Naw. As you say, non-GPL headers can be thrown together in a jiffy. Or is somebody going to make the claim that 'I have a program that edits text' (basically what a header file is- a description of what a piece of software does) is protected virally too? If so, whomever first said 'I have a program that edits text' owns the rights to every text editor that came after his 'header' described the task.
The difference between a volunteer and a
'commercial' development environment closely
parallels the kind of TV repair I used to do for
fun.
Back when I was in tech school I enjoyed
troubleshooting TV sets, so I'd pick them up for
$3-10 at the thrift store and fix quite a few of
them. Any set that was really messed up,
though, I'd just strip useful parts off of and
pitch in the dumpster.
A 'real' TV repairman has to fix each and every
set that lands on his bench (or at least make a
significant effort). Customers don't take kindly
to their set being stripped for parts and pitched
in the trash.
My dilettante attitude about TV repair closely
parallels 'volunteer' coding projects. The
'heavy lifting' isn't much fun, so all that yucky
stuff, i.e. human interface design, detailed
documentation (source code is NOT
documentation!), proper design (as opposed to
just slinging code) gets neglected. People only
do as much as they want to do, so ten more MP3
players appear on Freshmeat instead of the real
substantive projects which are lacking.
In the Win 1/2 era, Micrografx In-A-Vision was an
excellent vector-based drawing package for the
time. Fairly inexpensive, and decent. It's what
got me to install Windows on my 10 MHz XT (with a
hercules graphics card) back in the Windows 2
era.
In-A-Vision actually preceeded Win 1's release.
It was sold with a Windows 1.03 runtime version
(limited lightweight version of Windows that
would only load the app they were bundled with).
Early versions of Excel were distributed that way
as well.
You can also get the command line tools you want
on W2K by buying Interix, which gives you an
entire Posix subsystem that runs independent of
the Win32 subsystem (Cygwin is a kludge that runs
on top of Win32). Port all your Unix apps
yourself using the included GCC (sold by
Microsoft, no less!). Install the inetd and you
can rsh into your NT box remotely and pop up an
NT Xterm on your Unix screen. It's pretty
powerful, and 'only' $100.
I think you meant to say "Red Hat has a huge
stubbed out framework of control panel settings
that have existed since version 4.x and have
slowly become useful with each new release."
Don't even bring up 'Linuxconf' if you're going
to talk about RH Versions 4 or 5.
I bought a hard drive once that came preloaded
with Solaris. It was a second-hand eBay hard
drive, and when I plugged it into my Sparc 5 it
booted up into Solaris. Since I didn't have any
of the passwords, I ended up wiping it, of
course.
I disagree. I only know a very few people who
even have a full-power word processor on their
home computer. Most people use their PC to
browse the web, play games, burn CDs of music,
etc. I don't think Microsoft Word is as
important. At least not in the individual
'personal choice' market of individually owned
PCs. Company networks are another matter, but
even there it's more of a 'single platform to
administer' issue for IT. Companies will switch
over to Linux all-at-once if ever, not one
workstation at at time. This is only in part
because of the Word document format. Heck, most
of the important docs where I work are in
FrameMaker anyway.
I have a different tactic. I tend to hang around
the Red Hat and Mandrake boxes at the local Best
Buy. If I see somebody checking them out
closely, I always make sure they know about
Cheapbytes.com. They can buy a CheapBytes CD and
then get a good book on Linux, for about the same
price as that shrinkwrapped (and mostly empty)
box.
Many, many people have 'bought Perl' from O'Reilly. For people of the mindset that software is purchased, that Perl CD-ROM stuck in the back cover of their O'Reilly Perl book was bought and paid for.
Plus the fact that many of us buy books authored by the developers of software (I have LaTeX, TeX, and Perl books by the developers of those programs, for example) in part to pay back the developers.
Caldera has the aging and decrepit bones of AT&T's UNIX. In other words, Real UNIX. It passed through the hands of SCO on it's way, but it's really pathetic for you to slam it that way.
I don't know of anybody who still 'backs up' entire drive images of software. It's always better to install from distribution media than it is to drag out an image of a pock-marked filesystem that's probably still got the virus lurking in the shadows that caused the crash and forced a restore from backup in the first place.
Backups are for data, not entire software installations.
Paper tape, dude. Punched cards are too easy to drop on the floor. I had to load the interpreter (F.O.C.A.L.) onto a PDP-8 from Paper (actually Mylar) tape for my first college level programming course. And then type it in on an ASR-33. And en the end save my source back out onto paper tape using the teletype's punch. You kids have it easy these days.
Re:Astroturfers now define slashdot content
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
It originates in the concept that nobody, anywhere, ever, has actually liked Microsoft. The only people who would ever champion Microsoft in a public forum are people who are paid agents of Microsoft. These paid agents engage in a phony 'grass roots' movement in support of Microsoft. Fake grass- astroturf.
