The only sticking issue for me is binary compatibility especially for kernel drivers. Yes, it is very desirable from a user perspective, and yes, it would burden the kernel developers quite a lot. The philosophy to provide a consistant kernel including drivers does make a lot of sense. Actually, i am not sure that mswin drivers are really that compatible with newer mswin versions. Often you have to download newer versions which is a pain or doesn't even work which you find out after a couple of tries and reboots.
If drivers don't work within linux i think it's the manufacturers fault for not providing the source or at least help for developers to maintain GPLed drivers. Hardware manufactures should make money by selling hardware and not by controling software drivers IMHO.
ups, sorry, the url morphed into something silly (don't ask me how i did that), here is the correct link. Maybe it has the nice side effect that groklaw won't be slashdotted:-)
On Groklaw Jim Greer, who claims to have been responsible for the port of Autozone's software to linux speaks out in a interesting comment refuting some of SCOX claims. Here is the full comment in case groklaw is overloaded (quite often these days):
I don't know whether to be pleased or angry at SCO's assertion that IBM must have assisted AutoZone's transition to Linux due to the "precision and efficiency with which the migration occurred". You see, I was a Sr. Technical Advisor at AutoZone, where I was an employee for over 10 years. During my tenure, I participated and led in the design, development and maintenance of many of AutoZone's store systems. More importantly, I initiated AutoZone's transition to Linux and I directed the port of their existing store software base to Linux. I personally ported all of AutoZone's internal software libraries for use under Linux. I personally developed the rules by which other AutoZone developers should make changes to their code to support both Linux and SCO's OpenServer product. I believe at one point I had as many as 35 AutoZone developers performing porting work for me, much of which was trivial, given that our code did not generally rely on SCO specific features and that the more technologically sophisticated portions of our code tended to reside in our libraries. The developers were also responsible for testing their individual applications under both SCO and Linux; I supplemented this activity by performing builds of the entire AutoZone store software base on my desktop, which I had converted to Linux.
As to the claim that SCO's shared libraries were a necessary part of the port: false. No SCO libraries were involved in the porting activity.
As to the claim that IBM induced us to transition to Linux: false. It was, in fact, SCO's activities that 'greased the skids' and allowed the business case for using Linux to be made more easily. That is a story long in the telling; perhaps I'll share it another day.
One should remember the Linux business environment that existed at the time the AutoZone transition began. Several vendors - the original Caldera Linux distribution company, Red Hat, and Linuxcare - were offering support for enterprise installations of Linux. In fact, Bryan Sparks, then CEO of Caldera, flew to Memphis and met with me during my evaluation of the various distribution and support offerings. I also met and talked briefly with Dave Sifry of Linuxcare during the 1999 Linux Expo. AutoZone settled on Red Hat chiefly because of my familiarity with their distribution and the ease with which AutoZone could negotiate a support agreement with them.
I must add that SCO was eventually made aware of AutoZone's transition to Linux. They responded by offering to assist AutoZone in the porting activity. By the time of their offer, AutoZone had already completed the initial porting activity and had already installed a Linux-based version of their store system in several stores.
Finally, I'll add that I was for a time a member of SCO's Customer Advisory Board. As such, I believe I have some useful insights as to why SCO lost AutoZone's and several other large accounts' business.
Hmmm, groklaw has also many other interesting threads on the same topic. Go to the
article and search for "repudiate a". The author of that comment cites some court documents, recently submitted by $CO in the IBM case with the following "defense" statement:
The General Public License ('GPL') is unenforceable, void and/or voidable, and
IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are barred.
So your "nothing to see here" is pretty dubious. $CO might very well have a real problem here. Once they give in to Fyodor (aka "ok we drop it, we don't need it anyway") other GPL'ed projects might follow because there is no risk anymore. This might leave the only option for $CO to accept the GPL but that has other implications: they probably would have to stop making ridiclous claims about the GPL like they just did in the IBM case. Now, if they can't use the "GPL is unconstitional (or whatever)" argument anymore and they do have to publically accept the GPL then the next question is: How can they distribute the linux kernel under the GPL and still claim that it contains protected "IP"?
wasn't it alan cox of linux-kernel fame? rms does live in the US.
