What I got out of it wasn't that they are changing the license. It seems to me, that MySQL AB seems to confabulate linking with communicating. As others have pointed out, using ODBC to connect to a database is just like connecting to a web server with a web browser. What MySQL is apparantly up to is even worse than choosing an Evil New License. It looks like they are trying to pervert the GPL with an overly broad interpretation.
If MySQL persists in this, software devs will have to reduce interoperability for their own good. According to them, an ODBC connector has to be GPL. The app that communicates over the connector has to be GPL. I wouldn't even be surprised if the data in the database has to be GPL as well. MySQL will exist in a Galapagos style ecosystem where no other code outside it will interoperate in anyway. Hell, the proprietary browser that connects to web app that connects through ODBC to the database would have to be GPL too. Just to be safe, mind you.
Sarcasm aside, I have heard noise that PHP scripts that talk to MySQL would have to be GPL. As usual, it will take some nasty court battles to sort out what you really can and can't do. Hey MySQL, legal clarity is a major reason many of us use this stuff. YOU AREN'T HELPING. Nimrods.
Up till now, I always worried about evil companies like SCO and MS trying to legally narrow the GPL for nefarious ends. Maybe that isn't the real worry. Regardless of their rhetoric, MS distributes some GPL code properly. This would seem to indicate understanding and some legal respect for what those copyright holders could do. SCO? Well, they're done. The only question is which way the carcass gets carved up. Maybe the real worry is companies like MySQL trying to push the GPL a bit farther than it is really supposed to go.
I have little patience for GPL-is-a-virus FUD from proprietary fanboy zealots. If anything, I dislike it even more from a FOSS vendor. All the former can do is sling easily refuted mud. The latter can do real damage and give the proprietary world a lot of unintended aid and comfort in the process.
This is all true. However, you have to think about how long you need to keep something a secret. Let's say for the sake of argument that you confessed to a murder and encrypted it with single-DES in 1979. Anyone who got a hold of an intercept of it between then and now has evidence of a felony with no statute of limitations. Single-DES has been practically crackable by brute force since at least the mid-90s.
More realistically, what if the subject of the communication was a long standing bank account or evidence of a government scandal?
Advances in computing power can work for attackers who stand to profit from a long-delayed payoff. Advances in quantum computing will lower the expiration date of protection for anything you encrypted in the past even more. The further in the past the ciphertext was made, the weaker it gets. This will be generally true for any arbitrary past date and future date. No ciphertext can be considered indefinitely secure. We can only assume that reasonable protection only exists for the short-to-medium term.
The caste system that results from it is pretty damned horrible though. Having to manually unclog sewers because of who your parents were puts having to ride in the back of the bus in the shade. Judging from the low and high caste members blazing away at each other in India, I'd say the whole thing went too far a long time ago. It's also interesting to note that India doesn't want caste discrimination lumped in with sexism, racism, and homophobia in human rights matters.
It isn't outside the realm of possibility that a "hot jupiter" couldn't have Earth-like moons. Since the "hot jupiter" would reflect a fair amount of energy onto it's moons, it seems likely that the hottest of the "hot jupiters" aren't going to support anything Earthlike at all. A "hot jupiter" at a Mars-distance from a yellow or orange star could be interesting.
Apple is phasing out CRTs so this won't be true much longer but Apple Certified Technicians are indeed expected to be able to service Apple monitors. The Desktop Certification course contains a high voltage safety portion that has to be passed to get the certification.
For that matter, LCD panels have inverters in them that can give quite a nasty shock. Apple also expects techs to be able to change out inverters and the lcd itself. Even if you're not working on Apples, it isn't uncommon to have to turn down the flyback voltage and refocus CRTs. I'm certainly not going to throw out a CRT that is slightly out of focus.
As for power supplies, I've had supplies where the only thing wrong with it was that the fan had bad bearings. Swapping fans out with a more seriously damaged supply is nice quick repair.
I should have been less categorical. I did indeed neglect verification applications of pubkey crypto. I believe the other applications you mention will still boil down securing links, data in place, or authentication. Nothing says you can't do combinations.
Steganography can indeed mitigate difficuties but steganography isn't crypto although it is best combined with crypto.
I seriously doubt the government has some uber-leet technology that lets them crack any encryption. Encryption can do two things and two things only.
