Good points. SWG sounds like a neat game, and if it were being run by anyone other than SOE (the same SOE who pillaged the EQ dynamic of GM/player relations for profit margins), then I'd probably try it out. As it is, I've been burned by the "you're just players, you have no rights." attitude. If I'm going to immerse myself in a world, then I have to have some kind of respect for the caretakers of that world, and care is not the word I would you use to describe what SOE takes....
If Blizzard honestly never released a game until it was ready, then why would they have patches to fix game issues, problems and bugs? Those things makes games, not ready for release, yet even Blizzard has had them. Look, Blizzard has made some great games in the past and will make great games in the future. However, nobody is perfect, especially with MMORPGs.
Blizzard has released many games, and every one of them has had followup updates. I'm not saying that their games are the pinical of code, I'm saying that when Blizzard releases a game it's "ready", and by that I mean that it's up to an internal standard of playability that they set and I agree with from observation. I played a few of their games at release before any patches were released, and I have to say, they were some of the most playable games I've seen.
I'm not a fan of Warcraft because I don't like the Civ-style gather-and-build model, but I did play it early on, and I was impressed.
I think if anyone is going to release an MMOG that will hit the ground running, it will be an independant game publisher with a track-record of worrying about the details that make other games really lose.
Now, I'm not all roses. I think they will do what most game houses do: they will focus on the UI and the combat/spell/skill system to the exclusion of things that *I* care about like the network protocol, the server-side management, the intellegence of the AI-combat, etc. But the simple fact is that when you put Sony and Blizzard up to comparison... Sony has released many, many games that suck. Ultimately Sony is really just now getting the hang of MMOGs (they took over EQ in total starting about a year ago, and fumbled for quite a while).
Blizzard on the other hand has been doing a number of the most popular MOGs, and I think they're well-placed to release WoW with a wow.
I won't play EQ2 for many of the same reasons as SWG, I was just making the point that EQ2 was coming, and made a much more logical transition for those that do (for some odd reason) play these games for the graphics; or who want to see some of the core flaws in EQ's 5-year old model of gameplay addressed.
WoW is a special case. Blizzard has some things going for it that are very special. 1) they don't release on a schedule, they release when the game is done 2) they care about how good the game is 3) they have yet to produce a game that sucked... ever. That compares to Sony... rather favorably.
YOU won't be caught, but all they need to do is catch a few to make the point to a LOT of folks, and staunch the bleeding.
There will, of course, be other ways. Poisoning clients, suing on the basis that x% of what can be downloaded is infringing, and you're running a major client/server, which therefore contributes, etc.
The courts will do that in the US. As soon as this hits a court-room there are one of two outcomes I expect: 1) it gets thrown out on the basis that SCO has spent so much time trying this case in the court of public opinion that a court decision would be a meaningless adjunct to SCO PR 2) SCO is made to shut up for the duration of the case. I think 2 is far more likey, but SCO's in for a nasty bit of bonking on the head for their behavior.
Judges don't tend to be fond of those who would use their courts for PR purposes.
Here's my reaction as an EQ player: I'll never play SWG.
Why? Several reasons
My friends play EQ, why would I want to leave them?
If I leave EQ it will be because of Sony's (mis!)handling of the server-side content and general customer issues. If I do that, it won't be to play another Sony game... like duh;)
SWG has better graphics. Yes, this is a minus. I and most other seasoned EQ players turn graphics quality WAY down in order to speed rendering during complex encounters between dozens of mobs (player and NPC alike). Better graphics means slower display, and I can't deal with that. If anything, I want a game with graphics like DAoC which are a bit more cartoonish and obviously sprite-based in some places, but MUCH more efficient on the card
WoW is coming out, and to quote the mantra: Blizzard games don't suck.
EQ2 is coming out, and it will have all of the above features/problems PLUS a lot of it is written with EQ players in mind, and to address many of the concerns that players (or at least developers) had with EQ.
GM involvement in EQ has been scaled back a LOT since SOE took over from Verant. I expect that to be a trend across Sony games, and I don't really feel like getting to know the folks that run SWG, just to see them get fired or moved to "premium servers".
In sort, don't waste your money on SWG if you play EQ. You know you don't play EQ for the graphics. You know you don't play it for the story. You play it to hang out with friends, bash stuff gud and score phat lewtz!;-)
I see your point, but I think he's right. I think it's obvious that watermarks are going to be a big part of the music distribution system soon (if they aren't already). Sure, Felton has proved that you can remove a watermark that you know about, but the RIAA's memebers aren't going to tell you about it, and they'll place a few kinds of watermarks on each song if they're smart.
