There is nothing in the GPL that equates "comunity" and "the world as a whole". There is no default community that is entitled to anything. Once you distribute software to somebody, then they are brought into your "community". Neither you nor they are obligated to give anything to Torvalds or Stallman, only the sources to what you already provided the community you created.
Now that doesn't explicitly exclude them either - any party in your community can later decide to give (sell) this software to Stallman, which would then bring Stallman into their newly formed "community". This would cause no further obligations on you towards Stallman, but they would be obligated to offer Stallman for 3 years, the source to what they gave him - regardless of whether they originally got it from you.
Corporate policy should be able to limit your subsidiaries from then practically bringing unwanted members into any community with access to your in house software.
Perhaps as a precondition to any divesting of these subsidiaries, they could be required to stop using this software - not as per the GPL, but as a condition of the spin-off or take-over. Even if not, there is no requirement to give them the source, only to formally offer it for 3 years. So then the company must remain fully in your control until the term has passed.
The GPL was intended to be comprehensible by the General Public, so as to be useable as the General Public('s) License. All in all, other than a less legal than technical points, it has done a pretty good job of that. In this case, it sounds almost as if your lawyers were going more by misunderstood gossip than by the letter of the license, which IMO keeps a fair approximation of the spirit of the license.
Of course, I'm no lawyer. But I am a member of the General Public, and I present this official opinion as a member of the General Public. I futher acknowledge that in fact and in deed, GNU is Not UNIX. (But it might be Unix.)
Re:I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX famil
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When I say "UNIX family", I am referring to those systems that follow the UNIX design. Because far from being "archaic", the design features I'm talking about are absolutely critical to the success of UNIX in areas where it's proven strong.
And it doesn't matter what Be's goal was, any more than it matters whether GNU stands for "Gnu's Not Unix" or a big hairy animal. "The Unix family" is a practical definition based on what an OS does and how it behaves, not what it was designed to do or how it's implemented or what other capabilities are available alongside the traditional Unix ones.
Oh! Well why didn't you just say so!?! ***grin***
I am really not of the UNIX generation, so I guess I never really saw the simple consistency of UNIX in that light - as a desireable, working and useful in and of itself worldview. It seems I was always seeing efforts at moving away from UNIX, towards Windows, towards Linux. Maybe that's why I'm such a BeFanboy, instead of a Weenix-Weenie.
Yes, what I am looking for isn't UNIX, and might not even be Unix except for an accessible environment or emulation I can call, much like WINE - only when I need it, because some useful functionality hasn't yet been properly reimplemented natively. I might merely be looking for a post MacOS/Win95 WIMP desktop system, with a decent, fairly featureful but completely multithreaded nonblocking webbrowser, and a standard productivity suite. I would like UNIX style low-fat remote accessibility for the times some shit hits the fan - a nice OpenFirmware might even do the trick if GRUB can't be brought up to the task.
The name for what I wanted was BeOS, and it always felt over 89% there, until it got buried. Java for the Web, AbiWord almost Word compatible, NetPositive no Javascript yet, Mozilla almost feasible... no, it wasn't UNIX, it was just a nice smooth desktop that had plenty of promise. I'm not using Unix for UNIX, but for the glut of existing apps that can run on it - mostly GNU.
Just like I didn't really use IRIX for UNIX, but for the hardware that ran on it, and some of the fancy software that could take advantage of it. Maybe I could have gone a different way with different experiences, but for me, Unix is just one means to an end of an alternate desktop. The networking features were more of a luxury than a necessity for me, so more often than not the BeOS Network Kit fit the bill, and even if I broke it, it wouldn't take down the rest of my system. Because I don't trust BeOS networking as much as say OpenBSD, I really would rather avoid the BONE setup, and keep things segregated.
So you already had what you were looking for, and didn't need BeOS to be your UNIX. But I still need Haiku, or Blue-Eyed OS (what happened to it?) or maybe a different alternative Debian desktop, or Yellowtab or Zeta to be my BeOS.
Thanks for clarifying your posts. It was informative, and only consumed huge chunks of my time. Thanks for spending yours as well. Oh, and also for the sockpuppets vivisecting meatpuppets, and the literate daemon-king. It much better than going outdoors.
Re:I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX famil
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Okay, everytime I think I see where you're coming from, it seems like things change. I guess I'll try (for turing;P ) one more time to find the common ground in our views.
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement. For most people who now use "Unix", this is an obsolescent use - probably because we never used a historic "UNIX" productively as a stand alone system like you apparently have - today, most of the value of Unix is how it adheres to POSIX and such for the sake of inter-computer interaction. Most people today would only value UNIX for historical or legal purposes, to trace the direct lineage - not for the "UNIX" interfaces which have since been largely redefined, other than the basic HCI which is still available and basically the same. It seems to me, you assign value to UNIX as a consistent Human-Computer-Interface, meaning the HCI presented by UNIX in its heyday before POSIX, GNU, and UNIX(tm) was shuffled around. This somewhat unique, though very respectable stance you seem to be coming from can be causing confusion, if only for its rarity in today's "Brave GNU World".
For most people today, the term "Unix" is "Unix family" or "Unix-alike", which means a system capable of behaving according to modern POSIX and SUS definitions. BeOS cannot reach that, but it is close enough for somebody who only needs "UNIX" - it will fail to provide for modern Unix's needs. WinNT is farther by default, but can be brought into line to various degrees with different products. I propose as far as the defaults, this is because BeOS (by design) is much simpler, and there is no reason not to present that default - but then you can't get much further past the default. Here's a question - do you perceive that there is any way in which a system can pass as a modern Unix but not live up to your legacy UNIX? It seems you say WindowsNT doesn't, because it's Unix or UNIX is "slapped on the side". I would assume Mac OS X does. Does VMS? How about modern IBM mainframes? The ones that host Linux environments?
Now for you, the BeOS presents a useful UNIX HCI as you see it, and I have to agree with that, so it presents a useful "UNIX family" interface, and even API as long as you can stick to the C subset of the BeOS C++ API, and to straightfordward shell scripting. However, it does not present sufficient "Unix" HCIs, computer-computer interfaces, or sub-shell level programming APIs to be usefully considered "Unix family" to most modern perspectives.
