Yes, yes, python is not less perfect than perl. We get it. I think the point to TFA was that high-level languages + SDL make a nice game development combination, not that [insert high level language] is special.
This is that definition of "lost" that appeared in the late 20th century. It's akin to the money that the music industry is "losing" due to file sharing. The evidence is not lost, it is as yet, undiscovered, and in any civilized country, we would not assert that there WAS any evidence unless we could actually see it. In the U.K., however, they actually have a law that says that you have to reveal your secret keys to the authorities with no provision for simply not knowing them. You can be convicted of the crime of having white-noise on your disk that authorities assert is encrypted data to which you are refusing to reveal the key. Heck, you could be convicted of a crime for not divulging the key to/dev/random, which is clearly some secret message channel from an unknown party, since messages arrive from it in small bursts!
I'm still at a loss to understand this attitude (just as I was when so many people predicted doom for MySQL when Inno was bought out). These are open source products, and there's absolutely nothing preventing MySQL from continuing to use them. Of course, now Oracle has the right to release a closed-source fork of these products, but that doesn't change the fact that the open source version is still out there, and thousands of people around the world have and will continue to hack on them.
About the only thing that this does to MySQL is to potentially reduce the number of active developers working on the back-ends for a short period, and might increase MySQL's costs.
I've always had a problem with that view of the appendix. First off, one of the assertions made (e.g. by Joseph McCabe in 1912, and often cited since) is that, even if the appendix had some function (which recent research has been inconclusive on), it would clearly have been a greater function in the past in order to have been enough of a survival trait to be incorporated so universally into human anatomy. This, however, overlooks the fact that nearly all human organs had different purposes at one point in our evolution, and thus ANY non-essential organ, no matter how important would be considered "vestigal".
The other problem is that teh appendix has not gone away. One would expect that, at least in some large sample of humans, an organ that truly was useless would have gone away. This leads one to surmise that it serves some function which, while non-essential (you can live without it, after all) is almost certainly a survival trait in the broader context of humanity. Possible functions that would suit this purpose could include: reduction of harmful contaminants in food (possibly colesterol, which has been studdied recently); mitigation of some disease effects; and quite possibly a physical role in digestion (e.g. preventing certain kinds of particulate food from moving through the intestines as quickly as some other kinds).
These are all guesses, but what is known is that most "useless" organs have at one point or another in our history been determined to serve a crucial role. Even the brain was once thought to be nothing more than padding, protecting the eyes and neck.
Hi, I'm not sure if I'm feeding a troll or not, but gconf and clock-applet have never seen any problems on my FC1,2,3, or 4 machines. However, evolution CAN have some memory problems. Specficially, evolution seems to run spamassassin (which it uses to filter spam) in some kind of a strange mode that leaks memory like a sieve. I run a stock SA on my MTA, and never see this kind of memory leaking, but under FC4 with evolution running SA, I ran out of memory at home all the time.
The easy workaround: kill spamd. spamd will just be re-started by evolution.
The long-term fix might be to just do a full update, since I saw this problem a while back, but not in a few months.
If you're not running Fedora, then I can't help you out much. I just don't use anything else, not that that's a good or bad thing, just what I know.
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, a friend of mine says / types that all the time, and I forget that it's his neologism, not a general purpose initialism.
First off, no, there's no secret there. What's going on is that Google has a large farm (VERY LARGE farm) of servers, and they're not all in sync. By using a proxy, you break the load-balancer's concept of a "session" and so you get sent to some random server (small chance that it would be the same one).
I've seen this many times. For example, at one point I used to have the top entry for "d20 treasure", but then someone that redirects to my page got it. During the day of transition, that site and I were bouncing back and forth in the rankings depending on where I checked from and how long I waited between searches (as I hit different servers).
Also, the -google thing is pretty straight forward. You are seeing the top-ranked pages that do not contain the term "google", not pages that have any negative association with google.
There's some BAD AJAX out there. Mostly, you'll see this when crappy tools are used to generate exceedingly crappy JavaScript + CSS + XHTML with loads of redundancy and automated cut-n-paste.
Then again, there's that kind of bad code in just about every language.
AJAX is not a bad tool, it's just prone to be used by people who don't understand it.
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
·
· Score: 1
BWC = "Bitch Whine Complain"
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If it were rude to critisize open source, then Slashdot would be Miss Manners' nemesis. Fortunately, such criticism is part of the process, and has been since at least when I got involved, back in '88.
