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Thanks
Bruce
The postulated "hole" does not exist.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 1
Robin, I can't believe you posted this.
The guy's not a lawyer, he is completely ignorant of the law and licensing in general, and you didn't even bother to check this out with anyone first. The postulated "hole" does not exist.
Licenses only apply to individuals? Since when? That seems to be the center of his thesis, and it's simply not true. Corporations are legal entities and can be party to licenses. Other companies have their proprietors hold the license.
You have always been able to keep a GPL modification secret if you don't distribute the binary, because the GPL was explicitly written to allow that sort of "internal" use without disclosure. Only when you distribute the program to others do the GPL terms come into play.
If the licensee is a company, that company can decide when to distribute the binary, but then it's required to distribute source like everyone else. If you are an employee within that company, you can not decide to "out" the source without their permission, because you are not the licensee, and you are not the copyright holder to modifications - the company is. But that's as far as it goes. If the company distributes to another legal entity outside of itself, such as a beta tester or a customer, they have to comply with the GPL terms on source-code distribution.
One of the posters postulated an "association" with an agreement that would override the GPL for its members. This would be seen as an deliberate attempt to modify the terms of the GPL by any competent court, and thus would be infringement of copyright, since the GPL explicitly prohibits modification of its terms.
RMS has a law professor who consults on the GPL. Robin, if you want to run stories like this, it would make sense to consult that law professor first to make sure you aren't talking out of your hat. RMS would be happy to give you his email address and phone number. If you can't do even that much verification, maybe you should go back to driving that yellow car.
Geez. Given that it's a free software product I'd hope you could get it on your system even if nobody packages it for Debian.
It appears they are making changes that will let them admit new maintainers again. A lot of previously manual processes for managing maintainers seem to have been automated recently.
You don't have to get rid of dselect (although I hope you will eventually want to). It's only the front-end of the package system. I think Storm and Corel both wrote their own front-ends, too. As far as I'm aware they all work with the same backend.
I'd like to see more work on gnome-apt. A panel full of check-boxes is all you'd really need to set all the flags that dselect manipulates. The calls are there in libapt.
I would think that people who comment on an industry where the only continuous theme has been "nothing lasts forever" would at least see the stupidity in "free development always anything."
You touched on the point without seeing it. In a world where we're used to nothing lasting forever, wouldn't it be nice to have control over how long things last?
Free software gives you that. As long as there are a few people interested in running it, there is sufficient force for it to be maintained. You don't have to put up with some marketing department discontinuing your favorite product.
The last time I looked, the Debian pcmcia-cs package was built in synchrony with the kernel package. That means that when Debian builds a kernel package for 2.4, you'll get pcmcia-cs with it. I don't run the other stuff you mentioned here, and thus have indeed not tested it. The systems here are pretty generic server/desktop machines with a DSL connection and an external router.
I'd assume those facilities are significantly changed from 2.2 to 2.4, and thus you will have to get new packages for those with a new kernel package as well. Given the way that Debian works, that could be an automatic upgrade: select the kernel and the other stuff comes in too.
Thanks
Bruce
* ISDN * Anything NAT-related (the ipchains -> netfilter transition) * PCMCIA-CS stuff * All the IP routing stuff
I am running kernel 2.3.36 at the moment on my dual-processor system, and 2.3.31 on a monoprocessor. I've also tested the release kernel, of course. The development series of kernels build and run fine under the Debian distribution, any changes needed to support the new kernels and symmetrical multiprocessing already seem to be in place.
Debian "potato" runs Technocrat.net, perens.com, linuxvc.com, and my other sites. Although the web sites need the usual content management, the systems pretty much manage themselves. I've been doing an upgrade to the latest "unstable" version over the net every few days for the past several months, and the result has been admirably stable. Any failures around here seem to be problems in the PC hardware.
There will doubtless be some humor around the code-name of the next unstable version. You can refer to downloading it as "getting a woody":-)
Part of the problem is that some people are being meek about this because:
1. They want to be bending-over-backwards fair in giving them the benefit of the doubt and seeing if they'll be for real or not once they have the money. 2. They are afraid that they'll get sued. 3. They simply refuse to say anything negative about a Linux business.
