at least, not any time soon. Stallman is a great thinker, but he seems to have a reality distortion field that Steve Jobs would envy. I agree that the fact patents exist at all is a problem -but it's one which is not going to change, period. So the OSDL Patent project really is the only practical way of coping with the situation.
So, it sounds like dispite the technical challenges, the largest problem you have over there is in dealing with government interference. Look on the bright side, at least your post shows that for all the problems you're having, censorship isn't one of them!
Typed too fast, I meant: >Sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth, or rather, his company (canonical?): therefore proves my point about the necessity of corporate sponsorship
Really quickly here since I"m on my way out the door.... >What happens when you add >Ubuntu, Sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth, or rather, his company (canonical?): therefore proves my point about the necessity of governship
>KDE, Has a large amount of developers from Trolltech, Trolltech has a lot invested in the KDE project simply because it is *the* showcase for the qt library.
>FreeBSD Anyone who tried the 5.x series can tell you what happened to FreeBSD. Matt Dillon also would probably have some valuble insights as to the health of the FreeBSD project, though he may have his hands too full managing its' successor -DragonflyBSD- to comment.
Yep, that is exactly my point -it has to be a business. The volunteer-run projects are either collapsing from their on inertia (eg the debian project), mis-management (NetBSD) or are going nowhere at the speed of light (look at most of the projects on sourceforge).
It takes serious resources to get things done; and those resources don't come for free, as you excellently pointed out.
These small parts suffer from the same personality conflicts from which they originate (I'll point you to the circumstances surrounding the formation of the OpenBSD project, which you should already be familiar with if you're holding this conversation).
Larger projects manage to side-step personality conflicts and have infrastructure in place which prevents said conflicts from detracting from the project (not to say the project won't have other faults -NIH and Beaureaucratese are two that readily come to mind).
Privately-sponsored projects have people who manage not just the code but also the egos; which allows those projects to go forward with achieving goals instead of fighting and then splintering into a million dead-or-dying redundant sourceforge projects.
>>We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
>It should be noted that the majority of people working for RedHat/Novell/Intel on OSS projects were OSS developers first and then did good work which got them noticed by the corporate structure.
In short, we had the F/OSS boom which has led to a subsequent brain-drain, where the brightest and the best have left for the greener fields of corporate sponsorship. Nothing wrong with this, of course; without corporate sponsorship GNOME, GCC and many of the advanced features of the Linux kernel would either have never happened or would have happened many years later.
But a volunteer-run project cannot compete with the dollars and stability offered by the likes of Redhat or IBM, so we have a situation where the best and brightest (understandably) abandon the volunteer-oriented space in favor of a more favorable work enviroment.
>They were then hired to do what they were already doing,
In short, given a financial incentive to keep going past the point where the project lost interest for them, or -looking at it another way- to work on features which they find uninteresting but are needed by end users.
This is an incentive which volunteer projects -by their nature- do not have, which as a result ends up making volunteer run projects less featureful, less accessible and often times less innovated than their corporate owned competitors.
>of course now they have managers to deal with.
Which help to keep the corporate projects focused and keep releases going out the door in a predictable time frame. These same managers also function to prevent cock-size contests from getting in the way of reaching the projects' stated goals.
Now, I would agree with you that a spat between a few gentoo devs is hardly the end of FOSS; but if you read about the extent of the damage done to the NetBSD project by being tied to Wasabi, and then look at the fact that debian is having to pay people in order to release on time, the writing appears to be on the wall for your volunteer-run OSS. In fact there won't be a future for volunteer-based OSS model because the volunteer based model is dying (as evidenced by troubles with NetBSD-core, debian etc).
Running from any unstable source tree comes with it's own risks and necessitates a certain skill level (which, as a poster with a three-digit UID you doubtlessly have). That level of skill should not be necessary for building a stable tree. Finding problems with dependencies (routinely being unable to build package Y because library C has not be integrated) on a stable tree should never happen (and yet routinely does with gentoo); that kind of problem should only happen in unstable.
