Sorry to say this, but I feel that sponsorship is ultimately not a good way to run an OSS project.
If you rely on sponsorships, you have to expect this kind of thing to happen. It does. All the time.
If there are businesses which are using your software, then there should be a market for you in consulting. Consulting is a proven business model for OSS development. (Not that it is much more of a guarantee, but at least you have a contract.)
Not to mention that many big businesses view consulting and sponsorship as two very, very different things. It has to do with bookmaking. Money paid as consulting makes it more evident that you are providing a service than money marked down as 'sponsorship'.
Now, if your project is not commercially interesting, and you still want to get paid for doing it, perhaps you should be looking for a research position instead, if it's innovative enough.
And if it's not innovative nor commercially interesting.. Well then it's a hobby, goddamnit!:-)
Yeah, given tall tales like these, how could anyone possibly get the impression that they're a scam?
The story behind David reads like an adventure novel: In July of 2002, news of SpecOpS Labs' discovery was leaked from Oracle-Philippines to Microsoft in Redmond WA. Microsoft immediately relayed a communiqué to an Asian based Private Investigator requesting detailed info on the SpecOpS Labs Platform; days later, news of the investigation was intercepted by a friendly asset and delivered to SpecOpS Labs. In August, the Philippines' top computer scientist & MIT alumni scrutinized the David blueprint and certified its validity; a few weeks later, a high-ranking ASEAN IBM Official learned of the discovery and its certification and requested a meeting with SpecOpS Labs.
I have no idea. That all sounds perfectly reasonable.
AdTI doesn't make it's money of general muckraking, their research is funded by outside parties. There is plenty of evidence of that, and Mr. Brown himself did not deny his research was funded by someone.
Also, consider that Brown refused to answer a direct question on who was funding his 'research'.
It is also known that Microsoft has funded AdTI in the past.
Given that, it does not seem to me that simple idiocy would suffice as an explanation. Unless Red Hat or someone sponsored the research.
I seriously doubt that anyone will wish to obtain his services after this fiasco.
Do you think anyone obtaining his services wants a good, impartial report? Well, a good one probably, but definitely not an impartial one.
I'm afraid there is no shortage of fields in which this guy is a self-pronounced researcher. Just look at the dang AdTI homepage: Economics, Taxation, Education, Technology, Defense..
Hey, the guy has a bachelor's degree in Litterature -doesn't that automatically qualify him as an expert on everything under the sun?
(Hmm... Hey Taco! Re-brand Slashdot! We're not a geek news blog, we're a "think-tank" now! We've got plenty of people here prepared to expound their opinions on stuff they know nothing about. )
If I recall correctly, Fourth-Generation languages was going to be the future of programming back in the early 80's? (Machine code, Fortran/Basic-type languages and Pascal/C-type languages being the supposed first, second and third generations, IIRC)
Then in the early 90's.. OOP was going to save the world. Not that it hasn't had impact, but it certainly hasn't fundamentally changed things.
And now it's XML that's going to save the programmers, while the old-timers whine that we should all really be using Lisp.
Not that I'm a computer-language conservative myself, but it's worth pointing out that historically, there has been quite a big discrepancy between which languages the Comp-Sci researchers feel everyone should be using, and the ones which actually are used.
Problem is, your second paragraph is undone by your first - lazy people won't bother reading the details on a Grokline-like site anymore than they read one of those Unix history books. Too much work either way, and the soundbite prevails.
I disagree, actually. Books are thick. You have to go to a bookstore, or library. Information can be hard to find in a book if it doesn't have a good index. Et cetera. An easily-navigated web page does not have these drawbacks, and is instantly available to everyone.
Naturally some people are too lazy to even check a website, but at least I believe there are fewer of them than for books.
True. Stuff like this will never stop guys like SCO.
However, as we all know, SCO has managed to spread FUD and raise questions among people. Most people, including journalists are just too lazy to go check facts, like reading one of the books on Unix history.