If you work on something like MythTV, you expect a ton of BWCing, but not all of it is bad. Often, the complaints of users demonstrate those areas that your software is truly lacking. Of course, detailed bug reports are ALWAYS more helpful, but if all the brain power you can spare is that requried for a rant... well, don't think you're the first.
If you're familiar with the fungal world, this is not shocking. There is a fungus that infects ants. It causes them to climb to the top of the nearest blade of grass (or equivalent), where the clutch firmly and die. The fungus then sprouts a spore-dispersing stalk from the ant's head. When I first read about it, if it had not been a serious field guide, I would have assumed it was a joke. But, I've come across a number of references to it, since.
Of course, many people don't realize that you can enable TLS on your mail server, and many others (many right here on Slashdot) said that I and a few others were paranoid for not wanting to let a large ISP run our mail servers for us. Worse, we tend not to want to allow our mail to be relayed THROUGH such large mail servers. My ISP STILL doesn't use TLS if I try to relay through them (though I realize that would be pointless, since the Feds will simply require a tap into their MTA directly, which sees the unencrypted session).
And now, you see why I insist on running my own MTA (though there are also business reasons). AOL may not be willing to accept my connections, but I get to encrypt the WHOLE SESSION, and the only thing anyone sniffing packets gets to know is that I'm sending mail to someone else's MTA. Given the amount of mailing list traffic and other noise that my machines generate, that's probably not as useful as one might want.
Want to evesdrop on my mail? Get a warrant. It's not that much to ask.
There is a substantial difference between searching a well ordered filesystem and searching the contents of files. Try your find command this way:
find / -iname '*foo*' -o -exec grep -i foo {} \;
That'll take you quite a bit, and it's actually a pretty poor way to search, since some terms inside of binary format files won't be in plain ascii text. To interpret those files, you're going to have to uncompress some things, interpret some file formats, etc.
And of course, optimizing in that way is probably analogous to the halting problem, but that doesn't mean that a good general-purpose back-end for GCC could not be written. History teaches us one thing about specialized hardware that we should never forget: the average user of your hardware is going to need to have VERY LITTLE of their code hand-tuned for it. For example, let's say that this hardware tends to be very good at encryption. Your average user would likely be running a Web server or some other sort of networking technology, and almost NONE of that code cares about the 10-100 hand-tuned routines in OpenSSL that you wrote for this platform.
Get a good compiler and general-purpose OS up and running fast (which, by the way, I'm sure IBM is doing), and you'll see many more people writing special-purpose code where they need it.
You are giving RMS quite a bit too much credit, here. You are trying to read a rational thought process into his words that just isn't there (and has not been for decades).
He's blowing off the entire Creative Commons license suite because he feels that it would be too confusing to say, "I think CC-BY-SA-2.5 is a pretty good free software license"?! Stallman is smarter than that and so are we. The question is: are we smart enough to realize that he's just blowing smoke and telling us to play in his sandbox?
Ok, this is going nowhere. I feel that software should expand, gas-like, to fill every available nook and cranny of its environment, and you feel that it should be prevented from shipping on platforms that you feel limit freedoms.
*shrug*
It's a moot point. The Linux kernel license can't change at this point, and the average Linux software developer isn't going to select a license that Linus has such strong concerns about, so while I'm sure the GPLv3 will be used, I'm equally sure that you won't see it as widely adopted as the GPLv2, which is kind of sad, really. For all the respect I have for Stallman as a programmer, I still think the GPL was his cleverest hack. My sense of nostalgia wants to override my sense of fair play here, but... well, we've had that discussion, and we'll have to agree to disagree.
Good points. One more to add to the mix: the trend in global warming debate thus far has been to say that CO2 must be the unknown cause of global warming because no other factor could account for the increase in temperature. This is generally said because the increase does not map to the increase in solar output.
However, if solar output were to trigger non-linear increases in global temperatures (e.g. by triggering the ~2% increase in percipitation in the 20th century, trapping solar radiation under increased cloud-cover and water vapor content), then such models could easily be quite wrong.
This is nothing new. Solar researchers have been trying to point out the sun-climate interactions since the 1970s.
Just to make one further point. Your post here is highly hyperbolic. To say that software "isn't one iota free as in liberty" because it ships on a DRM platform doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, you have the source. Nothing about that software is secret to you except for a key. You can take the software to another platform and modify/distribute/whatever to your heart's content. You could even work out a deal with the hardware manufacturer to get yourself a key for signing your own code and run that same software, as compiled by you.