I have no doubt that you can find people who have the technical capacity to force gentoo into working through a series of kludges and nursing. That says less about the questionable health of the project and more about the willingness of users to come up with what should be un-needed workarounds (at least, shouldn't be needed in the stable tree) just to get a working system.
It's not the fans of a system that you judge it's quality, it's by the reasons put forth by it's detractors. Bring on the 'me toos' all day; but what they have to say is less indicative of the health of gentoo than are the ones who say 'tried it, never again!'.
So, let's recap. Debian is having to pay developers in order to get a working distribution out of the door anywhere near on-schedule; NetBSD is embroiled in a scandal surrounding the undue influence of Wasabi on the core team -when it's not flayling wildly trying to cope with its' other management problems, and now it emerges that gentoo has been stuck in a political quagmire for years holding back even the most frivilous of changes (forget any major ones).
We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.
Remove the structure, remove the incentive and before long you're left with nothing more than quibbling dorks and software packages like gentoo which half of the time are badly broken because no one can be bothered to work on them.
The creators now have several articles in various news outlets to add to their resumes and will be able to use those the next time they try to sell some half-assed idea of theirs. IE the profit was in publicity and 'buzz', not in dollars.
>Did anyone think "lonelygirl15" was real? Yes. I saw threads about her on several message boards I frequent where people who were decently intelligent (judging by the quality of their posts on other subjects) were discussing her without appearing to have a clue that it was a set-up.
I have an old 1.3ghz machine here I'm typing from. Since the original brouhaha I've been switching back and forth between the three BSD systems. I have invested some time in downloading gnome 2.14 over dialup and it works alright. Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are using older versions of gnome (I think open is still on 2.10; don't quote me on that, however!).
I'm rambling because I'm tired, sorry. My point is that the software in pkgsrc seems to be recent, and fairly stable (though that port of ajunta is crap, currently), NetBSD is running great as a desktop system for me and it seems to detect my (admittedly ancient) hardware ok, so...where's the gotcha? Does fall down on server tasks (if so - how so? compared to what? according to who?) or what, exactly?
I understand that there's concern because apparently most of the developers work for Wasabi and development appears to proceed (or stagnate) dependent on Wasabi's whims; but apart from the undisputed mis-management, are there any other signs of decay I'm just simply missing?
I hear you; it's my favorite out of all of them, though I hate the build.sh build system. Right now I have 3.0 with gnome 2.12 set up; if I want unixy goodness, it's a ctrl-alt-f1 away. The rest of the time, I enjoy gnome, firefox, all that.
Since this article appeared I have tried openbsd and freebsd; openbsd isn't that bad, but I personally don't like the fact that for their package system, they are making it so that when you build a source package the dependencies come as binary packages. That makes it harder to have a setup like I currently have with pkgsrc where I have all my source files and if I want to (later on) rebuild them or examine one I can.
Also, from what I can tell, the programs in openbsd's ports tree are often versions lower than ones in pkgsrc.
NetBSD does seem to be hemmoraging developers, and reading the mailing list (netbsd-users) the cracks are starting to appear. Since I'm not a developer, I fear for the future as well.
That answer is "no". We've seen numerous ratings and karma systems set up on a variety of boards and time and time again they've been defeated by people willing to take the time to game them for whatever reason.
It's typical nerd hubris to believe that you can solve social problems through technological means. It's been proven time and time again that you can't.
You're missing the entire point of this article. This demonstrates (as if we didn't already know) that the consumers aren't Microsoft's customers. Consumers are the product which miscrosoft sells to their customers -their customers being the content industry (RIAA,etc).
It happens on most Linux IRC channels and pretty much every *BSD project that's come down the pike. Of course, it does cripple OSS; why do you think Linux users have the reputation for answering everything with "RTFM"?
This is too important NOT to RTFA
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 5, Informative
So, for your convience, I'm posting it here:
The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation.
As one of the 4 originators of NetBSD, I am in a fairly unique position. I am the only one who has continuously participated and/or watched the project over its entire history. Many changes have taken place, and at the same time many things have remained the same -- including some of our early mistakes.
