You're totally right. I'll be interested to see what happens if and when that comes to pass.
So far, we have Interbase, which is currently in that odd limbo state, so common to formerly-commercial opened releases, of being called Open Source, but still no code being out. Will this actually arrive under an open license, and become the core for a free-for-all of open improvements, eventually eclipsing even Oracle, the second-largest software manufacturer in the world, in features, performance and stability?
We'll see. For now, we have the label "Open Source" on the website, a binary-only release, and a promise of code sometime in the next three months.
Until such a thing comes to pass, it's still just in "let's suppose"-land. It's still up to the garage hackers, so I stand by my comments. --
Aye, verily. My comment was getting really really long as it was, so I didn't even delve into the 'sexy factor' that comes into play in the itch. But yes, exactly so. People have to get paid to do boring things, they kind of definitionally don't do them for fun. That's why all these open-source projects focus on flash like themability before they actually get around to finishing their functionality -- you don't get a kewl screenshot of a database to put up on your project's site... --
Operating System design has been a solved problem for about a quarter of a century. 18-year-old kids write OSes as freshmen projects now. There's an astounding amount of freely-available material out there, including the source to several OSes, to get you started on doing such a thing, and there has been for a long time.
The graphical desktop environments you point out are still in the infancy stage, after 3-4 years of development. Although they're very cool, (as is Linux), both are basically aping existing art, and not very well in some cases. (Go on, moderate me down as flamebait and argue with me; this is not my primary point.)
RDBMS design is relatively new in the long view of the art of Computer Science. The commercial vendors that pay thousands of people fulltime to develop them still don't have it down correctly. It's certainly not progressed to the point where it's textbook knowledge, where any fresh-faced CS grad can get in there and build one.
I think the most telling evidence that this is beyond the current state of the art of Open Source, though, is the fact that it doesn't exist yet. It's not like this Ask Slashdot is the first time anyone's ever thought about free alternatives to the big boys of databases. It's a known need.
And the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" theory of Open Source as 'developers scratching their own itch' would seem to mean that if it COULD be done, it WOULD be done. Intrepid hackers would have taken Postgres or the GPL'ed old MySQL or the like and had a project underway years ago if it were just that easy. Apparently, it's not.
Open Source projects do not _innately_ scale well, merely from the fact of them being open. There are a lot of preconditions for a project to work. At least these three need to exist:
1) A critical mass of developers see the need. 2) That mass of developers (or a subset thereof) can be organized into a team to do the work. 3) That mass of developers has the knowledge and skills to do the required work.
As an example, there's a large set of people that would like an open-source engine to crack DES keys in real-time on commodity hardware. That takes care of 1. Getting a set of crypto hackers together to do this work would be a snap, cf OpenSSL et al. There's 2. But, the art isn't there. The general public, the mass of developers out there, simply don't have the knowledge or experience to do that. Maybe it can be done, maybe it can't, that's not the point. The point is that just saying "I'm starting an Open Source project to do [something really cool]" doesn't mean it's something you actually CAN do.
So, back to the topic at hand, yes, RDBMS is something that's outside of the Open Source world at this point. The skills required to do such a thing are reporting for work at Redwood Shores and Emeryville and the like, and not willing or able to share their really-quite-esoteric knowledge with the free software universe.
And pointing to a handful of other projects that are working doesn't prove that this project, or any other, will. Look around; the code's not coming, mostly because, no, there aren't many people out there who are up to the challenge. Or else they'd be doing it.
In a comment posted to part I of this series, I talked about an article I wrote for Electronic Musician about the state of music hardware and software for Linux as of about this time last year.
Since then, I've cleaned up the ASCII version of the article, and placed it online myself, since EM's parent company can't seem to run a website to save their lives.
Please check it out, but maybe wait a bit -- it's only a DSL line, and I'd prefer people not mirror it, since _I'm_ even publishing it without explicit permission.
I asked several of the digi tech guys about this at the 1999 Winter NAMM (yah, almost 15 months ago, now), and mostly they just looked at me funny. The one guy who'd ever HEARD of Linux said something best paraphrased as "we're still getting our WINDOWS support stabilized, man, why would we want to take on another platform?"
