TeX has always been a darling of the open-source community, but this is despite the fact that it's not actually copylefted.
Lots of open-source software isn't copylefted. For example, X11. See "What Is Copyleft"
.
So why is Java so often spoken of with disdain?
The problem is not that it's not copylefted; the problem is that it's not Open Source! Or rather, Sun's implementation isn't. Free implementations exist, but they yet to catch up with the full Java standard. Lots of software will only run on proprietary JVMs.
Consider the BitTorrent client Azureus. It is GPLd, but in practice it only runs with Sun's JVM. If you want to run it, you must first sacrifice your freedom by accepting Sun's Java license. The package as a whole is non-free, and contributing third-party code from another GPL project could land you in court.
This legal minefield has hindered Java's adoption in the Free Software universe.
Actually, they work together all the time. A major example is Samba, which implements Microsoft's mostly-closed SMB protocol. Or the open-source implementations of Microsoft's video codecs.
But what Sun is after is different. They want an open source license that only permits those modifications which preserve compatibility with Sun's specifications.
Sun is suffering from a classic misinterpretation of what on open source license is. They're thinking if they can just get the right secret handshake, they can gain entry to the club.
The real secret is, there is no secret handshake. While it certainly helps if a license is phrased in such a way that it appears to match the Open Source Definition, the only real test of a license is whether it lets people do what they need/want to do.
Sun's problem is that they know that people want to produce non-conformant implementations. They feel they have to stop them doing that. This goal is, by its very nature, incompatible with an open source license. No amount of clever wording is going to change that.
I've got bad news for you. Java isn't Open Source. The confusion over this has created a lot of problems for Free Software, and even now Java support in Linux is quite poor.
5) NFS, as we know it, came from where?
When Sun invented NFS, they were still a small upstart Unix vendor, so the only way they could get it adopted was for other vendors to support it, and they only way they could do that was by giving it away.
Personally, I wonder if something that sucked less might not have arisen had Sun not done that.
6) RPC's, as we know them, came from where?
I think you mean Sun RPC, as there are several other RPC systems floating around that suck in different, though broadly similar, ways. Note that due to the inate suckage and insecurity of RPC, Linux systems have never used it as pervasively as Sun systems, a fact for which I am truly grateful.
As everyone else has mentioned, you missed Open Office, possibly Sun's most impressive contribution to Open Source.
I still think the most remarkable thing about Sun's contributions is that they come from a company that is so openly hostile to Free Software. It's kinda like when Microsoft inexplicably gave their fonts away, at one stroke curing the most intractable weak spot in the Linux desktop, except that Sun keep on doing it again and again.
I wonder if people will ever come up with a replacement for the floppy disk icon when saving a file in most programs...
Hopefully they will just come up with a replacement for saving a file. The idea of "saving a file" is really a throwback to when software was a lot more primitive. It already in practice has evolved into a basic version control system.
There are obvious benefits in using a real version control system instead. Once "Save" is replaced by "Check In", the system can journal every character the user types to disk and a lot less work will be lost. I've yet to encounter a version control system that's actually simple enough for my mother to use, but once one appears the "Save" button could disappear virtually overnight.
The other thing "Save" is used for is file transfer (via email, or floppy, or network share). I'm not sure where this will go. MS Office already has "Send to..." right there in the File menu, but there's a bunch of niggling problems with it:
If I'm sending by email, I want to put some text in the actual email. I want to do this in my normal mail client, not whatever random interface MS Office feels like using.
I want a record of the same version I sent. In other words, I'm going to be clicking the "Save" button anyway.
I may or may not want to strip out all the change information. I may or may not want to send an editable version.
A.doc file may as well be a.exe in terms of what it can do. People have to stop running executables they recieve in email. But for that to happen, people have to stop sending each other executables. It's possible that the requirements for a format for document interchange are irreconcilable with the requirements for a format for document editing. At the very least, document interchange formats should obey open standards.
