If you must have a "certified Unix!!1!" system for some reason, then you must buy a new Apple. Remember, they'd still much rather sell you a new system than a copy of OS X for an old iMac. They wouldn't have a whole lot to gain by making that certification backward-compatible.
So why didn't they get 10.4 certified back when they were about to release it?
The two simplest reasons are that 1) it wasn't ready yet, or 2) there wasn't a demand for it. It seems possible that some large customer needed the "certified Unix!" checkoff for purchasing authorization and this makes it compliant.
Again, you have to start sometime. Apparently Apple felt that this was that time.
Well, you have to start sometime, and I presume the process is not cheap. You might as well use your soon-to-be-launched version instead of the soon-to-be-stale release.
Oh, hey, I didn't mean that as a slam on the FSF. I'm wholeheartedly behind them on this one. I just think it's highly ironic that Solaris may end up closer to RMS's heart than Linux.
Some people want the Two-clause BSD license approved because a number of FreeBSD packages use it. Would you say that it is substantially different from the pre-existing Three-clause BSD license?
No. It's almost identical to the MIT/X11 license. Since that already exists, there's no pressing need for "BSD2".
Is the Three-clause BSD license substantially different from the four-clause BSD license (the one with the advertising requirement)?
Yes. That extra clause was enough to make it incompatible with other F/OSS licenses, namely the GPL. Going from 4 to 3 was much more significant than going from 3 to 2.
We can't STOP people from creating OSD-compatible licenses. All we can do is not approve them, which just pisses off the associated developers.
Then piss them off. Everyone's entitled to write their own license if they wish, but they don't have to be approved. There's no need to have 100 different licenses saying almost the same thing in 99 different poorly thought out ways.
If you want to get rid of all the licenses, you have to get rid of all the developers, and shrink the community back to what it was in the pre-open-source era. I don't want to do that.
Don't get rid of current licenses unless you must, but why encourage and support the creation of new ones? No matter what terms you want, there's almost certainly an OSI-certified license that already has them. If there isn't, then what you're asking probably doesn't qualify as F/OSS anyway.
If every developer whipped out their own libc, we'd call them crazy. Let them come up with a new license, though, and there's a rush to get the OSI to accept it. Well, nuts with that.
We need the class action lawsuit; it's an important legal tool. But if you've got a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it.
I've said it before but I love to preach this idea: send all punitive damages to the federal government's general fund. Sue for $100 million if you really think they deserve it - just don't plan to see the money if you win. If it's that important to you then you can proceed.
Alternatively, if you sue and lose, then a number of people up to log10(requested amount) get to beat the crap out of you and your attorneys. Either of those would make me smile.
Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris?
Well, one unexpected turn of events is that Solaris will probably be GPLv3 years before Linux. Maybe that won't make a difference, but should the need arise to link a GPLv3 library into the kernel to add some functionality, that may not be legally possible under Linux.
You can, but only if you are the copyright holder.
But that's not correct. I can relicense any BSD software I want, including yours. Let's read the actual text:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
[snip "don't sue me" boilerplate]
Those are the only restrictions on its use. If I want to ship it with modifications, including a different license, I may do so as long as I keep the copyright notice intact and don't use your name to advertise it.
Yes, because GPL2/3 are viral and actually prevents cooperation, and BSD is obsolete (doesn't cover many important aspects of modern business).
As you cannot get their permission for relicensing, you cannot use any GPL code in your software.
You can always relicense BSD software as GPL - that's implicit in the license text - and if you absolutely must include GPL code in your BSD project then that's the bargain.
Note that you don't hear the *BSD projects whining about this. They choose not to accept those conditions so they write their own GPL-free code.
So, we've disproved your silly, oft-repeated (and oft-rebutted) hypothesis about the GPL being viral. What do you have against the BSD license? What does it allow or disallow that's anti-business and that one of the GPL versions doesn't cover?
I think you've overreached when you suggest that humanities and social sciences are "nothing more than indoctrinations in leftist ideology and political correctness"; your statement is a display of your ignorance.
