From my perspective there's nothing good about the GPL, so we're going to differ on that one. I view it as a negtative contribution, you as a positive one.
It's not at all clear that the GPL has resulted in more software being written; I'm not sure what you're basing that on.
As for Windows 2000, its improved stability was the result of a nearly ten-year effort developing Windows NT, which is older than any useful version of Linux. Crediting Linux for these infrastructural improvements seems hard to defend.
It's called "grandstanding," and it's one of the few actual skills the GNU bozos have. Their skills aren't in software -- they have yet to create a single program that anyone outside the nerd clique wants to use. They literally can't give their stuff away.
That was one of my comments. See if you can spot the others, and win valuable prizes!
Just as on MacSlash, somehow various people on/. failed to read or grasp the critical phrase "outside the nerd clique," citing supposed counterexamples that in fact are very much nerd-targeted, and completely unrelated to the desires or requirements of ordinary people.
Even for nerd-targeted software, GNU hasn't done well. They laboriously cloned a bunch of programs that were mostly written by a handful of actual innovators on PDP-11's a quarter-century ago. Big whoop.
The only original, which is to say non-cloned, programs from GNU that even nerds use in any significant numbers are autoconf and emacs -- gcc is a cc clone, but way behind commercial compilers in compilation speed and code quality. Autoconf is boring and trivial, while emacs is perhaps the most nightmarish and misbegotten program ever written. Other non-cloned GNU programs have sunk with few ripples for the most part. Not a stunning track record for the "vanguard of innovation and freedom." I have high standards for software, and I don't have much respect for this crowd of cloners and crap artists.
Can anybody tell me where to download the RH Advanced Server for free? I looked at their web site but cannot find it.
I don't believe you can. The last time this came up for me here, there was a great deal of confusion about whether the product could be considered open source or not, and whether or not it could be redistributed for free. There was a lot of speculation but very few facts. If this product makes Red Hat a profit, then that profit is not identifiably part of the open source or free software movements; it's much more like a proprietary software business model.
This quarter's profit is so slim that it doesn't say much of anything. Even under GAAP there's enough wiggle room in the accounting for a money-losing company to juggle the books and come up with a small faux profit every few quarters. In this case we're talking about a profit that is only 1.25% of revenues, well within that wiggle room. It's too early to say whether this is a real profit or creative bookkeeping; the next few quarters should give a much better indication.
If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in.
It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, so plug-ins must be treated as extensions to the main program. This means they must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the `main' function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
Drivers are not a borderline case. They do much more linking and data structure sharing than just invoking main with options. Their program, the kernel, "dynamically links plug-ins [drivers], and they make function calls to each other and share data structures".
There is a way to allow proprietary modules, but it requires a special license clause for the platform; see again the FAQ.
The inability to create proprietary plugins to extend a free platform is an important and possibly deliberate problem with the GPL. It makes it more difficult to build proprietary software by imposing an arbitrary restriction on its relationship to GPL software.
The three IBM/Apple projects were PowerPC, Taligent, and Kaleida. The two software projects failed. The chip project was well on its way to outstripping Intel when IBM lost its nerve, decided Apple was going to go out of business almost immediately, and handed off the PowerPC to Motorola. Motorola was not capable of handling such an advanced chip design and the PowerPC fell way behind Intel. The IBM execs who had blinked later moved on to other companies, and IBM got reinvolved in the PowerPC, but they're still suffering from the Motorola handoff.
As for Apple's early attitude to IBM, they saw IBM as The Enemy due to the IBM PC. Remember that IBM used to be the big personal computer maker, before the clones ate its lunch? There is embarassing video footage showing Steve Jobs introducing his friend Bill Gates as Apple's white knight in the war against IBM. Apple didn't have a clue who the real enemy was, and it was at that point that Jobs granted Gates a permanent royalty-free license to the Mac look and feel, for use in an obscure little program called "Windows."