Your argument is a bit like suggesting that you have no freedoms when someone ships binaries that only run on high-end, multi-million dollar hardware, for which compilers are only available from one company, and cost millions themselves. It's the exact same situation, and you have two choices: break the platform lock by writing a compiler (or defeating the DRM) or port to another platform. That latter option is only available to you with open source software!
"You just refuse to get it don't you? The end user doesn't give a crap if the software runs on some other platform. He cares if it runs on the platform he paid for."
Ok, so explain yourself. Why is it a bad thing to provide users with what they want? I make an OS, and I ship it on a dozen platforms. On this one particular platform, it only works if I use a secret key to sign my software that I cannot give to my customers. The GPLv3 says I can't support that platform and ship my code under that license.
Should I tell my customers to get stuffed, or should I dump the GPLv3? Linus is saying that, were the GPLv3 even an option, which it's not, he would not tell his "customers" to get stuffed. He would support them right along with everyone else. I'd do the same, and I'd still use every argument presented here as good and valid arguments against DRM hardware (which CAN be a good thing, but not in any form that I've heard much about to date).
"And me, as a republican, I think science needs to be left alone for the most part*. *Boldified by me (parent)
"Just like every other idiot, fundy! You want science to be left alone, except for those parts which you want to change."
I'm a moderate democrat, but I STRONGLY side with my republican counterpart (the GP) in this case! You're going off on someone for having said that "for the most part" science should be left alone (while defending NASA in this particular case).
Let us recall that most science in the U.S. (and we're discussing U.S. politics here, sorry foreign/. readers) is funded by one of two sources: corporate research or government funding. By its very nature any allocation of funding represents control, and to that extent, control is appropriate. You decide how much money to allocate to the CDC vs. NASA, etc. You also set direction for scientific research at a high level through grant agencies and the like.
However, it does not stop there. It is also appropriate for us to make laws that restrict the sciences according to democratic consensus. Why? Because there are avenues of research with powerful reprecussions on our society, and it is not always appropriate for research to out-pace our ethical discourse.
If anything, I think that we should have MORE discussion about such topics, not less. I'd like to make sure that we all understand the benefits and potential drawbacks of technologies like human stem-cell research (which I see as no different from organ donation, and which has huge benefits for humanity that I don't think we discuss often enough). In many cases further understanding will likely increase support for avenues of research.
Now, in the case of NASA, there are very few space-related projects which pose strong ethical questions (except for those performed in secret with the military), but they do come up. When they do, I think it is appropriate for all of us, as a nation, to work hard at becoming informed on the topics at hand, and have our say in the direction that NASA takes.
Anything else is a technocracy, and I will not abide that.
Again, great argument against DRM. Bad argument against software that runs equally on all platforms.
Let the market pressures take care of DRM hardware. In a market where new CPUs are measured by how overclockable they are, I just don't see DRM hardware becoming the default platform for computing.
I think it would be best to use the WHIRLPOOL hash of the virus.
I think my machine has been hit by B97DE512E91E3828B40D2B0FDCE9CEB3C4A71F9BEA8D88E75C 4FA854DF36725F D2B52EB6544EDCACD6F8BEDDFEA403CB55AE31F03AD62A5EF5 4E42EE82C3FB35, can anyone tell me what I should do?
"Linux is used by the corporate world because it is good."
Fair enough.
"And it is good because it has a very big and active community."
Fair.
"And it has a very big and active community because it can't be taken away."
Oh... no, I don't think so. I and many others made the choice to run Linux early on, and to advocate it in personal and business settings because of three factors:
1) At the time, it was the only stable, Unix-like OS for cheap hardware (BSD386 wasn't quite there yet in those days, and it had not yet spawned FreeBSD or NetBSD (OpenBSD would come even later))
2) MS Windows was crashing every 1-2 hours at least (when you didn't touch it) and no matter how good Cygwin or FTP Software's stuff was, we couldn't get work done on Windows.
3) Sun and the rest of the non-PC-hardware Unix platforms were too expensive and slow to adopt new admin techniques.
In short: it was good and the competition either wasn't there yet, sucked or was too expensive.
There was almost no consideration of the license for most of us who contributed to or advocated for Linux, other than the fact that we appreciated the idea of free software, and would not have contributed to non-free software. But most of us had grown up with BSD on Vaxen.
"If easy to take away where why companies are using Linux, they would already be using a BSD."
That's not the reason any more than that's the reason NOT.