I pestered them for hardware info on their AMIII cards, just to get a foot in the door, but never got anywhere productive.
digi's a very strange company, VERY proprietary about their hardware and software, and, like most of the MI industry, VERY myopic about their computing platforms. --
Here we go again. Based on past stories, here's my breakdown of how the commentary will go:
30% -- Comment threads defending religion's place in society, ranging from clever, well-spoken, impassioned defenses of spirituality and religion as necessary to a well-balanced life, on down through "GOD LOVS ME AND SIENTIST SINERS WILL GO TO HELL!" Interesting subflavors include "Some of the most reknowned scientists in history were religious," and "Scientific method isn't the only way to gain knowledge."
35% -- Comment threads alleging that any belief system based in faith is worthless because there's no empirical repeatability, ranging from graduate-level epistomological essays down through "SIENCE MAKES SENSE RILIGION DOSNT." Interesting subflavors include the issue that science is typically learned from elders with no empirical repeatability on the part of the learner and is therefore also based in faith, and oh-yeah?-yeah exchanges about the provability of (math|god|intelligence|grits)
15% -- Pot-calling-kettle-black posts, where someone makes an allegation about science or religion that's also true of the other. Typically starts with history of deaths, progresses through history of art, stalls out somewhere about the time the invention of Tang is being compared to televangelists.
10% -- Topical trolls. "Jesus was an idiot and so are you." "Scientists are all atheists." "Freeman Dyson naked and petrified."
3% -- Meta-posts. Commentary on the nature of the story. Ponderings about the makeup of Slashdot's readership. This post.
1% -- Posts that crept in from other threads. Slashdot bug? Posters losing track of multiple browser windows? It's a mystery. In any case, posts about Paying Bills Online, Chili!Soft, and whatever story gets posted next.
1% -- People karma whoring by posting mirror links, pasted text from the wire story, and other bloat that inexplicably keeps getting moderated up as 'informative.' See my.sig....
Predictions for final count of comments: 500-600.
Predictions for final count of comments that have anything new or interesting to say (and no, this one doesn't make that count): 5.
In any case, this whole story should be moderated (-1, Known-Controversial Ad-Banner-Revenue-Generation Flamebait).
>I admit ASP for Linux would be cool, but only if it were FREE! I mean, that's one of the big >considerations when thinking seriously about a Linux solution in a business.
Not in a business of any size. "Slightly Cheaper" might enter into it, but actual large-scale sites that might be making these decisions will be buying support contracts and heavy-hitting hardware and cooling systems and racks and on and on. The OS cost is just gravy around the edges.
>I went to the Chili!Soft home page and was dismayed to find a hefty $1000 pricetag on the >technology (you can get it for half off right now, for Linux -- still pricey).
$1000 is not hefty for server software. Consider a large site with a farm of front-end servers, application servers, database servers, image servers -- a Yahoo or an eBay, say -- and start doing the math. You're likely going to pay more than that $1000 per box per month just to colocate it somewhere with adequate bandwidth.
>Well, a license for NT Server is about that price these days, and you get IIS at no cost with that >license. That includes the bona-fide ASP capabilities.
Chili!Soft licensed the actual ASP engine from Microsoft. It's just as bona-fide.
>I mean, look what you can get for Linux instead of ASP:
All of those things are cool technologies, and some are in use at some pretty heavy-hitting sites. But ASP is also a very cool technology, and allows for VERY rapid development of dynamic content.
Also, unless you're going to be a Linux shop from end to end, most of your developers are likely to work on Windows boxes. (Not you, not me, but remember, we're talking about eBay-sized sites, here.) One benefit to using ASP is that you can have each developer working on a local instance of IIS on their Windows box, doing site development without impacting anyone else, then pushing final copies of the site, as-is, to a Chili!Soft-enabled farm of Linux or Solaris boxes to avoid uptime and stability issues.
>These don't cost a dime
Just to repeat the point I'm trying to make, Chili!Soft's target market is not www.mypersonalsite.com -- if $1000 makes you flinch, you're not playing in the league these folks are talking to.
>and give you all the functionality of ASP.
I _might_ give you PHP4 on that one. Otherwise, no. Read up on ASP -- it's very very cool.
