There was this guy, I forget his name, I think he flew a kite and got electrocuted, something about exchanging essential liberties for freedom... OK, a stretch you might say, but any time you voluntarily give up freedoms that you have in order to 'gain security', you lose. So what you're saying is, essentially, drop all licenses and contribute to the public domain?
The scarce resource is developer and engineering manpower, not the software itself. License-models use the licenses as a way of distributing access to that scarcity. However it is not the only possibility.
One option (that I do) is to charge customers for access to the actual scarcity-- my time! Want x feature? Pay me $y. You're really stretching the concept. It's possible someone has put themselves in to this kind of scenario. But I would imagine its relatively rare. Sure - time and manpower is finite but it is not available on an unrestricted basis. But few people allow themselves to be directed by a nameless mass of others. You, yourself, included it would seem.
Note I caveated it: Yes, one of the most restrictive OS Licenses will keep us 'free'./laugh.
The most restrictive open source license. Is there one more restrictive? Please, enlighten us. I can't think of one. You probably meant OSS (Open Source Software) vs. OS which is usually a reference to Operating System. But hey... I see what you're saying now.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is leading to the standard BSD vs. GPL thread. So I'll cut to the chase. You may laugh at the GPL maintaining freedom - but don't try to kid us with the idea that a BSD license will do better. Having said that - I'm still curious as to what license you think will do better for "freedom" than the GPL.
...could it take the same patent lawsuit against Linux that SCO attempted, while using it's rightful ownership?
The SCO lawsuit was not about patents, it was about contract violation and copyright infringement. Patents were never mentioned by SCO. Was it ever about copyright infringement? Sure - there was lots about it in the press. SCO really beat that drum in public forums where proof wasn't required. But they never produced any proof in court. Not just proof that was refuted... but anything proof at all. Theorizing that Novell now has a strong position gives a lot more credit to SCO's claims (read: FUD) than it warrants.
I can't recall if I've seen this around but: if nobody "owns" software, is it subject to tragedy of the commons?
There are probably arguments either way, but because software isn't a scarce commodity I don't know how that old idea applies.
...
I would suspect that as long as there are enough people willing and able to create new software and / or modify what's out there the issues would be minimized. The big problem I see with no "owners" of software is that ensuring you had "the real deal" would be difficult, because there's nobody to go after for "shoddy" software. Essentially, without an owner there is no responsibility. This could be detrimental, because it would mean that every organization that wants to use software would then have to hire competent software folks to evaluate and analyze the software, or make it all proprietary in the first place.
The whole point to the "tragedy of the commons" scenario is unrestricted access to a finite resource. Since software isn't naturally scarce (although some business strategies involve artificial scarcity), it doesn't apply.
Proprietary software does not guarantee quality. It doesn't matter if someone "owns" a given software package - there's only so much you can do if a company is unable to deliver. If you check your software license you'll probably find you don't even have any legal recourse (or at least that's the hope of most license verbiage - it's anyone's guess until after the lawsuit is settled).
Most OSS solutions have corporate entities surrounding the software. If you want to hire someone to cover you, that's the direction to go. Of course, you can always go somewhere else as well. I'm sure you'll be able to find any number of support structures for various OSS-based solutions.
If you've done your homework, and you've got a bit of luck going with you, you're going to pick a decent solution and a company that can support you. And any problem you have will be covered sufficiently by your support contract. That applies to both proprietary and OSS-based solutions. One difference with an OSS-based solution is if the company you hired doesn't live up to its promises... you have a chance of finding someone else who can (with a lot less hassle in the migration between the two - maybe).
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock. -Winston Churchill
You're erroneously combining British wit with Teddy Roosevelt's popular quote, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." It'd be erroneous if I had been claiming it was a quote by Winston Churchill. I rather thought the two combined nicely.:)
At this point someone simply needs to write up a formal documentation of the protocol as it currently exists and submit it to the W3C, at which point the wire protocol is pretty much settled. And go ahead and pick a new anme because you can bet your last dollar they will pull the trademark crap the second they realize they are being written out of the picture. There seems to be echoes of SSH in this story. Granted - the history of SSH involves some distinct differences (for example, Tatu Ylönen submitted SSH to the IETF as a standard which set the grounds for "SSH" becoming hard to restrict despite SSH,Inc.'s annoyance at the "OpenSSH" name). But one can't help to wonder if this will pan out the same way; the last BitTorrent OSS release becoming a springboard for continued development that competes if not completely overshadows the originator's own efforts.