Precisely: One can easily treat BeOS as an early, pre-X11, pre-POSIX single-user Unix,
(AKA UNIX, as opposed to a modern, POSIX multiuser post-UNIX Unix with X11 on top.)
Now for the other bit of confusion.
It's not free/Unix/OSX/real. I don't know about this. BeOS is a very comfortable and familiar environment for a UNIX user, with a very complete and very "native" UNIX API that's not just something slapped on the side like (say) Interix is on Windows NT. I would happily consider BeOS a member of the UNIX family of operating systems.
Windows NT can provide a "native" "Unix" API, with or without Interix as part of the solution. I don't know what kind of shell will made you happy, but Korn is at least as "UNIX" as BeOS BASH, in that neither one is CSH (assuming that CSH is historic UNIX enough to satify your needs). If Kor doesn't cut it, I am aware of BASH interfaces for DOS/Windows and WinNT as well.
Windows can present a telnet interface just like BeOS. BeOS is much easier to activate - it's hard to beat the checkbox interface. But then, for everyting that BeOS properly supports, it is much easier than Windows. There are also many things that BeOS supports through its partial POSIX systems that are much harder to use than wha
I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX family.
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I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX family, but only by marriage or law, not by blood.
If TCP and by extention Telnet are part of your definition of a member of the UNIX family, then there was no UNIX before there was BSD. Were SGI GL and Sun News Unix? I never used a pre-4dwm Silicon Graphics box, or a pre Single Unix System Unix for that matter, so I won't go there. Practically speaking, sometime before 1985 or so with POSIX, and after Berkley first developing TCP for their Unix, there was no UNIX in any current sense of the term.
My most important point, that you didn't touch on, is my objection to your grandparent post. POSIX is indeed slapped on the side of the non-Unix BeOS, and while a fair approximaion of it, this is a less complete POSIX than those available for Windows NT. Before Microsoft purchased Interex (which I've honestly never used, I have successfully avoided XP until very recently), there was an NT Services for Unix, which if you installed the Telnet server (included with NT Server 4.0 CD), it did indeed allow you to log in remotely and use Korn's POSIX Shell. Even though Windows and BeOS don't internally use or boot with Unix, after booting they are both able to present passable Unix interfaces (with appearances of POSIX compliant subsystems) because most of their internal systems are at least as funtional, even if different from Unix, and so can maintain most of the Unix facade.
My point with top and GCC was to point out that internally, BeOS is not Unix, and it boots and manages itself differently than Unix, or a even a kernel traditional proper. Would you say Unix style job control is a part of your definition for a member of the UNIX family? Because if you try to compile BASH with GCC, it will die when it fails to comprehend the job control parts. Forget about native C compilers - unless you consider Metroworks native - that would be at least as native as it to Mac OS System (pre-Mach). That is to say, not at all native.
Is VMS a member of the UNIX family? No, it isn't, but it too can be treated as a Unix alike with the right functionality installed, and so can meet the Single Unix Spec and be POSIX complaint, just like Windows NT can be made to do. BeOS can't - it was brought close enough to offer a variety of functional GNU and Unixy tools, but unfortunately Be met its fate before madking it to the point where Government-level POSIX compliance was an issue, and the original sources weren't available enough that someone could legally (or apparently otherwise) hack it up to par.
Top in itself isn't important, but it was intended to point out that process control and scheduling in BeOS is a very different thing - instead of niceing processes from -20 to 20, there are multithread aware process groups, each group is killable, and each thread can range from 0 to 100. This can be used to host an externally convincing Unix simulation if tools are created specifically with that in mind (e.g. the much nicer top replacement that I had downloaded, an ifconfig, a bash that can access Be process controls), as the BeOS implementation is at least as functional - but it is still different. Conversely, Windows has a less functional scheduler, it can still simulate some of the behaivor of nice, but with much less granularity.
Like Window's weak scheduling, in some ways BeOS offered services that did not even approximate Unix functionality - notably the lack of multiuser infrastructure, and so only the thinnest facade of Unix was offered for that. Be doesn't internally manage itself like Unix! $ls -l would still show flags, user and group info, but only PC-DOS equivalent file permissions were grokked. (An interesting irony considering the post-Multics nomenclature of Unix.) Booting BeOS into Single-User Mode is not possible - Be doesn't boot like Unix! It offered a debugging mode and basic VGA in case your hardware driver was causing the boot issues, but nothing like SGI's PROM ofered. Note that on PowerPC, there was of course OpenFirmware like on Sun -
Re:Reasons why you should care:
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"It's an alternative to Windows
No it isn't. It doesn't run any of my Windows applications, doesn't run any games, doesn't run Word. It also doesn't work with all the hardware that Windows works with.
So - tell me: Why do you think that it's an "alternative to Windows" when it clearly isn't? If you ask me, I'd say that it's a less popular alternative to MacOS X that happens to run on x86."
Which coutertroll should I use?
A: No, It isn't. Is doesn't run any of your Windows bluescreens, doesn't run any spyware, doesn't run Viruses. It works with hardware Windows can't work with.
b: Yes, it is. It runs Opera and Mozilla, it runs Quake and Abuse, it runs AbiWord. It also doesn't need as powerful/expensive hardware as Windows needs to work with.
While (b) is point for point and explicit, I considered saying Media Players and Web Browsers, minesweeper and solitaire... and AbiWord. Make that choice (c)
What can Windows do that BeOS can't? BeOS wasn't designed for the latest hardware, a requirement to push all that bloated legacy cruft, inhereted bugs and complex liabilities (for malware and viruses to exploit). It was designed to run reasonably, even unexpectedly well as a media PC using - in the eye of some beholders - "underpowered" cheap hardware. With less resources, it can do far more. It's an alternative to the locked-in, forced MS upgrade, forced hardware upgrade style of computing. BeOS was designed for the cheap and pitiful Hobbit processor, and only ported to Intel because economies of scale made it cheap and available. BeOS is an alternative to buying a new PC when your old one os "obsolete".
