Xandros bandied my name around as their "consultant" while setting up this deal. Please be advised, I have nothing to do with them. Although I verbaly agreed to advise them more than a year ago, nothing exists on paper and their behavior since then does not merit my continued involvement. Linux Global Partners, their parent, reneged on signed term sheets with a number of Linux companies in March. Just before announcing the Xandros deal, LGP was in talks with Progeny, got a very good look at Progeny's business plan, and then said "no thanks". In retrospect, it's clear that they simply wanted a look at the business plan.
I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.
The original copyright holder retains the right to license others to create derivative works. Others own their own copyrights but distribute the derivative work under license. But everyone is an original copyright holder in the case of Linux, not just Linus. They are all under license with each other.
Yes, that's correct. I advised JBoss to switch to the LGPL because it should be clear that you could load proprietary Java modules into JBoss. Since it's an application server, this makes sense. I was either about to join the Telkel board, or on it when the change was made. Telkel owned essentially all of the software and its copyrights at that time.
And yet here you are, posting for the first time in over half a month (save for replying to two posts which refer to you by name in their subject lines).
Yes. I find that these days I can be published in better venues. They get me more views, and a broader spread of readers than slashdot, while on Slashdot I'm generally preaching to the converted. That's fine, but I'm after new converts and can reach them better elsewhere. And I'd still be replying to posts with my name in them, except that the search function on the new slashdot software no longer will return hits sorted by time, and I can't find them any longer.
Feel free to
tell me otherwise, but I'd say it looks an awful lot like you do take him seriously,
enough to try to marginalize him as a selfish kook.
I posted because there are a lot of newbies on Slashdot who might not know Brett and his history. It's not out of order for the more experienced readers to help them out.
Think nobody was taking him
seriously when he was cleaning your clock in the Silicon Valley roundtable?
A number of the other panelists did not feel he belonged there, and although the SV folks admitted they screwed up by inviting him, and were quite chagrined about it, their own policies did not let them uninvite him. I probably spent too much time replying to him.
You seem to be distorting his views
Try to prove that I am distorting his views. For every assertion you make, I guarantee that I can show you in his online writing that he says exactly what I represent he says.
and by extension, people who dislike the GPL
license by acting like they want to take everything private, commercialize it, and
not return anything.
Yes, I think that taking public software private is a selfish act.
Actually, it's about freedom
Wrong. The BSD license is not about freedom. It's about one party giving a gift, and the other party taking it. Some BSD folks have forgotten that their software is based on the work of the U.S. Army through its DARPA grants to U.C. Berkeley. The taxpayers paid for the software, and was given to everyone as a gift. Most GPL software these days originates in private enterprise, and is written to solve an immediate business problem, other GPL software originates as a hobby or academic work. And a little of it is supported by government grants, for example Donald Becker's work on ethernet drivers was funded by NASA. But much less than with BSD.
the GPL tells me, "Better get a second job, because no matter how much time and money you spend improving this code, as soon as you release it, people are going to download the code for free rather than pay you a nickel."
If you just write software and do no other business, that may indeed be the case. People who profitably develop GPL software use it to facilitate some other business of their own. For example, a lot of the kernel development is paid for by hardware manufacturers who market Linux systems. Even Linus works for one.
The corpses of the Linux companies
Look around you. Linux use is growing 33% per year in the worst economic downturn in recent memory, and more people are doing business with Linux today than ever before. The fact that some companies went out is mostly because they could not compete, especially with the big companies coming into Linux. Most companies go out of business, you know, no matter what the industry. By the way, Progeny is putting money in the bank every month. We had to cut it to the bone to achieve that, but it's turning real profit when others only have a pro-forma profit. My investors in Linux Capital Group may well profit on their investment, the jury is still out.
the all-time low stock prices of the remaining ones
Well, a lot of the investors thought some of these companies had a "lock" on Linux. We don't want them to have a lock, and the investors have realized that. Not that the rest of the market is doing much better.
the decision by the owners of this very web site to start selling proprietary software
Hey, if I were VA I would have sold the company already. Their business plan denied that larger companies would get into Linux. If they want to produce a mix of propreitary and Open Source software now, there's nothing wrong with that. You're confusing me with RMS - I want Free Software and proprietary to co-exist, he wants it all to be free. But we both use the GPL.
the fact that GPL software is always left chasing the taillights of others in the industry
Oh yes, that's why Microsoft is copying the Tux web server features into IIS, and is still chasing the taillights of Linux in attempting to make its own systems reliable. XP turns out not to be nearly so stable as they said - its kernel crashes a lot.