Once you rip and distribute, you create a trail, and all the RIAA needs is a few high-profile cases that take Freenet users and run them through the wash for distributing songs.
However, the RIAA is doomed, and there's a simple reason. When we get to the juncture that it's reasonable for my DVD player, CD player, etc to be played REMOTELY by another rendering device (amplifier, TV, etc) then the RIAA is going to have to very carefully define their terms. I don't think they're going to be able to stop Joe Teen from sharing a new CD with everyone in his school. I also don't think that their business model will survive a 2-10x shrinkage when that becomes reasonable for your average non-technical teen.
Can you imagine "hey, Joe can I borrow the new XDestroyWindow CD?" "Oh, sure Jim it's in my streaming collection, log in any time."
It has been sold as a short book I think, but usually in a collection.
My first thought when I saw the slashdot article was... ah, I'm a huge Asimov fan, but Heilnein did The Roads Must Roll, which really introduced the moving sidewalk idea as a mass-highway replacement in SF.
Just to review the core strength of the GPL, while the GPL may have many satellite weaknesses in many legal systems, it will always fall back on revocation.
That is, if you cannot apply the GPL, you MUST NOT apply it. As soon as you are without the GPL, you have source code and binaries for something that you are now not allowed to distribute without getting permission from the author, except as allowed by your country's take on fair use.
The GPL is a voluntary license, and you never HAVE to apply it if you don't want to. The fact that, in some legal systems, it may not be possible to apply it in some or all situations, simply means that you have what you are given, and you may not use it in ways that you are not allowed to by law.
The GPL doesn't apply to you unless you want it to.
Wrong answer still, though I think you're closer than some others.
When interviewing for a job, you should know the tools that the job requires. If you are looking for office jobs, you should know the tools used in those jobs, and if that's MS Office you should learn MS Office, and learn it well.
That's also beside the point of the original thread. What should be used in K12 is any tools that teach the basics that you will need to move on to college or independant learning later in life. You should not be using MS Word as a (sole) example word processor absolutely because it's likely to be the one they'll use later on. They should be using something that will make them learn the basic skills of modern tools, and then switch to something else on another platform.
Schools should have PCs with Linux, PCs with Windows, Macs with MacOS, and anything else new or old they can get their hands on. The art of maintaining diverse platforms should be the key hiring criteria in K12 IT admins these days, because a) you should be able to take any freebies that come your way and b) you should be able to keep a diverse environment that makes kids keep learing new things while they're able to pick up these things MUCH faster than adults!
If you need to interview for jobs that require MS Office (or some other) skills after you get out of High School there are dozens of little 2-week certificate courses you can take that range from $100 to thousands and then there's simply getting a computer that comes with Office and trying it out. If you're poor, you can even find assistance programs that will teach you these skills for free!
What you can't find easily is a tool that makes you 14 years old again so that you can learn to learn.
A great many probably take them under perscription as well. Amphetamines are perscribed commonly (along with other stimulants) to treat Attention Def... hmmm... a shiny thing!
Ok, so what we have here is a branding battle between two companies that want to make sure that when you think "I need a fast video card" you think of one of their products.
Ok fine, but why is it stuff that matters? Tell me about recent advances in fabrication, or bandwidth to RAM or bus latching and I'll be thrilled. Show me someone's benchmark of the XYZ Foobar vs the ABC Barfoo one more time, and I'm going to start moderating up the goat-posts just to have something more informative to read!
Worse, you have to ask yourself: will putting your phone number on a list of people who consider their phone important increase or decrease the number of calls you get? If I can claim to be one of the exempt groups, I would start by whipping out a copy of that list, and calling everyone on it!
For Stallman it's not about "personal" credit nor is it about credit among geeks. For him it's about promoting the cause of Free Software.
And every time he re-states this divisive rant he hurts far more than he helps. Truth to be told, Linux has done far more for the cause of Free Software than even a successful campaign to remind people of its roots ever could. The problem is that "the cause of free software" is, to Stallman, an absolute. He cannot bear the thought that, as with all political causes, it will eventually be watered down by the mainstream. The culture clash betwee proprietary and free software will ultimately result in compromise, as all culture clashes do.
He's not seeing the fact that we've gone from a world full of non-interoperable proprietary software to a world where just about everything can be done with free software. He just sees the ways in which his TOTAL vision was not reached.
