I'm not trying to dis Red Hat. They are a symbiote. They take value from the community, the software we have written, and make money with it. They return that value by paying for people to write more free software. Give and take. Quid-pro-quo. Symbiosis
The safest possible place to be around New Years 2000 will be on a passenger airliner, in the air. That's because the plane is not going to fall out of the sky, and airline security will keep nuts with guns off of your plane. The greatest danger of Y2K is derranged millenial nuts with too much fire-power, not any computer failure.
I just could not let this one go by until tomorrow. If you look into Debian, you'll find that I wrote a whole lot there, and did not simply manage packages. A lot of that work also found its way into Red Hat. I also did a lot of architecture work for Debian.
Other software I've written can be found here. And I'm currently writing software - I've made a lot of contributions to the Squishdot forum software in the past week.
There's an Open Source / Open Science conference happening in October at Brookhaven National Laboratories, Long Island, New York. I'll be speaking. I expect this to be a discussion topic.
It's spending 90% of its time in Python. This is no surprise for a Pentium 120, it's time to make a trip to Fry's for a better CPU/motherboard, I guess. The 768K bit-per-second line is not being saturated.
Given that it's database-driven, Zope is very scalable: just synchronize database writes and you can make any number of servers run the same site.
Don't give up so quickly. The software is clearly going to benefit the public, and charitable donations earmarked for a particular project are very common. It's clearly within the domain of a 501(c)3, and in fact this is one of the things that SPI was supposed to do when we founded it.
I guess then that IBM is buying Buslogic, or what is left of Buslogic after Mylex moved them.
They used to be in the S.F. Bay area, and they had such great Linux support becuase they worked with Leonard Zuberoff (I might have spelled that wrong) who wrote the Linux drivers. Back when no other hardware manufacturer wanted to hear about Linux, Buslogic hardware people helped Leonard find problems in their hardware and our drivers, doing such things as connecting up SCSI analyzers and monitoring the bus while he debugged a driver in the presence of the hardware engineer who designed it. Leonard was then running "Dandelion Digital", a company that published Filksong CDs (science-fiction fan music), he now works for VA Research. I don't know if any of the Buslogic folks who helped us out in the early days are still there.
I think they are all starting out on the wrong foot. Non-profit organizations like FSF and SPI are better suited for the job of brokering free-software work, from a financial standpoint and a public responsibility standpoint as well.
The commercial Open Source clearing houses claim to be "more professional", but that's a red herring. A non-profit can contract the same consultants and reviewers that the commercial companies would. I'm also concerned that some of the commercial clearing houses have a vested interest in steering grants away from the non-profits who have done so much great work for us.
For an individual donor in the U.S, a non-profit organization with "501(c)3" tax status is up to 33% more effective per dollar spent. When I give FSF or SPI a grant, I can write the amount of of my income on my federal taxes. I get up to 1/3 back, and I can use that to fund more Open Source projects.
Then there's the responsibility issue: we know that FSF and SPI will run their projects for the benefit of the community. We can't say the same about the for-profits, they'll try to do the right thing when they can afford it and they'll put some free software pundits on their boards to appease us. I'm also concerned about some of the companies involved. For example, SourceXChange is an O'Reilly and Associates project, and O'Reilly's not, in my opinion, a good citizen of the Open Source community. For example, there's that situation with Perl: the software's Open Source, but the official reference manual is proprietary to O'Reilly. How open is it really if the documentation is closed? Do we want that to be the case with more software? Other publishers seem much more willing or able to get documentation with Open Source licenses produced while still paying their authors.
So, I think that this is a situation that merits careful watching. I personally am not going to register as a developer with any of these organizations until I know a lot more about them, and my donations will go to non-profit grants rather than commercially-mediated sponsorships. I'm also sponsoring net domains and offering hosting services to some free software projects to help them keep going without a budget.
Hannu made two versions, OSS/Free which was GPL-ed, and commercial OSS. He refused to put certain features in the free version as that would have destroyed the market for his paid version which had those features. Eventually, people got sick of someone holding back Linux' development for the sake of his commercial product, and ALSA was created, with Hannu bypassed as the kernel sound developer. Sorry, Hannu, but in my opinion you had a conflict of interest.
The GPL on the alsa.h file is not a problem for applications or kernel sound driver modules. Linus specifically makes an exception to the GPL for drivers that are loaded as modules (which must call into the GPL-ed kernel APIs) and in the same document where he makes that exception, he states that applicaitons that run on top of the Linux kernel are not derived works of the Linux kernel and need not be GPL-ed.
I don't know about this posting. It combines some publicly-known details with some stuff that I find difficult to believe. Even if it does come from someone at Pixar, it may be someone who wishes to mislead us.
If I had my 'druthers, I'd include the Open Source Definition, it's predecessor the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the month-long discussion on debian-private that led to the DFSG. Rather than being directly related to the Internet, though, I'd call them products of the Internet - they never would have happened without it.
