(If you don't know how to defrag, you're probably not ready for the Linux experience.)
Setting it all up can, however, be a little daunting...
Etc. This and other negative comments about usability in the article make an unintentional but important point.
Linux is not for ordinary people. It's for computer enthusiasts. Most people want to use the computer as a tool, not for its own sake. They have no interest in memorizing reams of arcane computer trivia in order to get email, surf the web, write, and work on spreadsheets.
Desktop Linux can't and won't satisfy the requirements of the ordinary user, even though it may be a great playground for hobbyists, as well as a perfectly reasonable solution on the server side for many applications. The conversion of a longtime computer hobbyist says nothing about the dream many Linux users have of their pet OS becoming a significant force in the desktop market. Neither they nor Chris Barton reflect the consumers in that market.
I can name two projects off the top of my head (JBOSS MySQL) that both turn a profit and both are open source software.
Can you support those claims with some evidence?
I went and looked at the My SQL press releases. While they claim to be "successful," they never claim to be profitable. In fact they're still looking for rounds of outside investment, an unusual act for a profitable company. Since they're privately held we don't have access to their finances, but they haven't claimed to be profitable.
JBoss, the services company, is also privately held, and does not claim to be proftable.
(My hat's off to Red Hat, though, for finally coming up with a profit that can't be dismissed as tweaking the ledgers!)
If you think the only money in software is selling the binary, you are again, lost. Try getting some free support on MS windows or MS office, etc. Try getting some free training for windows or office, etc.
Services due to their non-scalability -- whcih is a way of saying you have to pay for headcount per dollar earned -- is inherently less profitable that software sales -- which due to the economies of copying don't require headcount per dollar. Services don't provide the necessary financial oomph for the development of original software.
Based on this useful reference from cowmix (10566) I must retract and correct my statement that SCO was only quoting RMS. Cowmix is correct and SCO's page does misattribute the quote, which does not contain the words of RMS. Instead, it is a quote from Larry McVoy.
Re:sale of property an "accident"?
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OSI vs SCO
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"Adventitious" is just as much an attempt to downplay the significance of SCO's ownership of the Unix source code as its synonym "accidental" was.
How about substituting the word "legal" instead?
Re:sale of property an "accident"?
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OSI vs SCO
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The naming issue is not what the lawsuit is about. The lawsuit is about the pilfering of source code.
I'm using the definition of "accidental" that was intended, so far as I know, which is to say, "incidental." I am disagreeing with that and observing that legal ownership is anything but incidental, in a society that has decided that intellectual property can be bought and sold. It is key.
Re:sale of property an "accident"?
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OSI vs SCO
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Exactly, and ownership is integral to property. Calling SCO's ownership of Unix source an accident is like disparaging my ownership of my car as accicental. It's no accicdent -- the car was made to be sold, I bought it, and I have all property rights pertaining to it because of that sale.
sale of property an "accident"?
on
OSI vs SCO
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SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group.... There is a body of code and associated intellectual property (IP), originating in Bell Labs, which SCO purchased from Novell in 1995.
So, which is it, Eric? Does SCO own the Unix intellectual property as an "accident," or did they buy it?
This contradiction is understandable: he is saying that no one can truly own intellectual property, and that selling IP is null and void on a moral and ethical level. The fact that SCO owns the Unix source as a result of sale is simply a historical "accident."
There's some truth to that on the level of abstract justice. Coca-Cola could have bought Unix as easily as SCO did. Nerither of them wrote it in the first place, and neither of them has an abstract moral claim to it. Similarly. it's arbitrary that, say, Paul McCartney is currently the owner of the Buddy Holly catalog.
But that is the nature of property -- that it can be bought and sold, with reference primarily to the financial transaction, and with only limited concern about whether the new owner is in some moral sense the rightful owner. The reason we allow intellectual property in this society is so that people will be incented to create more of it, since IP becomes a thing of value the creator can then sell to someone who did not create it.