Some years later, Apple finally figured out who the enemy was, and decided to join forces with IBM, who were disgruntled with Microsoft's handing off the PC business to the clone makers. But the software cultures of the two companies never meshed, and the only successful project was the one that was almost completely IBM's doing and well within its core competencies -- until IBM blinked, that is.
There is an easy solution to that. Openness. If Apple openly discussed the direction they were taking, what future plans were going to be, what products they intended to ship and when.... rummor sites would become rather pointless.
Idealistically I share your view, but pragmatically that's not how competition or marketing work. Apple already can't announce a single move without Microsoft immediately saying "oh yeah, we'll have that too" and stealing their thunder. And too much information about improved future systems can only hurt demand for the current offerings. I would love it if we lived in a world where this kind of openness was possible, but we don't.
(Heck, even in open source projects, a lot of plans are held close to the chest just because there's already too much kibitzing.)
As for all the people saying, "yes, Linux used to be unfriendly, but now it's just as good as Mac or Windows," that would have a lot more credibility if the same people hadn't been saying exactly the same thing for the last seven years or so. The fact is, it hadn't caught up then, and it hasn't caught up now.
I will concede the issue that a product might still deserve the label open source even if it contains non-open-source components under certain circumstances. The presence of Netscape 4.x in Red Hat distributions is a good example.
I think the issue of whether such a product deserves to be called open source or not has nothing to do with who wrote the modules, and not a lot to do with whether the majority of code is open source. I think the questions are whether the non-open parts provide core or optional functionality, and how much they have to do with customer interest in the product.
Unfortunately, without a list of the modules in Advanced Server and their licenses, it's not possible for anyone who doesn't own the product to determine whether the non-open modules are core or optional, or whether they provide major differentiating features.
Send me eight hundred dollars and I'll tell you. I'm just going on what Red Hat says. Because it's not available for download and the specs online are vague, it's hard to say what is open source in it and what isn't. It's also hard to say whether the non-open-source modules are optional extensions or provide core functionality.
Neither annual nor quarterly reports are detailed enough to allow evaluation of a claim of that type. An auditor could check it, but wouldn't bother if it was just somebody's press statement -- that's not what they're looking for.
Whether the whole thing is written by Red Hat or not is not at issue. The fact is it's not an open source product; it's a product with open source portions.
As for "complaining," I'm not complaining at all -- I'm pointing out a fact. If anything it's good news for Red Hat, since they've been unprofitable trying to sell what anyone can give away for free. Their new business model may give them hope for a future.
The operative word being "most," brother. As your link says, The majority of it is open source. If it has non-open components, then it's neither free software nor open source, even though parts of it are.
If this suit passes in the favor of the RIAA, then you can kiss your fair use rights good-bye.
Providing complete copies of copyrighted recordings is by no means fair use. Fair use would be providing short sections for critical discussion and analysis.
Take a look at this excellent article on real threats to fair use. It defines fair use as follows: "If you are accused of infringing, you can make an argument that your use of the protected works is 'fair' because of some combination of these factors: The nature of the original work makes it important that it be publicly discussed; the nature of your use of it is important because of teaching, research, or commentary; you do not use very much of the original work; your use does not significantly affect the market for the original work." All of these four criteria fail in the case of pirated popular music.
Were you under the impression that all languages are translatable into each other? They're not. If version 1.2 allows a construct not present in version 1.1, then translation back and forth between the two formats leads to a loss of information. Again, consider the nested footnotes example.
So it appears this crazy cause to make software "free as in required by law" is not even popular among the open source faithful. Chalk one up for common sense!
XML does not solve the format change problem. Adding new features to an XML-based word processor would necessarily involve changing the schema. Old applications could well be confused by the new data. They might be able to create a parse tree in memory, but on a semantic level they would not be able to understand what the parse tree meant.
It's definitely not as easy as just ignoring new data, as you suggest. Suppose the new feature is footnotes within footnotes. Throwing away all the nested footnotes when the data are processed by an old application is not the right way to go. And you can't just blindly preserve the unknown information either, since transforms done to the rest of the data (e.g., changing the font universally to Garamond) also may need to be applied to the unknown data. Or they may not. If you don't understand the data you don't know whether they need to be done or not, and you may not understand the right way to do the transform.