Certainly you should get every outlet to research this issue and publish something about it. But don't stop when some of them refuse - in the end, it is up to the community to get this word out.
I posted it because another poster was confused about the link. But I am not claiming that this one is worthy of any moderation points. Have a good night:-)
Bruce
Re:Hostile TakeOver and run em into the ground
on
LinuxOne At It Again?
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· Score: 3
This isn't the way the market works. It would be the underwriter who would get stuck, but before that happened trading would be halted on the stock. There would also be an investigation afterward and collusion to tank a stock is no doubt a violation of securities law.
No, I think get the word out is the right way to do it. I would prefer to see other people making their own investigations, and posting what they have found out firsthand, so that it's not just me. Actually, I was reluctant to say as much as I did today - I wrote that posting this evening for Technocrat.net, because I simply could in good conscience let the situation go on any longer without my saying something forceful about it. But I would feel more comfortable if someone who isn't doing his own IPO, and thus has less appearance of prejudice, would take the "point" on this issue.
The storefront says "PS Multimedia" and is approximately across the street from the Burger King on San Pablo and a block south, if my memory is correct. Check them out yourself. Report back to us. 10032 San Pablo.
In a recent press release, LinuxOne announced a $500,000 software order from "Power Source" of El Cerrito, California.
What LinuxOne didn't mention is that Power Source runs out of a tiny storefront, and their "distributors in 130 countries", an exaggeration, run flea market tables. One of these distributors is usually seen at the Livermore Ham Radio Flea Market here in California, where he occupies one of the $10 tables.
While Power Source appears to be a legitimate business, it is extremely unlikely that they could have $500,000 cash to pay to LinuxOne. Rather, they probably made a deal to sell $500,000 worth of product, when and if they can, without pre-paying for much of it at all. But you would not have realized that from the LinuxOne press release.
There's a pattern here. LinuxOne persists in posing as a company with bright prospects in Linux, but look at what they have done: They are completely unknown in the Linux community, their officers are newcomers to Linux, and nobody known in the Linux community is on their technical staff (if they really have one). The founder of LinuxOne was previously behind NetUSA, which is trading around 60 cents a share, one tenth of its value a year ago. LinuxOne copied Red Hat's S-1 form (the form submitted when making a public stock offering) almost word-for-word, claiming that they have the prospects of Red Hat, a company that entered Linux 5 years before LinuxOne and employs hundreds of people, including some of the best programmers in the Linux world. LinuxOne's products so far appear to be mock-ups: their Linux CD is Red Hat's CD with the words Red Hat removed and LinuxOne filled in. Their "Linux on a disk" product is a Linux CD that someone installed on a hard disk, probably in a single day, and then they copied the disk. A claimed Linux system that runs on top of Windows called LinuxLite appears to be misrepresented in its functionality if it exists at all. LinuxOne staff have not written any significant Linux software to date that I can find, the only software they appear to have written is a program that displays a clock on the X window system.
And this is the company that has registered the stock symbol LINX and is going to take $23 Million from investors who don't know better, any day now. I think it's a really bad investment. But I'm prejudiced: I happen to have a Linux company too. Fortunately, you can hear the same message from other respectable people in the Linux world. For example, read this article in The Register by Rick Moen, a respected, long-time participant in the Linux community.
I've been a Unix operating system kernel programmer since 1981, and have worked on Linux since 1994. Another employee of my company has been working on Linux since 1993 when he started one of the best-respected Linux distributions. We're hiring other people with similar backgrounds. We have paid our dues and we have a proven performance record in the Linux world. There are a number of new companies similar to ours in the bacgrounds of their founders and their technical staff. These companies are not going public until they have real products, and when they do go public, they have some reasonable prospects for success. In contrast, I don't feel that LinuxOne has any prospects, I think they've been very sleazy in their press and promotion, and while it is remotely possible that anyone could build a real Linux software company with that $23M, it makes sense to invest in people with more skill and background than LinuxOne.