We've decided as a society that the incentive to create that is involved in limited monopoly outweighs the potential social benefits of unlimited access to all IP. Dismissing the transactions that placed Unix in the hands of SCO is dismissing the nature of property, and instead treating Unix as an ideal which is rightly the property of everyone. However, if Bell Labs couldn't have sold Unix, they most likely never would have developed it in the first place.
As if to underscore the point that he is protesting the fact that anyone owns Unix, that it was developed as property and sold as property, Raymond goes on to indulge in irrelevant bragging about the ease of obtaining the supposedly confidential sources:
The contents of the historical Bell Labs codebase is well known; through most of its history, AT&T/USL/Novell tacitly ignored source license violations for non-commercial purposes, and many senior Unix programmers still possess bootleg copies of that source code. (The authors of this document could lay hands on one without difficulty.)
This I think is near the heart of the free Unix controversy. The Unix community was accustomed for years to living outside the law. Bell Labs charged an unreasonable amount for source code access, but Unix and its client applications were written in such a way that one really needed source code to use it effectively, so bootlegging source became the regular practice. This led to a habit of disregard for intellectual property, and even a feeling that this disregard was somehow virtuous. And of course, people who feel this way would hardly coinsider it a problem to pilfer Unix sources to help create Linux. Unfortunately this subculture of software piracy is incompatible with the right of the owners to control their property.
This unresolved conflict is now coming to a head. I think any reasonable person can see which side the courts are likely to come down on. My hope is that IBM will settle by buying Unix into the public domain or otherwise freeing the source, but if that's not what happens, then SCO may very well succeed in enforcing its property rights, "accidental" as they may be.
Re:Slightly OT: Linking static libs w/GPL'd code?
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What if SCO is Right?
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If you're a developer, then yes, your job is satisfying user expectations. If you're a tinkerer, then things are different. The number of users exceeds the number of tinkerers by a couple of orders of magnitude. Free software makes tinkerers happy, but it doesn't make end users happy.
Application startup time and new window time are critical factors in web browser performance, and Mozilla is demonstrably inferior to both Safari and Explorer in those areas.
Re:Slightly OT: Linking static libs w/GPL'd code?
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What if SCO is Right?
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The GNU tool chain is programmer software, not a set of end-user applications. Development tools are a whole different issue.
Mozilla's slowness is a demonstrable fact, not a value judgment. And if you prefer OpenOffice to MS Office, let's just say your opinion is not widely shared.
If you give something away for free and people still would rather pay for the competition, that should tell you something about how well you've satisfied user expectations....
Re:Slightly OT: Linking static libs w/GPL'd code?
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What if SCO is Right?
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Maybe you could provide an actuial example of application-level free software that achieves the quality level of its proprietary competition?
The only one even in the running is Mozilla, which is buggy, slow and ugly, contrasted with either Safari (free core, proprietary at the application level) or Explorer (proprietary top to bottom).
At the next rung down, the GIMP is nowhere near Photoshop, and OpenOffice is nowhere near MS Office.
And these are the front-runners in the free application field. Why does free software suck?
Re:Slightly OT: Linking static libs w/GPL'd code?
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What if SCO is Right?
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If they are incompetent or crooked you can get smacked from behind at any moment.
Whereas in application-level open source software, there's no doubt. The developers are incompetent, and the application will smack you at every turn. I have yet to find a single open-source end-user application which achieves the quality level of its proprietary competition.
companies need to be extremely circumspect when dealing with the GPL because if they're not, there might be long-ranging unintended ramifications to their business down the road.
Excellent point. At one company I worked for, it turned out that one of the programmers had put some GPLed code into our proprietary software product. This was in no way an intentional infraction of the license -- he'd seen the code on the net, it billed itself as free, and having better things to do with his time than follow the antics and ideologies of RMS and crew, he didn't understand that "free" meant "free as in restricted."
Legally, this one little mistake could have been used in court to try to claim the proprietary product was now entirely GPLed and must be given away, destroying the company. Needless to say, we kept this extremely quiet instead, replaced the offending section of code, and hoped that no one ever found out.