Some of these problems can be addressed in part, but they require significant extra infrastructure to do so, and complicate everyday data processing tasks. That is, a format flexible enough to solve most of these problems would be quite hard to deal with on an ongoing basis, due to the need to constantly make decisions based on variant data types and informational attributes. There is no magic bullet for the format change problem.
ou no longer have to write parsers if you don't want to.
That's not true for all applications. XML in itself is only useful for data that is suitable for sequential scanning and complete storage in RAM. To access the data in a random form, you need to build and maintain a binary index. To access data too large to conveniently fit in RAM, you need to have an external index and to be able to deal with partial XML data. XML can be bridged to a database but it is not a database.
The big upside here is drawing on IBM's sales and marketing resources, since LNUX doesn't seem to be able to interest much of anyone in SourceForge so far. IBM certainly has a much better idea of how to sell enterprise software.
Still, I'm reminded of the bounce that Red Hat got when IBM said they would give them its Linux services business. That failed to translate into profit for Red Hat despite the exuberance around the announcement. We will see whether this does any better.
That's what the OEOne desktop was created for, thin client Internet computers, also known as NCs and network appliances. However, all incarnations of Larry Ellison's Network Computer from whatever source have failed. I don't think there are any left in the market at this point. With PC prices continuing to plummet, there's just no demand for a stripped-down computer that lacks the features of a mainstream PC.
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From my perspective there's nothing good about the GPL, so we're going to differ on that one. I view it as a negtative contribution, you as a positive one.
It's not at all clear that the GPL has resulted in more software being written; I'm not sure what you're basing that on.
As for Windows 2000, its improved stability was the result of a nearly ten-year effort developing Windows NT, which is older than any useful version of Linux. Crediting Linux for these infrastructural improvements seems hard to defend.
It's called "grandstanding," and it's one of the few actual skills the GNU bozos have. Their skills aren't in software -- they have yet to create a single program that anyone outside the nerd clique wants to use. They literally can't give their stuff away.
/. failed to read or grasp the critical phrase "outside the nerd clique," citing supposed counterexamples that in fact are very much nerd-targeted, and completely unrelated to the desires or requirements of ordinary people.
That was one of my comments. See if you can spot the others, and win valuable prizes!
Just as on MacSlash, somehow various people on
Even for nerd-targeted software, GNU hasn't done well. They laboriously cloned a bunch of programs that were mostly written by a handful of actual innovators on PDP-11's a quarter-century ago. Big whoop.
The only original, which is to say non-cloned, programs from GNU that even nerds use in any significant numbers are autoconf and emacs -- gcc is a cc clone, but way behind commercial compilers in compilation speed and code quality. Autoconf is boring and trivial, while emacs is perhaps the most nightmarish and misbegotten program ever written. Other non-cloned GNU programs have sunk with few ripples for the most part. Not a stunning track record for the "vanguard of innovation and freedom." I have high standards for software, and I don't have much respect for this crowd of cloners and crap artists.
Can anybody tell me where to download the RH Advanced Server for free? I looked at their web site but cannot find it.
I don't believe you can. The last time this came up for me here, there was a great deal of confusion about whether the product could be considered open source or not, and whether or not it could be redistributed for free. There was a lot of speculation but very few facts. If this product makes Red Hat a profit, then that profit is not identifiably part of the open source or free software movements; it's much more like a proprietary software business model.
This quarter's profit is so slim that it doesn't say much of anything. Even under GAAP there's enough wiggle room in the accounting for a money-losing company to juggle the books and come up with a small faux profit every few quarters. In this case we're talking about a profit that is only 1.25% of revenues, well within that wiggle room. It's too early to say whether this is a real profit or creative bookkeeping; the next few quarters should give a much better indication.
Please see the GNU FAQ on this point, which I quote:
If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in.
