You are doing so well outlining why it is important to have commercial support, and then, unexpectedly, embarrass yourself with your incoherent rant about the GPL (not GNU) license.
How can we drill in the skull of people spouting this "argument" that if somebody (company, individual, whatever) decides to use the GPL, then nobody can claim they are being "robbed" of anything if somebody else becomes rich using that same code?
Or do you think that somebody donating something for a charity shop and then walking to the police station to report he has been robed is actually sane?
As for paying for Linux CDs, good for you, but again, the people creating and releasing distros are fully aware that most people will never pay a dime for them, so your "defense" of their rights is frankly laughable and pointless.
There is no society, big or small, never has been, never will, in which you can do whatever you want.
This is not a matter of definition, it is a matter of fact, thus purporting the term and concept of freedom as something absolute disregards all of probable and known human experience.
I am not throwing definitions around, I am just saying that the absolutist definition of freedom is misguided, mistaken and unusable on practical terms.
I am sure he and any other Free Software proponents will welcome any contribution that is GPLed, even if as this case demonstrates, it is a selfish one off.
Stallman is that guy that thinks things through before plunging blindly.
Linus is a great figurehead and technician, but he does not always think long term, which has brought some amusing problems to Linux development during the years.
We need them both because their efforts complement each other's neatly.
What freedom means in the context of software, and according to the GPL licensing, is clearly spelled out.
Freedom always exists in respect to a frame of reference, legal, conventional or social, to pretend that Freedom is an absolute term is frankly ridiculous.
He has never said he does, nobody I can remember says he does.
So where do you get this nonsensical idea that he does?
You are, yet again, using ad hominem attacks (shoot the messenger) to undermine somebody with genuine authority in the field (by means of misrepresenting his position in respect to Linux and then refering to controversial opinions in unrelated fields in order to attempt to undermine his credibility in a completely different field).
Because he points out to problems that appear to be just theoretical before they become practical ones.
As for his eccentric behaviour, I could not care less. It is a logical fallacy to judge a message by the perceived faults of character of the person delivering it.
If the code is GPLed then the competition can use it.
If MS makes shitty code or plays dirty tricks (how could they do that with software that is open to all to see?) it would be obvious to all, and the problems could be fixed and the improvements used by others.
I dislike Microsoft strongly, you just have to read my comments on this website, but I have also argued that if they play fair they should be welcomed, cautiously of course, but I really struggle to see how MS could undo the effects of GPLed software released by them...
Once a piece of code is GPLed, anybody can do whatever they want with the code: fork a new project for example, without asking further permission from anybody, as long as they release everything under the GPL when the software is distributed.
It is amazing how people without the sightliest idea about how the GPL works feel qualified to comment about these news with such abandon.
GPL is not about maintaining control. It is about making software available to all to inspect it and change it if required. With GPL the original source of a program no longer has an absolute say about how the program evolves. If somebody else gets crossed abut the direction a project is taking then that person can fork the project without asking permission from anybody.
How that is to keep control in your mind is a real mystery.
All the BSDites complain exactly about not wanting to give control away when licensing under the GPL, they rightly see it as a tool to undermine the control of the programmer, this in exchange of collaboration with others.
If you want to keep computers as general purpose machines, you must make the distinction between the software whose task is to make the computer hardware accessible and the software that sits on top of that other software in order to run tasks for which the computer has been completely abstracted.
If you don't do that abstraction between OS and applications you are ensuring that security is more difficult to achieve and reliability is nigh impossible to ensure.
The myriad of security problems with MS OSes, where marketing and commercial matters took precedence over sound Engineering principles, tell us al lot about why the distinction although arbitrary, it is still important.
Nerds boasting here and elsewhere about their machines' uptimes may be annoying, but reveals an important fact: the abstraction in some OSes is much better than in others, this leads to reliable systems where the relationships between all the actors working in a computer are better understood (this is obviously witnessed in corporate environments, where Windows OSes are overwhelmingly not trusted with tasks where important information is handled).
What is so vital that you need to do organized backups?
Movies? How many movies do you have there? Will you ever watch them all?
Ditto for music, holiday photographs and videos (be honest, most of them are eminently forgettable).
Important stuff is on paper or off site in a safe place (contracts of any kind, etc).
Are you a developer? Your code is in your company's servers. OSS developer? Get an account in Sourceforge.
If you really must (most likely you don't) just buy another hard disk, make an exact copy of what is in your computer, and forget about it for 6 months.
I personally think that most people need only the above strategy. If you as an individual *think* you need to backup 2TB of data reliably I will say you have far too much crap in your hard drive. I humbly suggest that you get a life.
Slashdot Mirror
... you just say "goodbye, see you in two weeks time".
Any company were somebody needs to be disturbed during a holiday is not being well run....
You are doing so well outlining why it is important to have commercial support, and then, unexpectedly, embarrass yourself with your incoherent rant about the GPL (not GNU) license.
How can we drill in the skull of people spouting this "argument" that if somebody (company, individual, whatever) decides to use the GPL, then nobody can claim they are being "robbed" of anything if somebody else becomes rich using that same code?
Or do you think that somebody donating something for a charity shop and then walking to the police station to report he has been robed is actually sane?
As for paying for Linux CDs, good for you, but again, the people creating and releasing distros are fully aware that most people will never pay a dime for them, so your "defense" of their rights is frankly laughable and pointless.
Enterprise class means that you have a dedicated team of people that are experts and can troubleshoot problems for you.