I'm not saying we rest on our laurals, but Stallman needs to either fight the battles that are truely important: getting the world to see the GPL and other free software / open source licenses without fear; helping governments to transition away from an absolute reliance of proprietary software; opening up educational programming; and other cuases that will help people -- or he needs to walk away and yell about The Man from his rocking chair like a good senile old goat, not from the rooftops of corporate America, where he's doing a lot of harm to the credibility of his ideals.
As I write this, it is not too late to join EQ. If anything, it's a better time than ever.
The game has recently undergone:
A UI overhaul
Numerous fixes to make low-level play more rewarding
Massive work on game and class-ballance
A huge boost in the incentives to work in groups
All of this goes along with the fact that there are now five expansions to the basic game along with a new expansion only a month or two off. There are hundreds of zones, a rich player econmony, a (higher-priced) server with constant Game Master-run content, a new "newbie-only" server, and of course hundreds of thousands of other players!
Personally I can't see going off and playing SWG. If anything, I'm waiting for World of Warcraft. If that game is as good in comparison to EQ as Warcraft was in comparison to other games of its ilk a the time, THEN it will be worth jumping ship....
I'm betting that freegrep is a GNU-like grep with a BSD license. BSD's grep is, last I checked, sorely lacking quite a few features.
A hybrid BSD/Linux/GNU/etc/etc platform that really looked objectively at feature-sets to determine what parts to use, and then began slowly re-implementing all of those parts in-place would be a very interesting project.
I'd probably have a lot of fun doing that, and I think a lot of UNIX and UNIX-like tools could use a ton of work, like factoring out libraries that they should all be using instead of duplicating several wheels, etc.
The GNU tools did a lot of that, and it was a good thing, but for the most part, those libraries did not catch on outside of the GNU toolchain (e.g. libiberty).
I can utterly appreciate that he wants fair credit for the vast amount of work the GNU project put into "Linux"
I used to feel that way too, but the problem with that point of view is that he *does* get credit. He gets credit in the form of thousands of geeks proclaiming his programming prowess. He gets credit in the form of an OS which ships with software which includes his source code, and the copyright messages that he wrote and the licenses he wrote.
He gets credit in every book on Open Source or Free Software that I've ever read.
He gets credit... he gets a LOT MORE credit than most, but that's OK because he's done a lot to help.
What he doesn't deserve is to re-brand every instance of a system that came about, not as a result of his work, but in spite of it's FAILURE! He doesn't get to re-write history and claim that THIS is the system he always wanted because, quite frankly it's nothing even close. The registration / authentication system doesn't work the way he wanted. The UI is nothing like the plan was for GNU. Linux is it's own system, and the fact that it's build on a foundation of GNU tools doesn't make it any more GNU/Linux than my laptop is running IBM/Linux.
"GNU/Linux" is the battle-cry of Stallman's sour grapes against Linux for finishing where he could not. Too bad. He gets credit for what he did, but we will not forget what he did NOT do.
Enterprise is a widely mis-used term, but essentially it refers to any company.
Enterprise software is a niche market for software that aims at companies where procurement of software is managed at a corporate level, removed from the immediate IT infrastructure. That is to say that the grunts who maintain the hardware may get to feed information into the decision-making process, but ultimately, they're not even in the department that buys the software and/or hardware.
This presents many interesting differences from the rest of the software world. There are concerns like training, escarow and liability that rarely if ever come up in smaller organizations that will be sales lead-ins in the Enterprise market.
It's just a different type of sales and support model, which a company MUST take into account in order to succeed in certain areas.
gcc: Used to be egcs. That was the big leap in gcc development
Not quite accurate. egcs was a gcc fork that did a lot of good C++ work that needed to be done. The GCC core was slow to adopt these features becuase the project was primarily focused on C.
To say "gcc used to be egcs" is a bit disengenuous to the long history of gcc and the massive amount of development done on it all through that history (even when egcs was popular). egcs has since been merged back into the mainline of gcc development in much the same way that iLinux has been (for the most part) merged back into the core kernel.
grep: You can find that as an excerise for beginers in K&R TCPL
Heh, go ahead. Write your own. But don't just write a tool that reads lines and prints regexp matches. GNU Grep's features include:
matching of libc/POSIX-style regexps, "extended" regexps, Perl-style regexps and fixed strings.
Optional case independance
Matching only on whole words or lines
Inverted matches
Recursive matching (ah, I remember the days of having to use find to do this, and not as well)
File inclusion/exclusion
Arbitrary numbers of context lines before and/or after
Colorized output
Many forms of summary by count, filename, etc.
Not too bad. Certainly no bison! Have fun!
make: There *is* an alternative make. I don't rember the name.