Also, if what you say were correct, none of us would be using X today, and flocks of developers would have abandoned X to write a GPLed display server. No, it was good and it was early and it was free. That was enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, yes, python is not less perfect than perl. We get it. I think the point to TFA was that high-level languages + SDL make a nice game development combination, not that [insert high level language] is special.
This is that definition of "lost" that appeared in the late 20th century. It's akin to the money that the music industry is "losing" due to file sharing. The evidence is not lost, it is as yet, undiscovered, and in any civilized country, we would not assert that there WAS any evidence unless we could actually see it. In the U.K., however, they actually have a law that says that you have to reveal your secret keys to the authorities with no provision for simply not knowing them. You can be convicted of the crime of having white-noise on your disk that authorities assert is encrypted data to which you are refusing to reveal the key. Heck, you could be convicted of a crime for not divulging the key to /dev/random, which is clearly some secret message channel from an unknown party, since messages arrive from it in small bursts!
I'm still at a loss to understand this attitude (just as I was when so many people predicted doom for MySQL when Inno was bought out). These are open source products, and there's absolutely nothing preventing MySQL from continuing to use them. Of course, now Oracle has the right to release a closed-source fork of these products, but that doesn't change the fact that the open source version is still out there, and thousands of people around the world have and will continue to hack on them.
About the only thing that this does to MySQL is to potentially reduce the number of active developers working on the back-ends for a short period, and might increase MySQL's costs.
I've always had a problem with that view of the appendix. First off, one of the assertions made (e.g. by Joseph McCabe in 1912, and often cited since) is that, even if the appendix had some function (which recent research has been inconclusive on), it would clearly have been a greater function in the past in order to have been enough of a survival trait to be incorporated so universally into human anatomy. This, however, overlooks the fact that nearly all human organs had different purposes at one point in our evolution, and thus ANY non-essential organ, no matter how important would be considered "vestigal".
The other problem is that teh appendix has not gone away. One would expect that, at least in some large sample of humans, an organ that truly was useless would have gone away. This leads one to surmise that it serves some function which, while non-essential (you can live without it, after all) is almost certainly a survival trait in the broader context of humanity. Possible functions that would suit this purpose could include: reduction of harmful contaminants in food (possibly colesterol, which has been studdied recently); mitigation of some disease effects; and quite possibly a physical role in digestion (e.g. preventing certain kinds of particulate food from moving through the intestines as quickly as some other kinds).
These are all guesses, but what is known is that most "useless" organs have at one point or another in our history been determined to serve a crucial role. Even the brain was once thought to be nothing more than padding, protecting the eyes and neck.
Hi, I'm not sure if I'm feeding a troll or not, but gconf and clock-applet have never seen any problems on my FC1,2,3, or 4 machines. However, evolution CAN have some memory problems. Specficially, evolution seems to run spamassassin (which it uses to filter spam) in some kind of a strange mode that leaks memory like a sieve. I run a stock SA on my MTA, and never see this kind of memory leaking, but under FC4 with evolution running SA, I ran out of memory at home all the time.
The easy workaround: kill spamd. spamd will just be re-started by evolution.
The long-term fix might be to just do a full update, since I saw this problem a while back, but not in a few months.
If you're not running Fedora, then I can't help you out much. I just don't use anything else, not that that's a good or bad thing, just what I know.
Sorry, a friend of mine says / types that all the time, and I forget that it's his neologism, not a general purpose initialism.
"those 1.5 million people could have adopted real puppies instead and saved them from being put to sleep." —grimharvest
Am I the only one who sees the irony there?
First off, no, there's no secret there. What's going on is that Google has a large farm (VERY LARGE farm) of servers, and they're not all in sync. By using a proxy, you break the load-balancer's concept of a "session" and so you get sent to some random server (small chance that it would be the same one).
I've seen this many times. For example, at one point I used to have the top entry for "d20 treasure", but then someone that redirects to my page got it. During the day of transition, that site and I were bouncing back and forth in the rankings depending on where I checked from and how long I waited between searches (as I hit different servers).
Also, the -google thing is pretty straight forward. You are seeing the top-ranked pages that do not contain the term "google", not pages that have any negative association with google.
There's some BAD AJAX out there. Mostly, you'll see this when crappy tools are used to generate exceedingly crappy JavaScript + CSS + XHTML with loads of redundancy and automated cut-n-paste.
Then again, there's that kind of bad code in just about every language.
AJAX is not a bad tool, it's just prone to be used by people who don't understand it.