>Chili!Soft's main claim is that, with their ASP, you can use MS dev tools to develop web sites on >multiple platforms. I say pbthbthbthhthbthb to that. Is that worth a grand?
Yes. See above scenario. MS' Dev tools are nice, nice enough to merit using them to build a site. When you're talking Internet Time, poking at CGI scripts with vi is just not going to cut it -- time-to-market is everything, and ASP allows for quick, solid development. Having it available on Unix/Linux flavors, with the actual licensed-from-MS engine, is a Very Cool Thing indeed.
Unless I misunderstand RMS' position completely, he'd allege that the license should have been GPL all along, AND that the author should have been compensated for it -- a completely defensible position.
I think he'd side with me on the idea that licensing terms being held hostage to promise of compensation is not OK.
Well, by that definition, ALL planets are 'vagabond' planets. The very word 'planet' comes from the Greek word for 'wanderer.' I think the issue is that it's either incorrect (these planets orbit a stable 'home' like any other planets) or redundant (all planets wander).
Ah, now _I've_ been misunderstood. I don't think anyone should be compelled to license their code any particular way. Lawton had a source-available commercial thing going for a long time, and I didn't begrudge him that in the least.
The part that rubbed me the wrong way was when he put "I'll change the license for this if you give me a job" on the Bochs site. Not that he's not entitled to do that, but it seems counter to the concept of the Open Source universe to use the promise of a license as a bargaining chip for the author's benefit. It kind of misses the point of the sharing thing Open Source is all about, and just feels wrong to me.
(*shrug) I'm very happy for him, and I'm glad Bochs is LGPL'ed; I'm totally glad his work has paid off for him, in aplomb and in dollars. I just can't help feeling the whole thing is a little bit... underhanded or something.
Hmmn, I can't find the right words, but I did want to pipe up and say that I'm _not_ an Open Source Marxist, and I totally agree with your attitude about paying the rent. I just think that there's a right way to Open-Source-license things, if you're going to go that route, and I don't think this was necessarily done in that Right Way. That's all.
Ah, you're right, I missed the thrust of your comment; I thought you were saying that since Lawton was both Bochs' author and part of the plex86 team, the LGPL relicensing is not relevant to the 'interpollenation' of the two that the article implies is going to speed up.
But, yeah, the fact that he didn't open it up previously, choosing instead to dangle GPL/LGPL on his site as a carrot'n'stick device to get a job, well, that's all about the money, now, innit?
It's significant because the Bochs project itself is still valid separate from plex86 -- Bochs allows x86 emulation on non-x86 platforms, while plex86 uses native x86 instructions wherever possible for the best performance.
Bochs is very very cool, and having it Freely available is a Very Good Thing, Indeed.
I'd have to check with EM as to whether that's OK. Not sure either way. It's also over 3000 words long, so it would be roughly three times the usual length of a 'long'/. feature. I might update it and post a link, tho, if EM says it's OK.
I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 dead-tree issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on EM's very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's aimed at musicians looking at Linux, not at Linux geeks looking to music, so the focus might seem a bit strange to some of the Slashdot crowd, but I'm really rather proud of it.
Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives. Or maybe I'll post the draft version if Intertec's too clueless to post the final one.
>Codifex Maximus ~ It may hurt my pride to be wrong once in a while, but I'd rather be flamed >with better information than to be left blissfully ignorant.
Well, since you insist:
The actual interjection is "hear, hear," not "here, here." As in "Hear what the person I'm agreeing with has to say."
I've ALWAYS thought this idea would sell well, worldwide. Actual high-quality news content, delivered by sexy supermodels, interspliced with varying degrees/types of steamy/porn content to keep the viewers' attention. Porn News Network -- I can see the station break now:
"PNN -- with more hot girl-on-girl action than any other major news network...."
I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on their very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's not completely about MIDI support on Linux, since it also touches on hardware and audio support, but sort of topical to this question. Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives.
In addition to the discovery of channels on Mars, previously called 'canals,' the following headlines began to appear....
-- Scientists detect existance of 'eathre,' previously called 'aether;' now known to be the medium in which the Planck-sized subspace foam floats.
-- Observatory locates giant space dragon living in the Moon's trojan points that sporadically emerges to swallow the moon in an event called an 'eklypps.'