And your statement is a display of your naivete. I had exactly one liberal arts professor that wasn't vocally liberal - he taught economics. Every single other one was a self-parodying stereotype.
Religion class? Learn about how men and their religious structures oppress women and minorities.
Sociology? Learn about the institutional biases against women and minorities.
Psychology? Boys are as sweet and gentle as girls until men make them mean.
Political science? Liberals care about you; conservatives want to sell your corpse.
Communications? Learn how to talk to women so that they won't be at a disadvantage to men.
I couldn't wait to get back to the engineering and math halls, not because the professors were necessarily any less politically slanted, but because they never tried to teach greedy algorithms as a metaphor of capitalist class hatred. I couldn't even tell you what they believed, actually, and that's quite alright with me. It was a refreshing change from the constant yammering of their "soft arts" counterparts.
Seriously, we're way past the point that new licenses are tolerable. It seems like every major project demands its own license, even if the result is 99% similar to other common ones. Is there really a need for the Apache, CDDL, Mozilla, and Artistic licenses and their countless derivatives?
If you want other developers to use your code, no strings attached, pick BSD or maybe MIT. If you're more interested in end users but want the developers to still have a few avenues to lock the code down, there's GPLv2. If you're really into end users and care about patents, etc., then pick GPLv3. Repeat after me: no new licenses!
Really, I think OSI needs to pretty much reject all new submissions unless they are substantially different from the pre-existing major choices. Fragmenting codebases by writing Foo License and Bar License that are almost identical but incompatible in some subtle way can only appeal to Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. Just say no!
This is an example why open source projects are more effective when they're driven by pragmatism and not politics.
The problem is that politics is interested in you even if you're not interested in it. The pragmatic approach involves taking politics into account even if you're personally bored to tears by the subject.
they are not afraid of complexity. Examples that come to mind are pf
I don't know about the backend, but pf's frontend is a study in elegant simplicity. Seriously, it's just about as clean as such a potentially complicated system can be made. If it's underlying code really is complex, then I'd say that they made the tradeoff of keeping the frontend simple because that's what most people will see and shifting the tricky bits to the hidden backend where the experts can hover over it.
Are you saying it wouldn't be so bad/unethical if the companies were harming non-Americans?
I get your point. At the same time, a farmer in India is just some random Joe I'll never meet. An American farmer is my next door neighbor, Gene, who clears the snow from my driveway if he wakes up before I do. In that sense, I personally care a lot more about American farmers simply because I know them and work with them and take my kids to their houses to play. Nothing against non-Americans - I just don't know them.
Besides being GPL it has an SQL backend so doing things like changing the TTL for 300 domains takes a few seconds instead of the slog or scripting nightmare with BIND.
I haven't used PowerDNS but I've heard nothing but good about it. I only host about 20 DNS zones and BIND comes with FreeBSD, so I never bothered to learn anything else.
BIND maintenance doesn't have to be painful, though. The key is to refactor your zone files into smaller include files and let it auto-complete as much as necessary. Here's my standard template file:
$TTL 1800
@ IN SOA kanga.honeypot.net. root.kanga.honeypot.net. ( 2007072002 10800 3600 604800 86400 )
$INCLUDE external/glaakipeerheader
$ORIGIN @ $INCLUDE external/www-kanga
It expands "@" to the domain name that loaded it. That is, if I have something like:
zone "example.com" { type master; file "external/standardtemplate"; };
then it gets expanded to "example.com". Then it includes a file which pulls in my site's standard secondary NS and MX records, A record, and SPF/LOC records. Finally, it pulls in the standard entry for "www.".
If I need to update 18 of those 20 domains, I just edit that one file and reload. No, it's not as elegant as an SQL backend, but neither does it have to be a scripting nightmare if you plan it right.
"Hollywood is the main source of cash for Democrats" is just another legend in the rich and bizarre mythology of conservatism, and as such it is typically puerile and easily refuted.