BWC = "Bitch Whine Complain"
If it were rude to critisize open source, then Slashdot would be Miss Manners' nemesis. Fortunately, such criticism is part of the process, and has been since at least when I got involved, back in '88.
If you work on something like MythTV, you expect a ton of BWCing, but not all of it is bad. Often, the complaints of users demonstrate those areas that your software is truly lacking. Of course, detailed bug reports are ALWAYS more helpful, but if all the brain power you can spare is that requried for a rant... well, don't think you're the first.
I never said it was a fungus, I was just pointing out that it's not shocking, given the fungal world has "been there, done that".
If you're familiar with the fungal world, this is not shocking. There is a fungus that infects ants. It causes them to climb to the top of the nearest blade of grass (or equivalent), where the clutch firmly and die. The fungus then sprouts a spore-dispersing stalk from the ant's head. When I first read about it, if it had not been a serious field guide, I would have assumed it was a joke. But, I've come across a number of references to it, since.
Of course, many people don't realize that you can enable TLS on your mail server, and many others (many right here on Slashdot) said that I and a few others were paranoid for not wanting to let a large ISP run our mail servers for us. Worse, we tend not to want to allow our mail to be relayed THROUGH such large mail servers. My ISP STILL doesn't use TLS if I try to relay through them (though I realize that would be pointless, since the Feds will simply require a tap into their MTA directly, which sees the unencrypted session).
And now, you see why I insist on running my own MTA (though there are also business reasons). AOL may not be willing to accept my connections, but I get to encrypt the WHOLE SESSION, and the only thing anyone sniffing packets gets to know is that I'm sending mail to someone else's MTA. Given the amount of mailing list traffic and other noise that my machines generate, that's probably not as useful as one might want.
Want to evesdrop on my mail? Get a warrant. It's not that much to ask.
There is a substantial difference between searching a well ordered filesystem and searching the contents of files. Try your find command this way:
find / -iname '*foo*' -o -exec grep -i foo {} \;
That'll take you quite a bit, and it's actually a pretty poor way to search, since some terms inside of binary format files won't be in plain ascii text. To interpret those files, you're going to have to uncompress some things, interpret some file formats, etc.
Still think it's a small job?
And of course, optimizing in that way is probably analogous to the halting problem, but that doesn't mean that a good general-purpose back-end for GCC could not be written. History teaches us one thing about specialized hardware that we should never forget: the average user of your hardware is going to need to have VERY LITTLE of their code hand-tuned for it. For example, let's say that this hardware tends to be very good at encryption. Your average user would likely be running a Web server or some other sort of networking technology, and almost NONE of that code cares about the 10-100 hand-tuned routines in OpenSSL that you wrote for this platform.
Get a good compiler and general-purpose OS up and running fast (which, by the way, I'm sure IBM is doing), and you'll see many more people writing special-purpose code where they need it.
You are giving RMS quite a bit too much credit, here. You are trying to read a rational thought process into his words that just isn't there (and has not been for decades).
He's blowing off the entire Creative Commons license suite because he feels that it would be too confusing to say, "I think CC-BY-SA-2.5 is a pretty good free software license"?! Stallman is smarter than that and so are we. The question is: are we smart enough to realize that he's just blowing smoke and telling us to play in his sandbox?
Ok, this is going nowhere. I feel that software should expand, gas-like, to fill every available nook and cranny of its environment, and you feel that it should be prevented from shipping on platforms that you feel limit freedoms.
... well, we've had that discussion, and we'll have to agree to disagree.
*shrug*
It's a moot point. The Linux kernel license can't change at this point, and the average Linux software developer isn't going to select a license that Linus has such strong concerns about, so while I'm sure the GPLv3 will be used, I'm equally sure that you won't see it as widely adopted as the GPLv2, which is kind of sad, really. For all the respect I have for Stallman as a programmer, I still think the GPL was his cleverest hack. My sense of nostalgia wants to override my sense of fair play here, but
Good points. One more to add to the mix: the trend in global warming debate thus far has been to say that CO2 must be the unknown cause of global warming because no other factor could account for the increase in temperature. This is generally said because the increase does not map to the increase in solar output.
However, if solar output were to trigger non-linear increases in global temperatures (e.g. by triggering the ~2% increase in percipitation in the 20th century, trapping solar radiation under increased cloud-cover and water vapor content), then such models could easily be quite wrong.
This is nothing new. Solar researchers have been trying to point out the sun-climate interactions since the 1970s.