It could happen to you. The GPL is a dirty trick waiting to happen, and its characterization as "viral" is quite accurate.
I agree. Typecasting is just short of "goto" in its awfulness. If you need it more than once in a blue moon then there's something seriously wrong with your software architecture.
I got a lot of interesting responses, but most of them don't seem to have much to do with the question. Things like grouped bookmarking and easy background loading don't have anything to do with a tabbed browsing interface. These features could just as easily be implemented in a non-tabbing interface.
If you're on operating systems that don't let you manage multiple windows effectively when there are more than ten of them, that's a flaw in the operating system, which does not apply to Mac OS X (the platform for Safari). Adopting what amounts to a second task bar in mid-screen may be an effective way of working around the shortcomings of the Windows or KDE windowing and task bar designs, but it doesn't serve any apparent purpose on the Mac.
There are both the windows menu and the task bar for window navigation, as well as the keyboard shortcuts for window switching. I'm not sure why those wouldn't be adequate for you. I frequently have ten to twenty browser windows up at a time and I don't have trouble switching between them in Safari. I haven't missed tabs at all since going from Chimera to Safari, and I was a heavy tab user in Chimera for performance reasons.
Grouped bookmarking is not dependent on tabs. It could be just as easily implemented with separate windows. Personally, my experiences trying to use grouped bookmarks in Mozilla was dismal -- its page loading system wasn't up to the stress of asking for ten pages to load at once, and it crapped out on the later ones in the chain. But grouped bookmarking has the potential to be a good feature, as long as it doesn't require tabs.
What use is tabbed browsing in itself? In Mozilla, tabbing was a performance workaround -- Mozilla opens new windows at glacial speed, but opening just a new tab was much faster. The unfortunate consequence, though, was a fallback to effectively the old Windows MDI interface, which breeds user errors and undercuts the windowing system. Since Safari opens windows fast enough already, what need is there for this clunky performance workaround?
I have read it. It's full of irrelevant quibbling and barely touches on the salient facts of the case.
How about you read my message instead? You haven't responded to a single point in it.
It looks bad for IBM and it seems likely they will settle rather than have to face these embarrassing admissions in court. They'll try to get the case thrown out first, of course, but the complaint is too strong for that. A settlement would probably leave IBM in control of the Unix IP (whether by buying Caldera outright or buying its rights to Unix), and with any luck IBM would then free Unix from its proprietary restrictions.
SCO's complaint shows a handful of news accounts in which IBM officials claim the company will help improve Linux. However, this doesn't serve as proof that IBM violated its agreement to keep SCO's proprietary code secret.
Actually, if one bothers to read the complaint, IBM specifically stated a few things that are likely to prove extremely embarrassing if the case goes to court, and which go way beyond vague promises to improve Linux.
"We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable."
Oops. IBM doesn't own the rights to do that. AIX is licensed to it by SCO. Big problem.
"We don't want to take the risk of being sued for a patent infringement. That is why we don't do distributions, and that's why we have distributors.Because distributors are not so much exposed as we are.So that's the basic deal as I understand it."
Yikes. That's a public statement that IBM was aware that Linux might contain infringements of intellectual property, and that rather than take steps to make sure it didn't, they shielded themselves from IP liability by hiding behind a third party. Any decent lawyer could do a lot with that.
"IBM will exploit its expertise in AIX to bring Linux up to par with UNIX."
Only problem: IBM's expertise in AIX involves familiarity with trade secrets that are the undisputed property of SCO.
Then there are the conditions of IBM's Linux development, which are hosted in the same building as its UNIX development, and in which many Linux developers (according to the complaint) have access to SCO's UNIX code. Perhaps this is a new methodology, "dirty room development". It's fishy at best.
It's not an open and shut case on either side, but the above quotes succeed in making IBM look very bad. The LinuxWorld article, on the other hand, completely ignores every single one of these critical points. It's not an honest treatment of the case, but an ideological one.