A programmer asked how someone like him would make
a living (i.e., not have to take on a second job) in a GPL world, and Bruce told him
that he should start thinking about getting into the support or documentation
business.
Sure, sell support or extra documentation for his own software. What's wrong with that? Did you think he wasn't going to support his own software? Or did you expect him to do that for free? He doesn't have to.
It's really very easy to differentiate the GPL and BSD licenses. GPL is about sharing - you build on my code, you let me build on yours with the same rules I gave you. In contrast, BSD licensing is a gift - the developer gives their code to anyone to do what they please. A lot of people would like to take that gift and build something commercial on top of it, and sell it without giving anything back to the original developer. BSD licensing allows them to do that. Some people like that, and develop under the BSD license. Other people want to have a partnership rather than something one-way, and they use the GPL. And sometimes those BSD people get lucky and people actually do give back.
The most telling example for me is busybox, an embedded Linux toolkit that I created in 1996, which is a critical part of most of embedded Linux systems. Lineo took that toolkit into their product, as have most of the other embedded Linux companies. It gave them a time-to-market advantage. But because it was under the GPL, all of the various companies (especially Lineo) that improved Busybox contributed their work back under the GPL, and it's now about 5 times as functional as what I released, and everybody profits from that functionality. If I had used the BSD license, they would all have made their own improvements, duplicating effort, and keeping them proprietary, and fewer would have the benefit of that product, and the public version would still just be the 1/5 that I wrote. That's how a lot of non-GPL products have gone in the embedded market.
Thus, I think sharing works better than a handout.
I don't know enough yet to form an opinion. It could take some time for me to get the information necessary - planning will take a while, and of course there's a chance the merger could be blocked by European or US regulators. But if it's run right, this could be really good for Linux and Free Software.
Brett just doesn't like any form of free media or software that can't be "taken private". He's also very strongly opposed to the idea of free media, software, etc., if it takes the profit from commercial practicioners who would produce the same thing for a high price.
Brett would prefer if we'd all put out free media that he can take private, commercialize, and not return anything to the creator. I just don't see what's in it for anyone but Brett. Most people don't take him seriously.
Bruce
Re:Bruce Perens And Debian @ HP & Compaq
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Dear AC,
Note that HP's mainframe OS, MPE, is still a very healthy business. Entrenched products have a life of their own that has little to do with their competition.
Bruce
Re:Bruce Perens And Debian @ HP & Compaq
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Bruce's Opinion Follows, not the HP Official Line: Obviously both companies have a Linux thrust. I doubt the merger would turn that off, instead I expect that together the two companies are a Linux powerhouse. Although Compaq is somewhat late to accept Linux, they claim to move more Linux systems than any other company. HP has some very good Linux efforts in place, has its pioneering role with the ia-64 architecture, and of course has yours truly.
Of course we now have to figure out how to fit the two companies together, and that will take a while. I live in exciting times:-)
I am announcing this product in an hour. Shankland loves to jump the gun.
The kernel component of HP Secure Linux is under the GPL license. All of the other Linux security vendors currently hide their security mods to the kernel in binary-only modules, IMO abusing the modules exception to the kernel. HP would rather not play games of getting around the GPL. The user-mode component of Secure Linux is not GPL-ed, but we understand that given the kernel drivers, programmers can roll their own.
Actually, I can't say I'm a big fan of XML either. It seems to me that it's a good deal more verbose than it needed to be.
Regarding ASN.1, Yes, there are tools to make this easier. I do still find it more difficult to code and test. And in general my development time is more expensive than bandwidth. That probably applies to most people.
What we're really saying here is that XML is a very verbose protocol, and that ASN.1 isn't. But verbosity, or lack thereof, is hardly unique. Also, there is no compression claim here - only the difference in verbosity.
ASN.1 uses integers as its symbols. Remember the protocol used for SNMP? Did you really like it? It's not too human-readable or writable.
Also, the idea of promoting it through a consortium is rather old-fashioned.
Tee hee. Is that sarcasm or have you really never heard of me?
Yes, or I could use anacron on my 802.11-equipped laptop. But I am not so confident that I want those "unstable" packages installed while I'm sleeping. My workstation is also my main web server.
You are right. However, you can get an Official Debian distrubtion on CD for much less than the official release of anyone else. But of course you get 30 days of just awful phone support with those other guys:-) . There is an incredibly long list of Debian CD vendors, many of whom have rock-bottom prices, here.