Just to make one further point. Your post here is highly hyperbolic. To say that software "isn't one iota free as in liberty" because it ships on a DRM platform doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, you have the source. Nothing about that software is secret to you except for a key. You can take the software to another platform and modify/distribute/whatever to your heart's content. You could even work out a deal with the hardware manufacturer to get yourself a key for signing your own code and run that same software, as compiled by you.
Your argument is a bit like suggesting that you have no freedoms when someone ships binaries that only run on high-end, multi-million dollar hardware, for which compilers are only available from one company, and cost millions themselves. It's the exact same situation, and you have two choices: break the platform lock by writing a compiler (or defeating the DRM) or port to another platform. That latter option is only available to you with open source software!
"You just refuse to get it don't you? The end user doesn't give a crap if the software runs on some other platform. He cares if it runs on the platform he paid for."
Ok, so explain yourself. Why is it a bad thing to provide users with what they want? I make an OS, and I ship it on a dozen platforms. On this one particular platform, it only works if I use a secret key to sign my software that I cannot give to my customers. The GPLv3 says I can't support that platform and ship my code under that license.
Should I tell my customers to get stuffed, or should I dump the GPLv3? Linus is saying that, were the GPLv3 even an option, which it's not, he would not tell his "customers" to get stuffed. He would support them right along with everyone else. I'd do the same, and I'd still use every argument presented here as good and valid arguments against DRM hardware (which CAN be a good thing, but not in any form that I've heard much about to date).
I'm a moderate democrat, but I STRONGLY side with my republican counterpart (the GP) in this case! You're going off on someone for having said that "for the most part" science should be left alone (while defending NASA in this particular case).
Let us recall that most science in the U.S. (and we're discussing U.S. politics here, sorry foreign
However, it does not stop there. It is also appropriate for us to make laws that restrict the sciences according to democratic consensus. Why? Because there are avenues of research with powerful reprecussions on our society, and it is not always appropriate for research to out-pace our ethical discourse.
If anything, I think that we should have MORE discussion about such topics, not less. I'd like to make sure that we all understand the benefits and potential drawbacks of technologies like human stem-cell research (which I see as no different from organ donation, and which has huge benefits for humanity that I don't think we discuss often enough). In many cases further understanding will likely increase support for avenues of research.
Now, in the case of NASA, there are very few space-related projects which pose strong ethical questions (except for those performed in secret with the military), but they do come up. When they do, I think it is appropriate for all of us, as a nation, to work hard at becoming informed on the topics at hand, and have our say in the direction that NASA takes.
Anything else is a technocracy, and I will not abide that.
Again, great argument against DRM. Bad argument against software that runs equally on all platforms.
Let the market pressures take care of DRM hardware. In a market where new CPUs are measured by how overclockable they are, I just don't see DRM hardware becoming the default platform for computing.
I think it would be best to use the WHIRLPOOL hash of the virus.
C 4FA854DF36725F5 4E42EE82C3FB35, can anyone tell me what I should do?
I think my machine has been hit by B97DE512E91E3828B40D2B0FDCE9CEB3C4A71F9BEA8D88E75
D2B52EB6544EDCACD6F8BEDDFEA403CB55AE31F03AD62A5EF
"Linux is used by the corporate world because it is good."
Fair enough.
"And it is good because it has a very big and active community."
Fair.
"And it has a very big and active community because it can't be taken away."
Oh... no, I don't think so. I and many others made the choice to run Linux early on, and to advocate it in personal and business settings because of three factors:
1) At the time, it was the only stable, Unix-like OS for cheap hardware (BSD386 wasn't quite there yet in those days, and it had not yet spawned FreeBSD or NetBSD (OpenBSD would come even later))
2) MS Windows was crashing every 1-2 hours at least (when you didn't touch it) and no matter how good Cygwin or FTP Software's stuff was, we couldn't get work done on Windows.
3) Sun and the rest of the non-PC-hardware Unix platforms were too expensive and slow to adopt new admin techniques.
In short: it was good and the competition either wasn't there yet, sucked or was too expensive.
There was almost no consideration of the license for most of us who contributed to or advocated for Linux, other than the fact that we appreciated the idea of free software, and would not have contributed to non-free software. But most of us had grown up with BSD on Vaxen.
"If easy to take away where why companies are using Linux, they would already be using a BSD."
That's not the reason any more than that's the reason NOT.
Also, if what you say were correct, none of us would be using X today, and flocks of developers would have abandoned X to write a GPLed display server. No, it was good and it was early and it was free. That was enough.