1. Encryption can secure a communications link. Properly used Alice can talk to Bob with reasonable protection from Eve tapping the link halfway between them.
2. Encryption can secure stored data. Properly used, Alice could protect the files on her keychain should Eve filch it out of her purse.
Encryption will not:
1. Secure the ends of a link. If Eve physically installs a keylogger in Alice's keyboard then it doesn't matter what crypto she uses. Come to think of it, the old saw applies: all bets are off if an attacker has physical access to a terminal.
2. Preclude treachery and incompetence. Law enforcement may have threatened the other end of your link who is letting them see everything in return for light treatment. A while back, NPR ran a story about police officers who took over a kiddy porn website and roped in a pile of customers. Encryption doesn't help if the other end of the conversation isn't who you think it is. Maybe the other side left his passphrase taped under his keyboard. "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis" is what they call it when the police starting leaning on you.
3. Prevent the government from taking an interest in you. Certain uses of it may even draw their interest. Staying out of view of larger predators is often the best defense.
4. Conceal the existence of the link. Often the government only needs to prove Alice talked to Bob on 7/24/02 at 3:24p.
5. Somewhat OT but something else encryption doesn't do: Allow Alice to share data with Bob while simultaneously preventing Bob from divulging it to Eve. Both #1 and #2 apply. Bonus points if you understand what this scenario applies to.
What this all boils down to is that encryption is largely ineffective against old-fashioned police work. It is also worth noting that Al Queda and others are notorious for using low-tech communications and isolated organizational cells. Don't give those hunting you terminals and only the minimum in physical links to play with. If you're a criminal, try to work alone if possible and keep your mouth shut. If you are a crook or a terrorist, communications are the least of your problems. Your partners in crime and your own mouth are far more dangerous.
Since you have a Powerbook, the situation isn't that bad. pbbuttons is what you are looking for. In Debian at least, installation and configuration is dead easy. There is even a GUI. I use it on a Pismo Powerbook with good results.
I take your point, but is it still true that only the stable release gets security updates?
Yes and no. The stable release has a Security Team who are responsible for fixing security issues in Stable. The Security Team have their own apt repositories strictly for pushing fixes out. A few months after a Stable release, these fixes tend to be in the form of backports from the upstream project as the idea is to change the behaivor of the system as minimally as possible. The only changes that happen in Stable are security and stability fixes. This makes for nice deploy and forget servers but the price paid is forgoing the shiny new things when say Samba goes from 2.2.3 to 3.0...well there are ways around that but they all involve more admin attention if you use something like www.backports.org.
Packages in Unstable tend to follow the upstream projects pretty closely. Security and stability fixes DO come to Unstable but they don't have the priority they do in Stable. The package maintainers here are seeking correct configurations, merging upstream patches, and (sometimes) Debian specific patches, and so on and so forth. What they aren't doing is leaving packages unchanged except for fixes; they have to manage features and think more about interactions with other packages. Unstable package maintainers don't have the luxury of a separate Security maintenance team. They have to perform all of the maintenance.
Basically you have to pay a mind to security advisories and upgrade ASAP. The Unstable package maintainers diligence in such matters is comparable to a distro like Fedora or Gentoo. If a big security hole opens up in something important like Samba, then Unstable will get a fix. Sometimes it takes a few days.
Debian package maintainers often originate security fixes and submit them upstream themselves. You can sanely run machines on Unstable; you just have to exercise some diligence of your own and be ready to upgrade packages frequently.
The REALLY risky Debian flavor to run is Testing. Testing is a sort of perpetual release candidate that inherits packages from Unstable if they go more than a few weeks without major changes. Unless a release is imminent, a security hole in Testing can go unpatched for quite while. Testing has a higher degree of dependency and API stability than Unstable as it is deliberately held back from the bleeding edge. It is really intended for testing things like "What breaks if you upgrade from Stable?" It seems to be of more use to the Debian project itself than it is to Debian users. When a release is imminent, Testing is frozen and starts receiving the attention of the Security Team. When the "release critical" issues and bugs are sufficiently squashed, it becomes the new Stable and the whole process starts over.
Unstable doesn't mean "will crash if you so much as look at it incorrectly". It means "software dependencies and APIs change on a daily basis". A binary package targeted at Debian Stable can be counted on to install and run properly over it's supported lifetime. Stable releases are about three years apart and are supported for a year after new Stable releases.