-- Biologists observe quantum-tunneling effect of organic particles that allows manure to generate flies spontaneously.
...and, of course:
-- Giant flaming objects expected to fall from sky soon because of the wrath of the great god Iridium.
--
What about the customers?
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 2
Hmmn. A friend of mine _JUST_ bought an Iridium pager and service so that she could stay in touch for her 6+ month trip to the Near and Middle East. Now, less than a month after this purchase, the service is completely going away.
Will she have some kind of recourse?
Will she still have this recourse available several months from now, when she actually gets back to someplace with enough connectivity to file a claim?
If it uses RSA, inside the US, it doesn't matter where it was developed, the user needs a license from RSA (or to use RSAREF, see below).
If it doesn't use RSA, it doesn't matter where it was developed, the user doesn't need a license from RSA.
The whole 'outside the US' thing was the traditional response to export controls, not to the use of RSA. US-residing RSA users legally need to use either a licensed version of the RSA algorithm, or use the old RSAREF library that was released to the public (and is horribly slow and buggy).
>On the other hand: porn, violence, crackers, warez etc shouldn't be. Nobody argues about that too.
Au contraire. The question 'what is porn' is argued over constantly, leading to the vague-but-appropriate concept of community standards in obscenity trials and the like. What you call porn, I call erotic art, and Europeans call commercials.
Same with violence. Just filtering on violence gives you a world where Teletubbies are OK, and _Saving_Private_Ryan_ is banned. Who decides?
>Categories without a moral value judgement, just cleanly categorize it.
Except that categorizing _IS_ value judgment. Again with _Ryan_, it would be 'objectively' categorized into "Violence, graphic dismemberment," and correctly so. The fact that it is, in fact, a powerful work of art cannot be reflected except by offering up a relative value judgement of some kind.
>universally bad things (blatant violence, _commercial_ porno, the Ku Klux Klan
Right there. A value judgement. In the US, even the Klan has a right to express and believe whatever they want, so long as they're not actually committing crimes. Period. Calling it 'universally bad' and therefore OBVIOUSLY needing to be censored is exactly what you allege to be against: selling your ideas of propriety onto others.
Ratings systems, censorware, whatever, the very ACT of dividing things into acceptable and unacceptable is a set of value judgements. And it's simply impossible to make a set of value judgments that works for everyone, and irresponsible to try.
>Which isn't TOTALLY your fault, you shouldn't have to buy a Windows version in the first place.
I know this may come as a shock, but there are people who read Slashdot who don't run Linux. Or who run Linux, but are willing to boot to Windows to run apps (or games) that aren't supported on Linux.
>If a company doesn't want to support my OS, why should I have to change to run their products?
What a strange question; it contains its own answer: "Why should you have to change? To run their products."
Choosing your programs based on your OS is somewhat cart-before-the horse. Do you have a computer to run an operating system? Or to do work (play)? I, myself, am much more interested in what I'm doing than in what OS is living underneath it. If you want Diablo II, barring some new announcement by Loki anytime soon, you will need to be able to run Windows. It's that simple.
Which isn't to say I wouldn't appreciate a Linux port of Diablo II; rebooting is annoying to be sure. But it's currently a fact of life, and sitting back and pouting about it won't make Diablo II magically appear for Linux. And I, for one, want to play the game and enjoy myself instead of being sullen about OS politics. Life's too short.
>So Blizzard, keep you pretty-ed up Windows version, we don't want it. We want a game that >will run on our computers and on our OS. If you won't support us, we won't support you.
Please don't speak for me. Please don't speak for 'the community.' We don't all feel the way you do.
Bochs is a very cool project, in that it's like a DOSemu or VMware in concept, but it allows non-x86 machines to run x86 OSes. If it could be sped up aggressively (ASM speedups on certain platforms, maybe somehow using native x86 stuff on x86 platforms), it would be an EXTREMELY valuable tool.
Although that latter bit of x86 x86 mapping is more the domain of a VMware / FreeMWare....
Slashdot Mirror
You're totally right. I'll be interested to see what happens if and when that comes to pass.