Re:Closed Software slows down economic advances
on
EU IDA Study On OSS
·
· Score: 1
Come on. If you were right there wouldn't be any free software. It's a matter of finding a good model to get people enough money and let them hack and research away. E.g. in universities there are people payed and developing free software (i didn't say "for"). consider e.g. freebsd and python. Why not strengthen this kind of mutual benefit? Surely it's a lot harder to get some competing companies working on GPLed software so that they can all use it as a standard. I suggest use your imagination. that's where innovation comes from.
I just thought that you could as well have a big company providing web server-software. Once they would have had over 60% market share they would not care going proprietary and pressing more money off users. This money could not be used somewhere else. Luckily there is Apache. And i think the amount of money somehow spent on developing Apache is used *very* effectively. What do you think?
I know of some people thinking about implementing identity managers (mostly in germany). They center around the idea of "user-side" managment (as opposed to - you know it - passport).
Myself i have the vision of a central Identity managing agent which basically
let's you define identities in one central place (name/pgp-keys/ssh-keys etc.)
provides interfaces (corba/c) to other programs (e.g. email-clients) to use the current identity settings
acts as an ssh-agent
acts as an pgp-agent (much the same way as the ssh-agent does)
generally manages Identity-Information in profiles (like business-profile1, privat1,privat2, anonymous)
spawns and configures proxies intercepting network communication (mostly smtp/http-proxy), filtering/altering cookies and other identification elements
aids in encrypting personal stuff
could run on embedded (more controalable) environments/chipcards
I guess the agent itself should be very lean. The gui to configure/login is separated. And the programs using the ident-information (email/browsing/logins/Formular filling) should be separate too. And this has to be a free project not owned or controled by any company, i guess.
Re:Closed Software slows down economic advances
on
EU IDA Study On OSS
·
· Score: 1
Your are right. Maybe that was a bit sloppy. Still i guess that the "physical" actions like producing food, building houses and stuff are the basic stuff we all need. So if this doesn't go well the software is of no use. Somehow i think software is a means of doing the fundamental stuff which is needed for everyday life more effective.
Sorry if i can't make this point clearer but i hope you get the idea. probably it's more of an philosophical/political view than a hard fact. E.g. i don't really believe in eternal economical growth.
Closed Software slows down economic advances
on
EU IDA Study On OSS
·
· Score: 1
Nay. After all, Software and IT is meant to help the REAL business to advance. Bringing services to everyone and making communication,
billing and other stuff more effective. The less money you have to invest in IT the better.
And i would say the open collaborative (and competetive!) free software movement offers a great way of accomplishing this. At least in many areas, especially Operating Systems and Word processors. Just come up with a good scheme to pay folks for writing free software and almost everybody except a few like MS and Oracle will benefit. You may not get exorbitant salaries anymore:-)
"The United States government has so far shown a great deal of restraint, considering the situation."
I don't buy this. The only things you hear is war, revenge and war. I think the only reason the government waits for is logistics. Consider that the gulf-war took 3 month to prepare. And bush wants this to be bigger. And up until now nobody even knows against whom and how. I'd say 99% of the western and the majority of the arabian people want to see those responsible punished. But *war* against individuals?
I'd say: make a big conference in israel/palestine, get arabian countries, europe, the US, china and russia talking about actually solving problems. And working together. This is THE possibility to REALLY make advances in human rights, preventing terrorism and wars.
Democracy is about discussing and making rational decisions. At least it should be. The more people talk about consequences and take part in these discussions the more politicians cannot just implement their stricter laws in the name of "fight the terrorism". Some friends an me, too, are currently forming a group to help to spread discussion...
But where does fanaticism come from? It's not a genetical malfunction. It grows on the grounds of poverty and probably also because of the arrogant west who just believes itself to be the "good" versus "them", the "evil". Imposing their view of the world on everybody else. Don't you think this is at least sometimes some kind of fanatism too?
Exactly. It feels dangerous if the president of the united states says to eliminate terrorism. Is he really that naive? As most of the americans seem to call for "a war" it would be a lot more responsible to send signals that we also needs to help improve the situations in several countries. For their own good and for justice.
I don't know what is more scary. That we could be at the beggining of World War III where the terrorists want us to be. Or that terrorists will launch more attacks what they certainly want to do. Or that a lot of politicians now want to implement stricter laws what the terrorists will see as a sign of victory. Our clever politicians make a big show but change nothing.