A binary package targetted at Unstable could fail to install and run tomorrow because dependencies have incremented upward in version.
Unless you clean them out,/var/cache/apt/archives has all of the packages and their versions that you've been installing. I've had upgrades break things. No biggie, If foo_1.5-1.deb breaks things then I just dpkg -i/var/cache/apt/archives/foo_1.4-4.deb (or whatever) until a sane package is put out. With shell completion, it isn't as though I have to look very hard. Just install the next version back from whatever broke.
If I go a long stretch without breakage, I'll do an apt-get clean to clear those archives out every now and again.
The simple fact is that no credible scientific evidence of alien visitation has been documented.
The second simple fact is that no credible scientific efforts to gather such evidence have been made.
Why should I or a scientist for that matter take the idea in the least seriously? Once fraud and wishful thinking is accounted for, 99.99999999999% of the "evidence" for UFOs (and any number of other "fantastic" things) vanishes like a fart in the wind. I have yet to see evidence of tech humans aren't capable of. I have yet to see anything better than low-res grainy photos and extremely crappy looking video. Let's not even get into the rednecks who claim E.T. has an extreme interest in their colons.
You also have to wonder about E.T.'s motivations. E.T. can cross interstellar distances but can't avoid being seen by those lone witnesses in the countryside and exhausted lone small aircraft pilots. If E.T. doesn't want to be seen, we won't see him. Since saucer fans claim to see him cruising the skies on a regular basis, then why doesn't E.T. land in a well populated area and say howdy? The E.T. saucer fans go on about behaves rather like a moth dancing around a light bulb. It doesn't really add up.
Scientists aren't some kind of high priests to the truth. Before a scientist can gather evidence, he'd have to have a glimmer of an idea where to start looking. There is damned little to study once the crap has been dispensed with. They also aren't father confessors for disaffected saucer fans.
Accusing critics of close-mindedness isn't going to accomplish anything. If saucer fans want to be taken seriously then they'll have to produce evidence that clearly isn't the product of fraud or wishful thinking. A bonafide landing or an example of E.T. tech is what is required here. Bad observations that could be (and probably are) something else entirely won't cut it.
Sony getting into entertainment could turn out to be a huuuuggee mistake then. Their consumer electronics arm will be competing against other electronics firms that don't have this conflict of interest.
WTH gives those freeloading assholes the right if the band is playing original material? The band got paid on the spot. Oh well, yet another group to throw up against the wall when the revolution comes.....
Free software is great, I use it whenever I can. But there are certain situations where closed source is neccessary for a variety of reasons. RMS doesn't seem to understand that. He simply preaches that everything should be a hundred percent free no matter what.
Perhaps so. A commodity standard is not one of those situations. Even SPAM is preferable to the world MS wants for us.
I've said more than once that the FSF would do well to use someone else as their public face. RMS could accomplish a lot more if he took to heart something like "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
You're being a zealot yourself. If this standard goes through unchanged, we'll all be paying royalties to MS if we want to use email. The mere mention of the initials RMS is all it takes to shut down all cognitive functions of most readers here. RMS' point is damned valid and wouldn't be very controversial if it came from anybody other than him.
There is no problem serious enough that the solution merits MS or any other company being allowed to hijack open infrastructures.
Would you have considered this basic message if anyone other than RMS brought it up? Letting MS flibbertyhammer things so that you have to give MS money to use email is just plain rotten no matter who points it out. Bandwidth usage or not, Filtering gives me a spam free inbox right now and I didn't give MS one red cent to have it.
Letting MS jigger open protocols so they can say who can participate is just plain wrong. It's even wrong if they fix it so you can say "neener, neener" to RMS.
Unless I am mistaken, they are going to stick with the license used before XFree86 changed it. Changing the license to GPL would cause disruption for little good reason.
Anti-bong laws are dumb as hell. If the parody tune "Smoke-A-Bowla" is any indication, you can make bongs out of anything. Yeah, it won't look like a flowering tree or something but you could definitely put something in it and smoke it.
The best one I ever saw was a bowl fitted into a two-liter soda cap. This mated to the top half of a two liter bottle. You dunked the two-liter half into a bucket of water, screwed on the cap, lit your smokable and partially pulled up on the half-bottle. This creates a partial vacuum that draws smoke into the half-bottle. Then you unscrewed the cap and pushed down on the bottle to expel the smoke. Stoners call the things "gravity bongs" which is stupid. They're "vacuum bongs".
