As I understand things, it's the main copyright holder who can throw in an exception to the GPL (or some other license). If a group of people hold the copyright, they probably flame themselves on their private mailing list for a few days, and then make a public decision.:)
The history of Bison, as I understand it, makes this fairly interesting. IIRC, Bison was derived (by Richard Stallman, et al) from a Yacc which had a Berkeley style license. After he made his changes, he put Bison under the GNU GPL. People had concerns about Bison's output being automatically under the GPL, so the exception that Bruce mentioned above was introduced.
But what I'm curious about is what happens in a circumstance like this: J. R. Hacker writes a useful program that outputs some code. His useful program is under a BSD style copyright. I like his program, make some changes for myself, and put the new bit under the GPL. With my new souped up version, the outputted code is also under the GPL, because I want it that way. Now... can the program's original author, J. R. Hacker, preempt my licensing decision and say that output from the program, even my version, needn't be covered by the GPL?
There's a lot of potential for confusion here. My proposed solution? Make all software free, everywhere. All of this licensing crapola would go out the door. Everyone would be happy once the dust settled. It wouldn't send anyone into the poor house, either. But we all knew that.
Funny, but I've found most perl documentation to be guilty of providing correct but largely useless (or at least opaque) answers. (The llama book is an exception.)
On the other hand, the documentation that I've read for various GNU software is excellent. Coming to mind immediately is documentation for emacs, emacs-lisp, bison, and gdb. The problem is that you either need to print it out or suffer with the various info readers. (Or, you can read a lot of these in nicely formatted HTML at delorie.com/.)
GNU docs are not quite as copious, but significantly more useful, than any perl docs I've read.
The end result, hopefully, will be to make something like Emacs for GUIs. The Guile home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html - read it! If you don't like Scheme, the reason GNU picked it is that Scheme is powerful enough to write translators for other languages (for example, you can extend GUILE programs with a C-like syntax.)
Agreed, it looks like once more programs start using GUILE for extensibility, it'll be über-cool.
Problem is that, last I looked into it, not too many translators actually exist yet; in fact, I'm not sure that any do yet. Jim Blandy (the guy who maintains GUILE) thinks that some translators, such as Python -> Scheme, would be relatively easy to write, while a Perl -> Scheme translator "...[would be] a herculean task, because Perl's syntax and semantics are so complicated. Hats off to whoever even tries this."
A lot of people know and like Perl, and I'd hazard that the number of people who would be interested in writing extensions for programs in Perl probably outnumber the people interested in doing the same with Python or Scheme by an order of magnitude. A well-implemented way to get Perl and GUILE play nice together (or, more to the point, to speak the same language to each other) would probably accelerate GUILE's acceptance significantly.
A side note or two: I've read somewhere that one of the future plans for emacs (both the GNU flavor and the xemacs flavor) include ultimately replacing emacs lisp with a scheme of some sort. This is going to be a Big Deal when it happens, although probably not as bitching-inducing as libc upgrades. Also.. GUILE's real homepage is at www.red-bean.com/guile/. Check it out.
nodnod. WAAF is best rock station I've ever heard. Even despite that obnoxious white trash superstar wench Carrie who's on in the evenings.
There is no way that any globally broadcasted station would be anything like WAAF. It is far too controversial.
Remember when, before they moved to that sinkhole, O&A used to do that obnoxious "Radio Voice"? Well, with global radio stations, we get to look forward to listening to every rock DJ talking like that. It's pretty depressing to think about. Like John Ostralind says, the masses are asses. You see it on TV already, and it's coming to radio soon. Enjoy the stations like we've got in Boston while they last.
(btw, it sucks that in my last week in the Boston area, nay, the USA, for probably ywo years, Ostralind had to be out 3 times. Damnit!:/)
It's really upsetting to me when people claim that Linux's uptime should be measured in years. It's a lie, and I think most people realize this, whether they want to admit it or not. I don't think I've ever used a box that has an uptime of years. My personal uptime record is somewhere around 66 or 67 days; I love Linux; I advocate using Linux where appropriate; but I don't lie about it.