Yes, of course there is. There are many. BSD has one of course. There's something called "bake" that I ran across once. etc.
However, unless you make a feature-for-feature compatible program, it's hardly a replacement for GNU Make....
That's fine, let it be needed. Doesn't change the name of the system. RMS can call Hurd (as he named it back in the late 80s) GNU/Hurd because it's his. If he wants to make a Linux distro he can call it FSF GNU/Linux all he likes.
In the earliest days of Linux, when I or anyone else would install a complete system (such as complete was defined back then), we would call it "Linux". Then, one day someone came along and created a "distribution" and called it "Slackware Linux"... ok, that was fine. They had re-branded and everyone was OK with it.
Then came the CD distributions like Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux and Debian Linux.
Sometime after that Stallman started his rant. Sometime after that Debian caved and called their Linux "GNU/Linux"... thus was the start of the mess.
You're arguing that the system that we all called "Linux" for years wasn't REALLY Linux, we were just confused. I submit to you that you are the benificiary of our "confusion" and that those living in Pyrex houses should not tell Dow Chemical how to name Silcates.
The thing to do in that respect would be to clean-room re-implement the GNU toolchain. Start with glibc. Then move on to gcc. You may use Intel's compiler on one platfor for specific languages, but GCC is still an essential tool until something replaces ALL (or at least most) of the platforms and languages that it can compile for. For languages that includes Objective-C, C++, C, FORTRAN, ADA and Java. For platforms, I think you at least have to handle x86, PPC, Alpha, Sparc and ARM.
Those two will probably take 2-5 years to get usable. It's a laudable goal, IMHO. If for no other reason, at least this would force some re-engineering of the basic tools that we've been lugging around for over 10 years.
After glibc and GCC, you would want to tackle flex, bison, the assembler, and binutils.
Those are much easier than glibc and GCC, but still a fair amount of work. Probably another 1-2 years.
Then you have sh-utils, file-utils, grep, gawk, find-utils and make.
After that, I don't think there's really much left. A bunch of out-lying junk that can be replaced easily enough. GNOME and many other "GNU-named" things aren't really GNU, so Stallman has no claim to them. Things like EMACS aren't essentiall components of the system, so I don't see any reason to replace them (though EMACS has needed a re-design for about 15 years now).
The GNU contribution to modern Linux systems is huge, but it doesn't warrant Stallman's endless ranting over naming. IMHO, he's burned his bridges sufficenctly that it's worth the community's time to sever any ties to him.
I love the way everyone who gets into this fiasco brings their own agendas to it! For RMS this is just another chance to explain why "Linux" isn't an operating system, only "GNU/Linux" is an operating system... The difference between SCO and Stallman is essentially the audience that they are bringing their agendas to, not the opportunistic way that they force their agendas into any situation that might benefit them.
Stallman the coder is a man to be respected. Stallman the politician really needs to go away and stop hurting the cause he claims to care so much about.
Until then, I insist everyone refer to him as "MIT/Stallman" and his project as "MIT/GNU" since he wouldn't be where he is now without the space, time, and other resources that MIT has given him over the years.
For short, just call the OS "MIT/Linux", since "MIT/GNU/Linux" to too long. After all, that's why he says that we shouldn't bother calling it "GNU/X/BSD/Apache/MIT/CMU/DEC/HP/Sun/IBM/Red Hat/SuSE/Slackware/Debian Linux". Of course, that's just an abbreviation. The correct name lists all of the contributors and their curren email addresses as well. Credit where credit is due, after all!
I'm going back to my MIT/Linux system now to get some work done!
You took a statement of mine out of context, and removed many points that I made. Surprisingly, I think my statement still hold water well, but it certainly lacks any of the depth or completeness of my original statements.
Bottom line: the original poster said that releasing under the GPL removes all control. That's called "public domain". Releasing under the GPL removes SPECIFIC control, and retains SPECIFIC other controls. If that distinction is too difficult to grasp, you should probably avoid licensing your software at all, as I assure you that there are pitfalls you are not considering.
the GPL is about giving up any control you have over how the result is used
What you describe is called public domain software. The GPL imposes several key restrictions, and more importantly, it does not remove any of the default restrictions of copyright law unless you agree to the terms of the GPL.
If what you say were true, then distributing under the GPL and distributing as public domain would be the same thing. Such is not the case. I cannot take a GPLed work and use it in proprietary software (legally, we'll ignore the illegal case, since there are no limits on what you can do illegally, and there's no difference between public domain, GPLed, BSD-licensed or proprietary software in that respect).