When the simplest way to get a file from one Internet-connected computer to another Internet-connected computer is to put it on a floppy and carry it, something has gone badly wrong.
Why is it that this candy-coated windowmanager runs like a *DOG* when it's just moving windows and drawing text on a 512mb 550MHz PIII system, and BeOS 4.0 (pre)release could run multiple video streams effortlessly without lag (may as well mention almost instant boot) on a 166Mhz PPC 604 with 128 MB RAM? 5 years ago.
Yeah, and why is that my laptop can't render Shrek-quality 3D, when my pocket calculator could draw 2D graphs 10 YEARS ago?
Maybe getting paid for your work and quality go hand in hand in some products?
The trouble is that anything you read on that site is likely to be patented. That is, after all, the entire purpose of "Microsoft Research" existing. So if you use it as a source of ideas, you're opening yourself up to a world of pain down the road.
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 1
you'll also have a gimpy, crapped-up config file that other admins have to wade through after you get fired.
A small, custom config file takes much less wading than the default! A method I've found works wonders when I inherit an Apache server is to strip out all the comments with something like
perl -ni.old -e 'print unless/^#/' apache.conf
Suddenly, like magic, you have a config file that you can see what it does. You then have a headstart on removing cruft, bugs, obsolete and redundant stuff.
Finally, add brief comments to explain why you did things the way you did. You'll thank yourself when you have to change something a year later.
Obviously an Apache newbie isn't going to understand the result without consulting the documentation. On the other hand, consulting the documentation is an excellent way to cease being an Apache newbie!
*sigh* Why does junk like this get moderated up? When I meta-moderate I see maybe 90% good moderations and 10% slightly questionable. Yet when I'm reading, there seems to be consistantly at least one ridiculously ignorant post that gets moderated up on every article. What the hell is going on here? What would even be the point of posting a counter-argument, since this old chestnut has already been argued into the ground a million times on Slashdot, and yet here it is again, Score: 4, Insightful.
Maybe it's time for the whole of Slashdot to be moderated -1, Redundant.
I actually once had the opportunity to do this (on Linux). There was no crash. The rm completed successfully and returned to the shell prompt. Of course, the system wasn't terribly useable afterwards:-).
Why not? Why are people so complacent and accepting about censorship? Why are people so happy to surrender their right of self-expression for a paycheck?
Yeah, yeah, -1 Offtopic, I know. I'll get me coat.
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
I might as well ask, "Why does 'classic' look 10 years out-of-date?"
I like Luna. It makes Windows un-ugly enough to use. This is no small achievement. It's at least a generation behind the latest KDE and Gnome designs, but then, this is proprietary software. Lower your expectations.
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different
This basically comes down to the same thing as "Why aren't Microsoft developers worried that everyone outside Microsoft hates them?" "Because they're too busy worrying that everyone inside Microsoft hates them."
Why does every other Windows apps use their own weird-looking skin?
Because if they used the 'classic' look, their applications would look 10 years out-of-date. And not everyone has Luna.
4) Why do the buttons on every single installer all look different?
I don't even know why Windows applications use those installers. Are Windows users still impressed with them? Even open source applications have them! The Open Office installer is pretty cool the first time, but by the third or fourth time I'm wishing someone would port apt-get to Windows.
I like those Microsoft installers that give you a big square "Click here to install" button when you run them. Do they think I'm running the installer for some other reason?
But what's even better than that is when you use "Add/Remove programs" to uninstall some software and it runs an uninstaller program! There seems to be two schools of dependancy management in the Windows world; a) ask the user, and b) blindly delete/overwrite everything.
Corey Gouker is a 20 year-old geek who likes 5'8" redheads. He sits on 204 GB of music. He has one media device. His hobbies including hanging out in Microsoft newsgroups.