It would be fair to say that Linux's uptime is best measured in days (or maybe even weeks), while Windows' uptimes should probably be measured in hours. Saying that Linux's uptimes should be measured in years is akin to saying that people's heights should be measured in kilometers or miles. (But it's not quite the same -- after all, there are several boxen with multiyear uptimes, but not many. Obviously, there aren't any people who are KMs tall.)
It just breaks my heart to see the Good Guys (ESR is definitely one of them) lying. Being one of the Good Guys doesn't give you the right to do things that aren't good. It's not only morally corrupt, but intellectually corrupt as well, and it ultimately cheapens the cause you're advocating for.
I can't be sure what the ramifications would be, but it seems reasonable to assume that the consequences would not be unlike that of making sarcastic jokes about bombs while boarding a plane. (There are warnings about those, by the way, in airports.)
I wouldn't suggest it unless you're willing to pay the price. If you were someone with a high enough profile that this sort of thing would make a difference in the long run, maybe it would be worth it. Maybe.
As much as I resent what The Man is (purportedly) capable of, I'd resent having my life ruined even more. I'm not willing to be a martyr. Are you?
For those emacs users, try out M-x spook. It's amusing. (Don't think I'd actually insert it into a real email, though, if only because a lot of the people I correspond with wouldn't quite get it, and some of them take ire at having that sort of thing explained to them.)
Justin said linux/net/ipv4/ip_options.c. This seems obvious to people who've been using Unix for years, but to newbies it apparently doesn't; I'll explain.
linux/ means the directory where the Linux kernel sources live. Typically, when one refers to linux/ one means /usr/src/linux/ although this isn't a given. net/ means the dibdirectory called net/; ipv4/ means the subdirectory of net/ called ipv4/; ip_options.c is the file you want to edit. You want to open this file with your favorite text editor, preferably one that displays line numbers somewhere. (You can toggle whether emacs displays your current line number with M-x line-number-mode.) To comment out C code, you can use /*... */. Comments like these can't be nested. It's pretty easy to comment out large sections of code like this. (You'll fairly often see people using// for comments in C code, but it's a bad idea, and you shouldn't do it. Don't Be That Guy (tm)!)
It's fairly well known that Dr Mike and Raster have disagreed on a number of things. Dr Mike's target audience (in his programming) is for the real newbie and he's very much in favor of keeping things simple. Raster tends to be more interested in making cool stuff. Although I don't use Enlightenment, I have to concede that it is *very* cool.
Neither of them can design an interface worth a damn, though. (There's a difference between something that looks cool and something that drives you nuts when you try to use it for more than 8 seconds.) Examples: Dr Mike is one of the guys behind Gnome Help Browser, which doesn't have a Find function! Raster wrote Electric Eyes and the Gnome Pager applet, both of which are extremely cumbersome to use.
Lots of other Gnome programs are about as bad. One thing that's really lacking is good programmers who are also good at designing interfaces. (Designing a good interface is probably just as hard as designing a good program.) The problem is that when somebody says "Hey, program Foo really needs an extra menu here and a button or two there," he'll too often hear "Ok, code it yourself," as a response.
That's a well-and-good attitude (I guess..) for traditional Unixesque programming projects, but for one that's intended to ultimately be used by the masses, it's a problem.
I bet one of the RHAD (or any other party seriously interested in improving Unix's usability) might do would be to hire some former UI guy from (say) Apple and put him in charge, or at least in a position where he would be taken very seriously.
It's amazing how many inept people get to write for a living. This little snippet is a gem:
... several celebrated free software programmers and hackers, up to and including the infamous Trey, who created the Eggdrop program used by software pirates to send large.ftp files through IRC chat channels.
Wowzers! That's one *spectacular* display of ignorance! (Snipped from http://www.techsightings.com/cgi-bin/ts_review.pl? 317)
That's not the original quote, although I'm afraid that I don't remember just how the original goes, or who said it. It refers to someone who was in Nazi Germany; the gist of it is like this: "When they took the Jews I didn't say anything because I wasn't Jewish; when they took the Catholics, I didn't speak up because I wasn't Catholic;... when they came for me, there was nobody left."
I really wish I could give you an exact quote (I don't remember enough of it to get anything useful back from altavista:/), because it's a good one.
It's also a good one when adapted to the Bill of Rights, well worth it to take heed.