RTFA. They aren't closing the source, they are purchasing uTorrent and keeping uTorrent's source closed. They will still be releasing an SDK. They will still support the old client. They're just moving on to work on a closed source project. Sure they're releasing a SDK... but under what license? Yes - they're maintaining the Open Source client... with a protocol that they hint they will be leaving behind. Want to keep up? Get the SDK. Again - under what license?
No. It doesn't sound like business as usual to me.
With sftp Available on Windows.
and konqueror Or Internet Explorer 7. So I can fire up IE7 (or Windows Explorer) and point it at "sftp://my.example.com/" and start up a SFTP session, handling SSH keys, etc. and transfer my files through a secure SFTP session? I was poking around looking for a reference to this and I'm not finding it anywhere. The closest I've gotten is a hint of IE7 supporting FTP over SSL (which would be FTPS).
I realize most of the/. readers are far, if not radical left, wingers, but when Hillary is in the White House, I expect not to see word one going against her. You know it, I know it. I know you're an idiot. Nice try to derail this as a party issue though. I'm surprised that someone like yourself, who seems so keen to wrap yourself up in the flag, isn't hopping mad at what this administration is doing to basic American ideals not to mention our Constitution. What the heck happened to being a real Conservative?
And for the record - I wasn't that keen on Hillary when she had her husband in the oval office. I doubt I'd be too happy with her if she's in the Whitehouse again.
What if the military did this? The military is predominately Republican. Are you sure you want this precedent set? The next time the military disagrees with an order by Hillary they can ignore it? If she goes too far on her anti-Republican agenda they should put her under house arrest? The US Military are expected to follow only lawful orders. If (God forbid) Hilary Clinton is our next president and gives an order that is patently illegal, I hope there is resistance and whistleblowers.
Using KDE? Maybe something got wrong with your window/application settings (right-click on the title bar -> Advanced). "Geometry" tab. Other WMs may have similar options.
But I take it your problem is solved since the IceWeasel rename? Wasn't KDE specific. I created a test account so that I would use a different desktop environment, different window manager, and new profile. Same behavior. The behavior persisted through the first couple Iceweasel updates (I'm not sure about right now - I haven't used that laptop for the past several months).
I suspect it did involve some aspect of what geometry Xorg was expecting or reporting. The way my config worked is that it expected to set up a large screen area using two internal interfaces. When the laptop is undocked, one interface doesn't show so it doesn't initialize (which probably means a mismatch somewhere between my real screen geometry and what Xorg is told it has by the config).
Doing it this way is probably an ugly hack. But it seemed to work fine for every application with the exception of Debian's Firefox / Iceweasel. I found that really strange.
So, how many people on Slashdot smoke pot, anyways? I'm kind of curious how prevalent it is in the IT industry.
Is it possible to keep your mental edge and smoke pot at the same time? That should really be an Ask Slashdot... It worked for Mr. UK-NASA-UFO-Hacker. It could work for you.
No, the reason Mozilla forced Debian to rename Firefox is even stupider than that. Debian fixed their build process. They didn't actually patch the browser. They simply corrected the build process to work under Debian. That was enough to prevent them from using the name "Firefox". Is it just that, though? Before the whole Icedove rename, I had two copies of Firefox on my Debian desktop. One was the Debian package. The other was from Mozilla. I had the Mozilla version because something broke in the Debian package. It had something to do with my laptop's Xorg config (I have a config that allows dual screens when docked and just the single screen when not). When it wasn't docked, Debian's Firefox would run but wouldn't show. The Mozilla version came up without a problem. I could never figure out why (wish I could - then I would have filed a bug report).
I bring this up because this was going on around the same time the whole rename issue was getting a lot of attention. It seemed to me that Debian was introducing changes that Mozilla wasn't - as demonstrated by my own odd behavior of the two Firefox installs. Of course - I don't know enough about the bug I had or the issue in general to really know for sure. Maybe someone else can take a swing at it?
I should note that I use "Microsoft fanboy", "whiny Mac fanboy", and "Linux zealot" as stereotypical labels. Sometimes the labels are used with some accuracy. In those cases, we do have people who really get wrapped up in the emotional aspect of their choices and have a hard time producing any kind of rational argument to explain those choices (or criticisms). Other times, someone using such labels is really saying "I don't agree with your choices." And very rarely does the Windows / Microsoft crowd own up to the fact that irrational behavior exists in their corner of the IT world as well.