I cannot print a GPLed program in most magazines without permission, for example, because most magazines stipulate that you may not reproduce them. That's a MAJOR restriction on distribution that I have control over as a source code author.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. SWG sounds like a neat game, and if it were being run by anyone other than SOE (the same SOE who pillaged the EQ dynamic of GM/player relations for profit margins), then I'd probably try it out. As it is, I've been burned by the "you're just players, you have no rights." attitude. If I'm going to immerse myself in a world, then I have to have some kind of respect for the caretakers of that world, and care is not the word I would you use to describe what SOE takes....
Blizzard has released many games, and every one of them has had followup updates. I'm not saying that their games are the pinical of code, I'm saying that when Blizzard releases a game it's "ready", and by that I mean that it's up to an internal standard of playability that they set and I agree with from observation. I played a few of their games at release before any patches were released, and I have to say, they were some of the most playable games I've seen.
I'm not a fan of Warcraft because I don't like the Civ-style gather-and-build model, but I did play it early on, and I was impressed.
I think if anyone is going to release an MMOG that will hit the ground running, it will be an independant game publisher with a track-record of worrying about the details that make other games really lose.
Now, I'm not all roses. I think they will do what most game houses do: they will focus on the UI and the combat/spell/skill system to the exclusion of things that *I* care about like the network protocol, the server-side management, the intellegence of the AI-combat, etc. But the simple fact is that when you put Sony and Blizzard up to comparison... Sony has released many, many games that suck. Ultimately Sony is really just now getting the hang of MMOGs (they took over EQ in total starting about a year ago, and fumbled for quite a while).
Blizzard on the other hand has been doing a number of the most popular MOGs, and I think they're well-placed to release WoW with a wow.
I won't play EQ2 for many of the same reasons as SWG, I was just making the point that EQ2 was coming, and made a much more logical transition for those that do (for some odd reason) play these games for the graphics; or who want to see some of the core flaws in EQ's 5-year old model of gameplay addressed.
WoW is a special case. Blizzard has some things going for it that are very special. 1) they don't release on a schedule, they release when the game is done 2) they care about how good the game is 3) they have yet to produce a game that sucked... ever. That compares to Sony... rather favorably.
YOU won't be caught, but all they need to do is catch a few to make the point to a LOT of folks, and staunch the bleeding.
There will, of course, be other ways. Poisoning clients, suing on the basis that x% of what can be downloaded is infringing, and you're running a major client/server, which therefore contributes, etc.
The courts will do that in the US. As soon as this hits a court-room there are one of two outcomes I expect: 1) it gets thrown out on the basis that SCO has spent so much time trying this case in the court of public opinion that a court decision would be a meaningless adjunct to SCO PR 2) SCO is made to shut up for the duration of the case. I think 2 is far more likey, but SCO's in for a nasty bit of bonking on the head for their behavior.
Judges don't tend to be fond of those who would use their courts for PR purposes.
Why? Several reasons
- My friends play EQ, why would I want to leave them?
- If I leave EQ it will be because of Sony's (mis!)handling of the server-side content and general customer issues. If I do that, it won't be to play another Sony game... like duh
;) - SWG has better graphics. Yes, this is a minus. I and most other seasoned EQ players turn graphics quality WAY down in order to speed rendering during complex encounters between dozens of mobs (player and NPC alike). Better graphics means slower display, and I can't deal with that. If anything, I want a game with graphics like DAoC which are a bit more cartoonish and obviously sprite-based in some places, but MUCH more efficient on the card
- WoW is coming out, and to quote the mantra: Blizzard games don't suck.
- EQ2 is coming out, and it will have all of the above features/problems PLUS a lot of it is written with EQ players in mind, and to address many of the concerns that players (or at least developers) had with EQ.
- GM involvement in EQ has been scaled back a LOT since SOE took over from Verant. I expect that to be a trend across Sony games, and I don't really feel like getting to know the folks that run SWG, just to see them get fired or moved to "premium servers".
In sort, don't waste your money on SWG if you play EQ. You know you don't play EQ for the graphics. You know you don't play it for the story. You play it to hang out with friends, bash stuff gud and score phat lewtz!I see your point, but I think he's right. I think it's obvious that watermarks are going to be a big part of the music distribution system soon (if they aren't already). Sure, Felton has proved that you can remove a watermark that you know about, but the RIAA's memebers aren't going to tell you about it, and they'll place a few kinds of watermarks on each song if they're smart.
Once you rip and distribute, you create a trail, and all the RIAA needs is a few high-profile cases that take Freenet users and run them through the wash for distributing songs.