Uhm, this isn't pretty good evidence of anything, except that up to 1 million people have expressed interest in WP for Linux.
Evidence makes something obvious. That up to 1 million copies of WP for Linux were downloaded doesn't make anything obvious, nor does it prove anything.
What this is: an interesting tidbit of information useful for speculating about a fairly large number of things.
I suggest you take a good look at mutt. mutt's one of those programs where, once it's set up, people think, "Ahh, this is the way email was *meant* to be!" If the only thing it did better than pine was to thread messages, that would be a good enough reason to switch. It does much more than just that, though.
The frustrating thing about following the whole Mitnick case is that the various sources of information about him seem to be wildy at odds with each other.
At one end of the spectrum, you have people like the 2600.com guys who probably gloss over some things that Mitnick may have done and probably also paint the US Gov in a worse light than perhaps is fair.
On the other hand you have US Gov lawyers and their ilk painting Mitnick out to be the digital Anti-Christ.
It's probably pretty safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the grey area in between, but due to both biases and ignorant reporting in journalism, most people don't really know what's going on.
Are there any unbiased people who know much of anything about this?
I love Linux as much or more than the next guy, and positive press about it is great, but this article was, at best, mediocre. The writing was poor, there were plenty of dubious facts and assertions, and didn't seem to have any single clear message.
It's difficult to describe the writing's weaknesses (that is, the deficiencies in the writing and presentation per se) without quoting at length; in a nutshell, though, the piece seems to follow this (unfortunate) pattern throughout: "Linux has this, that, and the other thing. It also has foo. (Bar, baz, and bozo.)" It makes for very disjointed, stilted reading. It doesn't flow.
The inaccessability could be overcome by some solid evidence, but even when there is solid evidence, the author blows it. An example: "There are many stories of security fixes for Linux being made available within hours of an attack being known (the FTP bounce attack, the teardrop or IP fragmentation attack, and the 'ping of death')." Those are only several examples, not many as he stated. There are many other instances similar to this. While they would stand up in their own right (if they were properly explained: teardrop exploited a Linux bug; an FTP related exploit would not, on the other hand, be Linux-specific. This needs to be more clear.), the poor treatment they were given detracts from the paper and its credibility.
Because of already explained weaknesses, this article boils down to something along the lines of "Linux is good, and you should use it, or something." That's not a message I'd want PHBs to be seeing.
It's really too bad, because there were lots of good pieces of information there, and the author obviously did a lot of research. I would *love* to see the information in the article (there was a lot of it!) distilled and re-presented by a better writer, because as it is now, I was saying to myself "yeah, so what, this sounds like crap" -- and I'm not a hostile audience. There's no way I would show this to a manager (or anyone else, except perhaps a good writer who I'd be trying to convince to rewrite the thing) in its present form.
Right, ESR did make that point in C&B. It's an easy point to overlook, and a lot of people do. It doesn't take much imagination to picture someone saying, "Ooh, I'll open the source up and this program will be perfect in about 3 weeks!" (this has happened already, it would seem) before hr read the whole document.
It's pretty easy to tell when some code is worthy of being released ("Ok, it does a reasonable subset of what it should ultimately do."), and I think it's also pretty easy to tell when a site is ready to go "live", although maybe it's less easy to give a concrete definition. I'd say it's somewhere beyond the point of having a few stubs and pointers to external sites.
But I guess it's easy to set up a blank site and advertise for people to fill it with content, which is why so many sites start up this way...
I've been thinking about this (fairly common) phenomenon lately. It's a small part of something larger; lately, we've seen a lot of people making big announcements about open source projects, registering a domain, setting up a flashy web page and a mailing list, etc., but it turns out that practically nothing has been coded: main()'s defined and stdio.h #included.
It sounds like good ol' vaporware, but I think it's something more than just that.
I've come to the tentative conclusion that this is some of the negative backlash from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. People end up with a poor understanding of the document (Slashdot is probably guilty causing a lot of this:/); often they never read the whole paper.
I am not sure which is worse: having read but poorly understood Cathedral and the Bazaar or not having read it at all. I'm wondering if it might be the former.
Think twice before you make an announcement like this.