Being able to point out 'Here, look at this website. It has detailed info on who did what and when.' makes it easier to dispell the FUD. The more detail we have, the harder it is to 'spin'.
The original Levenez diagram is a good example of this. SCO actually used this to show how Linux 'derived' from Unix. Not that there's anything wrong with the chart, but without the details, most people don't realize which lines are actually shared code, and which are just inspiration; i.e. what parts actually have any legal relevance.
Thats 7 damn years ago. Please God, don't let this SCO thing go on that long. Finish them off with a bolt of lightning right now.
That bolt just struck. IBM requested Summary Judgement this week. If it's granted, Linux will be in the clear, and IBM will have a field day with some of their Lanham-act counterclaims.
Not to mention the DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone cases will fall like the houses of cards that they are. Red Hat should have an easy time with their case. And the Novell case is already not-unlikely to be dismissed.
The question is, who is going to go on propping up SCO once Linux is out of the picture, and there's just a Kamikaze attack on IBM, hardly likely to leave a dent, left.
Aha. GNU Halifax did the job wonderfully. I actually hadn't used it before. Another reason to love the plethora of software you get with Linux distros.
The Pacer docket (available free, due to high public interest) has the documents as TIFF files. Good luck on opening them (my pre-2.0 Gimp failed on some unknown tag.)
This is not entirely unexpected though, IBM already mentioned in a filing that they intended to move for summary judgement.
Actually, the real context is damning. His real reason for damning multitasking for MINIX is "no-one on a home PC will ever want to run more than one job at a time."
If by "home PC" you mean an Intel x86 machine, and put that into the context of way things were looking around 1990, that is an entirely reasonable standpoint. Not very many people ever did do much multitasking on 386es.
Most people around then (myself included) did not think the x86 architecture was going to hang around much longer. It is quite clear that Tanenbaum shared the majority view at the time, that RISC was the way to go.
Also, the design goals of MINIX, clearly stated by Tanenbaum, (see his book, I've read it.) was for MINIX to be an educational tool, and run on low-end (e.g. 286) PC:s. He was not planning MINIX to be a production-quality system. He did not want to add 386-specific features.
You should not dismiss Tanenbaum so lightly, he most likely is far more knowledgeable on these subjects than you or I. It's like saying Einstein was a moron because he didn't grok quantum theory.
I don't know, perhaps you're a Linux zealot who wants to believe that Linus is always right. But the reason this entire debate is so well-known is that both sides raise valid points. The difference is in their intentions and design goals, not in the facts.
This from a man who describes true multitasking and multi-threaded I/O as "a performance hack."
Now that is just unfair, and taken completely out of context.
The context he was talking of is of the old 16-bit PC systems, which had no hardware support for multitasking. And in that context, he is correct, and he's not making a secret of the fact that Minix was designed to run on low-end machines.
Linux, on the other hand, was 386-only.
So what the heck is the point in holding that quote up against him?
No, it's just obvious you're running different versions. I agree with both. The windows player is a total piece of crap which I'd never install on my machine, (if I used windows).
The Linux player, on the other hand, is a quite tolerable piece of software, without the nastiness of the Windows version.
The press-release, which I did read, is nothing but a summary of the report I was referring to. I did not read the report, and neither has anyone else, since as it notes, the report hasn't been published yet.
As for me basing my opinion on other comments: Look at the timestamp of my post. Five minutes after the story was posted. Riiight. There must've been dozens of "first post!" comments to give me a notion of the article.
Rather, I had already read the press relase and also PJs analysis on Groklaw, hence I already had an opinion formed when slashdot broke the story.
I expressed "the report seems" to imply not that I had read the report (which I could not have), but to express the impression which I have recieved from reading the press release and the report-writers comments in the Yahoo story.
Don't assume everyone didn't read the 'article' just because you obviously didn't.