As for me... I'm a Linux fanboy. I first started using Linux because I needed to learn something about Unix for a job opportunity. I picked up a cheap, used whitebox PC and installed Linux. After a few months of using Linux and working with HP/UX and Solaris... I came to realize that I just liked the Unix world better than the Windows one. A couple years later, I find that for me it is Windows that's the niche OS and Linux my primary desktop / environment of choice.
I grew up driving in cars with a steering wheel, accelerator, brake, clutch and gearshift. If you want me to switch to a different brand of car, don't complain when I say I'm not keen on it because I have to steer your car with my feet and operate the accelerator and brake with a joystick. If you want me to use your product instead of the one I'm already familiar and happy with, you'd better bend over backwards to make it easy for me. Here's the problem. Vast majority of cars do have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and break pedal. Fewer cars these days have a clutch or gearshift. Those with automatic transmission have differing ways of engaging different modes. And then theres these systems that allow you to jump between automatic and something akin to manual transmission modes. I'm sure there are people who've never driven a manual in their lives. I'm sure there are people who dislike one system or the other. But in the grand scheme - these are simply alternatives to how to do the same general thing... and likely not the only thing that impacts the success of any given car model in the market.
In short, different does not mean failure in the marketplace. If it did, Windows itself would have so much more problems having gone through various changes from MS-DOS to Vista.
Now... having said all that... we're talking about partitioning hard drives here, right? This isn't "how to drive a car." This is more akin to "how to rebuild an engine."
Using Linux is not like being gay. Strangely enough there aren't many people calling for your blood when you don't use a particular OS. It's only when you try and force what you use on everyone else that they get testy. Most people don't care - or even notice. But that's not to say nobody cares. You have to be careful about who it is doing the caring.
I've seen Microsoft fanboys dismiss Linux (and Unix in general) as well as MacOS just as completely as the whiniest of Mac fanboys or fervent of Linux zealots dismiss Windows. Technology zealotry is very much alive in all aspects of the IT world. And when IT decision makers are also the Windows zealots, anyone who wants to use something different has a hard path ahead of them.
Again - most people probably won't care. But the decision makers will feel that their authority is being challenged. And various supporters of management will come out of the woodwork likewise affronted by such deviation.
You're arguing for an implementation, not a standard. That's often lost in this. Once MS Office properly handles ODF, many of these arguments fall by the wayside. If ODF became the standard, you can bet Microsoft would support it - them being customer-driven and all that.
Of course, this being MS, they're going to try and sell this as an added value proposition: "seventy five percent of all the sock puppets that responded to our market research all said that they felt the lack of advertising was a serious lack in Microsoft Works"
That's all funny... until you start wondering if there's some truth to that.
Say you're in the cut-throat world of the consumer PC market. You want to boost sales by putting as many bullets as you can in that "Features" list your potential customer is going to compare with your competitor's "Features" list. But margins are slim. Those bullets better not cost much. Along comes OpenOffice. "Includes a fully functional office productivity suite" would look real nice and doesn't cost anything beyond getting it in your standard production image. It's better than Microsoft Works which used to be your throw-down "productivity suite" bullet. Why not? Well - those guys at Microsoft have a good answer to that.
What if Works wasn't just to fill in a bullet? What if works made you money? That's right. Microsoft now has a version of works that'll turn each unit sale in to an added revenue stream! Marketing loves it. They'll be able to keep your customer interested in your newest product offerings! That is - if the customer keeps the software installed. But that's just icing. What you'll get up front is per-unit advertising fees and partnership deals. That'll put some breathing room on that bottom line.
Yeah, but this is one guy. They don't know if Titan Rain is a whole organization, or even the entire Chinese military establishment. Does it matter? The writer dubbed it "the biggest military hack of all time." There's no qualifier for manpower involved. And while there's little public information about the detail of either case, what is available implies a higher degree of complexity (and perhaps effectiveness) in the Titan Rain case.
Gary McKinnon, the UK-based ex-systems administrator accused of conducting the biggest military hack of all time... I would think... maybe... Titan Rain might trump McKinnon's efforts. But hey - I know there's a long tradition in journalism. The subject of your "hacker" article is always a wunderkin uber-hacker responsible for the absolute pinnacle in hacking history. Always.
Also tack on the cost of equipment seized as evidence. There's been some changes in how things are handled recently. But back around the time period of this case, it wasn't uncommon for the FBI to lay claim to entire systems. If the budget-strapped lab was lucky, they got back everything but the hard drives. In at least one case I know of, a couple Unix workstations went away with the promise that they'd be back at the lab within the year. Anything that goes in to this prosecution-driven black hole needs to be replaced. That only adds to the cost of the incident.