Re:BeOS _is_ a member of the UNIX family.
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I basically agree with your posts in response to Dr Spong - except that the parent post contradicts most of your followups. Every argument you make for BeOS as a functional Unix applies equally to Windows NT with POSIX. If Unix is about providing a decent Bash environment, then both can do it equally well, with the respective POSIX interfaces that were slapped on. Early in BeOS, a decision was make to go with POSIX b/c they didn't have the programmer resourced to recreate the entire enviroment in the "modern, legacy free way" they would have like to, so they compromised and went with a Heirachical Filesystem to ease Posix compatiblity requirements. With their DB attributes, the Filesystem paradigm was arguably another peice of cruft. Using GCC and Bash let them leverage existing commandline infrastructure...
Wait a minute. I don't want to get into another nitpicking fest. Let me just restart this. Yes, the BeOS is a very comfortable and familiar environment for a UNIX user, as well as a Windows user, and a MacOS System user. (I never considered myself an Amiga user, so I won't comment - except to say there was an easter egg that allowed simulation of any of these desktops.) And who cares if it boots nothing like Unix. It could understand Bash scripts, and if you want to, you could use a remote BeOS system with a Bash interface very comfortably if you are used to Bash interfaces.
The thing that made BeOS's adoption of POSIX great was that you could run a command line as the workhorse engine, and then have a nice, responsive multithreaded completely non-Unix (read X11 - bleargh) non-blocking GUI interface on top of it. The Best of both worlds, a powerful command line with a fluid Gui. Even now, as nice as GNOME and KDE have become, even on modern hardware, they feel HEAVY and Stagnant compared to the smooth and responsive BeOS Gui. When Epiphany or FireFox choke on me, they dissapear. Very frustrating to lose track of where you were browsing - at least Epiphany offers to recover your last open pages. With Net+, I would move the Error dialog out of my way, finish reading the displayed page, scroll through the rest, and then close it and acknowledge the error.
As nice as eradiating BigGiantLocks in modern "Unix" kernels is, BeOS did away with all that cruft - the "kernel" included, by microkerneling everything into userland. This allowed them to focus on making the single user experience, and they then later slapped some Unix APIs on the side. As long as you intend the machine as a single user system, it can Be whatever you want. But you lose your suspension of disbeleif when you try to run the "native" top. Downloading a Unixier top was a very good thing to do. Note that GCC wasn't ported to BeOS until later, it was only Metroworks for quite some time.
As I understand it, a Ternary System would require less hardware, less circuit complexity, which is definitely worthwhile. So while this isn't a comment on the utility of the abstract logic, it is a comment on the usefulness of the logic to simplify hardware requirements.
Not knowing what I am talking about, I might theorize that perhaps miniatuization efforts might be able to leverage the reduction in hardware complexity. But does a change fom e.g. +1 to -1 actually take longer than a change from +1 to 0?
Re:At least you admit I had a good point.
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MicroBSD Is No More
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"It (wa)s overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill."
About my momma, that would be your second good point. Kudos.
"I hate to split hairs, but running a global search and replace (which appears to not have been done, or done on a regular..."
"...example). Perhaps this can be attributed to a mindless global sed command. It's still pretty irresponsible. "
If you hate to split hairs, then I'd hate to split your head open, but "I get the feeling that perhaps" your entire post was shit, and I don't mind burning karma to point that out to you and any moderators with an ounce of sense. I would give all of my karma to be able to smack you upside the head just once.
Your post reeked less of a clever monkey then a zombie parrot. No, wait, your hollow innuendos and insightful link to openbsd.org transformed your comment into a valuable piece of insight. A mistaken search and replace was actually a sinister plot to defame OpenBSD.
Your post was also irresponsible - it was self contradictory. Yet it contained slightly less text than the source code for an OS, and you couldn't be beothered to briefly check over it.
"I don't know if/MicroBSD/c13v3rm0nk3y/ should be held up to the same standards or not..." You are utterly nauseating. "The reason for all the furor seems to be that there appears to be some amount of disingenuousness with the..." baseless accusations you make to excuse persecuting an innocent mistake.
Do the world a favor and Open Source your internal organs.
... However, the issue wasn't restitution, so the offence can never be absolved, despite the destruction of the project and the alienation of hopeful developers for an innocent mistake made by one of them.
I am certain that you have never made a careless mistake when executing a UNIX command line. Even if you ever could have, it would have never caused you any harm because of your real-time streaming backup system, so if you accidentally made a less then comprehensively correct Regular Expression, you could easily prevent the problem from ever being caught by immediately powering off your system.
Strangulation with red tape would be too good for unhuman scum like you. A "core dump" on your face would be generous. Burn those witches, Idiot.
While not necessarily disagreeing with you, your post would perhaps have been more useful had it suggested an alternative term to use instead of "socialism".
I will admit that I really shouldn't have capitalized "Socialism" as I did, but might the lower case version of the word still prompt your response? Let me respond to you in kind. "Socially conscious", or rather "social consciousness" only reflects awareness, and not necessarily the intention of action as "social responsibility" does. I used the vulgar sense of Socialism to mean the latter, not quite the former. I will grant to you that Communism is probably a better Strawman than Socialism in this illustration.
As for politically loaded terms, "Welfare" is hardly neutral, but I'm not sure that the combined bias against those worsds was quite enough to balance the Politically Incorrect "selfishness." I capitalized Individualism to perhaps conjure up images of "Rugged Individualism", trying to counteract selfishness, the only non-capital label in the phrase. Again, I probably shouldn't have capitalized either Socialism, or Individualism.
At least now I have "social responsibility" to replace Socialism. How do you suggest I avoid the more Socially/Politically loaded term of selfishness?
>> The GNU philosophy is intended to keep the software free - I don't care about your freedom to enslave my software.
>You know, that's a very good summary of GNU software. The freedom of the software is more important then the freedom of users. BSD applies the reverse philosophy. Which license is better, is subjective.