I don't recall anyone saying that Hollywood's direct contributions were "the main source of cash for Democrats", although that's a clever strawman. The contention always has been that Hollywood is a big fundraiser for Democrats, and that's an important distinction.
If Jane Starlet hosts a $20,000-per-plate dinner for Candidate X, then she didn't actually contribute $2,000,000 to him - she just caused it to be donated. How many times do you hear about Republican actors holding these events? Compare and contrast with the nearly constant list of Democratic Party celebrity fundraisers.
Again, you knocked down an argument that I've never actually heard anyone put forth. If you have any numbers showing that Hollywood does not overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans in fundraising (and not contributions), as I would be sincerely interested in hearing them.
Re:The sad state of Slashdot editorial line nowada
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Well, I'll certainly give you that one. I'm a conservative, so I usually tend Republican (although we have a great Democrat senator here that I fully support). I'm liking Ron Paul these days because he actually seems to remember what being a conservative means.
Simply saying "we found canisters marked 'sarin' which appeared to be good at one time and of unknown status now" to indicate that actual WMDs were found is not logical.
But the important part is that it is possible to answer the question, "did we find WMDs in Iraq?", in the affirmative without being an ignorant slob. I'm aware of the subtleties on either decide of the question and understand the reasoning behind saying that we did not. On the other hand, after hearing both arguments, my opinion is that the answer more closely falls to "yes" than "no".
If I were forced to give a strictly boolean answer as the poll respondents were, I would say that we found WMDs in Iraq. If asked for further explanation, I'd happily explain about quantities and qualities of what we found and why I came to my decision, but the poll didn't ask for that.
Re:The sad state of Slashdot editorial line nowada
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Sad, sad, sad, this used to be a cool blog with real "news for nerds" but lately it seems more interested in generating polemic and the page views that accompany it.
Slashdot has always been this way. It's particularly noticeable if your opinions are outside the Slashdot mainstream, such as we few conservatives who have to listen the "Republicans want to eat your babies" stories that inevitably flood the Politics section every election cycle. If you believe that Republicans really do eat babies, you don't notice those stories. If you don't believe it, they stick out like a sore thumb.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but it supports my point: people notice the inflammatory rhetoric when it's their pet belief that's being demonized. Until then, it just hides in the background.
I guess that would mean that it daemonizes. But that's different.
The question remains why run both windows and linux? I run windows for ease of game playing (yes i know most things can be convinced to work under linux, but it is less time to maintain a windows install than it is to get them working).
My shortest answer: Quickbooks Pro doesn't run under Wine yet, and that's what my accountant uses. For business reasons, it's much easier and cheaper to run Windows in a VM for that lone non-graphic-intensive application than to try to get my accountant to accept something different.
Although Windows is mostly a game OS, it does still have a few important business apps.
That was a perfectly legitimate question (and one that I'd have asked, too). Right now, most people install VMWare to run Windows on their Linux hosts. I'd be quite pleased to be able to run it using standard, Free, built-in functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
If you must have a "certified Unix!!1!" system for some reason, then you must buy a new Apple. Remember, they'd still much rather sell you a new system than a copy of OS X for an old iMac. They wouldn't have a whole lot to gain by making that certification backward-compatible.
The two simplest reasons are that 1) it wasn't ready yet, or 2) there wasn't a demand for it. It seems possible that some large customer needed the "certified Unix!" checkoff for purchasing authorization and this makes it compliant.
Again, you have to start sometime. Apparently Apple felt that this was that time.
Well, you have to start sometime, and I presume the process is not cheap. You might as well use your soon-to-be-launched version instead of the soon-to-be-stale release.
Oh, hey, I didn't mean that as a slam on the FSF. I'm wholeheartedly behind them on this one. I just think it's highly ironic that Solaris may end up closer to RMS's heart than Linux.
No. It's almost identical to the MIT/X11 license. Since that already exists, there's no pressing need for "BSD2".
Is the Three-clause BSD license substantially different from the four-clause BSD license (the one with the advertising requirement)?Yes. That extra clause was enough to make it incompatible with other F/OSS licenses, namely the GPL. Going from 4 to 3 was much more significant than going from 3 to 2.