I'd like to say that I'm some great visionary, who foresaw the whole OSS market, but the fact is that's BS. When we started the project, Linux and 386BSD were both little hobbyist systems, both pretty buggy, and both lacking a lot of important hardware support. Mostly we were scratching an itch: there was no complete package of 386BSD plus the necessary patches to make it run on more systems and fix bugs, and there was no sign that Bill Jolitz was going to resurface and do anything.
Much of the project structure evolved because of problems we had early on. Probably our best choice was to start using central version control right off; this has enabled a very wide view of the code history and (eventually) made remote collaboration with a large number of developers much easier. Some other things we fudged; e.g. Chris got tired of being the point man for everything, and was trying to graduate college, so we created an internal "cabal" for managing the project, which became known as the "core group". Although the web was very new, we set up a web site fairly early, to disseminate information about the project and our releases.
Much of this early structure (CVS, web site, cabal, etc.) was copied verbatim by other open source (this term not being in wide use yet) projects -- even the form of the project name and the term "core". This later became a kind of standard template for starting up an open source project.
Unfortunately, we made some mistakes here. As we've seen over the years, one of the great successes of Linux was that it had a strong leader, who set goals and directions, and was able to get people to do what he wanted -- or find someone else to do it. This latter part is also a key element; there was no sense that anyone else "owned" a piece of Linux (although de facto "ownership" has happened in some parts); if you didn't produce, Linus would use someone else's code. If you wanted people to use your stuff, you had to keep moving.
NetBSD did not have this. Partly due to lack of people, and partly due to a more corporate mentality, projects were often "locked". One person would say they were working on a project, and everyone else would be told to refer to them. Often these projects stagnated, or never progressed at all. If they did, the motivators were often very slow. As a result, many important projects have moved at a glacial pace, or never materialized at all.
I'm sorry to say that I helped create this problem, and that most of the projects which modeled themselves after NetBSD (probably due to its high popularity in 1993 and 1994) have suffered similar problems. FreeBSD and XFree86, for example, have both forked successor projects (Dragonfly and X.org) for very similar reasons.
Unfortunately, these problems still exist in the NetBSD project today, and nothing is being done to fix them.
--
I won't attempt to pin blame on any specific people for this, except to say that some of it is definitely my fault. It's only in retrospect that I see so clearly the need for a very strong leader. Had I pursued it 10 years ago, things might be very different. Such is life. But let's talk about the situation today.
Nice in theory, except for the fact you are not taking into consideration a number of things:
1)In our society, the number of people who are actually going to follow your advice are a small enough blip to be dismissed as other factors (IE "there's no boycott, it's those damned pirates")
2)Popular music is popular for one reason -it's popular. You're not going to stop people from buying or pirating what's popular. It's how our culture currently works. Flat out, all of the people who buy britany spears and watch reality tv aren't going to stop. You haven't considered that
3)You have to get the word out to not just the people you're trying to convince, but to all of the people who *need* to be convinced. With no media access, you plan to do that how, exactly? (PROTIP: most suits, grandmothers and normal people aren't going to visit your fightdapowa.com websight)
In short, I think you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a plan which takes the real world into consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
at least, not any time soon. Stallman is a great thinker, but he seems to have a reality distortion field that Steve Jobs would envy. I agree that the fact patents exist at all is a problem -but it's one which is not going to change, period. So the OSDL Patent project really is the only practical way of coping with the situation.
So, it sounds like dispite the technical challenges, the largest problem you have over there is in dealing with government interference. Look on the bright side, at least your post shows that for all the problems you're having, censorship isn't one of them!
The "googling for ATM passwords" article is further down the page.
What should it tell us? That they're going to win? THAT became painfully obvious once the commercials rolled out!
Typed too fast, I meant:
>Sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth, or rather, his company (canonical?): therefore proves my point about the necessity of corporate sponsorship
Really quickly here since I"m on my way out the door....
>What happens when you add
>Ubuntu,
Sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth, or rather, his company (canonical?): therefore proves my point about the necessity of governship
>KDE,
Has a large amount of developers from Trolltech, Trolltech has a lot invested in the KDE project simply because it is *the* showcase for the qt library.