So far, we have Interbase, which is currently in that odd limbo state, so common to formerly-commercial opened releases, of being called Open Source, but still no code being out. Will this actually arrive under an open license, and become the core for a free-for-all of open improvements, eventually eclipsing even Oracle, the second-largest software manufacturer in the world, in features, performance and stability?
We'll see. For now, we have the label "Open Source" on the website, a binary-only release, and a promise of code sometime in the next three months.
Until such a thing comes to pass, it's still just in "let's suppose"-land. It's still up to the garage hackers, so I stand by my comments.
--
Aye, verily. My comment was getting really really long as it was, so I didn't even delve into the 'sexy factor' that comes into play in the itch. But yes, exactly so. People have to get paid to do boring things, they kind of definitionally don't do them for fun. That's why all these open-source projects focus on flash like themability before they actually get around to finishing their functionality -- you don't get a kewl screenshot of a database to put up on your project's site...
--
Operating System design has been a solved problem for about a quarter of a century. 18-year-old kids write OSes as freshmen projects now. There's an astounding amount of freely-available material out there, including the source to several OSes, to get you started on doing such a thing, and there has been for a long time.
The graphical desktop environments you point out are still in the infancy stage, after 3-4 years of development. Although they're very cool, (as is Linux), both are basically aping existing art, and not very well in some cases. (Go on, moderate me down as flamebait and argue with me; this is not my primary point.)
RDBMS design is relatively new in the long view of the art of Computer Science. The commercial vendors that pay thousands of people fulltime to develop them still don't have it down correctly. It's certainly not progressed to the point where it's textbook knowledge, where any fresh-faced CS grad can get in there and build one.
I think the most telling evidence that this is beyond the current state of the art of Open Source, though, is the fact that it doesn't exist yet. It's not like this Ask Slashdot is the first time anyone's ever thought about free alternatives to the big boys of databases. It's a known need.
And the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" theory of Open Source as 'developers scratching their own itch' would seem to mean that if it COULD be done, it WOULD be done. Intrepid hackers would have taken Postgres or the GPL'ed old MySQL or the like and had a project underway years ago if it were just that easy. Apparently, it's not.
Open Source projects do not _innately_ scale well, merely from the fact of them being open. There are a lot of preconditions for a project to work. At least these three need to exist:
1) A critical mass of developers see the need.
2) That mass of developers (or a subset thereof) can be organized into a team to do the work.
3) That mass of developers has the knowledge and skills to do the required work.
As an example, there's a large set of people that would like an open-source engine to crack DES keys in real-time on commodity hardware. That takes care of 1. Getting a set of crypto hackers together to do this work would be a snap, cf OpenSSL et al. There's 2. But, the art isn't there. The general public, the mass of developers out there, simply don't have the knowledge or experience to do that. Maybe it can be done, maybe it can't, that's not the point. The point is that just saying "I'm starting an Open Source project to do [something really cool]" doesn't mean it's something you actually CAN do.
So, back to the topic at hand, yes, RDBMS is something that's outside of the Open Source world at this point. The skills required to do such a thing are reporting for work at Redwood Shores and Emeryville and the like, and not willing or able to share their really-quite-esoteric knowledge with the free software universe.
And pointing to a handful of other projects that are working doesn't prove that this project, or any other, will. Look around; the code's not coming, mostly because, no, there aren't many people out there who are up to the challenge. Or else they'd be doing it.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
--
In a comment posted to part I of this series, I talked about an article I wrote for Electronic Musician about the state of music hardware and software for Linux as of about this time last year.
Since then, I've cleaned up the ASCII version of the article, and placed it online myself, since EM's parent company can't seem to run a website to save their lives.
Please check it out, but maybe wait a bit -- it's only a DSL line, and I'd prefer people not mirror it, since _I'm_ even publishing it without explicit permission.
--
I asked several of the digi tech guys about this at the 1999 Winter NAMM (yah, almost 15 months ago, now), and mostly they just looked at me funny. The one guy who'd ever HEARD of Linux said something best paraphrased as "we're still getting our WINDOWS support stabilized, man, why would we want to take on another platform?"
I pestered them for hardware info on their AMIII cards, just to get a foot in the door, but never got anywhere productive.
digi's a very strange company, VERY proprietary about their hardware and software, and, like most of the MI industry, VERY myopic about their computing platforms.
