Does not solve the problem, but makes it even wors
on
Make Out with SCons
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately it does not solve the problem. (Auto)Make's main problems are the lack of a robust syntax which would make it easier to give good error messages / feedback, the lack of a syntax that can easily be parsed and modified in IDEs and that it is far too complex for the casual developer / contributor. Most people want to program, not fiddle with the Make system. Scons may have some evolutionary improvements, but does not solve those issues. Actually replacing the make files by python scripts makes it only worse.
Ant solves the problem, but only for Java (admittedly building Java is much easier than C/C++).
I disagree. You contribution to change the world is bigger if you give away your contribution to more people, not fewer.
If your focus is to let other people use your software, yes. If your focus is that all people have access to their software's source code, no.
But what if I don't think people should be forced to release their source code? Then the GPL is the wrong choice.
Sure. If you don't care whether a few proprietary vendors control all information, then BSD is certainly the right license for you.
The free software world always has a technical advantage over the proprietary competition.
No, it doesn't. There are many area where the proprietary competition is still years ahead. For example high-end scalability (compare Solaris to Linux on >=64 CPU machines), VMs (compare MS's.NET CLR or Sun's Java VM to Mono, Portable.Net, Kaffee and all the others), usability (compare MacOS to KDE or Gnome)...
> So wait a second. Giving something away is a bad > thing?
It's not bad, but your contribution to change the world is not as big as it could be. If you put software under GPL, only the free software community can use it. If you put software under BSD, you give it to vendors of proprietary applications as well.
So if your goal is to help free software to replace proprietary software (and thus to lead to a world where the software infrastructure is free), the GPL is the right choice. Putting software under BSD won't help you to achieve this goal. It has other effects, like decreasing the value of software in general and providing *one* free implementation. But only software under GPL, especially if there is no proprietary equvalent, gives the free software world a technical advantage over the proprietary competition.
Of course not. If you release under BSD anybody can take your source to improve closed software. GPL doesnt matter then, BSD is GPL-compatible (so anybody is allowed to re-license BSD to GPL).
Sure. And Reiser would be helping commercial OSs to adopt it and customize it for their needs without giving anything back. Why is this desirable? MS integrated Kerberos. What did MS give back? Nothing afaik. Releasing stuff under a BSD-like license gives a short-term benefit to society: it makes closed-source software cheaper. But the long-term disadvantage is that this diminishes several competitive advantages of free software, especially the lower cost.
I can't give you any legal advice... just that this won't work, especially for programming work. After 2 weeks weeks your productivity will probably be lower than with a 40h week.
The status quo effect plus that there is no revolutionary improvement. There are evolutionary improvements, but they are not large enough to justify changing everything. That would be stupid, from an economically point of view. And since there has been no sufficient revolutionary improvement in the last 30 years, I would not expect one anytime soon.
Your exokernel also needs an API, a protocol or whatever you call it as a layer between the POSIX subsystem and its native implementation. You could as well implement POSIX (or a equivalent message protocol) as native interface...
The nice thing about POSIX is that after 30 years there is not a significantly better alternative out there. You could make it more consistent here and there, you may be able to get rid of the old console stuff and you could certainly change a lot of the kernels internals (like the whole/dev thing which is suboptimal in a modern hotplugging-capable system), but that does not influence the API that much. There are some experiments with other concepts, and there are some system which are much more complicated without a significant advantage. But there's nothing out there where everybody would immediately agree that it's really better than POSIX.
I guess most children are unable to cut letters into wood, or to write into stone. And, do you care? So why should you care when children are not able to paint letters with tink on mashed wood?
Rather a per-application flag, because it may break applications that are not prepared for case-insensitivity. On the other hand, if the app knows about it there should not be any problem in enabling it (BTW a higher layer could do it as well).
POSIX is certainly not perfect, but it is such a nice, simple low-level interface and relatively easy to extend/fix that it is not useful to throw away all the knowledge and applications.
Beside the finding and organizing files, the biggest problem for desktop users today is probably that changes on the file system are not recoverable. It is easy to accidentally overwrite a file and lose your work, and the only only sane way to solve these kinds of problems would be to make it possible to revert changes.
Several research systems have been created, like the Elephant File System, but none of them made it into the mainstream free and commercial operating systems. Are there any specific reasons why nobody offers recovery (high complexity in implementation, very bad effect on performance, etc) or is it just because FS designers don't see the need for it?
It is a ERP system. Basically SAP software remodels every aspect of a business. Invoices and orders, logistics, inventory, human resources, everything can be stored in and managed by the ERP system. It is a huge piece of software, and also quite customizable so it fits every possible need. And, of course, there are specialized packages and consulting companies for virtually every industry.