He is reviewing Microsoft's "iPod killer". It is gonna be like iTunes, except instead of buying music, you rent it. We all know this is a foolproof business model. It is loaded up to the gills with more of that tasty DRM that everyone loves.
The first thing he did was plug it in to the mains. Then he tried to take it apart. I think we have a potential Darwin Award nominee, folks. Then he had trouble turning it on.
The device has a 400MHz XScale CPU and 64Mb of RAM. It can play videos on its 320x240 screen. It performs well, apart from the artifacts and frame drops.
The device has cables coming out of every side but one. The good news is, you can add blue LEDs and make it really sexy.
Battery life is 22 hours for audio and 7 hours for video. The device weighs as much as a can of coke.
If you scroll to the bottom, you can download a 23Mb video. I'm too bored to watch it, maybe someone else can post a summary of that.
4D is not too bad. It's hard to make a recommendation, because the entire concept of "personal databases" is obsolete and was probably a bad idea to begin with. But 4D works on Mac and Windows, is well-engineered, well-supported and used for lots of serious applications. It's less toy-like than Access, there's less focus on eye-candy and more on performance and scalability.
Oy! That wasn't a troll! It's a serious question! Those images are awesome, and I'd seriously like to know how they came out of POV-Ray, which I had been assuming was totally obsolete.
Is this the same mirrored-sphere-on-infinite-checkboard POV-Ray? The one where you have to describe all your objects and light sources in a big text file which then takes all day to render? How the hell did they get it to do those amazing things?
Why would being close to Godzilla be a bad thing? Godzilla is hugely popular in Japan. I assume if the Godzilla trademark owners were going to sue, they'd have gotten around to it by now.
Does "why" or "why not" ever come into the picture of how the universe is set up? How is it any more than "is it" or "is it not"?
I think we should be free to ask the question, even if it's rather difficult to test our hypotheses. I'm basing my ideas on extrapolating from what I do know about. While this has obvious limitations, it's the best I can manage.
You can have a repeating universe, or a random universe with states that just never come up. Why wouldn't it be like this?
The idea of a repeating universe seems very weird to me. Say I do a quantum interference experiment, and the answer comes out as "1". Then another version of me, N light years away, is constrained to also get the answer "1". This seems like a violation of the no-action-at-a-distance principle.
Similarly, if there are states that never come up, I'd prefer it if there was some reason why they never came up.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of open-source software isn't copylefted. For example, X11. See "What Is Copyleft"
.The problem is not that it's not copylefted; the problem is that it's not Open Source! Or rather, Sun's implementation isn't. Free implementations exist, but they yet to catch up with the full Java standard. Lots of software will only run on proprietary JVMs.
Consider the BitTorrent client Azureus. It is GPLd, but in practice it only runs with Sun's JVM. If you want to run it, you must first sacrifice your freedom by accepting Sun's Java license. The package as a whole is non-free, and contributing third-party code from another GPL project could land you in court.
This legal minefield has hindered Java's adoption in the Free Software universe.
Actually, they work together all the time. A major example is Samba, which implements Microsoft's mostly-closed SMB protocol. Or the open-source implementations of Microsoft's video codecs.
But what Sun is after is different. They want an open source license that only permits those modifications which preserve compatibility with Sun's specifications.
Sun is suffering from a classic misinterpretation of what on open source license is. They're thinking if they can just get the right secret handshake, they can gain entry to the club.
The real secret is, there is no secret handshake. While it certainly helps if a license is phrased in such a way that it appears to match the Open Source Definition, the only real test of a license is whether it lets people do what they need/want to do.
Sun's problem is that they know that people want to produce non-conformant implementations. They feel they have to stop them doing that. This goal is, by its very nature, incompatible with an open source license. No amount of clever wording is going to change that.
Next question?
1) Sun workstations were the primary development environment for FOSS from about 1987 till the early 1990's.
:-) See http://www.tcl.tk/doc/tclHistory.html
This is true, but it is not clear how much credit for this can be given to Sun.