Linux sodrollers, on the other hand, are people who claim that because there are a few sod growers out there (Linux developers) and lots of trucks willing to deliver the sod (distribution builders), that there's some sort of 'grass roots' flavor to the way Linux is produced and distributed. There can be grass roots linux support and indeed there is, but it's not any more inherent than grass roots support for Microsoft's offerings.
The third party vendors made up for the deficiency of there not being a fan in the Mac Plus by selling them as add-on hardware. They're available at junk shops everywhere these days. The retrofit fan slides into the handle hole and pulls through air that was supposed to by 'natural convection' cool the Mac Plus. Obviously the fanless scheme of the Mac Plus was deficient, so there was a booming market for add-in fans of this sort. My point is they were quite expensive for what they represent in hardware, but Mac customers were/are using to paying a premium.
Your statistics are either skewed or they're five year old numbers. There are so few commercial sites running any significant amount of Mac hardware anymore that you're either citing figures from five years ago (before all the Mac hardware got pushed into the dumpsters) or you're reporting stats from a miniscule sample size.
Once you get above the nasty low end machines they take time to deburr the stampings.
So you put your clone hardware in the $79 case instead of the $39 case. Okay, that's $40 of a price difference. What accounts for the $800 difference on the invoice of your 'Higher Quality System'? The color badge on the brand name box? The Television Commercial? The full page magazine ads??
Naw. There are third party vendors who sell bolt-on siderails (complete with Macintax **) to make that tower G4 into a singularly ugly rackspace mount.
(**Macintax is that extra %30-60 that vendors know they can charge Mac users for any add-on accessories. I used to have a muffin fan in a cheap plastic shroud that sold for hundreds of dollars new because it was the cooling fan for a Mac Plus)
The irony for a long time was that MacOS was the only OS running on PPC that couldn't make use of the SMP hooks in the PowerPC processors.
My point also had to do with the lack of preemptive multitasking in MacOS. That's where the comparison to Windows 3.1 on a '286 (pre '386 enhanced mode') comes from. Though my understanding is that they bolted that on the side in later pre-10 versions of MacOS (similar to the way enhanced mode was bolted onto the side of Windows 3.1).
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily.
Non-GPL header files may have been contrived. I see no reason why that wouldn't be acceptable.
Judging from what the Free Software Song sounds like, some might choose the lawsuit if offered a choice.
Naw. As you say, non-GPL headers can be thrown together in a jiffy. Or is somebody going to make the claim that 'I have a program that edits text' (basically what a header file is- a description of what a piece of software does) is protected virally too? If so, whomever first said 'I have a program that edits text' owns the rights to every text editor that came after his 'header' described the task.
Most development on Linux uses a different
model.
Yes! It's so seldom that this point is
mentioned.
The difference between a volunteer and a
'commercial' development environment closely
parallels the kind of TV repair I used to do for
fun.
Back when I was in tech school I enjoyed
troubleshooting TV sets, so I'd pick them up for
$3-10 at the thrift store and fix quite a few of
them. Any set that was really messed up,
though, I'd just strip useful parts off of and
pitch in the dumpster.
A 'real' TV repairman has to fix each and every
set that lands on his bench (or at least make a
significant effort). Customers don't take kindly
to their set being stripped for parts and pitched
in the trash.
My dilettante attitude about TV repair closely
parallels 'volunteer' coding projects. The
'heavy lifting' isn't much fun, so all that yucky
stuff, i.e. human interface design, detailed
documentation (source code is NOT
documentation!), proper design (as opposed to
just slinging code) gets neglected. People only
do as much as they want to do, so ten more MP3
players appear on Freshmeat instead of the real
substantive projects which are lacking.
You're citing C.O.L.A. (or any Usenet
advocacy group, for that matter) as a credible
source? Gack!
Bad birdie! No cracker!
In the Win 1/2 era, Micrografx In-A-Vision was an
excellent vector-based drawing package for the
time. Fairly inexpensive, and decent. It's what
got me to install Windows on my 10 MHz XT (with a
hercules graphics card) back in the Windows 2
era.
In-A-Vision actually preceeded Win 1's release.
It was sold with a Windows 1.03 runtime version
(limited lightweight version of Windows that
would only load the app they were bundled with).
Early versions of Excel were distributed that way
as well.
You can also get the command line tools you want
on W2K by buying Interix, which gives you an
entire Posix subsystem that runs independent of
the Win32 subsystem (Cygwin is a kludge that runs
on top of Win32). Port all your Unix apps
yourself using the included GCC (sold by
Microsoft, no less!). Install the inetd and you
can rsh into your NT box remotely and pop up an
NT Xterm on your Unix screen. It's pretty
powerful, and 'only' $100.
I think you meant to say "Red Hat has a huge
stubbed out framework of control panel settings
that have existed since version 4.x and have
slowly become useful with each new release."
Don't even bring up 'Linuxconf' if you're going
to talk about RH Versions 4 or 5.