I love Linux as much or more than the next guy, and NetBSD sounds pretty cool, but how the heck does this record prove anything conclusively about NetBSD and Linux?
This says a lot about FreeBSD, and the potential for Free Software in general. Don't make more out of it than there is to be made, though.
It makes Free Software/Open Source advocates look intellectually dishonest.
...unless you actually like typical office furnature. As someone who's 6'4", I can imagine my back and neck cramping up after sitting on that chair for about 5 minutes. At least it'll take years before my hands wear out, if ever.
Ugh. "Upgrade path" sounds so suitey and phbey, it makes me wince.
Of course, all mission critical synergistically enhanced corporate package data mining and report generating suites need upgrade paths to facilitate corporate executive migrations.
Proms (was: Please, more flamebait.)
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
I didn't go to my prom, but I did go to one at in a neighboring town. (*ring* "Hi Mike, what's up?" "Not much, why"... [half an hour of small talk] "By the way, do you want to go to my prom with me?" "So THAT'S why you called! No.") I _hated_ it. Enormous waste of time and money (renting a tux ain't cheap).
It was so bad that I didn't go to the prom at my high school the subsequent year.
I don't feel as though I missed anything worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand things, it's the main copyright holder who can throw in an exception to the GPL (or some other license). If a group of people hold the copyright, they probably flame themselves on their private mailing list for a few days, and then make a public decision. :)
The history of Bison, as I understand it, makes this fairly interesting. IIRC, Bison was derived (by Richard Stallman, et al) from a Yacc which had a Berkeley style license. After he made his changes, he put Bison under the GNU GPL. People had concerns about Bison's output being automatically under the GPL, so the exception that Bruce mentioned above was introduced.
But what I'm curious about is what happens in a circumstance like this: J. R. Hacker writes a useful program that outputs some code. His useful program is under a BSD style copyright. I like his program, make some changes for myself, and put the new bit under the GPL. With my new souped up version, the outputted code is also under the GPL, because I want it that way. Now... can the program's original author, J. R. Hacker, preempt my licensing decision and say that output from the program, even my version, needn't be covered by the GPL?
There's a lot of potential for confusion here. My proposed solution? Make all software free, everywhere. All of this licensing crapola would go out the door. Everyone would be happy once the dust settled. It wouldn't send anyone into the poor house, either. But we all knew that.
On the other hand, the documentation that I've read for various GNU software is excellent. Coming to mind immediately is documentation for emacs, emacs-lisp, bison, and gdb. The problem is that you either need to print it out or suffer with the various info readers. (Or, you can read a lot of these in nicely formatted HTML at delorie.com/.)
GNU docs are not quite as copious, but significantly more useful, than any perl docs I've read.
egcs is based on gcc. It's not something entirely new. You'd probably still find original Stallman code somewhere in its source.
Agreed, it looks like once more programs start using GUILE for extensibility, it'll be über-cool.
Problem is that, last I looked into it, not too many translators actually exist yet; in fact, I'm not sure that any do yet. Jim Blandy (the guy who maintains GUILE) thinks that some translators, such as Python -> Scheme, would be relatively easy to write, while a Perl -> Scheme translator "...[would be] a herculean task, because Perl's syntax and semantics are so complicated. Hats off to whoever even tries this."
A lot of people know and like Perl, and I'd hazard that the number of people who would be interested in writing extensions for programs in Perl probably outnumber the people interested in doing the same with Python or Scheme by an order of magnitude. A well-implemented way to get Perl and GUILE play nice together (or, more to the point, to speak the same language to each other) would probably accelerate GUILE's acceptance significantly.
A side note or two: I've read somewhere that one of the future plans for emacs (both the GNU flavor and the xemacs flavor) include ultimately replacing emacs lisp with a scheme of some sort. This is going to be a Big Deal when it happens, although probably not as bitching-inducing as libc upgrades. Also.. GUILE's real homepage is at www.red-bean.com/guile/. Check it out.
(maw, originally from Boston, USA, now in Melbourne, Australia, and less than pleased with this recent turn of events.)
It really lives at http://nitro.fsck.org/~maw/al_wall/. There it will stay. For now.
There is no way that any globally broadcasted station would be anything like WAAF. It is far too controversial.