However, the RIAA is doomed, and there's a simple reason. When we get to the juncture that it's reasonable for my DVD player, CD player, etc to be played REMOTELY by another rendering device (amplifier, TV, etc) then the RIAA is going to have to very carefully define their terms. I don't think they're going to be able to stop Joe Teen from sharing a new CD with everyone in his school. I also don't think that their business model will survive a 2-10x shrinkage when that becomes reasonable for your average non-technical teen.
Can you imagine "hey, Joe can I borrow the new XDestroyWindow CD?" "Oh, sure Jim it's in my streaming collection, log in any time."
Yeah, that's gonna hurt....
It has been sold as a short book I think, but usually in a collection.
My first thought when I saw the slashdot article was... ah, I'm a huge Asimov fan, but Heilnein did The Roads Must Roll, which really introduced the moving sidewalk idea as a mass-highway replacement in SF.
Just to review the core strength of the GPL, while the GPL may have many satellite weaknesses in many legal systems, it will always fall back on revocation.
That is, if you cannot apply the GPL, you MUST NOT apply it. As soon as you are without the GPL, you have source code and binaries for something that you are now not allowed to distribute without getting permission from the author, except as allowed by your country's take on fair use.
The GPL is a voluntary license, and you never HAVE to apply it if you don't want to. The fact that, in some legal systems, it may not be possible to apply it in some or all situations, simply means that you have what you are given, and you may not use it in ways that you are not allowed to by law.
The GPL doesn't apply to you unless you want it to.
Wrong answer still, though I think you're closer than some others.
When interviewing for a job, you should know the tools that the job requires. If you are looking for office jobs, you should know the tools used in those jobs, and if that's MS Office you should learn MS Office, and learn it well.
That's also beside the point of the original thread. What should be used in K12 is any tools that teach the basics that you will need to move on to college or independant learning later in life. You should not be using MS Word as a (sole) example word processor absolutely because it's likely to be the one they'll use later on. They should be using something that will make them learn the basic skills of modern tools, and then switch to something else on another platform.
Schools should have PCs with Linux, PCs with Windows, Macs with MacOS, and anything else new or old they can get their hands on. The art of maintaining diverse platforms should be the key hiring criteria in K12 IT admins these days, because a) you should be able to take any freebies that come your way and b) you should be able to keep a diverse environment that makes kids keep learing new things while they're able to pick up these things MUCH faster than adults!
If you need to interview for jobs that require MS Office (or some other) skills after you get out of High School there are dozens of little 2-week certificate courses you can take that range from $100 to thousands and then there's simply getting a computer that comes with Office and trying it out. If you're poor, you can even find assistance programs that will teach you these skills for free!
What you can't find easily is a tool that makes you 14 years old again so that you can learn to learn.
A great many probably take them under perscription as well. Amphetamines are perscribed commonly (along with other stimulants) to treat Attention Def... hmmm... a shiny thing!
Ok, so what we have here is a branding battle between two companies that want to make sure that when you think "I need a fast video card" you think of one of their products.
Ok fine, but why is it stuff that matters? Tell me about recent advances in fabrication, or bandwidth to RAM or bus latching and I'll be thrilled. Show me someone's benchmark of the XYZ Foobar vs the ABC Barfoo one more time, and I'm going to start moderating up the goat-posts just to have something more informative to read!
Worse, you have to ask yourself: will putting your phone number on a list of people who consider their phone important increase or decrease the number of calls you get? If I can claim to be one of the exempt groups, I would start by whipping out a copy of that list, and calling everyone on it!
For Stallman it's not about "personal" credit nor is it about credit among geeks. For him it's about promoting the cause of Free Software.
And every time he re-states this divisive rant he hurts far more than he helps. Truth to be told, Linux has done far more for the cause of Free Software than even a successful campaign to remind people of its roots ever could. The problem is that "the cause of free software" is, to Stallman, an absolute. He cannot bear the thought that, as with all political causes, it will eventually be watered down by the mainstream. The culture clash betwee proprietary and free software will ultimately result in compromise, as all culture clashes do.
He's not seeing the fact that we've gone from a world full of non-interoperable proprietary software to a world where just about everything can be done with free software. He just sees the ways in which his TOTAL vision was not reached.
I'm not saying we rest on our laurals, but Stallman needs to either fight the battles that are truely important: getting the world to see the GPL and other free software / open source licenses without fear; helping governments to transition away from an absolute reliance of proprietary software; opening up educational programming; and other cuases that will help people -- or he needs to walk away and yell about The Man from his rocking chair like a good senile old goat, not from the rooftops of corporate America, where he's doing a lot of harm to the credibility of his ideals.