I can't save those investors from having their money go down the drain. Some people tell me that I shouldn't feel sorry for people who make poorly-researched investments, but I feel horrible about this. It's going to make Linux look bad and a lot of innocent people who don't have someone experienced in Linux to warn them are going to be hurt.
Somebody has to speak out. Please tell your friends. Tell everyone you know.
No, 6 months ago was not the time to do it either. If your IS person chucked out the micro or mainframe systems 2 to 5 years ago to replace them with MS NT, that was the time when the problem happened.
I do have a systems administration background since 1981. OK, it's all Unix and all for scientific facilities, but we ran 24/7 without UPS systems, using V6 unix and other things that didn't have fsck. Things are easier today.
I didn't buy the cost-benefit argument, sorry. It would need a significant chance of failure during the overnight period that would cost more to fix afterward than the cost of simply shutting down the servers and bringing them up again. OK, maybe you can justify it that way but it feels over conservative to me.
Actually, my utility has said a lot about its readiness. I happened to visit Hoover Dam recently, and they made a point of showing how they could manage the system with switches and relays, and without a computer, when necessary. As things played out, we lost one transformer here when someone shot it out, putting about 6000 people in Oakland in the dark. That is the only failure known for Pacific Gas and Electric at this time.
I think there's an emotional factor in this for me, too. Pride, I guess. I wouldn't feel proud to shut down for Y2K. I left my systems going, unattended, while I went to a party. The FTP log says the server was in use continuously, across midnight, by programs performing unattended downloads of the U.S. Map database. The Zope server log says that access of my web sites kept on throughout the night. Nothing has gone wrong.
In the real world, where most of us live, there is a lot of Microsoft software. It has not been shown to be especially reliable
OK, you've got a bigger problem than Y2K. Your IS manager picked the wrong software, because everybody uses it. That software is downtime prone, but your IS person can point a finger at Microsoft, say but we have to use it, everybody does, and provide excuses rather than running systems.
Believe it or not, people don't have to continue to buy unreliable software. OK, you might think I'm uncompromising, but if that's what is happening in your organization, you already had a reason to find a new IS person before Y2K came around.
So you know the status of my electric utility, and the capabilities of my UPS?
That's a very fearful statement. If you've looked into the situation at all, you know that not only is your electric utility ready to meet the challenge, they have extra staff on duty tonight.
IS facilities are not in business to provide downtime. If they can't cope with the Y2K roll-over while hot, it's a sign of long-term mismanagement, because the problems should have been fixed years ago.
Again, if your site is down tonight, it's because your pants are down, buddy.
I pay around $200/month for a DSL line that carries my sites. I have had them slashdotted any number of times without a denial of service occurring for other sites on the same host, and without the maximum bandwidth of the DSL wire being reached. I also serve the U.S. Map (3GB) off of the same wire.
Nobody should tolerate deliberate downtime. If you get too many hits, they should add something to your bill. If their server can't stand the hits, they need more bandwidth.
Several times lately I've hit sites hosted, I believe, by Best Internet, only to see error messages like "500 transfer limit exceeded". A link from Slashdot provokes this a lot, but it happens for other reasons, too.
Imagine an internet provider with the feature that they will cause your site downtime when it hits an arbitrary transfer limit for reasons that are entirely out of your control. It's practicaly an advertisement to find another provider.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks
Bruce
The guy's not a lawyer, he is completely ignorant of the law and licensing in general, and you didn't even bother to check this out with anyone first. The postulated "hole" does not exist.
Licenses only apply to individuals? Since when? That seems to be the center of his thesis, and it's simply not true. Corporations are legal entities and can be party to licenses. Other companies have their proprietors hold the license.
You have always been able to keep a GPL modification secret if you don't distribute the binary, because the GPL was explicitly written to allow that sort of "internal" use without disclosure. Only when you distribute the program to others do the GPL terms come into play.