>FreeBSD
Anyone who tried the 5.x series can tell you what happened to FreeBSD. Matt Dillon also would probably have some valuble insights as to the health of the FreeBSD project, though he may have his hands too full managing its' successor -DragonflyBSD- to comment.
Yep, that is exactly my point -it has to be a business. The volunteer-run projects are either collapsing from their on inertia (eg the debian project), mis-management (NetBSD) or are going nowhere at the speed of light (look at most of the projects on sourceforge).
It takes serious resources to get things done; and those resources don't come for free, as you excellently pointed out.
These small parts suffer from the same personality conflicts from which they originate (I'll point you to the circumstances surrounding the formation of the OpenBSD project, which you should already be familiar with if you're holding this conversation).
Larger projects manage to side-step personality conflicts and have infrastructure in place which prevents said conflicts from detracting from the project (not to say the project won't have other faults -NIH and Beaureaucratese are two that readily come to mind).
Privately-sponsored projects have people who manage not just the code but also the egos; which allows those projects to go forward with achieving goals instead of fighting and then splintering into a million dead-or-dying redundant sourceforge projects.
>>We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
>It should be noted that the majority of people working for RedHat/Novell/Intel on OSS projects were OSS developers first and then did good work which got them noticed by the corporate structure.
In short, we had the F/OSS boom which has led to a subsequent brain-drain, where the brightest and the best have left for the greener fields of corporate sponsorship. Nothing wrong with this, of course; without corporate sponsorship GNOME, GCC and many of the advanced features of the Linux kernel would either have never happened or would have happened many years later.
But a volunteer-run project cannot compete with the dollars and stability offered by the likes of Redhat or IBM, so we have a situation where the best and brightest (understandably) abandon the volunteer-oriented space in favor of a more favorable work enviroment.
>They were then hired to do what they were already doing,
In short, given a financial incentive to keep going past the point where the project lost interest for them, or -looking at it another way- to work on features which they find uninteresting but are needed by end users.
This is an incentive which volunteer projects -by their nature- do not have, which as a result ends up making volunteer run projects less featureful, less accessible and often times less innovated than their corporate owned competitors.
>of course now they have managers to deal with.
Which help to keep the corporate projects focused and keep releases going out the door in a predictable time frame. These same managers also function to prevent cock-size contests from getting in the way of reaching the projects' stated goals.
Now, I would agree with you that a spat between a few gentoo devs is hardly the end of FOSS; but if you read about the extent of the damage done to the NetBSD project by being tied to Wasabi, and then look at the fact that debian is having to pay people in order to release on time, the writing appears to be on the wall for your volunteer-run OSS. In fact there won't be a future for volunteer-based OSS model because the volunteer based model is dying (as evidenced by troubles with NetBSD-core, debian etc).
Running from any unstable source tree comes with it's own risks and necessitates a certain skill level (which, as a poster with a three-digit UID you doubtlessly have). That level of skill should not be necessary for building a stable tree. Finding problems with dependencies (routinely being unable to build package Y because library C has not be integrated) on a stable tree should never happen (and yet routinely does with gentoo); that kind of problem should only happen in unstable.
I have no doubt that you can find people who have the technical capacity to force gentoo into working through a series of kludges and nursing. That says less about the questionable health of the project and more about the willingness of users to come up with what should be un-needed workarounds (at least, shouldn't be needed in the stable tree) just to get a working system.
It's not the fans of a system that you judge it's quality, it's by the reasons put forth by it's detractors. Bring on the 'me toos' all day; but what they have to say is less indicative of the health of gentoo than are the ones who say 'tried it, never again!'.
So, let's recap. Debian is having to pay developers in order to get a working distribution out of the door anywhere near on-schedule; NetBSD is embroiled in a scandal surrounding the undue influence of Wasabi on the core team -when it's not flayling wildly trying to cope with its' other management problems, and now it emerges that gentoo has been stuck in a political quagmire for years holding back even the most frivilous of changes (forget any major ones).
