Apple did roll out their own flavor of Unix in the early 90s (A/UX). Some have speculated that FSF's disapproval of porting GNU tools to A/UX hurt the OS.
So just when has DJB been hypocritical? His stuff seems to be pretty secure, and I've never read where he's claimed to be a Free Software/Open Source advocate. Plus, I'm in a gossipy mood. Please elaborate!
I find djb hypocritical for one reason. He has, at at least one point in time, derided Wietse Venema's discovery of a security flaw in qmail as "a marketing stunt". The flaw could be fixed by editing a configfile in a fairly obvious way, but the flaw was present (and may continue to be present... as I recall, djb has steadfastly refused to change the default configuration) in the default configuration.
However, djb's vaunted "security guarantee" of $500 (which he didn't pay to Wietse afaik) is nothing more than a marketing stunt, and a marketing stunt of a vastly greater degree than Venema's finding of a flaw. Considering how much a security expert makes doing code audits, $500 (if and only if a flaw is found) doesn't buy much of an audit. Qmail's not popular enough of a mailer (maybe 5% of all email is sent by qmail) to give someone who tracks down a flaw a hug boost in reputation. Top that off with the fact that the only time someone has claimed to have found a flaw, djb denied that it was a flaw and didn't pay up, and it's hard to see why someone who would be capable of doing an audit would even bother to audit qmail. In short, the security guarantee is next to worthless, yet he trumpets the security guarantee on the qmail pages.
I should have been more clear. Postfix and qmail are (as you note) basically equivalent (there are edge cases where one is significantly better). Thus, when deciding which to use, I consider (among other things) which one I'd rather give the satisfaction of having his software be used. That person is Wietse.
djb is maintaining qmail? I thought he considered it to be finished (imagine that - a software job that was actually completed:).
If he's stopped maintaining it, that's a reason right there to stop using qmail, as he's written the license to make it very difficult for anyone but him to distribute modifications (such as upgrades and bugfixes) to it.
One advantage of Postfix over qmail is that Postfix, from the outside, looks a lot more like Sendmail (which, if you're migrating, is a good thing).
There's also a moral angle. Qmail is not Free Software (as djb does not allow publication of modified versions), while Postfix is Free (though GPL-incompatible) Software. Also, Wietse Venema is a better human being (aka not a hypocrite) like djb. For those reasons, I will never use qmail, and I advise all others to not use qmail.
Personally I'd avoid using people-soft in the first place... My university recently began using people soft.. the student front end is virtuall unusable and according to staff the staff interface is worse. The system also seems to be pretty unstable.
Wile these can be delt with they don't fill me with confidence in people soft's ablility to produce a quality system.
And which university allows you to get away with such atrocious spelling?;o)
Anyway, I can second that. UMass just went to PeopleSoft (for big bucks, despite massive budget cuts everywhere else on campus), and the new system sucks big fat hairy moose-cock. Jesus H. Christ, the idiots who are deploying it are beyond idiots. They went live (as in registrations and such depending on the system) with major components of the functionality still in TODO (like counting all courses to figure out GPAs...). I actually got a letter from the Dean saying [paraphrased] "your GPA is under 2.00. Please do not come back for the next semester... P.S. your GPA is actually above 2.00; the computer merely thinks you have a sub-2.00 GPA").
Is how sender is defined. Is any mail of a commerical nature the definition? Would an email from my stockbroker (ie one I hire) suggesting that I sell MSFT qualify? If it's limited strictly to bulk, where is "bulk" defined.
Yes, certain varieties of spam may be eradicated, but the spammers will simply move on to other varieties that aren't covered.
As soon as we receive abuse@ complaints, the routers will drop any and all packets bound to or from that host outside our network. On our support site, under the question, "I can't connect to outside hosts, what's wrong?" section, prominent mention will be given that hosts that have been zombied, are spamming, or otherwise abusing the network (ie being a poor network citizen) are cut off, with links on how to disable relaying, uninstall spyware, and so forth ("It's not wrong to run your own mailserver. However, by doing so, you must run it responsibly by configuring it properly and updating it regularly...").
I hope the users of your service never feel a need for any one of the many bidirectional uses of the network.
FACT: the majority of people on the Internet aren't taking advantage of the bidirectional uses of the network. Those that are would certainly not choose Tier One in that plan. Tier One is designed for one class of users: those who use it simply to browse the web, send/receive email (email would not be counted in the bandwidth estimations), and want to get a download speed that is significantly faster than dial-up.
I pity the guy who works with large data files for say some open source project and blows past his upload cap halfway through the month.
In that case, he pays for the bandwidth he uses. Simple as that. Bandwidth ain't free (though it does get cheaper (in the marginal sense) the more that is bought). There will also be an SDSL option available for a few more bucks a month (probably $10 for tier 1, $20 at tier 2, and $30 at tier 3). If you think that "one-size-fits-all" Internet service can possibly serve the huge number of different uses, with different requirements for each, then you are truly deluded.