I bought a hard drive once that came preloaded
with Solaris. It was a second-hand eBay hard
drive, and when I plugged it into my Sparc 5 it
booted up into Solaris. Since I didn't have any
of the passwords, I ended up wiping it, of
course.
I disagree. I only know a very few people who
even have a full-power word processor on their
home computer. Most people use their PC to
browse the web, play games, burn CDs of music,
etc. I don't think Microsoft Word is as
important. At least not in the individual
'personal choice' market of individually owned
PCs. Company networks are another matter, but
even there it's more of a 'single platform to
administer' issue for IT. Companies will switch
over to Linux all-at-once if ever, not one
workstation at at time. This is only in part
because of the Word document format. Heck, most
of the important docs where I work are in
FrameMaker anyway.
Good for you.
I have a different tactic. I tend to hang around
the Red Hat and Mandrake boxes at the local Best
Buy. If I see somebody checking them out
closely, I always make sure they know about
Cheapbytes.com. They can buy a CheapBytes CD and
then get a good book on Linux, for about the same
price as that shrinkwrapped (and mostly empty)
box.
Not sure if I would call it 'divide and conquer'
or not. It seems more like 'isolate and
exterminate.'
Obviously there's no natural affinity to the GPL
on the of people who release code under the BSD
license or any other non-GNU license. If there
was they'd be using the GPL, wouldn't they??
So the GNU advocates are on their own. Oh
well...
Many, many people have 'bought Perl' from O'Reilly. For people of the mindset that software is purchased, that Perl CD-ROM stuck in the back cover of their O'Reilly Perl book was bought and paid for.
Plus the fact that many of us buy books authored by the developers of software (I have LaTeX, TeX, and Perl books by the developers of those programs, for example) in part to pay back the developers.
Caldera has the aging and decrepit bones of AT&T's UNIX. In other words, Real UNIX. It passed through the hands of SCO on it's way, but it's really pathetic for you to slam it that way.
I don't know of anybody who still 'backs up' entire drive images of software. It's always better to install from distribution media than it is to drag out an image of a pock-marked filesystem that's probably still got the virus lurking in the shadows that caused the crash and forced a restore from backup in the first place.
Backups are for data, not entire software installations.
Paper tape, dude. Punched cards are too easy to drop on the floor. I had to load the interpreter (F.O.C.A.L.) onto a PDP-8 from Paper (actually Mylar) tape for my first college level programming course. And then type it in on an ASR-33. And en the end save my source back out onto paper tape using the teletype's punch. You kids have it easy these days.
It originates in the concept that nobody, anywhere, ever, has actually liked Microsoft. The only people who would ever champion Microsoft in a public forum are people who are paid agents of Microsoft. These paid agents engage in a phony 'grass roots' movement in support of Microsoft. Fake grass- astroturf.
Linux sodrollers, on the other hand, are people who claim that because there are a few sod growers out there (Linux developers) and lots of trucks willing to deliver the sod (distribution builders), that there's some sort of 'grass roots' flavor to the way Linux is produced and distributed. There can be grass roots linux support and indeed there is, but it's not any more inherent than grass roots support for Microsoft's offerings.
The third party vendors made up for the deficiency of there not being a fan in the Mac Plus by selling them as add-on hardware. They're available at junk shops everywhere these days. The retrofit fan slides into the handle hole and pulls through air that was supposed to by 'natural convection' cool the Mac Plus. Obviously the fanless scheme of the Mac Plus was deficient, so there was a booming market for add-in fans of this sort. My point is they were quite expensive for what they represent in hardware, but Mac customers were/are using to paying a premium.
Amoeba which is now freely available for anybody to use.
Okay, we can just say he hasn't done anything for about fifteen years, then.
Your statistics are either skewed or they're five year old numbers. There are so few commercial sites running any significant amount of Mac hardware anymore that you're either citing figures from five years ago (before all the Mac hardware got pushed into the dumpsters) or you're reporting stats from a miniscule sample size.
Once you get above the nasty low end machines they take time to deburr the stampings.
So you put your clone hardware in the $79 case instead of the $39 case. Okay, that's $40 of a price difference. What accounts for the $800 difference on the invoice of your 'Higher Quality System'? The color badge on the brand name box? The Television Commercial? The full page magazine ads??
Amoeba ??
Naw. There are third party vendors who sell bolt-on siderails (complete with Macintax **) to make that tower G4 into a singularly ugly rackspace mount.
(**Macintax is that extra %30-60 that vendors know they can charge Mac users for any add-on accessories. I used to have a muffin fan in a cheap plastic shroud that sold for hundreds of dollars new because it was the cooling fan for a Mac Plus)
The irony for a long time was that MacOS was the only OS running on PPC that couldn't make use of the SMP hooks in the PowerPC processors.
My point also had to do with the lack of preemptive multitasking in MacOS. That's where the comparison to Windows 3.1 on a '286 (pre '386 enhanced mode') comes from. Though my understanding is that they bolted that on the side in later pre-10 versions of MacOS (similar to the way enhanced mode was bolted onto the side of Windows 3.1).