Remember when, before they moved to that sinkhole, O&A used to do that obnoxious "Radio Voice"? Well, with global radio stations, we get to look forward to listening to every rock DJ talking like that. It's pretty depressing to think about. Like John Ostralind says, the masses are asses. You see it on TV already, and it's coming to radio soon. Enjoy the stations like we've got in Boston while they last.
(btw, it sucks that in my last week in the Boston area, nay, the USA, for probably ywo years, Ostralind had to be out 3 times. Damnit! :/)
It would be fair to say that Linux's uptime is best measured in days (or maybe even weeks), while Windows' uptimes should probably be measured in hours. Saying that Linux's uptimes should be measured in years is akin to saying that people's heights should be measured in kilometers or miles. (But it's not quite the same -- after all, there are several boxen with multiyear uptimes, but not many. Obviously, there aren't any people who are KMs tall.)
It just breaks my heart to see the Good Guys (ESR is definitely one of them) lying. Being one of the Good Guys doesn't give you the right to do things that aren't good. It's not only morally corrupt, but intellectually corrupt as well, and it ultimately cheapens the cause you're advocating for.
I wouldn't suggest it unless you're willing to pay the price. If you were someone with a high enough profile that this sort of thing would make a difference in the long run, maybe it would be worth it. Maybe.
As much as I resent what The Man is (purportedly) capable of, I'd resent having my life ruined even more. I'm not willing to be a martyr. Are you?
For those emacs users, try out M-x spook. It's amusing. (Don't think I'd actually insert it into a real email, though, if only because a lot of the people I correspond with wouldn't quite get it, and some of them take ire at having that sort of thing explained to them.)
linux/ means the directory where the Linux kernel sources live. Typically, when one refers to linux/ one means /usr/src/linux/ although this isn't a given. net/ means the dibdirectory called net/ ; ipv4/ means the subdirectory of net/ called ipv4/ ; ip_options.c is the file you want to edit. You want to open this file with your favorite text editor, preferably one that displays line numbers somewhere. (You can toggle whether emacs displays your current line number with M-x line-number-mode.) To comment out C code, you can use /* ... */ . Comments like these can't be nested. It's pretty easy to comment out large sections of code like this. (You'll fairly often see people using // for comments in C code, but it's a bad idea, and you shouldn't do it. Don't Be That Guy (tm)!)
HTH
Neither of them can design an interface worth a damn, though. (There's a difference between something that looks cool and something that drives you nuts when you try to use it for more than 8 seconds.) Examples: Dr Mike is one of the guys behind Gnome Help Browser, which doesn't have a Find function! Raster wrote Electric Eyes and the Gnome Pager applet, both of which are extremely cumbersome to use.
Lots of other Gnome programs are about as bad. One thing that's really lacking is good programmers who are also good at designing interfaces. (Designing a good interface is probably just as hard as designing a good program.) The problem is that when somebody says "Hey, program Foo really needs an extra menu here and a button or two there," he'll too often hear "Ok, code it yourself," as a response.
That's a well-and-good attitude (I guess..) for traditional Unixesque programming projects, but for one that's intended to ultimately be used by the masses, it's a problem.
I bet one of the RHAD (or any other party seriously interested in improving Unix's usability) might do would be to hire some former UI guy from (say) Apple and put him in charge, or at least in a position where he would be taken very seriously.
It's a frustrating situation.
Wowzers! That's one *spectacular* display of ignorance! (Snipped from http://www.techsightings.com/cgi-bin/ts_review.pl? 317)
I really wish I could give you an exact quote (I don't remember enough of it to get anything useful back from altavista :/), because it's a good one.
It's also a good one when adapted to the Bill of Rights, well worth it to take heed.
Evidence makes something obvious. That up to 1 million copies of WP for Linux were downloaded doesn't make anything obvious, nor does it prove anything.
What this is: an interesting tidbit of information useful for speculating about a fairly large number of things.
I suggest you take a good look at mutt. mutt's one of those programs where, once it's set up, people think, "Ahh, this is the way email was *meant* to be!" If the only thing it did better than pine was to thread messages, that would be a good enough reason to switch. It does much more than just that, though.
At one end of the spectrum, you have people like the 2600.com guys who probably gloss over some things that Mitnick may have done and probably also paint the US Gov in a worse light than perhaps is fair.