Interesting how the whole report seems to be one big straw-man argument. (i.e. claiming the other is saying something they're not, and then showing that it is false)
Their straw-man seems to be the idea (which noone, of course, has claimed) that Linux somehow was created in a vacuum.
From there they proceed to show how Linux was (*shock*) a clone of Unix! (Probably leaving out the fact that there are literally dozens of them.)
What I'm talking about here is information which is already public. The info in the case-in-point, for example: The Egyptian government cooperates with American intelligence agencies in monitoring and combating militant islamists. This is a well-estabished fact. There are both former officials and former islamists who have publicly testified to that. Everybody knows.
But what is the point here? It's not to keep that info away from terrorists for sure, they know already.
I think you'd be surprized how much irrelevant 'intelligence' ends up classified. Often, it's stuff which is already public (although not always general) knowledge but which the administration wants to deny. A lot of ass-covering, basically.
But it gets even stranger. For instance the case of the de-classified CIA documents relating to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. (Whups, now there's a piece of flamebait..)
Anyway, a bunch of these documents have been re-classified by the current administration, apparently to hide such disturbing secrets like what Señor Pinochet's favorite drink was. (Scotch)
Well, my intended 'slant' was that I don't consider this very newsworthy.
For people in the field sure, but the general public? Sure, 'a potential HIV drug' sounds great and interesting. But this thing isn't even into preclinical testing.
Do you know how many pre-clinical drug candidates make it to FDA approval? Not even 1 in 1000. (don't remember exactly, it may even be more like 1 in 10000)
I'm not doing that kind of calculations, and I wouldn't really attempt them either.
Consider protein folding; We have detailed knowledge of all the forces at work there. No real surprizes. But we haven't been able to model it accurately.
Now think of the immune system, which we don't understand terribly well. Modelling is a very risky business. Making predictions from the models is even riskier.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to say this, but I feel that sponsorship is ultimately not a good way to run an OSS project.
:-)
If you rely on sponsorships, you have to expect this kind of thing to happen. It does. All the time.
If there are businesses which are using your software, then there should be a market for you in consulting. Consulting is a proven business model for OSS development. (Not that it is much more of a guarantee, but at least you have a contract.)
Not to mention that many big businesses view consulting and sponsorship as two very, very different things. It has to do with bookmaking. Money paid as consulting makes it more evident that you are providing a service than money marked down as 'sponsorship'.
Now, if your project is not commercially interesting, and you still want to get paid for doing it, perhaps you should be looking for a research position instead, if it's innovative enough.
And if it's not innovative nor commercially interesting.. Well then it's a hobby, goddamnit!
I have no idea. That all sounds perfectly reasonable.
But doesn't it seem more fitting to computer geeks if the road to Béziers is curved?
Well, they almost had it back in the 50's:
I believe they were imagining the depressing of a small button causing thousands of people far far away to burst into flames.
Yes.
CNet and ZDnet among others.
AdTI doesn't make it's money of general muckraking, their research is funded by outside parties. There is plenty of evidence of that, and Mr. Brown himself did not deny his research was funded by someone.
Also, consider that Brown refused to answer a direct question on who was funding his 'research'.
It is also known that Microsoft has funded AdTI in the past.
Given that, it does not seem to me that simple idiocy would suffice as an explanation. Unless Red Hat or someone sponsored the research.
I seriously doubt that anyone will wish to obtain his services after this fiasco.
Do you think anyone obtaining his services wants a good, impartial report? Well, a good one probably, but definitely not an impartial one.
I'm afraid there is no shortage of fields in which this guy is a self-pronounced researcher.
Just look at the dang AdTI homepage: Economics, Taxation, Education, Technology, Defense..
Hey, the guy has a bachelor's degree in Litterature -doesn't that automatically qualify him as an expert on everything under the sun?