I think we're agreeing vigorously here, as they say, but please allow me to expand just a bit on the issue, and on why I don't think the phrase "personal attack" is appropriate here.
The understanding, talent and abilities of an author are legitimate subjects in a review of the author's work. A review may be a criticism but it need not be an attack. Some statements which in other contexts would rightly be considered personal attacks should not be considered personal attacks when they appear in reviews.
This could go too far, of course. The personal criticism may have nothing to do with the work under discussion ("he's a crappy tennis player as well as being too ignorant of math to write on quantum physics"), or commit the ad hominem fallacy (e.g., "so and so's manifesto is idiotic because he smells like a yak"). However, reasonable concerns about the author's grasp of the subject are fair game.
Yes, criticizing an author's understanding -- euphemistically or not -- could be considered a personal attack under a strict definition, but it is not a personal attack that necessarily merits disapproval. Disapproval is implicit in the phrase "personal attack," and that part of its connotation doesn't apply to this kind of review comment, so I think it's misleading to call it that. But yes, I will grant that strictly speaking it is a personal attack, as well as being legitimate criticism.
A statement in a review that an author does not seem to understand an important point is legitimate criticism, not personal attack. In this case the reviewer goes on to substantiate with numerous examples the author's apparent comprehension gap.
How can any conclusions about the relative virtues of two development methodologies with a universe in the millions of components be drawn from a single sample, and one as small and atypical as a TCP/IP stack?
Public support and a charity model may be very reasonable approaches to funding the development and maintenance of free software. After all, the supposed rationale for free software is unlimited public benefit. The idea of making a profit from it only crept in with the relatively recent open source fiasco. Open source proposed a poorly thought out and completely non-quantitative business model that has dragged down every company of significant size that's tried it. You can't make money selling software that can be given away for free. It's just that simple.
I think organizations employing the charity model would do better to seek corporate or government grants rather than appealing to their traditionally tight-fisted technical constituency, though. Certainly trying to play both sides of the fence, incorporating as a for-profit company but then asking for donations, is not going to make any friends or confer any credibility.
I have been quite specific about gcc's failings. It compiles very slowly, and produces very slow code, contrasted with commercial compilers such as Metrowerks which are fast and perform decent optimization. It also causes major release-to-release compatibility problems, far more than customers would let commercial compiler vendors get away with. None of this should come as a revelation.
autoconf is useful for building on UNIX, but it's not what I would call a significant innovation. It fills a tiny niche in the build process for a particular platform as a workaround for the lack of standards. That's not anything interesting or new. The effort spent on it would be much better spent on stanardizing Unices to the point where it isn't needed. I stand by my statement that autoconf is boring and trivial.
The goal of the GPL is to destroy the business of making software, in retribution for an early 1980's hiring snub. I can't see that as positive.
Good software is difficult to create; it takes money to do that well. That means it has to bring in revenue. There's really no place for that under the GPL. You can charge to send someone software, but if they can then upload it and provide it for free, then you wind up not recouping your development costs. If this model actually won over the traditional model, then we'd be left with nothing but software by and for hobbyists, with a little software on the side that served the strategic interests of large corporations or that investors were duped into paying for.
Mozilla has had big problems with the GPL, and excludes all GPL'ed code from its source tree for that reason. (Don't confuse this with the triple licensing.) It's been an impediment, not an aid, to them. They're trying to make software that developers can use for their own projects, so they can't require the GPL, since that forbids (in practical terms) commercial development.
You said, I think that many people even within the FSF would claim that their biggest accomplishment and major function of the organization has been creating the GPL, less importantly all the software that was licensed under the GPL. I read that as a statement that more free software had been written because of the GPL. If that was a mistaken reading, I apologize. If it was not, though, then I'm not sure what it's based on. There are plenty of other liceneses, or no license at all, under which free software can be and has been written.
I don't see how you can assert that gcc was dependent on or resulted from the GPL.