Close. The freedom of society to use the software is more important than any individual's freedom to use, or prevent others from using the software. That is usually called Socialism, versus Individualism. Welfare versus selfishness. Which philosophy is better, is subjective.
p.s. Personally, I dislike government mandated Socialism, but software, and "Intellectual Property" in general seems to be inflated in value and overly hoarded. Sharing information eventually increases compassion, so that charity should not need to be mandated from authorities.
Double mangled corruption redundancy cancellation
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Kevin Free
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Yes, that construction is both wrong, and double mangled, just like 1.44MB floppy disks are wrong (IIRC, mixing SI and binary).
The trouble in both cases comes from inconsistent conventions. Either use English conventions or "hackish" conventions, but not both. In hackish, you might have said:
...would you have typed "bar.."?
In Standard English, double quotes would have been more proper, i.e.:
...would you have typed "'bar..'?"
In hackish, there are other conventions which might have proven helpful. Perhaps using [period] to specify the "." character, for example.
Note also, that although the sysadmin constructed the message, it was intended for an audience more versed in Proper English than various computing-derived variants of the language, and so the sysadmin did "The Right Thing" in choosing the path of least surprise. If a trailing period were the last character in the password, then perhaps an extra bit of prose could have made that sufficiently unambiguous.
If I had 3 phase power handy, I'd take a handful of post Infinite Reality pipelines over an ATI/nVidia anyday. Now as for fitting that onto my desk.... hrmmm....
If your problem with Open Source software is the brief support and releace cycles, then you don't want Red Hat, you want Debian.
If you want to pay somebody to support it, I suggest you look at Progeny, who are very experienced with Debian, and used to support their own distribution... unless you prefer LibraNet's customized Debian distribution. Either way, I believe that Progeny will support any Debian derived OS, and they have much experience and history with the Debian Project.
If you aren't looking for flashiness, but for solid performance and reliability, then go with standard Debian Stable - their release cycle is paced much better, they really are Stable, and they support their releases much longer than other Open Source OSes. Either look into Progeny or find something else here.
You don't recommend Debian because the OpenBSD project has a new major release every 6 months? Would you mind clarifying that?
As for OpenBSD, you only need to upgrade when there is a flaw in some part of the system that you use, or a security risk. That should take less than 6 months to test. Hell, if you can wait 6 months before rolling out a security fix, then what's the sudden rush? You don't need to install OpenBSD 3.1, by the time you are done evaluating each security fix, just install OpenBSD 3.3 or 3.4.
Seriously, if you can't handle the 1 year (6 + 6 months) upgrade cycle, then just use Debian stable. You really need to explain that unfounded pot shot at Debian, which is very stable, and doesn't force you to reinstall at all... just keep up to date with the security patches, and you shouldn't have to upgrade in your hardware's lifetime.
Oh, and screw H-PU-X , Slowlaris or ACHES, your customers need to demand IRIX!
"Sol" is the name of our local star not because of the flexibility of a language, but because the choice of which language to use is flexible.
Not to say that a language cannot be flexible, especially a "living" language. Be it jargon, regional dialect or slang, slashdotted, boxen, phat can become viable.
The same isn't true for "Linux" over GNU/Linux. You don't call an apple an "orange" and say that it is correct because language is flexible, without some extreme application of poetic license. You also don't call a star "the Moon", a tree an "apple" or call a GNU OS "Linux".
Now you might call a potato an "apple of the earth" or a lime a "lemon", but that would be anoter instance where the choice of language is flexible, not where the language itself should be corruptibly flexible.
If you hate the term GNU/Linux, then just call it GNU. Nobody know's what you are talking about? then call it "GNU with Linux". If they don't know what GNU is, then they probably have no idea what a kernel is, so there is no point in talking about Linux anyway. Say "free Windows alternative".
Now do you really say "zero-w'nz-three-d"? That isn't really flexibility in language, that is "clever" dissafection, like "womyn". Heavy handed and artificial mutations don't illustrate the flexibility of language, but the speaker's need for attention.
Do you have any references? This was used as a form of espionage for decades, but I know of no laws regarding it.
Also, what are the easy and inexpensive protections? Double planing all glass windows and piping subterfuge noise to each interwindow cavity? That doesn't sound inexpensive to me.
With their positions as Interstate Superpowers, the US and EU also have the most restrictive effects in their applications of patent law. Since the US surpassed other nations global superpower, it really doesn't seem that we should be fighting so hard to be a global brain-drain at the cost of humanity... patents should be loosened, we are ahead of the game internationally.
It seems that the whole patent's protecting the huge investment of corporate research is an effective strawman, allowing the first company to strike upon a useful solution to global ills to hold humanity in its grasp, extorting those who it claims to be be helping.
It's not as if there isn't already significant interest in solving these problems. It's just unlikely that anybody else can beat a multibilliondollar corporation to the finish line, especially with the stifling portfolio of previous patents many of then have acquired. Perhaps independent, or or civic minded researcher could also come up with thereputic methods to cure disease, but not when they are competing with bottomless pits of money and influence.
Sure, the huge corporation might come up with the cure earlier than more charitable "competition", but how it that a benefit if the solution is then withheld from the world for X years beyond the lifespan of the original patentholder. How many lifetimes is that when you consider the afflicted who can't afford to recompensate the behemoth researcher who withholds this aid from the rest of the world?
Patents have multiplied almost as gemetrically as many pathogens, but they have outlifed their original, healthy purpose. Now they are a blight upon society, and should be eradicated.
unfortuantely, it is much easier to control the populations of moquitoes than it is lawyers...
All very good points, especially about Debian Policy. Perhaps that is why Progeny Debian had to be deiscontinued, because that was what they were lacking - Debian policy and community. Perhaps the selflessness of the community might becompromised by introducing finances into the mix... but I really don't think it even got close enough to that point before withdrawing their distribution.
One little addition... even if the product doesn't use the kernel Linux, it is still probably a good idea to integrate - as policy is greater than any one kernel. As the presentation pointed out when it tried to describe Debian from the Linux point of view "Sorry, This was Wrong". Debian is greater than Linux, or even a Unix like OS that uses Linux.