We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.
Remove the structure, remove the incentive and before long you're left with nothing more than quibbling dorks and software packages like gentoo which half of the time are badly broken because no one can be bothered to work on them.
The creators now have several articles in various news outlets to add to their resumes and will be able to use those the next time they try to sell some half-assed idea of theirs. IE the profit was in publicity and 'buzz', not in dollars.
>Did anyone think "lonelygirl15" was real?
Yes. I saw threads about her on several message boards I frequent where people who were decently intelligent (judging by the quality of their posts on other subjects) were discussing her without appearing to have a clue that it was a set-up.
It dates from 2001. In the computing world, five years is generally considered extremely out of date -if not ancient.
I have an old 1.3ghz machine here I'm typing from. Since the original brouhaha I've been switching back and forth between the three BSD systems. I have invested some time in downloading gnome 2.14 over dialup and it works alright. Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are using older versions of gnome (I think open is still on 2.10; don't quote me on that, however!).
I'm rambling because I'm tired, sorry. My point is that the software in pkgsrc seems to be recent, and fairly stable (though that port of ajunta is crap, currently), NetBSD is running great as a desktop system for me and it seems to detect my (admittedly ancient) hardware ok, so...where's the gotcha? Does fall down on server tasks (if so - how so? compared to what? according to who?) or what, exactly?
I understand that there's concern because apparently most of the developers work for Wasabi and development appears to proceed (or stagnate) dependent on Wasabi's whims; but apart from the undisputed mis-management, are there any other signs of decay I'm just simply missing?
I hear you; it's my favorite out of all of them, though I hate the build.sh build system. Right now I have 3.0 with gnome 2.12 set up; if I want unixy goodness, it's a ctrl-alt-f1 away. The rest of the time, I enjoy gnome, firefox, all that.
Since this article appeared I have tried openbsd and freebsd; openbsd isn't that bad, but I personally don't like the fact that for their package system, they are making it so that when you build a source package the dependencies come as binary packages. That makes it harder to have a setup like I currently have with pkgsrc where I have all my source files and if I want to (later on) rebuild them or examine one I can.
Also, from what I can tell, the programs in openbsd's ports tree are often versions lower than ones in pkgsrc.
NetBSD does seem to be hemmoraging developers, and reading the mailing list (netbsd-users) the cracks are starting to appear. Since I'm not a developer, I fear for the future as well.
That answer is "no". We've seen numerous ratings and karma systems set up on a variety of boards and time and time again they've been defeated by people willing to take the time to game them for whatever reason.
It's typical nerd hubris to believe that you can solve social problems through technological means.
It's been proven time and time again that you can't.
You're missing the entire point of this article. This demonstrates (as if we didn't already know) that the consumers aren't Microsoft's customers. Consumers are the product which miscrosoft sells to their customers -their customers being the content industry (RIAA,etc).
As someone who is currently running 2.14.2; what does this mean to me?
>There are records of Egyptian doctors doing successful brain surgeries.
Can you cite a source? Particularly on the 'successful' part?
It happens on most Linux IRC channels and pretty much every *BSD project that's come down the pike. Of course, it does cripple OSS; why do you think Linux users have the reputation for answering everything with "RTFM"?
Can BSD do the same? ;)
Don't worry; we've got governments on both sides of the pond working hard at doing exactly that!
Nice in theory, except for the fact you are not taking into consideration a number of things:
1)In our society, the number of people who are actually going to follow your advice are a small enough blip to be dismissed as other factors (IE "there's no boycott, it's those damned pirates")
2)Popular music is popular for one reason -it's popular. You're not going to stop people from buying or pirating what's popular. It's how our culture currently works. Flat out, all of the people who buy britany spears and watch reality tv aren't going to stop. You haven't considered that
3)You have to get the word out to not just the people you're trying to convince, but to all of the people who *need* to be convinced. With no media access, you plan to do that how, exactly? (PROTIP: most suits, grandmothers and normal people aren't going to visit your fightdapowa.com websight)
In short, I think you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a plan which takes the real world into consideration.