HP finds that most of its Linux customers download their Linux. We also find that Linux usage is consistently under-reported because the install happens after the sale, and the installation has no correspondence with a shipped unit of an operating system. This will probably change as the character of customer changes and more of them go for enterprise-quality support, as we ship our own load more often, etc.
I'll tell you what I'm doing on my personal system. Every day, I type
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
and my system is updated to the latest version of Debian. No charge, ever, and the software quality is best-of-class. I have my choice of "stable", the released version, or "testing", or "unstable", with "unstable" being the least tested (and the one I use) and "testing" being leading-edge packages but ones without show-stopping bugs. Over the past 5 years or so, I've really had only one situation where I had to stop and fix my system before I could get work done, because a package was badly broken. If I were running "stable" or "testing", I would have avoided that.
It happens that I'm speaking at AOL headquarters on Wednesday, to a few hundred of their staff. I can drop in a polite sentence about this, but asked Mark to advise me as I don't want to over-do it just in case someone has already decided to be nice to him.
I don't think you have to worry that I'm being corrupted by money. I make a livable wage working for HP, but not a ton of money. On the other hand, I am lucky enough to have a nice home and no debt, due to the Pixar IPO, which had nothing to do with Linux or Open Source. So, I don't need a lot of money. I do want to be working on what I want to, rather than what some boss tells me to work on, which is the opportunity HP offers me. I'm doing exactly what I would if I didn't work there.
Open standard means that it's published, not that it achieves world domination. MS clearly intends it to be a single "log in" for all internet services. OK, that's not such a bad idea, but it's a bad idea for Microsoft to be the sole organization in charge of such a thing. If we were able to get a look at how it works, then we'd be able to say if it was any good technically or not. MS, for all of its sins, employs some good software engineers and is responsible for a number of standards that have already been incorporated into GNOME. We might well want to go along and do things their way if the main objection to doing so, their central control, was not an issue.
As a general policy, our goal is not to destroy Microsoft, but to make a good partner of them. I'm not sure either one is possible, though:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.
Bruce
The original copyright holder retains the right to license others to create derivative works. Others own their own copyrights but distribute the derivative work under license. But everyone is an original copyright holder in the case of Linux, not just Linus. They are all under license with each other.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
And yet here you are, posting for the first time in over half a month (save for replying to two posts which refer to you by name in their subject lines).
Yes. I find that these days I can be published in better venues. They get me more views, and a broader spread of readers than slashdot, while on Slashdot I'm generally preaching to the converted. That's fine, but I'm after new converts and can reach them better elsewhere. And I'd still be replying to posts with my name in them, except that the search function on the new slashdot software no longer will return hits sorted by time, and I can't find them any longer.
Feel free to tell me otherwise, but I'd say it looks an awful lot like you do take him seriously, enough to try to marginalize him as a selfish kook.
I posted because there are a lot of newbies on Slashdot who might not know Brett and his history. It's not out of order for the more experienced readers to help them out.
Think nobody was taking him seriously when he was cleaning your clock in the Silicon Valley roundtable?
A number of the other panelists did not feel he belonged there, and although the SV folks admitted they screwed up by inviting him, and were quite chagrined about it, their own policies did not let them uninvite him. I probably spent too much time replying to him.
You seem to be distorting his views
Try to prove that I am distorting his views. For every assertion you make, I guarantee that I can show you in his online writing that he says exactly what I represent he says.
and by extension, people who dislike the GPL license by acting like they want to take everything private, commercialize it, and not return anything.
Yes, I think that taking public software private is a selfish act.
Actually, it's about freedom
Wrong. The BSD license is not about freedom. It's about one party giving a gift, and the other party taking it. Some BSD folks have forgotten that their software is based on the work of the U.S. Army through its DARPA grants to U.C. Berkeley. The taxpayers paid for the software, and was given to everyone as a gift. Most GPL software these days originates in private enterprise, and is written to solve an immediate business problem, other GPL software originates as a hobby or academic work. And a little of it is supported by government grants, for example Donald Becker's work on ethernet drivers was funded by NASA. But much less than with BSD.
the GPL tells me, "Better get a second job, because no matter how much time and money you spend improving this code, as soon as you release it, people are going to download the code for free rather than pay you a nickel."
If you just write software and do no other business, that may indeed be the case. People who profitably develop GPL software use it to facilitate some other business of their own. For example, a lot of the kernel development is paid for by hardware manufacturers who market Linux systems. Even Linus works for one.