No user should ever need to actually originate some data, and those that do are just slowing down my porn downloads dammit.
I'm not saying that uploading is not a valid use of the network; on the contrary, the right to upload, in an unrestricted manner, is enshrined in such a service. However, be prepared to pay for the upload. If you're getting broadband service, be prepared to pay broadband prices.
I think bandwidth should be free
Do you mean free as in speech? I completely agree with you. If you mean free as in beer, put down the crackpipe.
Do you honestly think the DSL and Cablemodem providers would lower their price if everyone stopped using so much bandwidth?
I'm not speaking for the existing DSL/cable providers. I'm strictly speaking for my own hypothetical ISP, one I would have no problem using (being an open-source contributor who regularly resyncs my own local mirror of Mandrake Cooker (around 200MB or so a day in downloads)). The simple fact is that each byte of data has a nonzero cost which must be paid by someone (perhaps its the taxpayer, perhaps the ISP eats it as a loss). To my mind, the fairest thing in the world is for those who are ultimately responsible for the sending of the bytes (ie the sender) to pay for their sending.
The government provides the wire going from a CO to your house (copper or coax or whatever). Well, not the government, a non-profit corporation chartered by act of the state legislature with no shareholders, the ability to issue debt with the guarantee of the state, and directors who are appointed by the state government (in a manner that minimizes any individual government's ability to pack the board). Anyway, this corporation is charged with maintaining the last mile infrastructure. It does not offer any services (because governments are shitty at delivering services). Anybody who wants to can lay their own backbone connection (fiber, satellite, whatever) to the CO, put their equipment in the CO, and offer service to those who have the lines (service being voice telephone, cable TV, data services, etc.) has the right to serve however many customers they want, with the corporation leasing CO space and renting the lines at the same rate (the cost of maintaining the lines connecting to the CO divided by the number of lines connecting to the CO). If you and some friends want to start up a co-op ISP, you make a deal for a backbone connection, buy your equipment, pay the fees for the maintenance, and you're off. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. would be able to sell services along the line, as well. Some allowance would be main for split lines (eg you get Earthlink data, Comcast television, and Verizon voice), possibly on a one-third split.
The problem with your plan is that the bandwidth would have to be so oversold that you would be talking about a 100 MB daily download cap (with extra bandwidth purchaseable in, say, 100MB increments for $5/month extra). Check out all the capping stories for Slashdotters' opinion on that capping.
If I were to start a DSL ISP, I would have a few tiers of service. All services have the same ToS: anything goes that's not prohibited by law. Run your own mailserver (as long as you don't spam). Run a webserver. Register a domain. Run an IRC server. Run a gameserver. Run every P2P service known to man.
Tier One. 192 Kbps down, 32 Kbps up. Unlimited downloads, but capped uploads of 100MB/month (if the other side is outside the network... intranetwork uploads are unlimited). Connections are PPPoE. Price: $29.99/month, $10 for every 50MB or portion thereof over the limit.
Tier Two. 1024 Kbps down, 128 Kbps up. Same up/download caps but outside uploads are 500MB/month. PPPoE (with static IP optional). $44.99/month, $5 for every 100MB or portion thereof overlimit, $5/month for static IP.
Tier Three. 1536 Kbps down, 768 Kbps up. Same caps except for monthly upload is 2 GB/month. Static IP. $79.99/month, $10 for every 500 MB or portion thereof overlimit, priority routing (packets bound for or sent from your IP have extra priority at the border routers) for an additional $10/month.
What an amazingly weak argument! Is _everyone_ supposed to be an arm of the law. People receiving unemployment benefits, people on welfare, people who drive on the interstate roads, people with federally-backed home loans and bank accounts, and on and on, all should become the enforcers of copyright violations by others? Perhaps you should rethink your position.
As bad as the position is (I think it's repugnant), it's become fully legal (no case of it, afaik, has been overturned, despite several challenges). The first example of this, that I can think of, was the 1980's, when the Congress made continued receipt of Interstate highway funds contingent on raising the drinking age to 21 (it was this that finally forced the last few holdouts (like New York, Vermont, etc.) to raise their ages).
This isn't one of those overly broad patents where every search engine is covered. Patent descriptions are conjunctive; to infringe, you need to infringe on every term. So building a search engine based on $FACTOR is okay, as long as $FACTOR is not "page interlinking".
You can trademark what is in common usage, as long as the usage does not have anything to do (within reason) with what you're using the trademark to refer to.
Thus, Microsoft's trademark of "Windows" does not in any way stop Andersen from using the term in conjunction with their glass products. The question would still remain, however, as to whether "windows" in the computing sense (ie boxes on screen with text and/or graphics within them that are movable and so forth...) renders the term untrademarkable in that environment.