But then, I'm prejudiced where the OSD is concerned:-)
Major publishers like IDG and Macmillan are bringing out books under Open Source licenses. If you are an author who would like to write one, I can put you in touch with their editors.
It would be really fun, and good from the standpoint of the people running the transmitters, but really bad for the listeners. There just aren't, and can't ever be, enough broadcast frequencies for this scheme to be pulled off without a lot of stations interfering with each other. Use the internet! I am watching a 300K bit-per-second stream from NASA Mission Control at the moment, courtesy of broadcast.com . It looks great, with high resolution and 12+ frames per second when there is enough action in the picture - it seems to fall back on a much slower rate when there is less movement.
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
I don't work there any longer, an I sold off all of my Pixar stock, so I can say what I want now. I am not a Pixar spokesperson. With that said:
No way.
Pixar is not a special-effects house. Their specialty is telling good stories with 3-D computer-graphic character animation, but telling good stories comes first. They actually spend more time on the script than they do on production. Toy Story and A Bug's Life spent 3 or 4 years in writing. Not until we could like the movie when shown as 100 minutes of shots of black and white pencil-drawn storyboards, with dialogue read by people around the office, would we go into production.
The problem with Tron is that the story isn't good enough - most people just are not interested in that story and the movie can not be saved by better special effects, not that any move can be saved this way. Nerdy folks like you and me might like it, but not a general audience. So, you might see a lesser studio give it a try, like the folks who did Small Soldiers.
Pixar writes its movies in house. They aren't interested in recycling old garbage. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but they could not be as successful as they are if they operated differently.
Again, I'm not a Pixar spokesperson, just someone who worked there for 12 years.
The article does not say that Open Source has more security problems.
The article says that because Back Orifice is open source, there will be more variants of Back Ofifice, and that this will be more of a problem for virus detection vendors.
However, the security problem exploited by Back Orifice is Microsoft's fault. The release of Back Orifice is an attempt to force Microsoft to deal with its security problems.
Folks, if you are running software that has wide-open security problems, like Back Office, and the vendor won't help you except to give you sorry band-aids like virus detection software, it's time for you to lean on that vendor. There is no reason for Microsoft to continue to leave the barn door open - they are every bit as guilty as the computer criminals who exploit that, and in a just world MS executives would be charged, tried, and jailed for the computer crime they have facilitated.
This is entirely off-topic, but what better way to broadcast a message than via slashdot?
Yes, I know that opensource.org is down. No, I don't know why buoy.com stopped serving their DNS. Yes, I know I'm still the admin contact. Yes, if the OSI guys email me, I'll do whatever is necessary to help them.
Some people got offers to purchase stock at the IPO price. Many stocks go up at IPO. You have the chance here to sell the stock as soon as it starts trading, potentially for a higher price. You also have the chance to lose your shirt if the stock tanks. It is, however, a nicer deal than going through the market to buy, because it may be that only people who get in before the IPO have the chance to purchase the stock at the offering price.
This is not different from the sort of offer many corporations give their board of directors, except the directors have a chance to purchase larger amounts.
This is not costing Red Hat much to do - they are selling you the stock at the same price they'd be selling it to the institutions who generally get in to IPOs. However, they are taking a public-relations risk, and that takes guts.
The only problem here is that you need money to get in the game. Some of the people who were chosen won't be able to play because of that.
Red Hat employees and a few special people are most likely being given "options", which means they can purchase the stock at a fixed price (which can range from pennies per share to the initial offering price) for a number of years. I've been there with Pixar. Options are a much better deal because you don't have to buy until you know you'll make a profit, but it costs RH much more to offer options because the artificially low price of the options dilutes the market value of their stock.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Valerie wants me to take her out, so I'll be off slashdot for a few hours, but can answer questions later.
I'm not a lawyer. Really!
I'm not trying to dis Red Hat. They are a symbiote. They take value from the community, the software we have written, and make money with it. They return that value by paying for people to write more free software. Give and take. Quid-pro-quo. Symbiosis
Oops, I think the law professor is from somewhere other than MIT. If I'm not mistaken, MIT doesn't have a law school.
Robin the Limo Driver, Fix the spelling of my name please!
Thanks
Bruce
It's still up :-)
Other software I've written can be found here. And I'm currently writing software - I've made a lot of contributions to the Squishdot forum software in the past week.
So, don't write me off as a writer, please.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Given that it's database-driven, Zope is very scalable: just synchronize database writes and you can make any number of servers run the same site.
Thanks
Bruce
Don't give up so quickly. The software is clearly going to benefit the public, and charitable donations earmarked for a particular project are very common. It's clearly within the domain of a 501(c)3, and in fact this is one of the things that SPI was supposed to do when we founded it.