So basically he's being punished because he embarrased a US institution that should know better about computer security. You're wrong on this point. He's facing legal action because that's how the law works. He was caught during a time when NASA's practical concept of information security had more to do with handing over evidence to the FBI so they can go after the person than taking the technical steps required to make yourself a difficult target. Now he's facing down the slow grind of the law and trying every possible thing he can to avoid the crunch.
And while you or I might be embarrassed if we were a NASA official, I doubt you'll find one involved in this case. NASA (and much of the US Gov't) just doesn't get this kind of thing (or at least - didn't at one time... how much things have changed is another discussion).
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One option (that I do) is to charge customers for access to the actual scarcity-- my time! Want x feature? Pay me $y. You're really stretching the concept. It's possible someone has put themselves in to this kind of scenario. But I would imagine its relatively rare. Sure - time and manpower is finite but it is not available on an unrestricted basis. But few people allow themselves to be directed by a nameless mass of others. You, yourself, included it would seem.
The most restrictive open source license. Is there one more restrictive? Please, enlighten us. I can't think of one. You probably meant OSS (Open Source Software) vs. OS which is usually a reference to Operating System. But hey... I see what you're saying now.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is leading to the standard BSD vs. GPL thread. So I'll cut to the chase. You may laugh at the GPL maintaining freedom - but don't try to kid us with the idea that a BSD license will do better. Having said that - I'm still curious as to what license you think will do better for "freedom" than the GPL.
The SCO lawsuit was not about patents, it was about contract violation and copyright infringement. Patents were never mentioned by SCO. Was it ever about copyright infringement? Sure - there was lots about it in the press. SCO really beat that drum in public forums where proof wasn't required. But they never produced any proof in court. Not just proof that was refuted... but anything proof at all. Theorizing that Novell now has a strong position gives a lot more credit to SCO's claims (read: FUD) than it warrants.
There are less restrictive licenses... true. But one of the MOST restrictive licenses? How did you put it... ahh yes... "/laugh".
I'm curious as to what license scheme you believe will guard freedom?
There are probably arguments either way, but because software isn't a scarce commodity I don't know how that old idea applies.
The whole point to the "tragedy of the commons" scenario is unrestricted access to a finite resource. Since software isn't naturally scarce (although some business strategies involve artificial scarcity), it doesn't apply.I would suspect that as long as there are enough people willing and able to create new software and / or modify what's out there the issues would be minimized. The big problem I see with no "owners" of software is that ensuring you had "the real deal" would be difficult, because there's nobody to go after for "shoddy" software. Essentially, without an owner there is no responsibility. This could be detrimental, because it would mean that every organization that wants to use software would then have to hire competent software folks to evaluate and analyze the software, or make it all proprietary in the first place.
Proprietary software does not guarantee quality. It doesn't matter if someone "owns" a given software package - there's only so much you can do if a company is unable to deliver. If you check your software license you'll probably find you don't even have any legal recourse (or at least that's the hope of most license verbiage - it's anyone's guess until after the lawsuit is settled).
Most OSS solutions have corporate entities surrounding the software. If you want to hire someone to cover you, that's the direction to go. Of course, you can always go somewhere else as well. I'm sure you'll be able to find any number of support structures for various OSS-based solutions.
If you've done your homework, and you've got a bit of luck going with you, you're going to pick a decent solution and a company that can support you. And any problem you have will be covered sufficiently by your support contract. That applies to both proprietary and OSS-based solutions. One difference with an OSS-based solution is if the company you hired doesn't live up to its promises... you have a chance of finding someone else who can (with a lot less hassle in the migration between the two - maybe).
You're erroneously combining British wit with Teddy Roosevelt's popular quote, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." It'd be erroneous if I had been claiming it was a quote by Winston Churchill. I rather thought the two combined nicely.
Diplomacy is saying "nice doggie" while you look for a bigger stick.
No. It doesn't sound like business as usual to me.
And for the record - I wasn't that keen on Hillary when she had her husband in the oval office. I doubt I'd be too happy with her if she's in the Whitehouse again.
But I take it your problem is solved since the IceWeasel rename? Wasn't KDE specific. I created a test account so that I would use a different desktop environment, different window manager, and new profile. Same behavior. The behavior persisted through the first couple Iceweasel updates (I'm not sure about right now - I haven't used that laptop for the past several months).