If the licensee is a company, that company can decide when to distribute the binary, but then it's required to distribute source like everyone else. If you are an employee within that company, you can not decide to "out" the source without their permission, because you are not the licensee, and you are not the copyright holder to modifications - the company is. But that's as far as it goes. If the company distributes to another legal entity outside of itself, such as a beta tester or a customer, they have to comply with the GPL terms on source-code distribution.
One of the posters postulated an "association" with an agreement that would override the GPL for its members. This would be seen as an deliberate attempt to modify the terms of the GPL by any competent court, and thus would be infringement of copyright, since the GPL explicitly prohibits modification of its terms.
RMS has a law professor who consults on the GPL. Robin, if you want to run stories like this, it would make sense to consult that law professor first to make sure you aren't talking out of your hat. RMS would be happy to give you his email address and phone number. If you can't do even that much verification, maybe you should go back to driving that yellow car.
Thanks
Bruce
It appears they are making changes that will let them admit new maintainers again. A lot of previously manual processes for managing maintainers seem to have been automated recently.
Thanks
Bruce
I'd like to see more work on gnome-apt. A panel full of check-boxes is all you'd really need to set all the flags that dselect manipulates. The calls are there in libapt.
Thanks
Bruce
You touched on the point without seeing it. In a world where we're used to nothing lasting forever, wouldn't it be nice to have control over how long things last?
Free software gives you that. As long as there are a few people interested in running it, there is sufficient force for it to be maintained. You don't have to put up with some marketing department discontinuing your favorite product.
Thanks
Bruce
I'd assume those facilities are significantly changed from 2.2 to 2.4, and thus you will have to get new packages for those with a new kernel package as well. Given the way that Debian works, that could be an automatic upgrade: select the kernel and the other stuff comes in too.
Thanks
Bruce
* ISDN
* Anything NAT-related (the ipchains -> netfilter transition)
* PCMCIA-CS stuff
* All the IP routing stuff
Thanks
Bruce
Oops, too late. I hope the rest of the posters will heed you. Knock on wood. :-)
There will doubtless be some humor around the code-name of the next unstable version. You can refer to downloading it as "getting a woody" :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Robin the limo driver. Maybe I shouldn't refer to him as a "poster".
Thanks
Bruce
1. They want to be bending-over-backwards fair in giving them the benefit of the doubt and seeing if they'll be for real or not once they have the money.
2. They are afraid that they'll get sued.
3. They simply refuse to say anything negative about a Linux business.
Certainly you should get every outlet to research this issue and publish something about it. But don't stop when some of them refuse - in the end, it is up to the community to get this word out.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
No, I think get the word out is the right way to do it. I would prefer to see other people making their own investigations, and posting what they have found out firsthand, so that it's not just me. Actually, I was reluctant to say as much as I did today - I wrote that posting this evening for Technocrat.net, because I simply could in good conscience let the situation go on any longer without my saying something forceful about it. But I would feel more comfortable if someone who isn't doing his own IPO, and thus has less appearance of prejudice, would take the "point" on this issue.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
The web site for Power Source is http://www.poso.com/ .
What LinuxOne didn't mention is that Power Source runs out of a tiny storefront, and their "distributors in 130 countries", an exaggeration, run flea market tables. One of these distributors is usually seen at the Livermore Ham Radio Flea Market here in California, where he occupies one of the $10 tables.
While Power Source appears to be a legitimate business, it is extremely unlikely that they could have $500,000 cash to pay to LinuxOne. Rather, they probably made a deal to sell $500,000 worth of product, when and if they can, without pre-paying for much of it at all. But you would not have realized that from the LinuxOne press release.