You don't understand how important this is until you have users losing millions per hour and you have got to fix something that is broken...
There is no society, big or small, never has been, never will, in which you can do whatever you want.
This is not a matter of definition, it is a matter of fact, thus purporting the term and concept of freedom as something absolute disregards all of probable and known human experience.
I am not throwing definitions around, I am just saying that the absolutist definition of freedom is misguided, mistaken and unusable on practical terms.
... once the laptops I have to fix allow people to do any useful work.
The amount of disk trashing Vista and its applications does is truly appaliing.
We are talking about machines with 1 GB of memory and recently modern (less than 3 years old).
I put Ubuntu on the same machine for my personal use and have not experienced all the latency other people with Vista in the same hardware are.
... before acknowledging the noxiousness of Microsoft as a company?
There is legal precedence in both the US and EU for starters about MS's behaviour, for bunnies sakes ....
I am sure he and any other Free Software proponents will welcome any contribution that is GPLed, even if as this case demonstrates, it is a selfish one off.
Stallman is that guy that thinks things through before plunging blindly.
Linus is a great figurehead and technician, but he does not always think long term, which has brought some amusing problems to Linux development during the years.
We need them both because their efforts complement each other's neatly.
Would you hate any person that was trying to cheat you at every turn of every business deal?
No?
Then you are a saint.
What freedom means in the context of software, and according to the GPL licensing, is clearly spelled out.
Freedom always exists in respect to a frame of reference, legal, conventional or social, to pretend that Freedom is an absolute term is frankly ridiculous.
He has never said he does, nobody I can remember says he does.
So where do you get this nonsensical idea that he does?
You are, yet again, using ad hominem attacks (shoot the messenger) to undermine somebody with genuine authority in the field (by means of misrepresenting his position in respect to Linux and then refering to controversial opinions in unrelated fields in order to attempt to undermine his credibility in a completely different field).
"But why does anybody listen to RMS anymore? "
Because he points out to problems that appear to be just theoretical before they become practical ones.
As for his eccentric behaviour, I could not care less. It is a logical fallacy to judge a message by the perceived faults of character of the person delivering it.
To me a hand written note means that somebody could not be arsed to turn on their computer and print something that is legible.
... why ballpoint pens replaced fountain pens....
The onus is on religious people to probe there is a god: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Negative_proof
So far, they have failed miserably.
The GPL tries to stop exactly that.
You, and other people commenting on this history will have to come with a credible scenario before claiming they can follow their normal tactics.
If the code is GPLed then the competition can use it.
If MS makes shitty code or plays dirty tricks (how could they do that with software that is open to all to see?) it would be obvious to all, and the problems could be fixed and the improvements used by others.
I dislike Microsoft strongly, you just have to read my comments on this website, but I have also argued that if they play fair they should be welcomed, cautiously of course, but I really struggle to see how MS could undo the effects of GPLed software released by them...
Once a piece of code is GPLed, anybody can do whatever they want with the code: fork a new project for example, without asking further permission from anybody, as long as they release everything under the GPL when the software is distributed.
It is amazing how people without the sightliest idea about how the GPL works feel qualified to comment about these news with such abandon.
GPL is not about maintaining control. It is about making software available to all to inspect it and change it if required. With GPL the original source of a program no longer has an absolute say about how the program evolves. If somebody else gets crossed abut the direction a project is taking then that person can fork the project without asking permission from anybody.
How that is to keep control in your mind is a real mystery.
All the BSDites complain exactly about not wanting to give control away when licensing under the GPL, they rightly see it as a tool to undermine the control of the programmer, this in exchange of collaboration with others.
If you want to keep computers as general purpose machines, you must make the distinction between the software whose task is to make the computer hardware accessible and the software that sits on top of that other software in order to run tasks for which the computer has been completely abstracted.
If you don't do that abstraction between OS and applications you are ensuring that security is more difficult to achieve and reliability is nigh impossible to ensure.
The myriad of security problems with MS OSes, where marketing and commercial matters took precedence over sound Engineering principles, tell us al lot about why the distinction although arbitrary, it is still important.
Nerds boasting here and elsewhere about their machines' uptimes may be annoying, but reveals an important fact: the abstraction in some OSes is much better than in others, this leads to reliable systems where the relationships between all the actors working in a computer are better understood (this is obviously witnessed in corporate environments, where Windows OSes are overwhelmingly not trusted with tasks where important information is handled).
This is a home computer isn't it?
What is so vital that you need to do organized backups?
Movies? How many movies do you have there? Will you ever watch them all?
Ditto for music, holiday photographs and videos (be honest, most of them are eminently forgettable).
Important stuff is on paper or off site in a safe place (contracts of any kind, etc).
Are you a developer? Your code is in your company's servers. OSS developer? Get an account in Sourceforge.
If you really must (most likely you don't) just buy another hard disk, make an exact copy of what is in your computer, and forget about it for 6 months.
I personally think that most people need only the above strategy. If you as an individual *think* you need to backup 2TB of data reliably I will say you have far too much crap in your hard drive. I humbly suggest that you get a life.
In which planet do you live???
To drive home the inadequacy of online backups in the *cloud" (Web 2.0 music here please).
That is the real problem that few people want to address: that we don't need to backup everything that we have.
Sun is putting SSDs on their storage devices.
Those are enterprise quality devices, not pr0n backup servers ....
But thanks for playing, nice troll.