It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, so plug-ins must be treated as extensions to the main program. This means they must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the `main' function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
Drivers are not a borderline case. They do much more linking and data structure sharing than just invoking main with options. Their program, the kernel, "dynamically links plug-ins [drivers], and they make function calls to each other and share data structures".
There is a way to allow proprietary modules, but it requires a special license clause for the platform; see again the FAQ.
The inability to create proprietary plugins to extend a free platform is an important and possibly deliberate problem with the GPL. It makes it more difficult to build proprietary software by imposing an arbitrary restriction on its relationship to GPL software.
The three IBM/Apple projects were PowerPC, Taligent, and Kaleida. The two software projects failed. The chip project was well on its way to outstripping Intel when IBM lost its nerve, decided Apple was going to go out of business almost immediately, and handed off the PowerPC to Motorola. Motorola was not capable of handling such an advanced chip design and the PowerPC fell way behind Intel. The IBM execs who had blinked later moved on to other companies, and IBM got reinvolved in the PowerPC, but they're still suffering from the Motorola handoff.
As for Apple's early attitude to IBM, they saw IBM as The Enemy due to the IBM PC. Remember that IBM used to be the big personal computer maker, before the clones ate its lunch? There is embarassing video footage showing Steve Jobs introducing his friend Bill Gates as Apple's white knight in the war against IBM. Apple didn't have a clue who the real enemy was, and it was at that point that Jobs granted Gates a permanent royalty-free license to the Mac look and feel, for use in an obscure little program called "Windows."
Some years later, Apple finally figured out who the enemy was, and decided to join forces with IBM, who were disgruntled with Microsoft's handing off the PC business to the clone makers. But the software cultures of the two companies never meshed, and the only successful project was the one that was almost completely IBM's doing and well within its core competencies -- until IBM blinked, that is.
There is an easy solution to that. Openness. If Apple openly discussed the direction they were taking, what future plans were going to be, what products they intended to ship and when.... rummor sites would become rather pointless.
Idealistically I share your view, but pragmatically that's not how competition or marketing work. Apple already can't announce a single move without Microsoft immediately saying "oh yeah, we'll have that too" and stealing their thunder. And too much information about improved future systems can only hurt demand for the current offerings. I would love it if we lived in a world where this kind of openness was possible, but we don't.
(Heck, even in open source projects, a lot of plans are held close to the chest just because there's already too much kibitzing.)
The obvious reason the Times said this today was the Sun announcement about Linux PCs.
As for all the people saying, "yes, Linux used to be unfriendly, but now it's just as good as Mac or Windows," that would have a lot more credibility if the same people hadn't been saying exactly the same thing for the last seven years or so. The fact is, it hadn't caught up then, and it hasn't caught up now.
I will concede the issue that a product might still deserve the label open source even if it contains non-open-source components under certain circumstances. The presence of Netscape 4.x in Red Hat distributions is a good example.
I think the issue of whether such a product deserves to be called open source or not has nothing to do with who wrote the modules, and not a lot to do with whether the majority of code is open source. I think the questions are whether the non-open parts provide core or optional functionality, and how much they have to do with customer interest in the product.
Unfortunately, without a list of the modules in Advanced Server and their licenses, it's not possible for anyone who doesn't own the product to determine whether the non-open modules are core or optional, or whether they provide major differentiating features.
Send me eight hundred dollars and I'll tell you. I'm just going on what Red Hat says. Because it's not available for download and the specs online are vague, it's hard to say what is open source in it and what isn't. It's also hard to say whether the non-open-source modules are optional extensions or provide core functionality.
Neither annual nor quarterly reports are detailed enough to allow evaluation of a claim of that type. An auditor could check it, but wouldn't bother if it was just somebody's press statement -- that's not what they're looking for.
Whether the whole thing is written by Red Hat or not is not at issue. The fact is it's not an open source product; it's a product with open source portions.