We can't STOP people from creating OSD-compatible licenses. All we can do is not approve them, which just pisses off the associated developers.Then piss them off. Everyone's entitled to write their own license if they wish, but they don't have to be approved. There's no need to have 100 different licenses saying almost the same thing in 99 different poorly thought out ways.
If you want to get rid of all the licenses, you have to get rid of all the developers, and shrink the community back to what it was in the pre-open-source era. I don't want to do that.Don't get rid of current licenses unless you must, but why encourage and support the creation of new ones? No matter what terms you want, there's almost certainly an OSI-certified license that already has them. If there isn't, then what you're asking probably doesn't qualify as F/OSS anyway.
If every developer whipped out their own libc, we'd call them crazy. Let them come up with a new license, though, and there's a rush to get the OSI to accept it. Well, nuts with that.
I've said it before but I love to preach this idea: send all punitive damages to the federal government's general fund. Sue for $100 million if you really think they deserve it - just don't plan to see the money if you win. If it's that important to you then you can proceed.
Alternatively, if you sue and lose, then a number of people up to log10(requested amount) get to beat the crap out of you and your attorneys. Either of those would make me smile.
Well, one unexpected turn of events is that Solaris will probably be GPLv3 years before Linux. Maybe that won't make a difference, but should the need arise to link a GPLv3 library into the kernel to add some functionality, that may not be legally possible under Linux.
Irony, thy name is FSF.
But that's not correct. I can relicense any BSD software I want, including yours. Let's read the actual text:
Those are the only restrictions on its use. If I want to ship it with modifications, including a different license, I may do so as long as I keep the copyright notice intact and don't use your name to advertise it.
So you've missed the point completely.Ditto.
You can always relicense BSD software as GPL - that's implicit in the license text - and if you absolutely must include GPL code in your BSD project then that's the bargain.
Note that you don't hear the *BSD projects whining about this. They choose not to accept those conditions so they write their own GPL-free code.
So, we've disproved your silly, oft-repeated (and oft-rebutted) hypothesis about the GPL being viral. What do you have against the BSD license? What does it allow or disallow that's anti-business and that one of the GPL versions doesn't cover?
And your statement is a display of your naivete. I had exactly one liberal arts professor that wasn't vocally liberal - he taught economics. Every single other one was a self-parodying stereotype.
Religion class? Learn about how men and their religious structures oppress women and minorities.
Sociology? Learn about the institutional biases against women and minorities.
Psychology? Boys are as sweet and gentle as girls until men make them mean.
Political science? Liberals care about you; conservatives want to sell your corpse.
Communications? Learn how to talk to women so that they won't be at a disadvantage to men.
I couldn't wait to get back to the engineering and math halls, not because the professors were necessarily any less politically slanted, but because they never tried to teach greedy algorithms as a metaphor of capitalist class hatred. I couldn't even tell you what they believed, actually, and that's quite alright with me. It was a refreshing change from the constant yammering of their "soft arts" counterparts.
Seriously, we're way past the point that new licenses are tolerable. It seems like every major project demands its own license, even if the result is 99% similar to other common ones. Is there really a need for the Apache, CDDL, Mozilla, and Artistic licenses and their countless derivatives?
If you want other developers to use your code, no strings attached, pick BSD or maybe MIT. If you're more interested in end users but want the developers to still have a few avenues to lock the code down, there's GPLv2. If you're really into end users and care about patents, etc., then pick GPLv3. Repeat after me: no new licenses!
Really, I think OSI needs to pretty much reject all new submissions unless they are substantially different from the pre-existing major choices. Fragmenting codebases by writing Foo License and Bar License that are almost identical but incompatible in some subtle way can only appeal to Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. Just say no!
I think you mistake politeness for submissiveness. For example:
You can be polite and respectful without being a pushover. This is also commonly referred to as "tact".
You're going to love this Theo guy, then.
I keed, I keed.
The problem is that politics is interested in you even if you're not interested in it. The pragmatic approach involves taking politics into account even if you're personally bored to tears by the subject.