One of the reason is that by releasing your source code you can easily create de-facto standards. VNC is a good example. It is not standardized at all, but the original implementation came with source code under GPL. Dozens of VNC projects have been created since, all inter-operable, and most of them are based on the original source code.
>>However, I'll continue to support directFB and fresco over XFree86 just so that the projects get the much deserved attention that is essential to their success.
Ehm.... fresco gets a lot of attention for a project that goes on for many years and did not deliver any stable code... actually much more attention than many projects that are useful today. And the real work on fresco has not even begun, after all you need applications...
But, in case you didnt notice, you always see one app at a time and everything runs as root.
Re:This will kill X in the long term.
on
DRI Comes to DirectFB
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you would port Qt to DirectFB... what would manage your windows? How could DCOP work without authentication over X11? What server manages drag&drop and cut&paste? X11 does far more important stuff than only letting you access the framebuffer.
Beside that, no mainstream system will have a chance to succeed if it only fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. Unless you get 100% it doesnt have a chance. MS understands this, thats why they have put *a*lot* of effort into the Terminal Services and RDP.
Re:Lets get to the real point of this article's sh
on
Too Much Free Software
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
People who waste their time with text editors are usually beginners who don't have any experience... i wouldnt want them to write something as complex as a WordPerfect filter:)
Besider that it is their spare time, and I wouldnt dictate them what to do with it...
It is not like people create large projects for fun. Very few people write software just for the sake of doing it, especially larger pieces of software. They do because they have a reason for doing it. Maybe because they think that the competing projects have a wrong focus. Or they are written in a different programming language that they consider inferior. Or the competing projects have big architectural disadvantages. Are these decisions always right? Certainly not. But the chance that they could be right justifies the extra-effort, because they avoid the worst thing that can happen: that there is no competition, the only choice sucks and is a technological dead end. There is no innovation without experimentation.
Psst... one unknown secret of free software's relative success is that people are always thinking that they are in a 'community'. This is, of course, not a advantage of free software itself. Proprietary systems like BeOS and Amiga have similar communities. It is not a result of the software's license, but of the community's size. When you have 10000 users personal contact is easier then with 10 million users. It is physically not possible in the Microsoft world that 1% of all users of a particular app or feature write a mail to a MS developer and get a personal answer.
The system that has been proposed has different levels of wages. Thus less developed countries would have lower wages, higher developed countries have higher minimum wages. It just regulates them to be more fair for all participants.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately it does not solve the problem. (Auto)Make's main problems are the lack of a robust syntax which would make it easier to give good error messages / feedback, the lack of a syntax that can easily be parsed and modified in IDEs and that it is far too complex for the casual developer / contributor. Most people want to program, not fiddle with the Make system. Scons may have some evolutionary improvements, but does not solve those issues. Actually replacing the make files by python scripts makes it only worse.
Ant solves the problem, but only for Java (admittedly building Java is much easier than C/C++).
I disagree. You contribution to change the world is bigger if you give away your contribution to more people, not fewer.
.NET CLR or Sun's Java VM to Mono, Portable.Net, Kaffee and all the others), usability (compare MacOS to KDE or Gnome)...
If your focus is to let other people use your software, yes. If your focus is that all people have access to their software's source code, no.
But what if I don't think people should be forced to release their source code? Then the GPL is the wrong choice.
Sure. If you don't care whether a few proprietary vendors control all information, then BSD is certainly the right license for you.
The free software world always has a technical advantage over the proprietary competition.
No, it doesn't. There are many area where the proprietary competition is still years ahead. For example high-end scalability (compare Solaris to Linux on >=64 CPU machines), VMs (compare MS's
> So wait a second. Giving something away is a bad
> thing?
It's not bad, but your contribution to change the world is not as big as it could be. If you put software under GPL, only the free software community can use it. If you put software under BSD, you give it to vendors of proprietary applications as well.
So if your goal is to help free software to replace proprietary software (and thus to lead to a world where the software infrastructure is free), the GPL is the right choice. Putting software under BSD won't help you to achieve this goal. It has other effects, like decreasing the value of software in general and providing *one* free implementation. But only software under GPL, especially if there is no proprietary equvalent, gives the free software world a technical advantage over the proprietary competition.
Of course not. If you release under BSD anybody can take your source to improve closed software. GPL doesnt matter then, BSD is GPL-compatible (so anybody is allowed to re-license BSD to GPL).
scan the KDE CVS for stuff by tjansen...
Sure. And Reiser would be helping commercial OSs to adopt it and customize it for their needs without giving anything back. Why is this desirable? MS integrated Kerberos. What did MS give back? Nothing afaik. Releasing stuff under a BSD-like license gives a short-term benefit to society: it makes closed-source software cheaper. But the long-term disadvantage is that this diminishes several competitive advantages of free software, especially the lower cost.