But, if I wanted to launch a new candy bar, I could call it Windows, and even trademark that term within the limited domain of "food products".
Slashdot Mirror
Apple did roll out their own flavor of Unix in the early 90s (A/UX). Some have speculated that FSF's disapproval of porting GNU tools to A/UX hurt the OS.
I find djb hypocritical for one reason. He has, at at least one point in time, derided Wietse Venema's discovery of a security flaw in qmail as "a marketing stunt". The flaw could be fixed by editing a configfile in a fairly obvious way, but the flaw was present (and may continue to be present... as I recall, djb has steadfastly refused to change the default configuration) in the default configuration.
However, djb's vaunted "security guarantee" of $500 (which he didn't pay to Wietse afaik) is nothing more than a marketing stunt, and a marketing stunt of a vastly greater degree than Venema's finding of a flaw. Considering how much a security expert makes doing code audits, $500 (if and only if a flaw is found) doesn't buy much of an audit. Qmail's not popular enough of a mailer (maybe 5% of all email is sent by qmail) to give someone who tracks down a flaw a hug boost in reputation. Top that off with the fact that the only time someone has claimed to have found a flaw, djb denied that it was a flaw and didn't pay up, and it's hard to see why someone who would be capable of doing an audit would even bother to audit qmail. In short, the security guarantee is next to worthless, yet he trumpets the security guarantee on the qmail pages.
I should have been more clear. Postfix and qmail are (as you note) basically equivalent (there are edge cases where one is significantly better). Thus, when deciding which to use, I consider (among other things) which one I'd rather give the satisfaction of having his software be used. That person is Wietse.
Also because the FSF forbade porting GNU tools to Apple systems.
"Forbade" might be a strong word, but it was at least "strongly discouraged".
Postal employees also have the tendency to, well, go postal.
If he's stopped maintaining it, that's a reason right there to stop using qmail, as he's written the license to make it very difficult for anyone but him to distribute modifications (such as upgrades and bugfixes) to it.
One advantage of Postfix over qmail is that Postfix, from the outside, looks a lot more like Sendmail (which, if you're migrating, is a good thing).
There's also a moral angle. Qmail is not Free Software (as djb does not allow publication of modified versions), while Postfix is Free (though GPL-incompatible) Software. Also, Wietse Venema is a better human being (aka not a hypocrite) like djb. For those reasons, I will never use qmail, and I advise all others to not use qmail.
And which university allows you to get away with such atrocious spelling? ;o)
Anyway, I can second that. UMass just went to PeopleSoft (for big bucks, despite massive budget cuts everywhere else on campus), and the new system sucks big fat hairy moose-cock. Jesus H. Christ, the idiots who are deploying it are beyond idiots. They went live (as in registrations and such depending on the system) with major components of the functionality still in TODO (like counting all courses to figure out GPAs...). I actually got a letter from the Dean saying [paraphrased] "your GPA is under 2.00. Please do not come back for the next semester... P.S. your GPA is actually above 2.00; the computer merely thinks you have a sub-2.00 GPA").
Is how sender is defined. Is any mail of a commerical nature the definition? Would an email from my stockbroker (ie one I hire) suggesting that I sell MSFT qualify? If it's limited strictly to bulk, where is "bulk" defined.
Yes, certain varieties of spam may be eradicated, but the spammers will simply move on to other varieties that aren't covered.
It's always your "friend" who gets hax0red, and not you... I see.
As soon as we receive abuse@ complaints, the routers will drop any and all packets bound to or from that host outside our network. On our support site, under the question, "I can't connect to outside hosts, what's wrong?" section, prominent mention will be given that hosts that have been zombied, are spamming, or otherwise abusing the network (ie being a poor network citizen) are cut off, with links on how to disable relaying, uninstall spyware, and so forth ("It's not wrong to run your own mailserver. However, by doing so, you must run it responsibly by configuring it properly and updating it regularly...").
Fine. Firewall those IPs from using the root servers.
So the innocent people that get shot because incompetent SWAT teams got the wrong address for a drug bust are victims of drug users?
Yeah, um... right.
FACT: the majority of people on the Internet aren't taking advantage of the bidirectional uses of the network. Those that are would certainly not choose Tier One in that plan. Tier One is designed for one class of users: those who use it simply to browse the web, send/receive email (email would not be counted in the bandwidth estimations), and want to get a download speed that is significantly faster than dial-up.
In that case, he pays for the bandwidth he uses. Simple as that. Bandwidth ain't free (though it does get cheaper (in the marginal sense) the more that is bought). There will also be an SDSL option available for a few more bucks a month (probably $10 for tier 1, $20 at tier 2, and $30 at tier 3). If you think that "one-size-fits-all" Internet service can possibly serve the huge number of different uses, with different requirements for each, then you are truly deluded.