Unless I have the easily installable choice of X.Org, I'll have to switch distros. It sounds like a compatibility nightmare to me. Like or not, I have to use the nvidia drivers and occaisionally binaries from other systems. It looks very much to me that X.Org is the defacto Linux standard now.
From a pure architecture point of view, what Debian proposes sounds beautiful. But you still need to be able to run what everybody else is running. From what I understand, those modular trees don't even have 2D accelleration for most video cards. WTH are these guys doing?
Now if I can just apt-get install xorg and cause no dependency troubles with the rest of the apps then that is fine.
We don't need MS to fall over. It wouldn't break my heart if they did...and I think an IBM style market beating followed by reformation is more likely in the long run.
We just want to get enough market share that they can't push us around with polluted file formats and comm protocols. For that matter, we need enough share that buying politicians and filing frivolous patent suits would be a bad idea. SCO is a trial balloon as much as anything. Hopefully, they're getting the hint. As flaky as ESR is, his last little missive was right to point: We really don't care about destroying MS. We just want to write code and solve problems. On the other hand, MS DOES want to destroy us. Peaceful co-existance is still an option but it is their move.
Actually, most condoms are only around 95% effective.
For your typical slashdotter, those are betting odds. I mean seriously, how many of these guys are going to get enough partners for the virus with their name on it to come up?
Slashdot Mirror
What I got out of it wasn't that they are changing the license. It seems to me, that MySQL AB seems to confabulate linking with communicating. As others have pointed out, using ODBC to connect to a database is just like connecting to a web server with a web browser. What MySQL is apparantly up to is even worse than choosing an Evil New License. It looks like they are trying to pervert the GPL with an overly broad interpretation.
If MySQL persists in this, software devs will have to reduce interoperability for their own good. According to them, an ODBC connector has to be GPL. The app that communicates over the connector has to be GPL. I wouldn't even be surprised if the data in the database has to be GPL as well. MySQL will exist in a Galapagos style ecosystem where no other code outside it will interoperate in anyway. Hell, the proprietary browser that connects to web app that connects through ODBC to the database would have to be GPL too. Just to be safe, mind you.
Sarcasm aside, I have heard noise that PHP scripts that talk to MySQL would have to be GPL. As usual, it will take some nasty court battles to sort out what you really can and can't do. Hey MySQL, legal clarity is a major reason many of us use this stuff. YOU AREN'T HELPING. Nimrods.
Up till now, I always worried about evil companies like SCO and MS trying to legally narrow the GPL for nefarious ends. Maybe that isn't the real worry. Regardless of their rhetoric, MS distributes some GPL code properly. This would seem to indicate understanding and some legal respect for what those copyright holders could do. SCO? Well, they're done. The only question is which way the carcass gets carved up. Maybe the real worry is companies like MySQL trying to push the GPL a bit farther than it is really supposed to go.
I have little patience for GPL-is-a-virus FUD from proprietary fanboy zealots. If anything, I dislike it even more from a FOSS vendor. All the former can do is sling easily refuted mud. The latter can do real damage and give the proprietary world a lot of unintended aid and comfort in the process.
This is all true. However, you have to think about how long you need to keep something a secret. Let's say for the sake of argument that you confessed to a murder and encrypted it with single-DES in 1979. Anyone who got a hold of an intercept of it between then and now has evidence of a felony with no statute of limitations. Single-DES has been practically crackable by brute force since at least the mid-90s.
More realistically, what if the subject of the communication was a long standing bank account or evidence of a government scandal?
Advances in computing power can work for attackers who stand to profit from a long-delayed payoff. Advances in quantum computing will lower the expiration date of protection for anything you encrypted in the past even more. The further in the past the ciphertext was made, the weaker it gets. This will be generally true for any arbitrary past date and future date. No ciphertext can be considered indefinitely secure. We can only assume that reasonable protection only exists for the short-to-medium term.
Fairly long OTP messages may be one exception.
The caste system that results from it is pretty damned horrible though. Having to manually unclog sewers because of who your parents were puts having to ride in the back of the bus in the shade. Judging from the low and high caste members blazing away at each other in India, I'd say the whole thing went too far a long time ago. It's also interesting to note that India doesn't want caste discrimination lumped in with sexism, racism, and homophobia in human rights matters.