You close by saying that free software has had an effect on the world. However, my statement was about a different subject: whether software developed by the GNU organization was desirable to non-technical users. Note the difference -- it's a big one. It's almost as if I'd said Chevys were crap cars and you said that people like to drive in the country. It may be true but it's not on topic.
Slashdot Mirror
(If you don't know how to defrag, you're probably not ready for the Linux experience.)
Setting it all up can, however, be a little daunting...
Etc. This and other negative comments about usability in the article make an unintentional but important point.
Linux is not for ordinary people. It's for computer enthusiasts. Most people want to use the computer as a tool, not for its own sake. They have no interest in memorizing reams of arcane computer trivia in order to get email, surf the web, write, and work on spreadsheets.
Desktop Linux can't and won't satisfy the requirements of the ordinary user, even though it may be a great playground for hobbyists, as well as a perfectly reasonable solution on the server side for many applications. The conversion of a longtime computer hobbyist says nothing about the dream many Linux users have of their pet OS becoming a significant force in the desktop market. Neither they nor Chris Barton reflect the consumers in that market.
I can name two projects off the top of my head (JBOSS MySQL) that both turn a profit and both are open source software.
Can you support those claims with some evidence?
I went and looked at the My SQL press releases. While they claim to be "successful," they never claim to be profitable. In fact they're still looking for rounds of outside investment, an unusual act for a profitable company. Since they're privately held we don't have access to their finances, but they haven't claimed to be profitable.
JBoss, the services company, is also privately held, and does not claim to be proftable.
(My hat's off to Red Hat, though, for finally coming up with a profit that can't be dismissed as tweaking the ledgers!)
If you think the only money in software is selling the binary, you are again, lost. Try getting some free support on MS windows or MS office, etc. Try getting some free training for windows or office, etc.
Services due to their non-scalability -- whcih is a way of saying you have to pay for headcount per dollar earned -- is inherently less profitable that software sales -- which due to the economies of copying don't require headcount per dollar. Services don't provide the necessary financial oomph for the development of original software.
Tim
Based on this useful reference from cowmix (10566) I must retract and correct my statement that SCO was only quoting RMS. Cowmix is correct and SCO's page does misattribute the quote, which does not contain the words of RMS. Instead, it is a quote from Larry McVoy.
Directly quoting someone's own words is libel?
"Adventitious" is just as much an attempt to downplay the significance of SCO's ownership of the Unix source code as its synonym "accidental" was.
How about substituting the word "legal" instead?
The naming issue is not what the lawsuit is about. The lawsuit is about the pilfering of source code.
I'm using the definition of "accidental" that was intended, so far as I know, which is to say, "incidental." I am disagreeing with that and observing that legal ownership is anything but incidental, in a society that has decided that intellectual property can be bought and sold. It is key.
Exactly, and ownership is integral to property. Calling SCO's ownership of Unix source an accident is like disparaging my ownership of my car as accicental. It's no accicdent -- the car was made to be sold, I bought it, and I have all property rights pertaining to it because of that sale.
SCO has never owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the accidental owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with the Open Group.... There is a body of code and associated intellectual property (IP), originating in Bell Labs, which SCO purchased from Novell in 1995.
So, which is it, Eric? Does SCO own the Unix intellectual property as an "accident," or did they buy it?
This contradiction is understandable: he is saying that no one can truly own intellectual property, and that selling IP is null and void on a moral and ethical level. The fact that SCO owns the Unix source as a result of sale is simply a historical "accident."
There's some truth to that on the level of abstract justice. Coca-Cola could have bought Unix as easily as SCO did. Nerither of them wrote it in the first place, and neither of them has an abstract moral claim to it. Similarly. it's arbitrary that, say, Paul McCartney is currently the owner of the Buddy Holly catalog.
But that is the nature of property -- that it can be bought and sold, with reference primarily to the financial transaction, and with only limited concern about whether the new owner is in some moral sense the rightful owner. The reason we allow intellectual property in this society is so that people will be incented to create more of it, since IP becomes a thing of value the creator can then sell to someone who did not create it.