As I write this, it is not too late to join EQ. If anything, it's a better time than ever.
The game has recently undergone:
- A UI overhaul
- Numerous fixes to make low-level play more rewarding
- Massive work on game and class-ballance
- A huge boost in the incentives to work in groups
All of this goes along with the fact that there are now five expansions to the basic game along with a new expansion only a month or two off. There are hundreds of zones, a rich player econmony, a (higher-priced) server with constant Game Master-run content, a new "newbie-only" server, and of course hundreds of thousands of other players!Personally I can't see going off and playing SWG. If anything, I'm waiting for World of Warcraft. If that game is as good in comparison to EQ as Warcraft was in comparison to other games of its ilk a the time, THEN it will be worth jumping ship....
I'm betting that freegrep is a GNU-like grep with a BSD license. BSD's grep is, last I checked, sorely lacking quite a few features.
A hybrid BSD/Linux/GNU/etc/etc platform that really looked objectively at feature-sets to determine what parts to use, and then began slowly re-implementing all of those parts in-place would be a very interesting project.
I'd probably have a lot of fun doing that, and I think a lot of UNIX and UNIX-like tools could use a ton of work, like factoring out libraries that they should all be using instead of duplicating several wheels, etc.
The GNU tools did a lot of that, and it was a good thing, but for the most part, those libraries did not catch on outside of the GNU toolchain (e.g. libiberty).
I can utterly appreciate that he wants fair credit for the vast amount of work the GNU project put into "Linux"
I used to feel that way too, but the problem with that point of view is that he *does* get credit. He gets credit in the form of thousands of geeks proclaiming his programming prowess. He gets credit in the form of an OS which ships with software which includes his source code, and the copyright messages that he wrote and the licenses he wrote.
He gets credit in every book on Open Source or Free Software that I've ever read.
He gets credit... he gets a LOT MORE credit than most, but that's OK because he's done a lot to help.
What he doesn't deserve is to re-brand every instance of a system that came about, not as a result of his work, but in spite of it's FAILURE! He doesn't get to re-write history and claim that THIS is the system he always wanted because, quite frankly it's nothing even close. The registration / authentication system doesn't work the way he wanted. The UI is nothing like the plan was for GNU. Linux is it's own system, and the fact that it's build on a foundation of GNU tools doesn't make it any more GNU/Linux than my laptop is running IBM/Linux.
"GNU/Linux" is the battle-cry of Stallman's sour grapes against Linux for finishing where he could not. Too bad. He gets credit for what he did, but we will not forget what he did NOT do.
Enterprise is a widely mis-used term, but essentially it refers to any company.
Enterprise software is a niche market for software that aims at companies where procurement of software is managed at a corporate level, removed from the immediate IT infrastructure. That is to say that the grunts who maintain the hardware may get to feed information into the decision-making process, but ultimately, they're not even in the department that buys the software and/or hardware.
This presents many interesting differences from the rest of the software world. There are concerns like training, escarow and liability that rarely if ever come up in smaller organizations that will be sales lead-ins in the Enterprise market.
It's just a different type of sales and support model, which a company MUST take into account in order to succeed in certain areas.
Not quite accurate. egcs was a gcc fork that did a lot of good C++ work that needed to be done. The GCC core was slow to adopt these features becuase the project was primarily focused on C.
To say "gcc used to be egcs" is a bit disengenuous to the long history of gcc and the massive amount of development done on it all through that history (even when egcs was popular). egcs has since been merged back into the mainline of gcc development in much the same way that iLinux has been (for the most part) merged back into the core kernel.
grep: You can find that as an excerise for beginers in K&R TCPL
Heh, go ahead. Write your own. But don't just write a tool that reads lines and prints regexp matches. GNU Grep's features include:
- matching of libc/POSIX-style regexps, "extended" regexps, Perl-style regexps and fixed strings.
- Optional case independance
- Matching only on whole words or lines
- Inverted matches
- Recursive matching (ah, I remember the days of having to use find to do this, and not as well)
- File inclusion/exclusion
- Arbitrary numbers of context lines before and/or after
- Colorized output
- Many forms of summary by count, filename, etc.
Not too bad. Certainly no bison! Have fun!make: There *is* an alternative make. I don't rember the name.
Yes, of course there is. There are many. BSD has one of course. There's something called "bake" that I ran across once. etc.
However, unless you make a feature-for-feature compatible program, it's hardly a replacement for GNU Make....