--
Here we go again. Based on past stories, here's my breakdown of how the commentary will go:
.sig....
30% -- Comment threads defending religion's place in society, ranging from clever, well-spoken, impassioned defenses of spirituality and religion as necessary to a well-balanced life, on down through "GOD LOVS ME AND SIENTIST SINERS WILL GO TO HELL!" Interesting subflavors include "Some of the most reknowned scientists in history were religious," and "Scientific method isn't the only way to gain knowledge."
35% -- Comment threads alleging that any belief system based in faith is worthless because there's no empirical repeatability, ranging from graduate-level epistomological essays down through "SIENCE MAKES SENSE RILIGION DOSNT." Interesting subflavors include the issue that science is typically learned from elders with no empirical repeatability on the part of the learner and is therefore also based in faith, and oh-yeah?-yeah exchanges about the provability of (math|god|intelligence|grits)
15% -- Pot-calling-kettle-black posts, where someone makes an allegation about science or religion that's also true of the other. Typically starts with history of deaths, progresses through history of art, stalls out somewhere about the time the invention of Tang is being compared to televangelists.
10% -- Topical trolls. "Jesus was an idiot and so are you." "Scientists are all atheists." "Freeman Dyson naked and petrified."
5% -- Typical trolls. "First post." "Grits." Stupid repressed-homosexual Katz/Columbine stories.
3% -- Meta-posts. Commentary on the nature of the story. Ponderings about the makeup of Slashdot's readership. This post.
1% -- Posts that crept in from other threads. Slashdot bug? Posters losing track of multiple browser windows? It's a mystery. In any case, posts about Paying Bills Online, Chili!Soft, and whatever story gets posted next.
1% -- People karma whoring by posting mirror links, pasted text from the wire story, and other bloat that inexplicably keeps getting moderated up as 'informative.' See my
Predictions for final count of comments: 500-600.
Predictions for final count of comments that have anything new or interesting to say (and no, this one doesn't make that count): 5.
In any case, this whole story should be moderated (-1, Known-Controversial Ad-Banner-Revenue-Generation Flamebait).
--
>I admit ASP for Linux would be cool, but only if it were FREE! I mean, that's one of the big
>considerations when thinking seriously about a Linux solution in a business.
Not in a business of any size. "Slightly Cheaper" might enter into it, but actual large-scale sites that might be making these decisions will be buying support contracts and heavy-hitting hardware and cooling systems and racks and on and on. The OS cost is just gravy around the edges.
>I went to the Chili!Soft home page and was dismayed to find a hefty $1000 pricetag on the
>technology (you can get it for half off right now, for Linux -- still pricey).
$1000 is not hefty for server software. Consider a large site with a farm of front-end servers, application servers, database servers, image servers -- a Yahoo or an eBay, say -- and start doing the math. You're likely going to pay more than that $1000 per box per month just to colocate it somewhere with adequate bandwidth.
>Well, a license for NT Server is about that price these days, and you get IIS at no cost with that
>license. That includes the bona-fide ASP capabilities.
Chili!Soft licensed the actual ASP engine from Microsoft. It's just as bona-fide.
>I mean, look what you can get for Linux instead of ASP:
All of those things are cool technologies, and some are in use at some pretty heavy-hitting sites. But ASP is also a very cool technology, and allows for VERY rapid development of dynamic content.
Also, unless you're going to be a Linux shop from end to end, most of your developers are likely to work on Windows boxes. (Not you, not me, but remember, we're talking about eBay-sized sites, here.) One benefit to using ASP is that you can have each developer working on a local instance of IIS on their Windows box, doing site development without impacting anyone else, then pushing final copies of the site, as-is, to a Chili!Soft-enabled farm of Linux or Solaris boxes to avoid uptime and stability issues.
>These don't cost a dime
Just to repeat the point I'm trying to make, Chili!Soft's target market is not www.mypersonalsite.com -- if $1000 makes you flinch, you're not playing in the league these folks are talking to.
>and give you all the functionality of ASP.
I _might_ give you PHP4 on that one. Otherwise, no. Read up on ASP -- it's very very cool.