The corpses of the Linux companies
Look around you. Linux use is growing 33% per year in the worst economic downturn in recent memory, and more people are doing business with Linux today than ever before. The fact that some companies went out is mostly because they could not compete, especially with the big companies coming into Linux. Most companies go out of business, you know, no matter what the industry. By the way, Progeny is putting money in the bank every month. We had to cut it to the bone to achieve that, but it's turning real profit when others only have a pro-forma profit. My investors in Linux Capital Group may well profit on their investment, the jury is still out.
the all-time low stock prices of the remaining ones
Well, a lot of the investors thought some of these companies had a "lock" on Linux. We don't want them to have a lock, and the investors have realized that. Not that the rest of the market is doing much better.
the decision by the owners of this very web site to start selling proprietary software
Hey, if I were VA I would have sold the company already. Their business plan denied that larger companies would get into Linux. If they want to produce a mix of propreitary and Open Source software now, there's nothing wrong with that. You're confusing me with RMS - I want Free Software and proprietary to co-exist, he wants it all to be free. But we both use the GPL.
the fact that GPL software is always left chasing the taillights of others in the industry
Oh yes, that's why Microsoft is copying the Tux web server features into IIS, and is still chasing the taillights of Linux in attempting to make its own systems reliable. XP turns out not to be nearly so stable as they said - its kernel crashes a lot.
A programmer asked how someone like him would make a living (i.e., not have to take on a second job) in a GPL world, and Bruce told him that he should start thinking about getting into the support or documentation business.
Sure, sell support or extra documentation for his own software. What's wrong with that? Did you think he wasn't going to support his own software? Or did you expect him to do that for free? He doesn't have to.
I still think he's Brett.
Bruce
The most telling example for me is busybox, an embedded Linux toolkit that I created in 1996, which is a critical part of most of embedded Linux systems. Lineo took that toolkit into their product, as have most of the other embedded Linux companies. It gave them a time-to-market advantage. But because it was under the GPL, all of the various companies (especially Lineo) that improved Busybox contributed their work back under the GPL, and it's now about 5 times as functional as what I released, and everybody profits from that functionality. If I had used the BSD license, they would all have made their own improvements, duplicating effort, and keeping them proprietary, and fewer would have the benefit of that product, and the public version would still just be the 1/5 that I wrote. That's how a lot of non-GPL products have gone in the embedded market.
Thus, I think sharing works better than a handout.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Brett would prefer if we'd all put out free media that he can take private, commercialize, and not return anything to the creator. I just don't see what's in it for anyone but Brett. Most people don't take him seriously.
Bruce
Note that HP's mainframe OS, MPE, is still a very healthy business. Entrenched products have a life of their own that has little to do with their competition.
Bruce
Of course we now have to figure out how to fit the two companies together, and that will take a while. I live in exciting times
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I am announcing this product in an hour. Shankland loves to jump the gun.
The kernel component of HP Secure Linux is under the GPL license. All of the other Linux security vendors currently hide their security mods to the kernel in binary-only modules, IMO abusing the modules exception to the kernel. HP would rather not play games of getting around the GPL. The user-mode component of Secure Linux is not GPL-ed, but we understand that given the kernel drivers, programmers can roll their own.
Thanks
Bruce
Regarding ASN.1, Yes, there are tools to make this easier. I do still find it more difficult to code and test. And in general my development time is more expensive than bandwidth. That probably applies to most people.
Thanks
Bruce
ASN.1 uses integers as its symbols. Remember the protocol used for SNMP? Did you really like it? It's not too human-readable or writable.
Also, the idea of promoting it through a consortium is rather old-fashioned.
Bruce
Yes, or I could use anacron on my 802.11-equipped laptop. But I am not so confident that I want those "unstable" packages installed while I'm sleeping. My workstation is also my main web server.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I'll tell you what I'm doing on my personal system. Every day, I type
and my system is updated to the latest version of Debian. No charge, ever, and the software quality is best-of-class. I have my choice of "stable", the released version, or "testing", or "unstable", with "unstable" being the least tested (and the one I use) and "testing" being leading-edge packages but ones without show-stopping bugs. Over the past 5 years or so, I've really had only one situation where I had to stop and fix my system before I could get work done, because a package was badly broken. If I were running "stable" or "testing", I would have avoided that.Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
As a general policy, our goal is not to destroy Microsoft, but to make a good partner of them. I'm not sure either one is possible, though :-)