GNU is needed to get the system usable
That's fine, let it be needed. Doesn't change the name of the system. RMS can call Hurd (as he named it back in the late 80s) GNU/Hurd because it's his. If he wants to make a Linux distro he can call it FSF GNU/Linux all he likes.
In the earliest days of Linux, when I or anyone else would install a complete system (such as complete was defined back then), we would call it "Linux". Then, one day someone came along and created a "distribution" and called it "Slackware Linux"... ok, that was fine. They had re-branded and everyone was OK with it.
Then came the CD distributions like Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux and Debian Linux.
Sometime after that Stallman started his rant. Sometime after that Debian caved and called their Linux "GNU/Linux"... thus was the start of the mess.
You're arguing that the system that we all called "Linux" for years wasn't REALLY Linux, we were just confused. I submit to you that you are the benificiary of our "confusion" and that those living in Pyrex houses should not tell Dow Chemical how to name Silcates.
The thing to do in that respect would be to clean-room re-implement the GNU toolchain. Start with glibc. Then move on to gcc. You may use Intel's compiler on one platfor for specific languages, but GCC is still an essential tool until something replaces ALL (or at least most) of the platforms and languages that it can compile for. For languages that includes Objective-C, C++, C, FORTRAN, ADA and Java. For platforms, I think you at least have to handle x86, PPC, Alpha, Sparc and ARM.
Those two will probably take 2-5 years to get usable. It's a laudable goal, IMHO. If for no other reason, at least this would force some re-engineering of the basic tools that we've been lugging around for over 10 years.
After glibc and GCC, you would want to tackle flex, bison, the assembler, and binutils.
Those are much easier than glibc and GCC, but still a fair amount of work. Probably another 1-2 years.
Then you have sh-utils, file-utils, grep, gawk, find-utils and make.
After that, I don't think there's really much left. A bunch of out-lying junk that can be replaced easily enough. GNOME and many other "GNU-named" things aren't really GNU, so Stallman has no claim to them. Things like EMACS aren't essentiall components of the system, so I don't see any reason to replace them (though EMACS has needed a re-design for about 15 years now).
The GNU contribution to modern Linux systems is huge, but it doesn't warrant Stallman's endless ranting over naming. IMHO, he's burned his bridges sufficenctly that it's worth the community's time to sever any ties to him.
I love the way everyone who gets into this fiasco brings their own agendas to it! For RMS this is just another chance to explain why "Linux" isn't an operating system, only "GNU/Linux" is an operating system... The difference between SCO and Stallman is essentially the audience that they are bringing their agendas to, not the opportunistic way that they force their agendas into any situation that might benefit them.
Stallman the coder is a man to be respected. Stallman the politician really needs to go away and stop hurting the cause he claims to care so much about.
Until then, I insist everyone refer to him as "MIT/Stallman" and his project as "MIT/GNU" since he wouldn't be where he is now without the space, time, and other resources that MIT has given him over the years.
For short, just call the OS "MIT/Linux", since "MIT/GNU/Linux" to too long. After all, that's why he says that we shouldn't bother calling it "GNU/X/BSD/Apache/MIT/CMU/DEC/HP/Sun/IBM/Red Hat/SuSE/Slackware/Debian Linux". Of course, that's just an abbreviation. The correct name lists all of the contributors and their curren email addresses as well. Credit where credit is due, after all!
I'm going back to my MIT/Linux system now to get some work done!
Are you a half wit?
As it turns out, no.
You took a statement of mine out of context, and removed many points that I made. Surprisingly, I think my statement still hold water well, but it certainly lacks any of the depth or completeness of my original statements.
Bottom line: the original poster said that releasing under the GPL removes all control. That's called "public domain". Releasing under the GPL removes SPECIFIC control, and retains SPECIFIC other controls. If that distinction is too difficult to grasp, you should probably avoid licensing your software at all, as I assure you that there are pitfalls you are not considering.
the GPL is about giving up any control you have over how the result is used
What you describe is called public domain software. The GPL imposes several key restrictions, and more importantly, it does not remove any of the default restrictions of copyright law unless you agree to the terms of the GPL.
If what you say were true, then distributing under the GPL and distributing as public domain would be the same thing. Such is not the case. I cannot take a GPLed work and use it in proprietary software (legally, we'll ignore the illegal case, since there are no limits on what you can do illegally, and there's no difference between public domain, GPLed, BSD-licensed or proprietary software in that respect).
I cannot print a GPLed program in most magazines without permission, for example, because most magazines stipulate that you may not reproduce them. That's a MAJOR restriction on distribution that I have control over as a source code author.
Please revise your usage of the word "any".