It isn't outside the realm of possibility that a "hot jupiter" couldn't have Earth-like moons. Since the "hot jupiter" would reflect a fair amount of energy onto it's moons, it seems likely that the hottest of the "hot jupiters" aren't going to support anything Earthlike at all. A "hot jupiter" at a Mars-distance from a yellow or orange star could be interesting.
Apple is phasing out CRTs so this won't be true much longer but Apple Certified Technicians are indeed expected to be able to service Apple monitors. The Desktop Certification course contains a high voltage safety portion that has to be passed to get the certification.
For that matter, LCD panels have inverters in them that can give quite a nasty shock. Apple also expects techs to be able to change out inverters and the lcd itself. Even if you're not working on Apples, it isn't uncommon to have to turn down the flyback voltage and refocus CRTs. I'm certainly not going to throw out a CRT that is slightly out of focus.
As for power supplies, I've had supplies where the only thing wrong with it was that the fan had bad bearings. Swapping fans out with a more seriously damaged supply is nice quick repair.
I should have been less categorical. I did indeed neglect verification applications of pubkey crypto. I believe the other applications you mention will still boil down securing links, data in place, or authentication. Nothing says you can't do combinations.
Steganography can indeed mitigate difficuties but steganography isn't crypto although it is best combined with crypto.
I seriously doubt the government has some uber-leet technology that lets them crack any encryption. Encryption can do two things and two things only.
1. Encryption can secure a communications link. Properly used Alice can talk to Bob with reasonable protection from Eve tapping the link halfway between them.
2. Encryption can secure stored data. Properly used, Alice could protect the files on her keychain should Eve filch it out of her purse.
Encryption will not:
1. Secure the ends of a link. If Eve physically installs a keylogger in Alice's keyboard then it doesn't matter what crypto she uses. Come to think of it, the old saw applies: all bets are off if an attacker has physical access to a terminal.
2. Preclude treachery and incompetence. Law enforcement may have threatened the other end of your link who is letting them see everything in return for light treatment. A while back, NPR ran a story about police officers who took over a kiddy porn website and roped in a pile of customers. Encryption doesn't help if the other end of the conversation isn't who you think it is. Maybe the other side left his passphrase taped under his keyboard. "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis" is what they call it when the police starting leaning on you.
3. Prevent the government from taking an interest in you. Certain uses of it may even draw their interest. Staying out of view of larger predators is often the best defense.
4. Conceal the existence of the link. Often the government only needs to prove Alice talked to Bob on 7/24/02 at 3:24p.
5. Somewhat OT but something else encryption doesn't do: Allow Alice to share data with Bob while simultaneously preventing Bob from divulging it to Eve. Both #1 and #2 apply. Bonus points if you understand what this scenario applies to.
What this all boils down to is that encryption is largely ineffective against old-fashioned police work. It is also worth noting that Al Queda and others are notorious for using low-tech communications and isolated organizational cells. Don't give those hunting you terminals and only the minimum in physical links to play with. If you're a criminal, try to work alone if possible and keep your mouth shut. If you are a crook or a terrorist, communications are the least of your problems. Your partners in crime and your own mouth are far more dangerous.
Since you have a Powerbook, the situation isn't that bad. pbbuttons is what you are looking for. In Debian at least, installation and configuration is dead easy. There is even a GUI. I use it on a Pismo Powerbook with good results.
I take your point, but is it still true that only the stable release gets security updates?
Yes and no. The stable release has a Security Team who are responsible for fixing security issues in Stable. The Security Team have their own apt repositories strictly for pushing fixes out. A few months after a Stable release, these fixes tend to be in the form of backports from the upstream project as the idea is to change the behaivor of the system as minimally as possible. The only changes that happen in Stable are security and stability fixes. This makes for nice deploy and forget servers but the price paid is forgoing the shiny new things when say Samba goes from 2.2.3 to 3.0...well there are ways around that but they all involve more admin attention if you use something like www.backports.org.
Packages in Unstable tend to follow the upstream projects pretty closely. Security and stability fixes DO come to Unstable but they don't have the priority they do in Stable. The package maintainers here are seeking correct configurations, merging upstream patches, and (sometimes) Debian specific patches, and so on and so forth. What they aren't doing is leaving packages unchanged except for fixes; they have to manage features and think more about interactions with other packages. Unstable package maintainers don't have the luxury of a separate Security maintenance team. They have to perform all of the maintenance.