And mostly everybody seems to refuse to REALLY THINK about what the hell made all this happen. It's surely not just a big bank account and some mislead religious fanatism. That's just the surface. There is MUCH MUCH more to it.
I don't know what is more scary. That we could be at the beggining of World War III where the terrorists want us to be. Or that terrorists will launch more attacks what they certainly want to do. Or that a lot of politicians now will want to implement stricter laws what the terrorists will see as a sign of victory. Our clever politicians make a big show but change nothing.
And mostly everybody seems to refuse to REALLY THINK about what the hell made all this happen. It's surely not just a big bank account and some mislead religious fanatism. That's just the surface. There is MUCH MUCH more to it.
The problem is even worse. The main problem of
the military and intelligence service is: adaptation. Whatever the security measure is, a determined group can adapt their methods.
Really, even monitoring every single communication on the world would not help. You can use steganography and communicate e.g. via eBay-bids. Every moderately experienced programmer could setup a system, to e.g. use a newsforum or even just TCP-timing-traffic to communicate undetactably.
You cannot prevent these attacks by military or intelligence force. It's an understandable wish but it simply doesn't work. To be honest, it's
detestable how politicians use these horrible events to implement their politics.
By technical/military means you can improve security a little but you cannot rule out attacks like the ones happend. There must be far more to it than just showing muscles and regulating cryptography and flying a revengeful attack.
This is simply not true. The problem is: adaptation. Whatever the security measure is a determined group can adapt it's methods.
Really, even monitoring every single communication on the world would not help. You can use steganography and communicate e.g. via eBay-bids. Every moderately experienced programmer could setup a system, to e.g. use a newsforum or even just TCP-timing-traffic to communicate undetactably.
You cannot prevent these attacks by military or intelligence force. It's an understandable wish but it simply doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
I enjoyed reading both blog entries.
The only sticking issue for me is binary compatibility especially for kernel drivers. Yes, it is very desirable from a user perspective, and yes, it would burden the kernel developers quite a lot. The philosophy to provide a consistant kernel including drivers does make a lot of sense. Actually, i am not sure that mswin drivers are really that compatible with newer mswin versions. Often you have to download newer versions which is a pain or doesn't even work which you find out after a couple of tries and reboots.
If drivers don't work within linux i think it's the manufacturers fault for not providing the source or at least help for developers to maintain GPLed drivers. Hardware manufactures should make money by selling hardware and not by controling software drivers IMHO.
ups, sorry, the url morphed into something silly (don't ask me how i did that), here is the :-)
correct link. Maybe it has the nice side effect that groklaw won't be slashdotted
interesting comment refuting some of SCOX claims. Here is the full comment in case groklaw is overloaded (quite often these days):
doxygen is far superior to javadoc. and it :-)
can do java too
wasn't it alan cox of linux-kernel fame? rms does live in the US.
Come on. If you were right there wouldn't be any free software. It's a matter of finding a good model to get people enough money and let them hack and research away. E.g. in universities there are people payed and developing free software (i didn't say "for"). consider e.g. freebsd and python. Why not strengthen this kind of mutual benefit? Surely it's a lot harder to get some competing companies working on GPLed software so that they can all use it as a standard. I suggest use your imagination. that's where innovation comes from.
I just thought that you could as well have a big company providing web server-software. Once they would have had over 60% market share they would not care going proprietary and pressing more money off users. This money could not be used somewhere else. Luckily there is Apache. And i think the amount of money somehow spent on developing Apache is used *very* effectively. What do you think?
Myself i have the vision of a central Identity managing agent which basically
let's you define identities in one central place (name/pgp-keys/ssh-keys etc.)
provides interfaces (corba/c) to other programs (e.g. email-clients) to use the current identity settings
acts as an ssh-agent
acts as an pgp-agent (much the same way as the ssh-agent does)
generally manages Identity-Information in profiles (like business-profile1, privat1,privat2, anonymous)
spawns and configures proxies intercepting network communication (mostly smtp/http-proxy), filtering/altering cookies and other identification elements
aids in encrypting personal stuff
could run on embedded (more controalable) environments/chipcards
I guess the agent itself should be very lean. The gui to configure/login is separated. And the programs using the ident-information (email/browsing/logins/Formular filling) should be separate too. And this has to be a free project not owned or controled by any company, i guess.