They used to be in the S.F. Bay area, and they had such great Linux support becuase they worked with Leonard Zuberoff (I might have spelled that wrong) who wrote the Linux drivers. Back when no other hardware manufacturer wanted to hear about Linux, Buslogic hardware people helped Leonard find problems in their hardware and our drivers, doing such things as connecting up SCSI analyzers and monitoring the bus while he debugged a driver in the presence of the hardware engineer who designed it. Leonard was then running "Dandelion Digital", a company that published Filksong CDs (science-fiction fan music), he now works for VA Research. I don't know if any of the Buslogic folks who helped us out in the early days are still there.
Thanks
Bruce
Well, obviously we need to convince one of the non-profits to do this. I know just who to talk with...
The commercial Open Source clearing houses claim to be "more professional", but that's a red herring. A non-profit can contract the same consultants and reviewers that the commercial companies would. I'm also concerned that some of the commercial clearing houses have a vested interest in steering grants away from the non-profits who have done so much great work for us.
For an individual donor in the U.S, a non-profit organization with "501(c)3" tax status is up to 33% more effective per dollar spent. When I give FSF or SPI a grant, I can write the amount of of my income on my federal taxes. I get up to 1/3 back, and I can use that to fund more Open Source projects.
Then there's the responsibility issue: we know that FSF and SPI will run their projects for the benefit of the community. We can't say the same about the for-profits, they'll try to do the right thing when they can afford it and they'll put some free software pundits on their boards to appease us. I'm also concerned about some of the companies involved. For example, SourceXChange is an O'Reilly and Associates project, and O'Reilly's not, in my opinion, a good citizen of the Open Source community. For example, there's that situation with Perl: the software's Open Source, but the official reference manual is proprietary to O'Reilly. How open is it really if the documentation is closed? Do we want that to be the case with more software? Other publishers seem much more willing or able to get documentation with Open Source licenses produced while still paying their authors.
So, I think that this is a situation that merits careful watching. I personally am not going to register as a developer with any of these organizations until I know a lot more about them, and my donations will go to non-profit grants rather than commercially-mediated sponsorships. I'm also sponsoring net domains and offering hosting services to some free software projects to help them keep going without a budget.
The GPL on the alsa.h file is not a problem for applications or kernel sound driver modules. Linus specifically makes an exception to the GPL for drivers that are loaded as modules (which must call into the GPL-ed kernel APIs) and in the same document where he makes that exception, he states that applicaitons that run on top of the Linux kernel are not derived works of the Linux kernel and need not be GPL-ed.
Thanks
Bruce
Does anyone remember Ralph Bashke? Motion capture isn't "toony" enough.
Bruce
But then, I'm prejudiced where the OSD is concerned :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
Thanks
Bruce
No way.
Pixar is not a special-effects house. Their specialty is telling good stories with 3-D computer-graphic character animation, but telling good stories comes first. They actually spend more time on the script than they do on production. Toy Story and A Bug's Life spent 3 or 4 years in writing. Not until we could like the movie when shown as 100 minutes of shots of black and white pencil-drawn storyboards, with dialogue read by people around the office, would we go into production.
The problem with Tron is that the story isn't good enough - most people just are not interested in that story and the movie can not be saved by better special effects, not that any move can be saved this way. Nerdy folks like you and me might like it, but not a general audience. So, you might see a lesser studio give it a try, like the folks who did Small Soldiers.
Pixar writes its movies in house. They aren't interested in recycling old garbage. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but they could not be as successful as they are if they operated differently.
Again, I'm not a Pixar spokesperson, just someone who worked there for 12 years.
Thanks
Bruce
The article says that because Back Orifice is open source, there will be more variants of Back Ofifice, and that this will be more of a problem for virus detection vendors.
However, the security problem exploited by Back Orifice is Microsoft's fault. The release of Back Orifice is an attempt to force Microsoft to deal with its security problems.
Folks, if you are running software that has wide-open security problems, like Back Office, and the vendor won't help you except to give you sorry band-aids like virus detection software, it's time for you to lean on that vendor. There is no reason for Microsoft to continue to leave the barn door open - they are every bit as guilty as the computer criminals who exploit that, and in a just world MS executives would be charged, tried, and jailed for the computer crime they have facilitated.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Yes, I know that opensource.org is down. No, I don't know why buoy.com stopped serving their DNS. Yes, I know I'm still the admin contact. Yes, if the OSI guys email me, I'll do whatever is necessary to help them.
We return you to slashdot, already in progress
Thanks
Bruce
This is not different from the sort of offer many corporations give their board of directors, except the directors have a chance to purchase larger amounts.
This is not costing Red Hat much to do - they are selling you the stock at the same price they'd be selling it to the institutions who generally get in to IPOs. However, they are taking a public-relations risk, and that takes guts.
The only problem here is that you need money to get in the game. Some of the people who were chosen won't be able to play because of that.
Red Hat employees and a few special people are most likely being given "options", which means they can purchase the stock at a fixed price (which can range from pennies per share to the initial offering price) for a number of years. I've been there with Pixar. Options are a much better deal because you don't have to buy until you know you'll make a profit, but it costs RH much more to offer options because the artificially low price of the options dilutes the market value of their stock.
Thanks
Bruce Perens