I can't give you any legal advice... just that this won't work, especially for programming work. After 2 weeks weeks your productivity will probably be lower than with a 40h week.
The status quo effect plus that there is no revolutionary improvement. There are evolutionary improvements, but they are not large enough to justify changing everything. That would be stupid, from an economically point of view. And since there has been no sufficient revolutionary improvement in the last 30 years, I would not expect one anytime soon.
Your exokernel also needs an API, a protocol or whatever you call it as a layer between the POSIX subsystem and its native implementation. You could as well implement POSIX (or a equivalent message protocol) as native interface...
/dev thing which is suboptimal in a modern hotplugging-capable system), but that does not influence the API that much. There are some experiments with other concepts, and there are some system which are much more complicated without a significant advantage. But there's nothing out there where everybody would immediately agree that it's really better than POSIX.
The nice thing about POSIX is that after 30 years there is not a significantly better alternative out there. You could make it more consistent here and there, you may be able to get rid of the old console stuff and you could certainly change a lot of the kernels internals (like the whole
I guess most children are unable to cut letters into wood, or to write into stone. And, do you care? So why should you care when children are not able to paint letters with tink on mashed wood?
Rather a per-application flag, because it may break applications that are not prepared for case-insensitivity. On the other hand, if the app knows about it there should not be any problem in enabling it (BTW a higher layer could do it as well).
Well, it's not by you :)
POSIX is certainly not perfect, but it is such a nice, simple low-level interface and relatively easy to extend/fix that it is not useful to throw away all the knowledge and applications.
Beside the finding and organizing files, the biggest problem for desktop users today is probably that changes on the file system are not recoverable. It is easy to accidentally overwrite a file and lose your work, and the only only sane way to solve these kinds of problems would be to make it possible to revert changes.
Several research systems have been created, like the Elephant File System, but none of them made it into the mainstream free and commercial operating systems. Are there any specific reasons why nobody offers recovery (high complexity in implementation, very bad effect on performance, etc) or is it just because FS designers don't see the need for it?
It is a ERP system. Basically SAP software remodels every aspect of a business. Invoices and orders, logistics, inventory, human resources, everything can be stored in and managed by the ERP system. It is a huge piece of software, and also quite customizable so it fits every possible need. And, of course, there are specialized packages and consulting companies for virtually every industry.
Please make a Howard The Duck sequel. That would rock! But maybe Howard should rap, the times have changed...
One of the reason is that by releasing your source code you can easily create de-facto standards. VNC is a good example. It is not standardized at all, but the original implementation came with source code under GPL. Dozens of VNC projects have been created since, all inter-operable, and most of them are based on the original source code.
I guess transparency without applications is not enough for him :)
>>However, I'll continue to support directFB and fresco over XFree86 just so that the projects get the much deserved attention that is essential to their success.
Ehm.... fresco gets a lot of attention for a project that goes on for many years and did not deliver any stable code... actually much more attention than many projects that are useful today. And the real work on fresco has not even begun, after all you need applications...
But, in case you didnt notice, you always see one app at a time and everything runs as root.
If you would port Qt to DirectFB... what would manage your windows? How could DCOP work without authentication over X11? What server manages drag&drop and cut&paste?
X11 does far more important stuff than only letting you access the framebuffer.
Beside that, no mainstream system will have a chance to succeed if it only fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. Unless you get 100% it doesnt have a chance. MS understands this, thats why they have put *a*lot* of effort into the Terminal Services and RDP.
People who waste their time with text editors are usually beginners who don't have any experience... i wouldnt want them to write something as complex as a WordPerfect filter :)
Besider that it is their spare time, and I wouldnt dictate them what to do with it...
It is not like people create large projects for fun. Very few people write software just for the sake of doing it, especially larger pieces of software. They do because they have a reason for doing it. Maybe because they think that the competing projects have a wrong focus. Or they are written in a different programming language that they consider inferior. Or the competing projects have big architectural disadvantages.
Are these decisions always right? Certainly not. But the chance that they could be right justifies the extra-effort, because they avoid the worst thing that can happen: that there is no competition, the only choice sucks and is a technological dead end. There is no innovation without experimentation.
Psst... one unknown secret of free software's relative success is that people are always thinking that they are in a 'community'.
This is, of course, not a advantage of free software itself. Proprietary systems like BeOS and Amiga have similar communities. It is not a result of the software's license, but of the community's size. When you have 10000 users personal contact is easier then with 10 million users. It is physically not possible in the Microsoft world that 1% of all users of a particular app or feature write a mail to a MS developer and get a personal answer.
The system that has been proposed has different levels of wages. Thus less developed countries would have lower wages, higher developed countries have higher minimum wages. It just regulates them to be more fair for all participants.
Well, as somebody else already noticed, the majority of software still comes from the US. If you start protecting the US you will only hurt yourself.