>Chili!Soft's main claim is that, with their ASP, you can use MS dev tools to develop web sites on >multiple platforms. I say pbthbthbthhthbthb to that. Is that worth a grand?
Yes. See above scenario. MS' Dev tools are nice, nice enough to merit using them to build a site. When you're talking Internet Time, poking at CGI scripts with vi is just not going to cut it -- time-to-market is everything, and ASP allows for quick, solid development. Having it available on Unix/Linux flavors, with the actual licensed-from-MS engine, is a Very Cool Thing indeed.
--
Unless I misunderstand RMS' position completely, he'd allege that the license should have been GPL all along, AND that the author should have been compensated for it -- a completely defensible position.
I think he'd side with me on the idea that licensing terms being held hostage to promise of compensation is not OK.
--
Doh.
Twice today I've posted w/o reading closely. Gotta stop doing that. Please to disregard the above moronic comment.
--
Well, by that definition, ALL planets are 'vagabond' planets. The very word 'planet' comes from the Greek word for 'wanderer.' I think the issue is that it's either incorrect (these planets orbit a stable 'home' like any other planets) or redundant (all planets wander).
--
Ah, now _I've_ been misunderstood. I don't think anyone should be compelled to license their code any particular way. Lawton had a source-available commercial thing going for a long time, and I didn't begrudge him that in the least.
The part that rubbed me the wrong way was when he put "I'll change the license for this if you give me a job" on the Bochs site. Not that he's not entitled to do that, but it seems counter to the concept of the Open Source universe to use the promise of a license as a bargaining chip for the author's benefit. It kind of misses the point of the sharing thing Open Source is all about, and just feels wrong to me.
(*shrug) I'm very happy for him, and I'm glad Bochs is LGPL'ed; I'm totally glad his work has paid off for him, in aplomb and in dollars. I just can't help feeling the whole thing is a little bit... underhanded or something.
Hmmn, I can't find the right words, but I did want to pipe up and say that I'm _not_ an Open Source Marxist, and I totally agree with your attitude about paying the rent. I just think that there's a right way to Open-Source-license things, if you're going to go that route, and I don't think this was necessarily done in that Right Way. That's all.
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Ah, you're right, I missed the thrust of your comment; I thought you were saying that since Lawton was both Bochs' author and part of the plex86 team, the LGPL relicensing is not relevant to the 'interpollenation' of the two that the article implies is going to speed up.
But, yeah, the fact that he didn't open it up previously, choosing instead to dangle GPL/LGPL on his site as a carrot'n'stick device to get a job, well, that's all about the money, now, innit?
Apologies, I was off in the weeds somewhere....
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It's significant because the Bochs project itself is still valid separate from plex86 -- Bochs allows x86 emulation on non-x86 platforms, while plex86 uses native x86 instructions wherever possible for the best performance.
Bochs is very very cool, and having it Freely available is a Very Good Thing, Indeed.
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I'd have to check with EM as to whether that's OK. Not sure either way. It's also over 3000 words long, so it would be roughly three times the usual length of a 'long' /. feature. I might update it and post a link, tho, if EM says it's OK.
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No.
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I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 dead-tree issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on EM's very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's aimed at musicians looking at Linux, not at Linux geeks looking to music, so the focus might seem a bit strange to some of the Slashdot crowd, but I'm really rather proud of it.
Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives. Or maybe I'll post the draft version if Intertec's too clueless to post the final one.
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>Codifex Maximus ~ It may hurt my pride to be wrong once in a while, but I'd rather be flamed
>with better information than to be left blissfully ignorant.
Well, since you insist:
The actual interjection is "hear, hear," not "here, here." As in "Hear what the person I'm agreeing with has to say."
Just FYI.
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I've ALWAYS thought this idea would sell well, worldwide. Actual high-quality news content, delivered by sexy supermodels, interspliced with varying degrees/types of steamy/porn content to keep the viewers' attention. Porn News Network -- I can see the station break now:
"PNN -- with more hot girl-on-girl action than any other major news network...."
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I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on their very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's not completely about MIDI support on Linux, since it also touches on hardware and audio support, but sort of topical to this question. Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives.
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In addition to the discovery of channels on Mars, previously called 'canals,' the following headlines began to appear....