There's a pattern here. LinuxOne persists in posing as a company with bright prospects in Linux, but look at what they have done: They are completely unknown in the Linux community, their officers are newcomers to Linux, and nobody known in the Linux community is on their technical staff (if they really have one). The founder of LinuxOne was previously behind NetUSA, which is trading around 60 cents a share, one tenth of its value a year ago. LinuxOne copied Red Hat's S-1 form (the form submitted when making a public stock offering) almost word-for-word, claiming that they have the prospects of Red Hat, a company that entered Linux 5 years before LinuxOne and employs hundreds of people, including some of the best programmers in the Linux world. LinuxOne's products so far appear to be mock-ups: their Linux CD is Red Hat's CD with the words Red Hat removed and LinuxOne filled in. Their "Linux on a disk" product is a Linux CD that someone installed on a hard disk, probably in a single day, and then they copied the disk. A claimed Linux system that runs on top of Windows called LinuxLite appears to be misrepresented in its functionality if it exists at all. LinuxOne staff have not written any significant Linux software to date that I can find, the only software they appear to have written is a program that displays a clock on the X window system.
And this is the company that has registered the stock symbol LINX and is going to take $23 Million from investors who don't know better, any day now. I think it's a really bad investment. But I'm prejudiced: I happen to have a Linux company too. Fortunately, you can hear the same message from other respectable people in the Linux world. For example, read this article in The Register by Rick Moen, a respected, long-time participant in the Linux community.
I've been a Unix operating system kernel programmer since 1981, and have worked on Linux since 1994. Another employee of my company has been working on Linux since 1993 when he started one of the best-respected Linux distributions. We're hiring other people with similar backgrounds. We have paid our dues and we have a proven performance record in the Linux world. There are a number of new companies similar to ours in the bacgrounds of their founders and their technical staff. These companies are not going public until they have real products, and when they do go public, they have some reasonable prospects for success. In contrast, I don't feel that LinuxOne has any prospects, I think they've been very sleazy in their press and promotion, and while it is remotely possible that anyone could build a real Linux software company with that $23M, it makes sense to invest in people with more skill and background than LinuxOne.
I can't save those investors from having their money go down the drain. Some people tell me that I shouldn't feel sorry for people who make poorly-researched investments, but I feel horrible about this. It's going to make Linux look bad and a lot of innocent people who don't have someone experienced in Linux to warn them are going to be hurt.
Somebody has to speak out. Please tell your friends. Tell everyone you know.
Bruce Perens
I do have a systems administration background since 1981. OK, it's all Unix and all for scientific facilities, but we ran 24/7 without UPS systems, using V6 unix and other things that didn't have fsck. Things are easier today.
Thanks
Bruce
Actually, my utility has said a lot about its readiness. I happened to visit Hoover Dam recently, and they made a point of showing how they could manage the system with switches and relays, and without a computer, when necessary. As things played out, we lost one transformer here when someone shot it out, putting about 6000 people in Oakland in the dark. That is the only failure known for Pacific Gas and Electric at this time.
I think there's an emotional factor in this for me, too. Pride, I guess. I wouldn't feel proud to shut down for Y2K. I left my systems going, unattended, while I went to a party. The FTP log says the server was in use continuously, across midnight, by programs performing unattended downloads of the U.S. Map database. The Zope server log says that access of my web sites kept on throughout the night. Nothing has gone wrong.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
OK, you've got a bigger problem than Y2K. Your IS manager picked the wrong software, because everybody uses it. That software is downtime prone, but your IS person can point a finger at Microsoft, say but we have to use it, everybody does, and provide excuses rather than running systems.
Believe it or not, people don't have to continue to buy unreliable software. OK, you might think I'm uncompromising, but if that's what is happening in your organization, you already had a reason to find a new IS person before Y2K came around.
Thanks
Bruce
That's a very fearful statement. If you've looked into the situation at all, you know that not only is your electric utility ready to meet the challenge, they have extra staff on duty tonight.
IS facilities are not in business to provide downtime. If they can't cope with the Y2K roll-over while hot, it's a sign of long-term mismanagement, because the problems should have been fixed years ago.
Again, if your site is down tonight, it's because your pants are down, buddy.
Bruce
Nobody should tolerate deliberate downtime. If you get too many hits, they should add something to your bill. If their server can't stand the hits, they need more bandwidth.
Thanks
Bruce
Imagine an internet provider with the feature that they will cause your site downtime when it hits an arbitrary transfer limit for reasons that are entirely out of your control. It's practicaly an advertisement to find another provider.
Bruce