Too bad you didn't just try an earlier version of LibraNet. Especially since if it fixes the problem (maybe by using an earlier revision of the kernel) you can then apt-get to the more featureful apps included with later versions (especially since you already bought the newer version).
Whether or not it was Linux, the kernel causing the problem, you probably should have reported it back to LibraNet. since you bought it, you should be entitled to some support, and they can then improve LibraNet for everybody.
If Red Hat is getting the job done, then Kudos. But if you have to reinstall, maybe you could give LibraNet a heads up to fix your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing in the GPL that equates "comunity" and "the world as a whole". There is no default community that is entitled to anything. Once you distribute software to somebody, then they are brought into your "community". Neither you nor they are obligated to give anything to Torvalds or Stallman, only the sources to what you already provided the community you created.
Now that doesn't explicitly exclude them either - any party in your community can later decide to give (sell) this software to Stallman, which would then bring Stallman into their newly formed "community". This would cause no further obligations on you towards Stallman, but they would be obligated to offer Stallman for 3 years, the source to what they gave him - regardless of whether they originally got it from you.
Corporate policy should be able to limit your subsidiaries from then practically bringing unwanted members into any community with access to your in house software.
Perhaps as a precondition to any divesting of these subsidiaries, they could be required to stop using this software - not as per the GPL, but as a condition of the spin-off or take-over. Even if not, there is no requirement to give them the source, only to formally offer it for 3 years. So then the company must remain fully in your control until the term has passed.
The GPL was intended to be comprehensible by the General Public, so as to be useable as the General Public('s) License. All in all, other than a less legal than technical points, it has done a pretty good job of that. In this case, it sounds almost as if your lawyers were going more by misunderstood gossip than by the letter of the license, which IMO keeps a fair approximation of the spirit of the license.
Of course, I'm no lawyer. But I am a member of the General Public, and I present this official opinion as a member of the General Public. I futher acknowledge that in fact and in deed, GNU is Not UNIX. (But it might be Unix.)
I am really not of the UNIX generation, so I guess I never really saw the simple consistency of UNIX in that light - as a desireable, working and useful in and of itself worldview. It seems I was always seeing efforts at moving away from UNIX, towards Windows, towards Linux. Maybe that's why I'm such a BeFanboy, instead of a Weenix-Weenie.
Yes, what I am looking for isn't UNIX, and might not even be Unix except for an accessible environment or emulation I can call, much like WINE - only when I need it, because some useful functionality hasn't yet been properly reimplemented natively. I might merely be looking for a post MacOS/Win95 WIMP desktop system, with a decent, fairly featureful but completely multithreaded nonblocking webbrowser, and a standard productivity suite. I would like UNIX style low-fat remote accessibility for the times some shit hits the fan - a nice OpenFirmware might even do the trick if GRUB can't be brought up to the task.
The name for what I wanted was BeOS, and it always felt over 89% there, until it got buried. Java for the Web, AbiWord almost Word compatible, NetPositive no Javascript yet, Mozilla almost feasible... no, it wasn't UNIX, it was just a nice smooth desktop that had plenty of promise. I'm not using Unix for UNIX, but for the glut of existing apps that can run on it - mostly GNU.
Just like I didn't really use IRIX for UNIX, but for the hardware that ran on it, and some of the fancy software that could take advantage of it. Maybe I could have gone a different way with different experiences, but for me, Unix is just one means to an end of an alternate desktop. The networking features were more of a luxury than a necessity for me, so more often than not the BeOS Network Kit fit the bill, and even if I broke it, it wouldn't take down the rest of my system. Because I don't trust BeOS networking as much as say OpenBSD, I really would rather avoid the BONE setup, and keep things segregated.
So you already had what you were looking for, and didn't need BeOS to be your UNIX. But I still need Haiku, or Blue-Eyed OS (what happened to it?) or maybe a different alternative Debian desktop, or Yellowtab or Zeta to be my BeOS.
Thanks for clarifying your posts. It was informative, and only consumed huge chunks of my time. Thanks for spending yours as well.
Oh, and also for the sockpuppets vivisecting meatpuppets, and the literate daemon-king. It much better than going outdoors.
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement. For most people who now use "Unix", this is an obsolescent use - probably because we never used a historic "UNIX" productively as a stand alone system like you apparently have - today, most of the value of Unix is how it adheres to POSIX and such for the sake of inter-computer interaction. Most people today would only value UNIX for historical or legal purposes, to trace the direct lineage - not for the "UNIX" interfaces which have since been largely redefined, other than the basic HCI which is still available and basically the same. It seems to me, you assign value to UNIX as a consistent Human-Computer-Interface, meaning the HCI presented by UNIX in its heyday before POSIX, GNU, and UNIX(tm) was shuffled around. This somewhat unique, though very respectable stance you seem to be coming from can be causing confusion, if only for its rarity in today's "Brave GNU World".
For most people today, the term "Unix" is "Unix family" or "Unix-alike", which means a system capable of behaving according to modern POSIX and SUS definitions. BeOS cannot reach that, but it is close enough for somebody who only needs "UNIX" - it will fail to provide for modern Unix's needs. WinNT is farther by default, but can be brought into line to various degrees with different products. I propose as far as the defaults, this is because BeOS (by design) is much simpler, and there is no reason not to present that default - but then you can't get much further past the default. Here's a question - do you perceive that there is any way in which a system can pass as a modern Unix but not live up to your legacy UNIX? It seems you say WindowsNT doesn't, because it's Unix or UNIX is "slapped on the side". I would assume Mac OS X does. Does VMS? How about modern IBM mainframes? The ones that host Linux environments?
Now for you, the BeOS presents a useful UNIX HCI as you see it, and I have to agree with that, so it presents a useful "UNIX family" interface, and even API as long as you can stick to the C subset of the BeOS C++ API, and to straightfordward shell scripting. However, it does not present sufficient "Unix" HCIs, computer-computer interfaces, or sub-shell level programming APIs to be usefully considered "Unix family" to most modern perspectives.
(AKA UNIX, as opposed to a modern, POSIX multiuser post-UNIX Unix with X11 on top.)
