks too many questions. This is why there are multiple distros - not every one needs to be installed onto a bare metal machine by a newb without instructions.
Besides, Linux has *far* exceeded every MS windows installer. Boot Knoppix and install Debian or RedHat on a partition, while browsing the web, SSHed into your servers, watching a movie, using the included development tools.
Windows on the other hand, if you don't get it pre-installed on the machine requires you to reboot, answer a bunch of questions without help available, makes your machine unusable until finished, requires you to go find the patches, requires multiple reboots or an admin to make a slipstreamed install CD, etc...
Besides, if your parents need a machine they can drool over, buy a Mac, or at least pre-installed Ubuntu. They've turned off the fancy stuff to keep people from hurting themselves.
To the contrary, I know a few people who believe they have chosen their faith and are fairly well read, familiar with some of the basic philosophical arguments, etc.
But when it comes to their own belief they let drop all shreds of rational examination and simply go on a gut feeling. They're well spoken and otherwise intelligent people, but a little "3am high" or other bliss moment and they immediately latch onto religion as an answer.
The standards of proof go completely out the window. In no other area can people just choose what to believe without any shred of proof or plausibility and be treated with respect as an intellectual equal.
I shared a suite with a Baptist minister who was a biblical scholar, he spent years in school studying the bible and yet when asked why he's religious, simply is "because it just makes so much sense".
Where do you even begin? I just smile and nod.
And I've never met a rational religious person who had actually examined their beliefs.
The farthest they can get is that is seems lonely without something, or it "all seems too magnificent" to not have a creator, or some other jibber-jabber nonsense about wish fulfillment. 2 + 2 might as well equal 5 in a world with a space ghost who created everything. It removes the requirement for anything to make sense.
"Why is X?"
"'Cause god made it that way!"
If someone actually believed 2+2=5 you could write out other formulas and see what else they thought. Maybe you'd discover that 5 was their symbol for 4. But religion isn't that kind of thing, all the answers are god. You can't really examine it for anything. Reading the bible/etc is as meaningful as looking for answers in drugs and alcohol. Anything you do come up with will merely seem profound but will crumble under the light of day unless you can get a whole cult to support you in it.
Because nobody insists on equal time for the '3' side in the '1+1' debate. Nobody really believes the FSM exists. But god, any god, will get you an unending stream of crap. First about why it's reasonable, then why it's a lifestyle choice, then because it's a freedom issue, but then they'll insist right after they've fought for their right to believe whatever they want, they'll insist on stuffing it down their children's throats.
Nothing else other than homeopathic medicine brings so many idiots out of the woodwork, loudly arguing that their invisible friend deserves equal time with things they don't understand.
Theoretically, the treatment of company executives should be the same. Either they're found guilty and not protected, or they aren't found guilty and there's nothing to protect them from.
And of course it's the dominant business pattern, it's the best for those who run businesses. But if it weren't available, 100% of businesses would have a different charter. Society has benefited during this time, as well as the business owners, but that doesn't mean that limited liability is *the* reason. Liability is carried somewhere, if not on the people that caused it, then on society as a whole.
Essentially, limited liability is non-capitalist. It's corporate welfare, externalizing the costs of business by letting society as a whole bear them.
However, we've found that a small reduction in absolute capitalism (helping losers to avoid debtors prisons and starvation, etc) increases willingness to participate in risk and thus provides a healthier economy. It's not the investors that deserve the pat on the back for their investments, after all, the rest of society is carrying all of the risk of failure, leaving investors to only cover their opportunity cost.
So people shouldn't be able to write their liability off on the chance of there being someone else to pass the buck to later. These hospitals are now discovering where the liability stops...
If the hospitals had thought they were on the hook for the results of these systems they'd have demanded far simpler ones they could audit. Instead they buy a more complex system because of lies about its safety. This makes it almost impossible for honest firms to compete. If you discuss security issues you sound like more of a risk than the people who hand-wave them away.
Well, companies that haven't been burned don't realize the value of proper design. Just like people who've never witnessed a bridge collapse are reluctant to spend more for a sturdier design.
It's measured in typos. And the number of reboots it takes you to fill out a web form.
It doesn't take name dropping to understand that the only value of gold over money are that it has some innate value and the supply is relatively known. It's still a fiat currency. Who can eat gold?
Better if you realize that currency, gold or otherwise, isn't a good store of value. Productive land is. Means of production are. Currency is just what lets you trade one for another at some moment in time. The relative stability of currency has led people to try to hold value in it alone, then getting mad at the government when an arbitrary relationship of numbers to stuff doesn't remain constant for multiple lifetimes...
I checked what was mounted and found an extrernal 500GB via USB without noatime so I decided to try a test.
/dev/null' on the external drive. There were 250k files totallying roughly 450GB on ReiserFS.
I ran a 'find . >
The first run took 50s, then it quickly stabilized between 1.5s and 6.5s, mostly around 4s. The cache obviously made a huge difference.
Then I remounted with noatime and reran the test. It was very consistently at just under 0.7s.
So, between 1.08 times faster and 6.4 times depending on if the reads are already cached.
whale in a shark tank...
It is taking over. Just more slowly than the others. :)
But eventually it will be on more desktops/hand-helds/phones than Windows was when the statement was first made.