I suspect it did involve some aspect of what geometry Xorg was expecting or reporting. The way my config worked is that it expected to set up a large screen area using two internal interfaces. When the laptop is undocked, one interface doesn't show so it doesn't initialize (which probably means a mismatch somewhere between my real screen geometry and what Xorg is told it has by the config).
Doing it this way is probably an ugly hack. But it seemed to work fine for every application with the exception of Debian's Firefox / Iceweasel. I found that really strange.
Is it possible to keep your mental edge and smoke pot at the same time? That should really be an Ask Slashdot... It worked for Mr. UK-NASA-UFO-Hacker. It could work for you.
I bring this up because this was going on around the same time the whole rename issue was getting a lot of attention. It seemed to me that Debian was introducing changes that Mozilla wasn't - as demonstrated by my own odd behavior of the two Firefox installs. Of course - I don't know enough about the bug I had or the issue in general to really know for sure. Maybe someone else can take a swing at it?
I should note that I use "Microsoft fanboy", "whiny Mac fanboy", and "Linux zealot" as stereotypical labels. Sometimes the labels are used with some accuracy. In those cases, we do have people who really get wrapped up in the emotional aspect of their choices and have a hard time producing any kind of rational argument to explain those choices (or criticisms). Other times, someone using such labels is really saying "I don't agree with your choices." And very rarely does the Windows / Microsoft crowd own up to the fact that irrational behavior exists in their corner of the IT world as well.
As for me... I'm a Linux fanboy. I first started using Linux because I needed to learn something about Unix for a job opportunity. I picked up a cheap, used whitebox PC and installed Linux. After a few months of using Linux and working with HP/UX and Solaris... I came to realize that I just liked the Unix world better than the Windows one. A couple years later, I find that for me it is Windows that's the niche OS and Linux my primary desktop / environment of choice.
In short, different does not mean failure in the marketplace. If it did, Windows itself would have so much more problems having gone through various changes from MS-DOS to Vista.
Now... having said all that... we're talking about partitioning hard drives here, right? This isn't "how to drive a car." This is more akin to "how to rebuild an engine."
I've seen Microsoft fanboys dismiss Linux (and Unix in general) as well as MacOS just as completely as the whiniest of Mac fanboys or fervent of Linux zealots dismiss Windows. Technology zealotry is very much alive in all aspects of the IT world. And when IT decision makers are also the Windows zealots, anyone who wants to use something different has a hard path ahead of them.
Again - most people probably won't care. But the decision makers will feel that their authority is being challenged. And various supporters of management will come out of the woodwork likewise affronted by such deviation.
You're arguing for an implementation, not a standard. That's often lost in this. Once MS Office properly handles ODF, many of these arguments fall by the wayside. If ODF became the standard, you can bet Microsoft would support it - them being customer-driven and all that.
That's all funny... until you start wondering if there's some truth to that.Of course, this being MS, they're going to try and sell this as an added value proposition: "seventy five percent of all the sock puppets that responded to our market research all said that they felt the lack of advertising was a serious lack in Microsoft Works"
Say you're in the cut-throat world of the consumer PC market. You want to boost sales by putting as many bullets as you can in that "Features" list your potential customer is going to compare with your competitor's "Features" list. But margins are slim. Those bullets better not cost much. Along comes OpenOffice. "Includes a fully functional office productivity suite" would look real nice and doesn't cost anything beyond getting it in your standard production image. It's better than Microsoft Works which used to be your throw-down "productivity suite" bullet. Why not? Well - those guys at Microsoft have a good answer to that.
What if Works wasn't just to fill in a bullet? What if works made you money? That's right. Microsoft now has a version of works that'll turn each unit sale in to an added revenue stream! Marketing loves it. They'll be able to keep your customer interested in your newest product offerings! That is - if the customer keeps the software installed. But that's just icing. What you'll get up front is per-unit advertising fees and partnership deals. That'll put some breathing room on that bottom line.
Also tack on the cost of equipment seized as evidence. There's been some changes in how things are handled recently. But back around the time period of this case, it wasn't uncommon for the FBI to lay claim to entire systems. If the budget-strapped lab was lucky, they got back everything but the hard drives. In at least one case I know of, a couple Unix workstations went away with the promise that they'd be back at the lab within the year. Anything that goes in to this prosecution-driven black hole needs to be replaced. That only adds to the cost of the incident.
And while you or I might be embarrassed if we were a NASA official, I doubt you'll find one involved in this case. NASA (and much of the US Gov't) just doesn't get this kind of thing (or at least - didn't at one time... how much things have changed is another discussion).