Your are right. Maybe that was a bit sloppy. Still i guess that the "physical" actions like producing food, building houses and stuff are the basic stuff we all need. So if this doesn't go well the software is of no use. Somehow i think software is a means of doing the fundamental stuff which is needed for everyday life more effective.
Sorry if i can't make this point clearer but i hope you get the idea. probably it's more of an philosophical/political view than a hard fact. E.g. i don't really believe in eternal economical growth.
Nay. After all, Software and IT is meant to help the REAL business to advance. Bringing services to everyone and making communication, billing and other stuff more effective. The less money you have to invest in IT the better.
:-)
And i would say the open collaborative (and competetive!) free software movement offers a great way of accomplishing this. At least in many areas, especially Operating Systems and Word processors. Just come up with a good scheme to pay folks for writing free software and almost everybody except a few like MS and Oracle will benefit. You may not get exorbitant salaries anymore
"The United States government has so far shown a great deal of restraint, considering the situation."
I don't buy this. The only things you hear is war, revenge and war. I think the only reason the government waits for is logistics. Consider that the gulf-war took 3 month to prepare. And bush wants this to be bigger. And up until now nobody even knows against whom and how. I'd say 99% of the western and the majority of the arabian people want to see those responsible punished. But *war* against individuals?
I'd say: make a big conference in israel/palestine, get arabian countries, europe, the US, china and russia talking about actually solving problems. And working together. This is THE possibility to REALLY make advances in human rights, preventing terrorism and wars.
Democracy is about discussing and making rational decisions. At least it should be. The more people talk about consequences and take part in these discussions the more politicians cannot just implement their stricter laws in the name of "fight the terrorism". Some friends an me, too, are currently forming a group to help to spread discussion ...
But where does fanaticism come from? It's not a genetical malfunction. It grows on the grounds of poverty and probably also because of the arrogant west who just believes itself to be the "good" versus "them", the "evil". Imposing their view of the world on everybody else. Don't you think this is at least sometimes some kind of fanatism too?
Exactly. It feels dangerous if the president of the united states says to eliminate terrorism. Is he really that naive? As most of the americans seem to call for "a war" it would be a lot more responsible to send signals that we also needs to help improve the situations in several countries. For their own good and for justice.
I don't know what is more scary. That we could be at the beggining of World War III where the terrorists want us to be. Or that terrorists will launch more attacks what they certainly want to do. Or that a lot of politicians now want to implement stricter laws what the terrorists will see as a sign of victory. Our clever politicians make a big show but change nothing.
And mostly everybody seems to refuse to REALLY THINK about what the hell made all this happen. It's surely not just a big bank account and some mislead religious fanatism. That's just the surface. There is MUCH MUCH more to it.
I don't know what is more scary. That we could be at the beggining of World War III where the terrorists want us to be. Or that terrorists will launch more attacks what they certainly want to do. Or that a lot of politicians now will want to implement stricter laws what the terrorists will see as a sign of victory. Our clever politicians make a big show but change nothing.
And mostly everybody seems to refuse to REALLY THINK about what the hell made all this happen. It's surely not just a big bank account and some mislead religious fanatism. That's just the surface. There is MUCH MUCH more to it.
The problem is even worse. The main problem of
the military and intelligence service is: adaptation. Whatever the security measure is, a determined group can adapt their methods.
Really, even monitoring every single communication on the world would not help. You can use steganography and communicate e.g. via eBay-bids. Every moderately experienced programmer could setup a system, to e.g. use a newsforum or even just TCP-timing-traffic to communicate undetactably.
You cannot prevent these attacks by military or intelligence force. It's an understandable wish but it simply doesn't work. To be honest, it's
detestable how politicians use these horrible events to implement their politics.
By technical/military means you can improve security a little but you cannot rule out attacks like the ones happend. There must be far more to it than just showing muscles and regulating cryptography and flying a revengeful attack.
This is simply not true. The problem is: adaptation. Whatever the security measure is a determined group can adapt it's methods.
Really, even monitoring every single communication on the world would not help. You can use steganography and communicate e.g. via eBay-bids. Every moderately experienced programmer could setup a system, to e.g. use a newsforum or even just TCP-timing-traffic to communicate undetactably.
You cannot prevent these attacks by military or intelligence force. It's an understandable wish but it simply doesn't work.