I don't know about the backend, but pf's frontend is a study in elegant simplicity. Seriously, it's just about as clean as such a potentially complicated system can be made. If it's underlying code really is complex, then I'd say that they made the tradeoff of keeping the frontend simple because that's what most people will see and shifting the tricky bits to the hidden backend where the experts can hover over it.
I get your point. At the same time, a farmer in India is just some random Joe I'll never meet. An American farmer is my next door neighbor, Gene, who clears the snow from my driveway if he wakes up before I do. In that sense, I personally care a lot more about American farmers simply because I know them and work with them and take my kids to their houses to play. Nothing against non-Americans - I just don't know them.
I haven't used PowerDNS but I've heard nothing but good about it. I only host about 20 DNS zones and BIND comes with FreeBSD, so I never bothered to learn anything else.
BIND maintenance doesn't have to be painful, though. The key is to refactor your zone files into smaller include files and let it auto-complete as much as necessary. Here's my standard template file:
It expands "@" to the domain name that loaded it. That is, if I have something like:
then it gets expanded to "example.com". Then it includes a file which pulls in my site's standard secondary NS and MX records, A record, and SPF/LOC records. Finally, it pulls in the standard entry for "www.".
If I need to update 18 of those 20 domains, I just edit that one file and reload. No, it's not as elegant as an SQL backend, but neither does it have to be a scripting nightmare if you plan it right.
CFO: "Four nines are 80% as good, right?"
djbdns is proprietary, source-available software. It's nowhere near BSD or GPL licensed.
I don't recall anyone saying that Hollywood's direct contributions were "the main source of cash for Democrats", although that's a clever strawman. The contention always has been that Hollywood is a big fundraiser for Democrats, and that's an important distinction.
If Jane Starlet hosts a $20,000-per-plate dinner for Candidate X, then she didn't actually contribute $2,000,000 to him - she just caused it to be donated. How many times do you hear about Republican actors holding these events? Compare and contrast with the nearly constant list of Democratic Party celebrity fundraisers.
Again, you knocked down an argument that I've never actually heard anyone put forth. If you have any numbers showing that Hollywood does not overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans in fundraising (and not contributions), as I would be sincerely interested in hearing them.
Well, I'll certainly give you that one. I'm a conservative, so I usually tend Republican (although we have a great Democrat senator here that I fully support). I'm liking Ron Paul these days because he actually seems to remember what being a conservative means.
But the important part is that it is possible to answer the question, "did we find WMDs in Iraq?", in the affirmative without being an ignorant slob. I'm aware of the subtleties on either decide of the question and understand the reasoning behind saying that we did not. On the other hand, after hearing both arguments, my opinion is that the answer more closely falls to "yes" than "no".
If I were forced to give a strictly boolean answer as the poll respondents were, I would say that we found WMDs in Iraq. If asked for further explanation, I'd happily explain about quantities and qualities of what we found and why I came to my decision, but the poll didn't ask for that.
Slashdot has always been this way. It's particularly noticeable if your opinions are outside the Slashdot mainstream, such as we few conservatives who have to listen the "Republicans want to eat your babies" stories that inevitably flood the Politics section every election cycle. If you believe that Republicans really do eat babies, you don't notice those stories. If you don't believe it, they stick out like a sore thumb.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but it supports my point: people notice the inflammatory rhetoric when it's their pet belief that's being demonized. Until then, it just hides in the background.
I guess that would mean that it daemonizes. But that's different.
My shortest answer: Quickbooks Pro doesn't run under Wine yet, and that's what my accountant uses. For business reasons, it's much easier and cheaper to run Windows in a VM for that lone non-graphic-intensive application than to try to get my accountant to accept something different.
Although Windows is mostly a game OS, it does still have a few important business apps.
That was a perfectly legitimate question (and one that I'd have asked, too). Right now, most people install VMWare to run Windows on their Linux hosts. I'd be quite pleased to be able to run it using standard, Free, built-in functionality.