As for "complaining," I'm not complaining at all -- I'm pointing out a fact. If anything it's good news for Red Hat, since they've been unprofitable trying to sell what anyone can give away for free. Their new business model may give them hope for a future.
The operative word being "most," brother. As your link says, The majority of it is open source. If it has non-open components, then it's neither free software nor open source, even though parts of it are.
It contains a bunch of proprietary modules.
the $1 billion spent on Linux last year has been entirely recouped at the beginning of this year.
I saw an IBM spokesperson say that. I didn't see any numbers to back up it up. Got any?
I mean, what do you expect a company spokesperson to say? "Sorry, guys, this Linux thing really isn't working out?"
As more and more open source project become so mature they can be run in a large corporation, the need to run on big iron emerges.
Advanced Server isn't open source. This deal marks Red Hat's continued transition away from the open source business model.
You're discussing copying for personal use. I was discussing providing copies to others. Those are very different cases.
I agree that ISPs should not have to block web sites in this way. I was only addressing the fair use issue that was raised and widely agreed to.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
If this suit passes in the favor of the RIAA, then you can kiss your fair use rights good-bye.
Providing complete copies of copyrighted recordings is by no means fair use. Fair use would be providing short sections for critical discussion and analysis.
Take a look at this excellent article on real threats to fair use. It defines fair use as follows: "If you are accused of infringing, you can make an argument that your use of the protected works is 'fair' because of some combination of these factors: The nature of the original work makes it important that it be publicly discussed; the nature of your use of it is important because of teaching, research, or commentary; you do not use very much of the original work; your use does not significantly affect the market for the original work." All of these four criteria fail in the case of pirated popular music.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
Were you under the impression that all languages are translatable into each other? They're not. If version 1.2 allows a construct not present in version 1.1, then translation back and forth between the two formats leads to a loss of information. Again, consider the nested footnotes example.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
Linux users march on city hall
So it appears this crazy cause to make software "free as in required by law" is not even popular among the open source faithful. Chalk one up for common sense!
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
XML does not solve the format change problem. Adding new features to an XML-based word processor would necessarily involve changing the schema. Old applications could well be confused by the new data. They might be able to create a parse tree in memory, but on a semantic level they would not be able to understand what the parse tree meant.
It's definitely not as easy as just ignoring new data, as you suggest. Suppose the new feature is footnotes within footnotes. Throwing away all the nested footnotes when the data are processed by an old application is not the right way to go. And you can't just blindly preserve the unknown information either, since transforms done to the rest of the data (e.g., changing the font universally to Garamond) also may need to be applied to the unknown data. Or they may not. If you don't understand the data you don't know whether they need to be done or not, and you may not understand the right way to do the transform.
Some of these problems can be addressed in part, but they require significant extra infrastructure to do so, and complicate everyday data processing tasks. That is, a format flexible enough to solve most of these problems would be quite hard to deal with on an ongoing basis, due to the need to constantly make decisions based on variant data types and informational attributes. There is no magic bullet for the format change problem.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
ou no longer have to write parsers if you don't want to.
That's not true for all applications. XML in itself is only useful for data that is suitable for sequential scanning and complete storage in RAM. To access the data in a random form, you need to build and maintain a binary index. To access data too large to conveniently fit in RAM, you need to have an external index and to be able to deal with partial XML data. XML can be bridged to a database but it is not a database.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
The big upside here is drawing on IBM's sales and marketing resources, since LNUX doesn't seem to be able to interest much of anyone in SourceForge so far. IBM certainly has a much better idea of how to sell enterprise software.
Still, I'm reminded of the bounce that Red Hat got when IBM said they would give them its Linux services business. That failed to translate into profit for Red Hat despite the exuberance around the announcement. We will see whether this does any better.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
That's what the OEOne desktop was created for, thin client Internet computers, also known as NCs and network appliances. However, all incarnations of Larry Ellison's Network Computer from whatever source have failed. I don't think there are any left in the market at this point. With PC prices continuing to plummet, there's just no demand for a stripped-down computer that lacks the features of a mainstream PC.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org