On the other hand you have US Gov lawyers and their ilk painting Mitnick out to be the digital Anti-Christ.
It's probably pretty safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the grey area in between, but due to both biases and ignorant reporting in journalism, most people don't really know what's going on.
Are there any unbiased people who know much of anything about this?
I think the long term result will be similar, if perhaps somewhat less dramatic.
I mean, not too many corporations are strangled to death by Darth Vader's use of the Force. :)
It's difficult to describe the writing's weaknesses (that is, the deficiencies in the writing and presentation per se) without quoting at length; in a nutshell, though, the piece seems to follow this (unfortunate) pattern throughout: "Linux has this, that, and the other thing. It also has foo. (Bar, baz, and bozo.)" It makes for very disjointed, stilted reading. It doesn't flow.
The inaccessability could be overcome by some solid evidence, but even when there is solid evidence, the author blows it. An example: "There are many stories of security fixes for Linux being made available within hours of an attack being known (the FTP bounce attack, the teardrop or IP fragmentation attack, and the 'ping of death')." Those are only several examples, not many as he stated. There are many other instances similar to this. While they would stand up in their own right (if they were properly explained: teardrop exploited a Linux bug; an FTP related exploit would not, on the other hand, be Linux-specific. This needs to be more clear.), the poor treatment they were given detracts from the paper and its credibility.
Because of already explained weaknesses, this article boils down to something along the lines of "Linux is good, and you should use it, or something." That's not a message I'd want PHBs to be seeing.
It's really too bad, because there were lots of good pieces of information there, and the author obviously did a lot of research. I would *love* to see the information in the article (there was a lot of it!) distilled and re-presented by a better writer, because as it is now, I was saying to myself "yeah, so what, this sounds like crap" -- and I'm not a hostile audience. There's no way I would show this to a manager (or anyone else, except perhaps a good writer who I'd be trying to convince to rewrite the thing) in its present form.
It's pretty easy to tell when some code is worthy of being released ("Ok, it does a reasonable subset of what it should ultimately do."), and I think it's also pretty easy to tell when a site is ready to go "live", although maybe it's less easy to give a concrete definition. I'd say it's somewhere beyond the point of having a few stubs and pointers to external sites.
I've been thinking about this (fairly common) phenomenon lately. It's a small part of something larger; lately, we've seen a lot of people making big announcements about open source projects, registering a domain, setting up a flashy web page and a mailing list, etc., but it turns out that practically nothing has been coded: main()'s defined and stdio.h #included.
It sounds like good ol' vaporware, but I think it's something more than just that.
I've come to the tentative conclusion that this is some of the negative backlash from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. People end up with a poor understanding of the document (Slashdot is probably guilty causing a lot of this :/); often they never read the whole paper.
I am not sure which is worse: having read but poorly understood Cathedral and the Bazaar or not having read it at all. I'm wondering if it might be the former.
Think twice before you make an announcement like this.
I love Linux as much or more than the next guy, and NetBSD sounds pretty cool, but how the heck does this record prove anything conclusively about NetBSD and Linux?
This says a lot about FreeBSD, and the potential for Free Software in general. Don't make more out of it than there is to be made, though.
It makes Free Software/Open Source advocates look intellectually dishonest.
...unless you actually like typical office furnature. As someone who's 6'4", I can imagine my back and neck cramping up after sitting on that chair for about 5 minutes. At least it'll take years before my hands wear out, if ever.
Except for the minor detail that the review wasn't actually there, uhm, yeah, we did. :)
Ugh. "Upgrade path" sounds so suitey and phbey, it makes me wince.
Of course, all mission critical synergistically enhanced corporate package data mining and report generating suites need upgrade paths to facilitate corporate executive migrations.
I didn't go to my prom, but I did go to one at in a neighboring town. (*ring* "Hi Mike, what's up?" "Not much, why" ... [half an hour of small talk] "By the way, do you want to go to my prom with me?" "So THAT'S why you called! No.") I _hated_ it. Enormous waste of time and money (renting a tux ain't cheap).
It was so bad that I didn't go to the prom at my high school the subsequent year.
I don't feel as though I missed anything worthwhile.