We've decided as a society that the incentive to create that is involved in limited monopoly outweighs the potential social benefits of unlimited access to all IP. Dismissing the transactions that placed Unix in the hands of SCO is dismissing the nature of property, and instead treating Unix as an ideal which is rightly the property of everyone. However, if Bell Labs couldn't have sold Unix, they most likely never would have developed it in the first place.
As if to underscore the point that he is protesting the fact that anyone owns Unix, that it was developed as property and sold as property, Raymond goes on to indulge in irrelevant bragging about the ease of obtaining the supposedly confidential sources:
The contents of the historical Bell Labs codebase is well known; through most of its history, AT&T/USL/Novell tacitly ignored source license violations for non-commercial purposes, and many senior Unix programmers still possess bootleg copies of that source code. (The authors of this document could lay hands on one without difficulty.)
This I think is near the heart of the free Unix controversy. The Unix community was accustomed for years to living outside the law. Bell Labs charged an unreasonable amount for source code access, but Unix and its client applications were written in such a way that one really needed source code to use it effectively, so bootlegging source became the regular practice. This led to a habit of disregard for intellectual property, and even a feeling that this disregard was somehow virtuous. And of course, people who feel this way would hardly coinsider it a problem to pilfer Unix sources to help create Linux. Unfortunately this subculture of software piracy is incompatible with the right of the owners to control their property.
This unresolved conflict is now coming to a head. I think any reasonable person can see which side the courts are likely to come down on. My hope is that IBM will settle by buying Unix into the public domain or otherwise freeing the source, but if that's not what happens, then SCO may very well succeed in enforcing its property rights, "accidental" as they may be.
If you're a developer, then yes, your job is satisfying user expectations. If you're a tinkerer, then things are different. The number of users exceeds the number of tinkerers by a couple of orders of magnitude. Free software makes tinkerers happy, but it doesn't make end users happy.
Application startup time and new window time are critical factors in web browser performance, and Mozilla is demonstrably inferior to both Safari and Explorer in those areas.
The GNU tool chain is programmer software, not a set of end-user applications. Development tools are a whole different issue.
Mozilla's slowness is a demonstrable fact, not a value judgment. And if you prefer OpenOffice to MS Office, let's just say your opinion is not widely shared.
If you give something away for free and people still would rather pay for the competition, that should tell you something about how well you've satisfied user expectations....
Maybe you could provide an actuial example of application-level free software that achieves the quality level of its proprietary competition?
The only one even in the running is Mozilla, which is buggy, slow and ugly, contrasted with either Safari (free core, proprietary at the application level) or Explorer (proprietary top to bottom).
At the next rung down, the GIMP is nowhere near Photoshop, and OpenOffice is nowhere near MS Office.
And these are the front-runners in the free application field. Why does free software suck?
If they are incompetent or crooked you can get smacked from behind at any moment.
Whereas in application-level open source software, there's no doubt. The developers are incompetent, and the application will smack you at every turn. I have yet to find a single open-source end-user application which achieves the quality level of its proprietary competition.
companies need to be extremely circumspect when dealing with the GPL because if they're not, there might be long-ranging unintended ramifications to their business down the road.
Excellent point. At one company I worked for, it turned out that one of the programmers had put some GPLed code into our proprietary software product. This was in no way an intentional infraction of the license -- he'd seen the code on the net, it billed itself as free, and having better things to do with his time than follow the antics and ideologies of RMS and crew, he didn't understand that "free" meant "free as in restricted."
Legally, this one little mistake could have been used in court to try to claim the proprietary product was now entirely GPLed and must be given away, destroying the company. Needless to say, we kept this extremely quiet instead, replaced the offending section of code, and hoped that no one ever found out.
It could happen to you. The GPL is a dirty trick waiting to happen, and its characterization as "viral" is quite accurate.
I agree. Typecasting is just short of "goto" in its awfulness. If you need it more than once in a blue moon then there's something seriously wrong with your software architecture.