(Hmm... Hey Taco! Re-brand Slashdot! We're not a geek news blog, we're a "think-tank" now! We've got plenty of people here prepared to expound their opinions on stuff they know nothing about. )
If I recall correctly,
Fourth-Generation languages was going to be the future of programming back in the early 80's?
(Machine code, Fortran/Basic-type languages and Pascal/C-type languages being the supposed first, second and third generations, IIRC)
Then in the early 90's.. OOP was going to save the world. Not that it hasn't had impact, but it certainly hasn't fundamentally changed things.
And now it's XML that's going to save the programmers, while the old-timers whine that we should all really be using Lisp.
Not that I'm a computer-language conservative myself, but it's worth pointing out that historically, there has been quite a big discrepancy between which languages the Comp-Sci researchers feel everyone should be using, and the ones which actually are used.
Problem is, your second paragraph is undone by your first - lazy people won't bother reading the details on a Grokline-like site anymore than they read one of those Unix history books. Too much work either way, and the soundbite prevails.
I disagree, actually. Books are thick. You have to go to a bookstore, or library. Information can be hard to find in a book if it doesn't have a good index. Et cetera.
An easily-navigated web page does not have these drawbacks, and is instantly available to everyone.
Naturally some people are too lazy to even check a website, but at least I believe there are fewer of them than for books.
True. Stuff like this will never stop guys like SCO.
However, as we all know, SCO has managed to spread FUD and raise questions among people. Most people, including journalists are just too lazy to go check facts, like reading one of the books on Unix history.
Being able to point out 'Here, look at this website. It has detailed info on who did what and when.' makes it easier to dispell the FUD. The more detail we have, the harder it is to 'spin'.
The original Levenez diagram is a good example of this. SCO actually used this to show how Linux 'derived' from Unix. Not that there's anything wrong with the chart, but without the details, most people don't realize which lines are actually shared code, and which are just inspiration; i.e. what parts actually have any legal relevance.
He attempts to blister the president over "fiction," when the movie he's accepting the award for is filled with the same, presented as fact.
Um. Ok, assuming you're correct, where is the hypocrisy in that?
Shouldn't the President of the United States be expected to hold the truth in a higher regard than a filmmaker?
Thats 7 damn years ago. Please God, don't let this SCO thing go on that long. Finish them off with a bolt of lightning right now.
That bolt just struck. IBM requested Summary Judgement this week. If it's granted, Linux will be in the clear, and IBM will have a field day with some of their Lanham-act counterclaims.
Not to mention the DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone cases will fall like the houses of cards that they are. Red Hat should have an easy time with their case. And the Novell case is already not-unlikely to be dismissed.
The question is, who is going to go on propping up SCO once Linux is out of the picture, and there's just a Kamikaze attack on IBM, hardly likely to leave a dent, left.
Aha. GNU Halifax did the job wonderfully. I actually hadn't used it before. Another reason to love the plethora of software you get with Linux distros.
The Pacer docket (available free, due to high public interest) has the documents as TIFF files. Good luck on opening them (my pre-2.0 Gimp failed on some unknown tag.)
This is not entirely unexpected though, IBM already mentioned in a filing that they intended to move for summary judgement.
Actually, the real context is damning. His real reason for damning multitasking for MINIX is "no-one on a home PC will ever want to run more than one job at a time."
If by "home PC" you mean an Intel x86 machine, and put that into the context of way things were looking around 1990, that is an entirely reasonable standpoint. Not very many people ever did do much multitasking on 386es.
Most people around then (myself included) did not think the x86 architecture was going to hang around much longer. It is quite clear that Tanenbaum shared the majority view at the time, that RISC was the way to go.
Also, the design goals of MINIX, clearly stated by Tanenbaum, (see his book, I've read it.) was for MINIX to be an educational tool, and run on low-end (e.g. 286) PC:s. He was not planning MINIX to be a production-quality system. He did not want to add 386-specific features.
You should not dismiss Tanenbaum so lightly, he most likely is far more knowledgeable on these subjects than you or I. It's like saying Einstein was a moron because he didn't grok quantum theory.