Now for the other bit of confusion.
Windows NT can provide a "native" "Unix" API, with or without Interix as part of the solution. I don't know what kind of shell will made you happy, but Korn is at least as "UNIX" as BeOS BASH, in that neither one is CSH (assuming that CSH is historic UNIX enough to satify your needs). If Kor doesn't cut it, I am aware of BASH interfaces for DOS/Windows and WinNT as well.
Windows can present a telnet interface just like BeOS. BeOS is much easier to activate - it's hard to beat the checkbox interface. But then, for everyting that BeOS properly supports, it is much easier than Windows. There are also many things that BeOS supports through its partial POSIX systems that are much harder to use than wha
I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX family, but only by marriage or law, not by blood.
If TCP and by extention Telnet are part of your definition of a member of the UNIX family, then there was no UNIX before there was BSD. Were SGI GL and Sun News Unix? I never used a pre-4dwm Silicon Graphics box, or a pre Single Unix System Unix for that matter, so I won't go there. Practically speaking, sometime before 1985 or so with POSIX, and after Berkley first developing TCP for their Unix, there was no UNIX in any current sense of the term.
My most important point, that you didn't touch on, is my objection to your grandparent post. POSIX is indeed slapped on the side of the non-Unix BeOS, and while a fair approximaion of it, this is a less complete POSIX than those available for Windows NT. Before Microsoft purchased Interex (which I've honestly never used, I have successfully avoided XP until very recently), there was an NT Services for Unix, which if you installed the Telnet server (included with NT Server 4.0 CD), it did indeed allow you to log in remotely and use Korn's POSIX Shell. Even though Windows and BeOS don't internally use or boot with Unix, after booting they are both able to present passable Unix interfaces (with appearances of POSIX compliant subsystems) because most of their internal systems are at least as funtional, even if different from Unix, and so can maintain most of the Unix facade.
My point with top and GCC was to point out that internally, BeOS is not Unix, and it boots and manages itself differently than Unix, or a even a kernel traditional proper. Would you say Unix style job control is a part of your definition for a member of the UNIX family? Because if you try to compile BASH with GCC, it will die when it fails to comprehend the job control parts. Forget about native C compilers - unless you consider Metroworks native - that would be at least as native as it to Mac OS System (pre-Mach). That is to say, not at all native.
Is VMS a member of the UNIX family? No, it isn't, but it too can be treated as a Unix alike with the right functionality installed, and so can meet the Single Unix Spec and be POSIX complaint, just like Windows NT can be made to do. BeOS can't - it was brought close enough to offer a variety of functional GNU and Unixy tools, but unfortunately Be met its fate before madking it to the point where Government-level POSIX compliance was an issue, and the original sources weren't available enough that someone could legally (or apparently otherwise) hack it up to par.
Top in itself isn't important, but it was intended to point out that process control and scheduling in BeOS is a very different thing - instead of niceing processes from -20 to 20, there are multithread aware process groups, each group is killable, and each thread can range from 0 to 100. This can be used to host an externally convincing Unix simulation if tools are created specifically with that in mind (e.g. the much nicer top replacement that I had downloaded, an ifconfig, a bash that can access Be process controls), as the BeOS implementation is at least as functional - but it is still different. Conversely, Windows has a less functional scheduler, it can still simulate some of the behaivor of nice, but with much less granularity.
Like Window's weak scheduling, in some ways BeOS offered services that did not even approximate Unix functionality - notably the lack of multiuser infrastructure, and so only the thinnest facade of Unix was offered for that. Be doesn't internally manage itself like Unix! $ls -l would still show flags, user and group info, but only PC-DOS equivalent file permissions were grokked. (An interesting irony considering the post-Multics nomenclature of Unix.) Booting BeOS into Single-User Mode is not possible - Be doesn't boot like Unix! It offered a debugging mode and basic VGA in case your hardware driver was causing the boot issues, but nothing like SGI's PROM ofered. Note that on PowerPC, there was of course OpenFirmware like on Sun -
"It's an alternative to Windows
No it isn't. It doesn't run any of my Windows applications, doesn't run any games, doesn't run Word. It also doesn't work with all the hardware that Windows works with.
So - tell me: Why do you think that it's an "alternative to Windows" when it clearly isn't? If you ask me, I'd say that it's a less popular alternative to MacOS X that happens to run on x86."
Which coutertroll should I use?
A: No, It isn't. Is doesn't run any of your Windows bluescreens, doesn't run any spyware, doesn't run Viruses. It works with hardware Windows can't work with.
b: Yes, it is. It runs Opera and Mozilla, it runs Quake and Abuse, it runs AbiWord. It also doesn't need as powerful/expensive hardware as Windows needs to work with.
While (b) is point for point and explicit, I considered saying Media Players and Web Browsers, minesweeper and solitaire... and AbiWord. Make that choice (c)
What can Windows do that BeOS can't? BeOS wasn't designed for the latest hardware, a requirement to push all that bloated legacy cruft, inhereted bugs and complex liabilities (for malware and viruses to exploit). It was designed to run reasonably, even unexpectedly well as a media PC using - in the eye of some beholders - "underpowered" cheap hardware. With less resources, it can do far more. It's an alternative to the locked-in, forced MS upgrade, forced hardware upgrade style of computing. BeOS was designed for the cheap and pitiful Hobbit processor, and only ported to Intel because economies of scale made it cheap and available. BeOS is an alternative to buying a new PC when your old one os "obsolete".
I basically agree with your posts in response to Dr Spong - except that the parent post contradicts most of your followups. Every argument you make for BeOS as a functional Unix applies equally to Windows NT with POSIX. If Unix is about providing a decent Bash environment, then both can do it equally well, with the respective POSIX interfaces that were slapped on. Early in BeOS, a decision was make to go with POSIX b/c they didn't have the programmer resourced to recreate the entire enviroment in the "modern, legacy free way" they would have like to, so they compromised and went with a Heirachical Filesystem to ease Posix compatiblity requirements. With their DB attributes, the Filesystem paradigm was arguably another peice of cruft. Using GCC and Bash let them leverage existing commandline infrastructure...