-- Scientists detect existance of 'eathre,' previously called 'aether;' now known to be the medium in which the Planck-sized subspace foam floats.
-- Observatory locates giant space dragon living in the Moon's trojan points that sporadically emerges to swallow the moon in an event called an 'eklypps.'
-- Biologists observe quantum-tunneling effect of organic particles that allows manure to generate flies spontaneously.
...and, of course:
-- Giant flaming objects expected to fall from sky soon because of the wrath of the great god Iridium.
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Hmmn. A friend of mine _JUST_ bought an Iridium pager and service so that she could stay in touch for her 6+ month trip to the Near and Middle East. Now, less than a month after this purchase, the service is completely going away.
Will she have some kind of recourse?
Will she still have this recourse available several months from now, when she actually gets back to someplace with enough connectivity to file a claim?
Enquiring minds want to know.
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If it uses RSA, inside the US, it doesn't matter where it was developed, the user needs a license from RSA (or to use RSAREF, see below).
If it doesn't use RSA, it doesn't matter where it was developed, the user doesn't need a license from RSA.
The whole 'outside the US' thing was the traditional response to export controls, not to the use of RSA. US-residing RSA users legally need to use either a licensed version of the RSA algorithm, or use the old RSAREF library that was released to the public (and is horribly slow and buggy).
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>On the other hand: porn, violence, crackers, warez etc shouldn't be. Nobody argues about that too.
Au contraire. The question 'what is porn' is argued over constantly, leading to the vague-but-appropriate concept of community standards in obscenity trials and the like. What you call porn, I call erotic art, and Europeans call commercials.
Same with violence. Just filtering on violence gives you a world where Teletubbies are OK, and _Saving_Private_Ryan_ is banned. Who decides?
>Categories without a moral value judgement, just cleanly categorize it.
Except that categorizing _IS_ value judgment. Again with _Ryan_, it would be 'objectively' categorized into "Violence, graphic dismemberment," and correctly so. The fact that it is, in fact, a powerful work of art cannot be reflected except by offering up a relative value judgement of some kind.
>universally bad things (blatant violence, _commercial_ porno, the Ku Klux Klan
Right there. A value judgement. In the US, even the Klan has a right to express and believe whatever they want, so long as they're not actually committing crimes. Period. Calling it 'universally bad' and therefore OBVIOUSLY needing to be censored is exactly what you allege to be against: selling your ideas of propriety onto others.
Ratings systems, censorware, whatever, the very ACT of dividing things into acceptable and unacceptable is a set of value judgements. And it's simply impossible to make a set of value judgments that works for everyone, and irresponsible to try.
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>Which isn't TOTALLY your fault, you shouldn't have to buy a Windows version in the first place.
I know this may come as a shock, but there are people who read Slashdot who don't run Linux. Or who run Linux, but are willing to boot to Windows to run apps (or games) that aren't supported on Linux.
>If a company doesn't want to support my OS, why should I have to change to run their products?
What a strange question; it contains its own answer: "Why should you have to change? To run their products."
Choosing your programs based on your OS is somewhat cart-before-the horse. Do you have a computer to run an operating system? Or to do work (play)? I, myself, am much more interested in what I'm doing than in what OS is living underneath it. If you want Diablo II, barring some new announcement by Loki anytime soon, you will need to be able to run Windows. It's that simple.
Which isn't to say I wouldn't appreciate a Linux port of Diablo II; rebooting is annoying to be sure. But it's currently a fact of life, and sitting back and pouting about it won't make Diablo II magically appear for Linux. And I, for one, want to play the game and enjoy myself instead of being sullen about OS politics. Life's too short.
>So Blizzard, keep you pretty-ed up Windows version, we don't want it. We want a game that
>will run on our computers and on our OS. If you won't support us, we won't support you.
Please don't speak for me. Please don't speak for 'the community.' We don't all feel the way you do.
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Bochs is a very cool project, in that it's like a DOSemu or VMware in concept, but it allows non-x86 machines to run x86 OSes. If it could be sped up aggressively (ASM speedups on certain platforms, maybe somehow using native x86 stuff on x86 platforms), it would be an EXTREMELY valuable tool.
Although that latter bit of x86 x86 mapping is more the domain of a VMware / FreeMWare....
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