2) How many copies of Linux and related software were dowdloaded from a "sunsite"?
Millions. I think this is probably your strongest point, as Sun indirectly (and probably knowingly) sponsored the embryonic GNU project.
3) TCL came from where?
Berkeley
4) Java came from where?
I've got bad news for you. Java isn't Open Source. The confusion over this has created a lot of problems for Free Software, and even now Java support in Linux is quite poor.
5) NFS, as we know it, came from where?
When Sun invented NFS, they were still a small upstart Unix vendor, so the only way they could get it adopted was for other vendors to support it, and they only way they could do that was by giving it away.
Personally, I wonder if something that sucked less might not have arisen had Sun not done that.
6) RPC's, as we know them, came from where?
I think you mean Sun RPC, as there are several other RPC systems floating around that suck in different, though broadly similar, ways. Note that due to the inate suckage and insecurity of RPC, Linux systems have never used it as pervasively as Sun systems, a fact for which I am truly grateful.
As everyone else has mentioned, you missed Open Office, possibly Sun's most impressive contribution to Open Source.
I still think the most remarkable thing about Sun's contributions is that they come from a company that is so openly hostile to Free Software. It's kinda like when Microsoft inexplicably gave their fonts away, at one stroke curing the most intractable weak spot in the Linux desktop, except that Sun keep on doing it again and again.
Hopefully they will just come up with a replacement for saving a file. The idea of "saving a file" is really a throwback to when software was a lot more primitive. It already in practice has evolved into a basic version control system.
There are obvious benefits in using a real version control system instead. Once "Save" is replaced by "Check In", the system can journal every character the user types to disk and a lot less work will be lost. I've yet to encounter a version control system that's actually simple enough for my mother to use, but once one appears the "Save" button could disappear virtually overnight.
The other thing "Save" is used for is file transfer (via email, or floppy, or network share). I'm not sure where this will go. MS Office already has "Send to..." right there in the File menu, but there's a bunch of niggling problems with it:
Yeah, and why is that my laptop can't render Shrek-quality 3D, when my pocket calculator could draw 2D graphs 10 YEARS ago?
Forget flamewars... how about some trolling?
The trouble is that anything you read on that site is likely to be patented. That is, after all, the entire purpose of "Microsoft Research" existing. So if you use it as a source of ideas, you're opening yourself up to a world of pain down the road.
A small, custom config file takes much less wading than the default! A method I've found works wonders when I inherit an Apache server is to strip out all the comments with something like
perl -ni.old -e 'print unless
Suddenly, like magic, you have a config file that you can see what it does. You then have a headstart on removing cruft, bugs, obsolete and redundant stuff.
Finally, add brief comments to explain why you did things the way you did. You'll thank yourself when you have to change something a year later.
Obviously an Apache newbie isn't going to understand the result without consulting the documentation. On the other hand, consulting the documentation is an excellent way to cease being an Apache newbie!
*sigh* Why does junk like this get moderated up? When I meta-moderate I see maybe 90% good moderations and 10% slightly questionable. Yet when I'm reading, there seems to be consistantly at least one ridiculously ignorant post that gets moderated up on every article. What the hell is going on here? What would even be the point of posting a counter-argument, since this old chestnut has already been argued into the ground a million times on Slashdot, and yet here it is again, Score: 4, Insightful.
Maybe it's time for the whole of Slashdot to be moderated -1, Redundant.
I actually once had the opportunity to do this (on Linux). There was no crash. The rm completed successfully and returned to the shell prompt. Of course, the system wasn't terribly useable afterwards :-).
I believe that people should tend to their own gardens before interfering with other people's.
Sounds about what I expected.
Why not? Why are people so complacent and accepting about censorship? Why are people so happy to surrender their right of self-expression for a paycheck?
Yeah, yeah, -1 Offtopic, I know. I'll get me coat.