Wait a minute. I don't want to get into another nitpicking fest. Let me just restart this. Yes, the BeOS is a very comfortable and familiar environment for a UNIX user, as well as a Windows user, and a MacOS System user. (I never considered myself an Amiga user, so I won't comment - except to say there was an easter egg that allowed simulation of any of these desktops.) And who cares if it boots nothing like Unix. It could understand Bash scripts, and if you want to, you could use a remote BeOS system with a Bash interface very comfortably if you are used to Bash interfaces.
The thing that made BeOS's adoption of POSIX great was that you could run a command line as the workhorse engine, and then have a nice, responsive multithreaded completely non-Unix (read X11 - bleargh) non-blocking GUI interface on top of it. The Best of both worlds, a powerful command line with a fluid Gui. Even now, as nice as GNOME and KDE have become, even on modern hardware, they feel HEAVY and Stagnant compared to the smooth and responsive BeOS Gui. When Epiphany or FireFox choke on me, they dissapear. Very frustrating to lose track of where you were browsing - at least Epiphany offers to recover your last open pages. With Net+, I would move the Error dialog out of my way, finish reading the displayed page, scroll through the rest, and then close it and acknowledge the error.
As nice as eradiating BigGiantLocks in modern "Unix" kernels is, BeOS did away with all that cruft - the "kernel" included, by microkerneling everything into userland. This allowed them to focus on making the single user experience, and they then later slapped some Unix APIs on the side. As long as you intend the machine as a single user system, it can Be whatever you want. But you lose your suspension of disbeleif when you try to run the "native" top. Downloading a Unixier top was a very good thing to do. Note that GCC wasn't ported to BeOS until later, it was only Metroworks for quite some time.
That's just in preparation for season 10. That's when Yoda is going to storm the Azguard homeworld.
As I understand it, a Ternary System would require less hardware, less circuit complexity, which is definitely worthwhile. So while this isn't a comment on the utility of the abstract logic, it is a comment on the usefulness of the logic to simplify hardware requirements.
Not knowing what I am talking about, I might theorize that perhaps miniatuization efforts might be able to leverage the reduction in hardware complexity. But does a change fom e.g. +1 to -1 actually take longer than a change from +1 to 0?
"It (wa)s overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill."
About my momma, that would be your second good point. Kudos.
Thank you for providing a release. I really do feel better now.
*phew*
Although if you view really were an opposition, and not a party line, it really wouldn't have been as satisfying as it was.
"I hate to split hairs, but running a global search and replace (which appears to not have been done, or done on a regular..."
/MicroBSD/c13v3rm0nk3y/ should be held up to the same standards or not..." You are utterly nauseating.
"...example). Perhaps this can be attributed to a mindless global sed command. It's still pretty irresponsible. "
If you hate to split hairs, then I'd hate to split your head open, but "I get the feeling that perhaps" your entire post was shit, and I don't mind burning karma to point that out to you and any moderators with an ounce of sense. I would give all of my karma to be able to smack you upside the head just once.
Your post reeked less of a clever monkey then a zombie parrot. No, wait, your hollow innuendos and insightful link to openbsd.org transformed your comment into a valuable piece of insight. A mistaken search and replace was actually a sinister plot to defame OpenBSD.
Your post was also irresponsible - it was self contradictory. Yet it contained slightly less text than the source code for an OS, and you couldn't be beothered to briefly check over it.
"I don't know if
"The reason for all the furor seems to be that there appears to be some amount of disingenuousness with the..." baseless accusations you make to excuse persecuting an innocent mistake.
Do the world a favor and Open Source your internal organs.
... However, the issue wasn't restitution, so the offence can never be absolved, despite the destruction of the project and the alienation of hopeful developers for an innocent mistake made by one of them.
I am certain that you have never made a careless mistake when executing a UNIX command line. Even if you ever could have, it would have never caused you any harm because of your real-time streaming backup system, so if you accidentally made a less then comprehensively correct Regular Expression, you could easily prevent the problem from ever being caught by immediately powering off your system.
Strangulation with red tape would be too good for unhuman scum like you. A "core dump" on your face would be generous. Burn those witches, Idiot.
Touche.
While not necessarily disagreeing with you, your post would perhaps have been more useful had it suggested an alternative term to use instead of "socialism".
I will admit that I really shouldn't have capitalized "Socialism" as I did, but might the lower case version of the word still prompt your response? Let me respond to you in kind. "Socially conscious", or rather "social consciousness" only reflects awareness, and not necessarily the intention of action as "social responsibility" does. I used the vulgar sense of Socialism to mean the latter, not quite the former. I will grant to you that Communism is probably a better Strawman than Socialism in this illustration.
As for politically loaded terms, "Welfare" is hardly neutral, but I'm not sure that the combined bias against those worsds was quite enough to balance the Politically Incorrect "selfishness." I capitalized Individualism to perhaps conjure up images of "Rugged Individualism", trying to counteract selfishness, the only non-capital label in the phrase. Again, I probably shouldn't have capitalized either Socialism, or Individualism.
At least now I have "social responsibility" to replace Socialism. How do you suggest I avoid the more Socially/Politically loaded term of selfishness?
>> The GNU philosophy is intended to keep the software free - I don't care about your freedom to enslave my software.
>You know, that's a very good summary of GNU software. The freedom of the software is more important then the freedom of users. BSD applies the reverse philosophy. Which license is better, is subjective.
Close. The freedom of society to use the software is more important than any individual's freedom to use, or prevent others from using the software. That is usually called Socialism, versus Individualism. Welfare versus selfishness. Which philosophy is better, is subjective.
p.s. Personally, I dislike government mandated Socialism, but software, and "Intellectual Property" in general seems to be inflated in value and overly hoarded. Sharing information eventually increases compassion, so that charity should not need to be mandated from authorities.
The trouble in both cases comes from inconsistent conventions. Either use English conventions or "hackish" conventions, but not both. In hackish, you might have said:
In Standard English, double quotes would have been more proper, i.e.:
In hackish, there are other conventions which might have proven helpful. Perhaps using [period] to specify the "." character, for example.