I got a lot of interesting responses, but most of them don't seem to have much to do with the question. Things like grouped bookmarking and easy background loading don't have anything to do with a tabbed browsing interface. These features could just as easily be implemented in a non-tabbing interface.
If you're on operating systems that don't let you manage multiple windows effectively when there are more than ten of them, that's a flaw in the operating system, which does not apply to Mac OS X (the platform for Safari). Adopting what amounts to a second task bar in mid-screen may be an effective way of working around the shortcomings of the Windows or KDE windowing and task bar designs, but it doesn't serve any apparent purpose on the Mac.
There are both the windows menu and the task bar for window navigation, as well as the keyboard shortcuts for window switching. I'm not sure why those wouldn't be adequate for you. I frequently have ten to twenty browser windows up at a time and I don't have trouble switching between them in Safari. I haven't missed tabs at all since going from Chimera to Safari, and I was a heavy tab user in Chimera for performance reasons.
Grouped bookmarking is not dependent on tabs. It could be just as easily implemented with separate windows. Personally, my experiences trying to use grouped bookmarks in Mozilla was dismal -- its page loading system wasn't up to the stress of asking for ten pages to load at once, and it crapped out on the later ones in the chain. But grouped bookmarking has the potential to be a good feature, as long as it doesn't require tabs.
What use is tabbed browsing in itself? In Mozilla, tabbing was a performance workaround -- Mozilla opens new windows at glacial speed, but opening just a new tab was much faster. The unfortunate consequence, though, was a fallback to effectively the old Windows MDI interface, which breeds user errors and undercuts the windowing system. Since Safari opens windows fast enough already, what need is there for this clunky performance workaround?
Tim
Read ESR's analysis!
I have read it. It's full of irrelevant quibbling and barely touches on the salient facts of the case.
How about you read my message instead? You haven't responded to a single point in it.
It looks bad for IBM and it seems likely they will settle rather than have to face these embarrassing admissions in court. They'll try to get the case thrown out first, of course, but the complaint is too strong for that. A settlement would probably leave IBM in control of the Unix IP (whether by buying Caldera outright or buying its rights to Unix), and with any luck IBM would then free Unix from its proprietary restrictions.
SCO's complaint shows a handful of news accounts in which IBM officials claim the company will help improve Linux. However, this doesn't serve as proof that IBM violated its agreement to keep SCO's proprietary code secret.
Actually, if one bothers to read the complaint, IBM specifically stated a few things that are likely to prove extremely embarrassing if the case goes to court, and which go way beyond vague promises to improve Linux.
"We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community considers valuable."
Oops. IBM doesn't own the rights to do that. AIX is licensed to it by SCO. Big problem.
"We don't want to take the risk of being sued for a patent infringement. That is why we don't do distributions, and that's why we have distributors.Because distributors are not so much exposed as we are.So that's the basic deal as I understand it."
Yikes. That's a public statement that IBM was aware that Linux might contain infringements of intellectual property, and that rather than take steps to make sure it didn't, they shielded themselves from IP liability by hiding behind a third party. Any decent lawyer could do a lot with that.
"IBM will exploit its expertise in AIX to bring Linux up to par with UNIX."
Only problem: IBM's expertise in AIX involves familiarity with trade secrets that are the undisputed property of SCO.
Then there are the conditions of IBM's Linux development, which are hosted in the same building as its UNIX development, and in which many Linux developers (according to the complaint) have access to SCO's UNIX code. Perhaps this is a new methodology, "dirty room development". It's fishy at best.
It's not an open and shut case on either side, but the above quotes succeed in making IBM look very bad. The LinuxWorld article, on the other hand, completely ignores every single one of these critical points. It's not an honest treatment of the case, but an ideological one.
Tim
I think we're agreeing vigorously here, as they say, but please allow me to expand just a bit on the issue, and on why I don't think the phrase "personal attack" is appropriate here.