Windows is in a market position sort of like id software, with Quake. They released a popular product at the right time (founding of the WWW, public internet access for the masses, etc) and it took off by simple virtue of being the best thing in people's faces. They quickly gained nearly 100% of their relevant markets and held that for so long it looked to some like we should stop writing games, Quake-likes were forever. Then the market fragmented and you couldn't find more than a handful of people on anything, any of the 900 Quake 1 mods, the 100 Q2 mods, the 40 Half-Life mods, etc... Then that started to reverse a bit when more games had multi-mod browsers in-game. The second wave hit, and there are more games with more people playing that Q1 had in its prime, but because no one game achieves the absolute platform, technology, and design stranglehold, it'll never be quite the same.
Microsoft is here. They're still the strong tech in many ways - it's id's engines and Microsoft's OSes that you don't get fired for buying. But they were so big just because of their positioning, and now everyone is writing their own OSes and their own apps. Even if Open Office isn't much of a threat to MS Office (as Duke Nukem 3d wasn't to Quake) it's still yet another split in the developer and user bases.
So yes, this combines to make this (and every) year, the year of more Linux on the desktop. But also, of everything else on the desktop. Mac, Windows, BSD, Linux via OLPC, various embedded OSes in pdas and phones, Firefox on X, the iPhone, etc. Some of everything, monopoly of nothing.
To me, Microsoft *is* falling. They were able to make me pay the MS tax on laptops, they were all I could use for many tasks. Their patent nonsense is just their panicked flailing at realizing they no-longer control the market. Dominate it like a while in a shark tank, but not control per-se. And that's good enough for me. I've always said "just watch when they have to compete on merit", if they actually do an about-face like IBM seems to have, then Bill's old obsessive MS will have lost, and we will all have won.
Might I suggest: The fastest way to learn how to do X, with Y, is to claim on the Internet that it can't be done.
Xenocide's corollary would be: with Linux (FOSS?) this is true, even if Y really couldn't do X (yesterday).
I have heard that question a lot, but I question if it ever comes from anyone other than astroturfers.
Yes, the GPL is a license, and it could be confusing. But, only to someone who found it and read it, and who also had never seen an EULA or worse.
Commercial software requires you to click past legal agreements, but these same "honest doubters" never seem to have a problem with the EULAs on their OS, Applications, Trivial Extensions, Patches, Updates, etc.
The GPL is buried. You'd never see it unless you were poking around in the contents of a CD or downloaded, which isn't likely unless you've been exposed to those EULAs I mention above.
And finally, the GPL specifically says that you maintain full ownership (and no GPL requirements) on everything you create.
So who, honestly, is going to find it, and read enough to get scared, have never seen an EULA (thus realizing that they've clicked-through far worse) and either have taken the whole issue to a lawyer, or have realized that post-sale contracts couldn't possibly be binding and aren't worried.
Other than that, there are a few businesses who want to link things to GPLed or LGPLed software and have question on exactly how to best do this without having problems, how to handle community concerns, etc. But the difference is that these people aren't scared of the GPL, they merely want to exploit every bit of it (like tax laws, the speed limit, etc) possible and want advice on how to not go too far.
Show me the mythical "scared of the GPL, thus avoiding Linux" people who refuse to use a Linux/SMB file-server because they might lose control of the licensing of the data stored on it. Or the people afraid to use X, or vi/Emacs/OpenOffice/whatever because they won't own the documents they write.
I don't doubt that one or two exist, but I'll just show them discussions of how Oracle's EULA forbids critical discussion of their product, or how various MMOGs claim to own screenshots, how Microsoft Windows XP will artificially limit the number of connections (for market separation reasons) even though bugs in MS's own product like SourceSafe mean that the server often locks developers out of their own resources and how Microsoft threatened legal action and criminal charges against those discussing a registry tweak to disable this mal-feature.
The GPL is a little big, but compared to the EULAs (which it clearly differentiates itself from early on, when giving the reader all kinds of assurances about having no obligations or liabilities...) it's a pretty easy read.
To obtain without permission shouldn't be a crime. Only to deprive someone of something unfairly, perhaps by taking it away.
Whose permission do I need to obtain sunlight, fresh air, a good idea, a smile from a pretty flower, or girl, a catchy rhyme, or a better understanding of physics?
If I see a flower you have grown I achieve almost as much gain as you for no effort at all. Yet, this is totally legal, even if you order me not to look at your flower.
If you want to control the viewing of your flower you need to build walls, as the law gives you no way to force others not to look at something.
This all stems from the mistaken belief that if you have a good idea you deserve the uninterrupted right to milk it, forever. At that, the first flower grower should have the right not only to tell everyone not to look at their flower (unless you've paid) but also to prevent their intellectual property (the idea of charging to look at something) being used by anyone else. This might impact the free market a little bit.
Once you start using RMS's name as a blind reason to support one side over another, you've crossed a line that I doubt even ESR would respect.
If the GFDL means that you can't take a document and treat it like everything else on the Debian disk, that's a serious liability. They'd have to issue an exception to how they do everything just because someone wanted more control over derivative work than the GPL provides.
The whole point of the GPL is so that there are no restrictions on what people do. The GFDL might be good for some things, but in that is contains more restrictions, it isn't the GPL...
Are you fucking retarded?
My bitch is that companies don't have to. "Free shipping" doesn't have to mean anything. Normal rights to dispute something in court - taken away by unseen licenses.