I'm not saying that uploading is not a valid use of the network; on the contrary, the right to upload, in an unrestricted manner, is enshrined in such a service. However, be prepared to pay for the upload. If you're getting broadband service, be prepared to pay broadband prices.
Do you mean free as in speech? I completely agree with you. If you mean free as in beer, put down the crackpipe.
I'm not speaking for the existing DSL/cable providers. I'm strictly speaking for my own hypothetical ISP, one I would have no problem using (being an open-source contributor who regularly resyncs my own local mirror of Mandrake Cooker (around 200MB or so a day in downloads)). The simple fact is that each byte of data has a nonzero cost which must be paid by someone (perhaps its the taxpayer, perhaps the ISP eats it as a loss). To my mind, the fairest thing in the world is for those who are ultimately responsible for the sending of the bytes (ie the sender) to pay for their sending.
To put it bluntly, yes. That's the model I'm looking at.
Just wait until the Germans begin spamming...
My view:
The government provides the wire going from a CO to your house (copper or coax or whatever). Well, not the government, a non-profit corporation chartered by act of the state legislature with no shareholders, the ability to issue debt with the guarantee of the state, and directors who are appointed by the state government (in a manner that minimizes any individual government's ability to pack the board). Anyway, this corporation is charged with maintaining the last mile infrastructure. It does not offer any services (because governments are shitty at delivering services). Anybody who wants to can lay their own backbone connection (fiber, satellite, whatever) to the CO, put their equipment in the CO, and offer service to those who have the lines (service being voice telephone, cable TV, data services, etc.) has the right to serve however many customers they want, with the corporation leasing CO space and renting the lines at the same rate (the cost of maintaining the lines connecting to the CO divided by the number of lines connecting to the CO). If you and some friends want to start up a co-op ISP, you make a deal for a backbone connection, buy your equipment, pay the fees for the maintenance, and you're off. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. would be able to sell services along the line, as well. Some allowance would be main for split lines (eg you get Earthlink data, Comcast television, and Verizon voice), possibly on a one-third split.
The problem with your plan is that the bandwidth would have to be so oversold that you would be talking about a 100 MB daily download cap (with extra bandwidth purchaseable in, say, 100MB increments for $5/month extra). Check out all the capping stories for Slashdotters' opinion on that capping.
If I were to start a DSL ISP, I would have a few tiers of service. All services have the same ToS: anything goes that's not prohibited by law. Run your own mailserver (as long as you don't spam). Run a webserver. Register a domain. Run an IRC server. Run a gameserver. Run every P2P service known to man.
Tier One. 192 Kbps down, 32 Kbps up. Unlimited downloads, but capped uploads of 100MB/month (if the other side is outside the network... intranetwork uploads are unlimited). Connections are PPPoE. Price: $29.99/month, $10 for every 50MB or portion thereof over the limit.
Tier Two. 1024 Kbps down, 128 Kbps up. Same up/download caps but outside uploads are 500MB/month. PPPoE (with static IP optional). $44.99/month, $5 for every 100MB or portion thereof overlimit, $5/month for static IP.
Tier Three. 1536 Kbps down, 768 Kbps up. Same caps except for monthly upload is 2 GB/month. Static IP. $79.99/month, $10 for every 500 MB or portion thereof overlimit, priority routing (packets bound for or sent from your IP have extra priority at the border routers) for an additional $10/month.
It's not a battery! It's a chemical weapon! Call Hans Blix!
As bad as the position is (I think it's repugnant), it's become fully legal (no case of it, afaik, has been overturned, despite several challenges). The first example of this, that I can think of, was the 1980's, when the Congress made continued receipt of Interstate highway funds contingent on raising the drinking age to 21 (it was this that finally forced the last few holdouts (like New York, Vermont, etc.) to raise their ages).
This isn't one of those overly broad patents where every search engine is covered. Patent descriptions are conjunctive; to infringe, you need to infringe on every term. So building a search engine based on $FACTOR is okay, as long as $FACTOR is not "page interlinking".
Basically, the DoJ took over the servers, presumably through a court order.
Read the parent comment.
This isn't Windows Update he's talking about, it's the EULA for recent versions (XP, IIRC) of Windows.
You can trademark what is in common usage, as long as the usage does not have anything to do (within reason) with what you're using the trademark to refer to.
Thus, Microsoft's trademark of "Windows" does not in any way stop Andersen from using the term in conjunction with their glass products. The question would still remain, however, as to whether "windows" in the computing sense (ie boxes on screen with text and/or graphics within them that are movable and so forth...) renders the term untrademarkable in that environment.
But, if I wanted to launch a new candy bar, I could call it Windows, and even trademark that term within the limited domain of "food products".
That is why I referred to it as, IIRC, "poseur hairspray glam rock", which some misguided people assume qualifies as metal.