The understanding, talent and abilities of an author are legitimate subjects in a review of the author's work. A review may be a criticism but it need not be an attack. Some statements which in other contexts would rightly be considered personal attacks should not be considered personal attacks when they appear in reviews.
This could go too far, of course. The personal criticism may have nothing to do with the work under discussion ("he's a crappy tennis player as well as being too ignorant of math to write on quantum physics"), or commit the ad hominem fallacy (e.g., "so and so's manifesto is idiotic because he smells like a yak"). However, reasonable concerns about the author's grasp of the subject are fair game.
Yes, criticizing an author's understanding -- euphemistically or not -- could be considered a personal attack under a strict definition, but it is not a personal attack that necessarily merits disapproval. Disapproval is implicit in the phrase "personal attack," and that part of its connotation doesn't apply to this kind of review comment, so I think it's misleading to call it that. But yes, I will grant that strictly speaking it is a personal attack, as well as being legitimate criticism.
A statement in a review that an author does not seem to understand an important point is legitimate criticism, not personal attack. In this case the reviewer goes on to substantiate with numerous examples the author's apparent comprehension gap.
How can any conclusions about the relative virtues of two development methodologies with a universe in the millions of components be drawn from a single sample, and one as small and atypical as a TCP/IP stack?
Public support and a charity model may be very reasonable approaches to funding the development and maintenance of free software. After all, the supposed rationale for free software is unlimited public benefit. The idea of making a profit from it only crept in with the relatively recent open source fiasco. Open source proposed a poorly thought out and completely non-quantitative business model that has dragged down every company of significant size that's tried it. You can't make money selling software that can be given away for free. It's just that simple.
I think organizations employing the charity model would do better to seek corporate or government grants rather than appealing to their traditionally tight-fisted technical constituency, though. Certainly trying to play both sides of the fence, incorporating as a for-profit company but then asking for donations, is not going to make any friends or confer any credibility.
I have been quite specific about gcc's failings. It compiles very slowly, and produces very slow code, contrasted with commercial compilers such as Metrowerks which are fast and perform decent optimization. It also causes major release-to-release compatibility problems, far more than customers would let commercial compiler vendors get away with. None of this should come as a revelation.
autoconf is useful for building on UNIX, but it's not what I would call a significant innovation. It fills a tiny niche in the build process for a particular platform as a workaround for the lack of standards. That's not anything interesting or new. The effort spent on it would be much better spent on stanardizing Unices to the point where it isn't needed. I stand by my statement that autoconf is boring and trivial.
The goal of the GPL is to destroy the business of making software, in retribution for an early 1980's hiring snub. I can't see that as positive.
Good software is difficult to create; it takes money to do that well. That means it has to bring in revenue. There's really no place for that under the GPL. You can charge to send someone software, but if they can then upload it and provide it for free, then you wind up not recouping your development costs. If this model actually won over the traditional model, then we'd be left with nothing but software by and for hobbyists, with a little software on the side that served the strategic interests of large corporations or that investors were duped into paying for.
Mozilla has had big problems with the GPL, and excludes all GPL'ed code from its source tree for that reason. (Don't confuse this with the triple licensing.) It's been an impediment, not an aid, to them. They're trying to make software that developers can use for their own projects, so they can't require the GPL, since that forbids (in practical terms) commercial development.
You said, I think that many people even within the FSF would claim that their biggest accomplishment and major function of the organization has been creating the GPL, less importantly all the software that was licensed under the GPL. I read that as a statement that more free software had been written because of the GPL. If that was a mistaken reading, I apologize. If it was not, though, then I'm not sure what it's based on. There are plenty of other liceneses, or no license at all, under which free software can be and has been written.
I don't see how you can assert that gcc was dependent on or resulted from the GPL.
You close by saying that free software has had an effect on the world. However, my statement was about a different subject: whether software developed by the GNU organization was desirable to non-technical users. Note the difference -- it's a big one. It's almost as if I'd said Chevys were crap cars and you said that people like to drive in the country. It may be true but it's not on topic.