Note also, that although the sysadmin constructed the message, it was intended for an audience more versed in Proper English than various computing-derived variants of the language, and so the sysadmin did "The Right Thing" in choosing the path of least surprise. If a trailing period were the last character in the password, then perhaps an extra bit of prose could have made that sufficiently unambiguous.
*ahem*
ASCI Blue Mountain would likely do the trick.
If I had 3 phase power handy, I'd take a handful of post Infinite Reality pipelines over an ATI/nVidia anyday. Now as for fitting that onto my desk.... hrmmm....
maybe it would fit into a CAVE.
If your problem with Open Source software is the brief support and releace cycles, then you don't want Red Hat, you want Debian.
If you want to pay somebody to support it, I suggest you look at Progeny, who are very experienced with Debian, and used to support their own distribution... unless you prefer LibraNet's customized Debian distribution. Either way, I believe that Progeny will support any Debian derived OS, and they have much experience and history with the Debian Project.
If you aren't looking for flashiness, but for solid performance and reliability, then go with standard Debian Stable - their release cycle is paced much better, they really are Stable, and they support their releases much longer than other Open Source OSes. Either look into Progeny or find something else here.
You don't recommend Debian because the OpenBSD project has a new major release every 6 months? Would you mind clarifying that?
As for OpenBSD, you only need to upgrade when there is a flaw in some part of the system that you use, or a security risk. That should take less than 6 months to test. Hell, if you can wait 6 months before rolling out a security fix, then what's the sudden rush? You don't need to install OpenBSD 3.1, by the time you are done evaluating each security fix, just install OpenBSD 3.3 or 3.4.
Seriously, if you can't handle the 1 year (6 + 6 months) upgrade cycle, then just use Debian stable. You really need to explain that unfounded pot shot at Debian, which is very stable, and doesn't force you to reinstall at all... just keep up to date with the security patches, and you shouldn't have to upgrade in your hardware's lifetime.
Oh, and screw H-PU-X , Slowlaris or ACHES, your customers need to demand IRIX!
Nah, you screwed up the analagy.
"Sol" is the name of our local star not because of the flexibility of a language, but because the choice of which language to use is flexible.
Not to say that a language cannot be flexible, especially a "living" language. Be it jargon, regional dialect or slang, slashdotted, boxen, phat can become viable.
The same isn't true for "Linux" over GNU/Linux. You don't call an apple an "orange" and say that it is correct because language is flexible, without some extreme application of poetic license. You also don't call a star "the Moon", a tree an "apple" or call a GNU OS "Linux".
Now you might call a potato an "apple of the earth" or a lime a "lemon", but that would be anoter instance where the choice of language is flexible, not where the language itself should be corruptibly flexible.
If you hate the term GNU/Linux, then just call it GNU. Nobody know's what you are talking about? then call it "GNU with Linux". If they don't know what GNU is, then they probably have no idea what a kernel is, so there is no point in talking about Linux anyway. Say "free Windows alternative".
Now do you really say "zero-w'nz-three-d"? That isn't really flexibility in language, that is "clever" dissafection, like "womyn". Heavy handed and artificial mutations don't illustrate the flexibility of language, but the speaker's need for attention.
Don't Sneeze!
If you have to sneeze, hold your damn nose, and look the other way.
---
Excuse my while I powder my nose.
Do you have any references? This was used as a form of espionage for decades, but I know of no laws regarding it.
Also, what are the easy and inexpensive protections? Double planing all glass windows and piping subterfuge noise to each interwindow cavity? That doesn't sound inexpensive to me.
With their positions as Interstate Superpowers, the US and EU also have the most restrictive effects in their applications of patent law. Since the US surpassed other nations global superpower, it really doesn't seem that we should be fighting so hard to be a global brain-drain at the cost of humanity... patents should be loosened, we are ahead of the game internationally.
It seems that the whole patent's protecting the huge investment of corporate research is an effective strawman, allowing the first company to strike upon a useful solution to global ills to hold humanity in its grasp, extorting those who it claims to be be helping.
It's not as if there isn't already significant interest in solving these problems. It's just unlikely that anybody else can beat a multibilliondollar corporation to the finish line, especially with the stifling portfolio of previous patents many of then have acquired. Perhaps independent, or or civic minded researcher could also come up with thereputic methods to cure disease, but not when they are competing with bottomless pits of money and influence.
Sure, the huge corporation might come up with the cure earlier than more charitable "competition", but how it that a benefit if the solution is then withheld from the world for X years beyond the lifespan of the original patentholder. How many lifetimes is that when you consider the afflicted who can't afford to recompensate the behemoth researcher who withholds this aid from the rest of the world?
Patents have multiplied almost as gemetrically as many pathogens, but they have outlifed their original, healthy purpose. Now they are a blight upon society, and should be eradicated.
unfortuantely, it is much easier to control the populations of moquitoes than it is lawyers...
All very good points, especially about Debian Policy. Perhaps that is why Progeny Debian had to be deiscontinued, because that was what they were lacking - Debian policy and community. Perhaps the selflessness of the community might becompromised by introducing finances into the mix... but I really don't think it even got close enough to that point before withdrawing their distribution.
One little addition... even if the product doesn't use the kernel Linux, it is still probably a good idea to integrate - as policy is greater than any one kernel. As the presentation pointed out when it tried to describe Debian from the Linux point of view "Sorry, This was Wrong". Debian is greater than Linux, or even a Unix like OS that uses Linux.
Too bad you didn't just try an earlier version of LibraNet. Especially since if it fixes the problem (maybe by using an earlier revision of the kernel) you can then apt-get to the more featureful apps included with later versions (especially since you already bought the newer version).
Whether or not it was Linux, the kernel causing the problem, you probably should have reported it back to LibraNet. since you bought it, you should be entitled to some support, and they can then improve LibraNet for everybody.
If Red Hat is getting the job done, then Kudos. But if you have to reinstall, maybe you could give LibraNet a heads up to fix your problem.