I might as well ask, "Why does 'classic' look 10 years out-of-date?"
I like Luna. It makes Windows un-ugly enough to use. This is no small achievement. It's at least a generation behind the latest KDE and Gnome designs, but then, this is proprietary software. Lower your expectations.
This basically comes down to the same thing as "Why aren't Microsoft developers worried that everyone outside Microsoft hates them?" "Because they're too busy worrying that everyone inside Microsoft hates them."
Because if they used the 'classic' look, their applications would look 10 years out-of-date. And not everyone has Luna.
I don't even know why Windows applications use those installers. Are Windows users still impressed with them? Even open source applications have them! The Open Office installer is pretty cool the first time, but by the third or fourth time I'm wishing someone would port apt-get to Windows.
I like those Microsoft installers that give you a big square "Click here to install" button when you run them. Do they think I'm running the installer for some other reason?
But what's even better than that is when you use "Add/Remove programs" to uninstall some software and it runs an uninstaller program! There seems to be two schools of dependancy management in the Windows world; a) ask the user, and b) blindly delete/overwrite everything.
Sorry, got a bit carried away there.
Corey Gouker is a 20 year-old geek who likes 5'8" redheads. He sits on 204 GB of music. He has one media device. His hobbies including hanging out in Microsoft newsgroups.
He is reviewing Microsoft's "iPod killer". It is gonna be like iTunes, except instead of buying music, you rent it. We all know this is a foolproof business model. It is loaded up to the gills with more of that tasty DRM that everyone loves.
The first thing he did was plug it in to the mains. Then he tried to take it apart. I think we have a potential Darwin Award nominee, folks. Then he had trouble turning it on.
The device has a 400MHz XScale CPU and 64Mb of RAM. It can play videos on its 320x240 screen. It performs well, apart from the artifacts and frame drops.
The device has cables coming out of every side but one. The good news is, you can add blue LEDs and make it really sexy.
Battery life is 22 hours for audio and 7 hours for video. The device weighs as much as a can of coke.
If you scroll to the bottom, you can download a 23Mb video. I'm too bored to watch it, maybe someone else can post a summary of that.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
4D is not too bad. It's hard to make a recommendation, because the entire concept of "personal databases" is obsolete and was probably a bad idea to begin with. But 4D works on Mac and Windows, is well-engineered, well-supported and used for lots of serious applications. It's less toy-like than Access, there's less focus on eye-candy and more on performance and scalability.
Nice. Have you considered putting in a nice orange glow from the setting sun? Maybe I'm just a sunset fetishist...
Oh, in that case, well done. Though I don't have any karma handy.
Oy! That wasn't a troll! It's a serious question! Those images are awesome, and I'd seriously like to know how they came out of POV-Ray, which I had been assuming was totally obsolete.
Like what, exactly? I've ready the FA and all the comments, and I'm still not feeling insighterated (made up word).
Unless the fact that millions of Koreans play a game I've never heard of constitutes an insight?
Is this the same mirrored-sphere-on-infinite-checkboard POV-Ray? The one where you have to describe all your objects and light sources in a big text file which then takes all day to render? How the hell did they get it to do those amazing things?
Why would being close to Godzilla be a bad thing? Godzilla is hugely popular in Japan. I assume if the Godzilla trademark owners were going to sue, they'd have gotten around to it by now.
Shockingly, there are still people out there who can't read Japanese. Or were you joking?
I think we should be free to ask the question, even if it's rather difficult to test our hypotheses. I'm basing my ideas on extrapolating from what I do know about. While this has obvious limitations, it's the best I can manage.
The idea of a repeating universe seems very weird to me. Say I do a quantum interference experiment, and the answer comes out as "1". Then another version of me, N light years away, is constrained to also get the answer "1". This seems like a violation of the no-action-at-a-distance principle.
Similarly, if there are states that never come up, I'd prefer it if there was some reason why they never came up.
Thanks for the interesting response.