I don't know, perhaps you're a Linux zealot who wants to believe that Linus is always right. But the reason this entire debate is so well-known is that both sides raise valid points. The difference is in their intentions and design goals, not in the facts.
This from a man who describes true multitasking and multi-threaded I/O as "a performance hack."
Now that is just unfair, and taken completely out of context.
The context he was talking of is of the old 16-bit PC systems, which had no hardware support for multitasking. And in that context, he is correct, and he's not making a secret of the fact that Minix was designed to run on low-end machines.
Linux, on the other hand, was 386-only.
So what the heck is the point in holding that quote up against him?
Maybe we just have differing definitions.
No, it's just obvious you're running different versions. I agree with both. The windows player is a total piece of crap which I'd never install on my machine, (if I used windows).
The Linux player, on the other hand, is a quite tolerable piece of software, without the nastiness of the Windows version.
Uuuh.. a refrigerator works by transferring heat from the inside to the outside. The back of a refrigerator gets HOT.
Nice place to put your computer. And in a wooden case too.
Those better be some good fans!
You didn't read it either, silly.
The press-release, which I did read, is nothing but a summary of the report I was referring to. I did not read the report, and neither has anyone else, since as it notes, the report hasn't been published yet.
As for me basing my opinion on other comments: Look at the timestamp of my post. Five minutes after the story was posted. Riiight. There must've been dozens of "first post!" comments to give me a notion of the article.
Rather, I had already read the press relase and also PJs analysis on Groklaw, hence I already had an opinion formed when slashdot broke the story.
I expressed "the report seems" to imply not that I had read the report (which I could not have), but to express the impression which I have recieved from reading the press release and the report-writers comments in the Yahoo story.
Don't assume everyone didn't read the 'article' just because you obviously didn't.
Interesting how the whole report seems to be one big straw-man argument.
(i.e. claiming the other is saying something they're not, and then showing that it is false)
Their straw-man seems to be the idea (which noone, of course, has claimed) that Linux somehow was created in a vacuum.
From there they proceed to show how Linux was (*shock*) a clone of Unix!
(Probably leaving out the fact that there are literally dozens of them.)
What I'm talking about here is information which is already public.
The info in the case-in-point, for example:
The Egyptian government cooperates with American intelligence agencies in monitoring and combating militant islamists.
This is a well-estabished fact. There are both former officials and former islamists who have publicly testified to that. Everybody knows.
But what is the point here? It's not to keep that info away from terrorists for sure, they know already.
The Euro is a reserve currency. Naturally, it's still far from the USD, but it is being used as a reserve currency.
I about 15% of China's national reserve are in Euros, for instance.
What did the documents reveal??
I think you'd be surprized how much irrelevant 'intelligence' ends up classified. Often, it's stuff which is already public (although not always general) knowledge but which the administration wants to deny.
A lot of ass-covering, basically.
But it gets even stranger. For instance the case of the de-classified CIA documents relating to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. (Whups, now there's a piece of flamebait..)
Anyway, a bunch of these documents have been re-classified by the current administration, apparently to hide such disturbing secrets like what Señor Pinochet's favorite drink was. (Scotch)
Well, my intended 'slant' was that I don't consider this very newsworthy.
For people in the field sure, but the general public? Sure, 'a potential HIV drug' sounds great and interesting. But this thing isn't even into preclinical testing.
Do you know how many pre-clinical drug candidates make it to FDA approval? Not even 1 in 1000.
(don't remember exactly, it may even be more like 1 in 10000)
Not really. I hope. :-)
I'm not doing that kind of calculations, and I wouldn't really attempt them either.
Consider protein folding; We have detailed knowledge of all the forces at work there. No real surprizes. But we haven't been able to model it accurately.
Now think of the immune system, which we don't understand terribly well. Modelling is a very risky business. Making predictions from the models is even riskier.