Basically you have to pay a mind to security advisories and upgrade ASAP. The Unstable package maintainers diligence in such matters is comparable to a distro like Fedora or Gentoo. If a big security hole opens up in something important like Samba, then Unstable will get a fix. Sometimes it takes a few days.
Debian package maintainers often originate security fixes and submit them upstream themselves. You can sanely run machines on Unstable; you just have to exercise some diligence of your own and be ready to upgrade packages frequently.
The REALLY risky Debian flavor to run is Testing. Testing is a sort of perpetual release candidate that inherits packages from Unstable if they go more than a few weeks without major changes. Unless a release is imminent, a security hole in Testing can go unpatched for quite while. Testing has a higher degree of dependency and API stability than Unstable as it is deliberately held back from the bleeding edge. It is really intended for testing things like "What breaks if you upgrade from Stable?" It seems to be of more use to the Debian project itself than it is to Debian users. When a release is imminent, Testing is frozen and starts receiving the attention of the Security Team. When the "release critical" issues and bugs are sufficiently squashed, it becomes the new Stable and the whole process starts over.
Unstable doesn't mean "will crash if you so much as look at it incorrectly". It means "software dependencies and APIs change on a daily basis". A binary package targeted at Debian Stable can be counted on to install and run properly over it's supported lifetime. Stable releases are about three years apart and are supported for a year after new Stable releases.
A binary package targetted at Unstable could fail to install and run tomorrow because dependencies have incremented upward in version.
Unless you clean them out, /var/cache/apt/archives has all of the packages and their versions that you've been installing. I've had upgrades break things. No biggie, If foo_1.5-1.deb breaks things then I just dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/foo_1.4-4.deb (or whatever) until a sane package is put out. With shell completion, it isn't as though I have to look very hard. Just install the next version back from whatever broke.
If I go a long stretch without breakage, I'll do an apt-get clean to clear those archives out every now and again.
The simple fact is that no credible scientific evidence of alien visitation has been documented.
The second simple fact is that no credible scientific efforts to gather such evidence have been made.
Why should I or a scientist for that matter take the idea in the least seriously? Once fraud and wishful thinking is accounted for, 99.99999999999% of the "evidence" for UFOs (and any number of other "fantastic" things) vanishes like a fart in the wind. I have yet to see evidence of tech humans aren't capable of. I have yet to see anything better than low-res grainy photos and extremely crappy looking video. Let's not even get into the rednecks who claim E.T. has an extreme interest in their colons.
You also have to wonder about E.T.'s motivations. E.T. can cross interstellar distances but can't avoid being seen by those lone witnesses in the countryside and exhausted lone small aircraft pilots. If E.T. doesn't want to be seen, we won't see him. Since saucer fans claim to see him cruising the skies on a regular basis, then why doesn't E.T. land in a well populated area and say howdy? The E.T. saucer fans go on about behaves rather like a moth dancing around a light bulb. It doesn't really add up.
Scientists aren't some kind of high priests to the truth. Before a scientist can gather evidence, he'd have to have a glimmer of an idea where to start looking. There is damned little to study once the crap has been dispensed with. They also aren't father confessors for disaffected saucer fans.
Accusing critics of close-mindedness isn't going to accomplish anything. If saucer fans want to be taken seriously then they'll have to produce evidence that clearly isn't the product of fraud or wishful thinking. A bonafide landing or an example of E.T. tech is what is required here. Bad observations that could be (and probably are) something else entirely won't cut it.
Sony getting into entertainment could turn out to be a huuuuggee mistake then. Their consumer electronics arm will be competing against other electronics firms that don't have this conflict of interest.
I've cut that down to around 40 Megs. You just have an OS and a browser at that point.
They'll sue and harass anyone who tries to publically maintain a project. They'll also sue and harrass distributions and mirror sites.
WTH gives those freeloading assholes the right if the band is playing original material? The band got paid on the spot. Oh well, yet another group to throw up against the wall when the revolution comes.....
Free software is great, I use it whenever I can. But there are certain situations where closed source is neccessary for a variety of reasons. RMS doesn't seem to understand that. He simply preaches that everything should be a hundred percent free no matter what.
Perhaps so. A commodity standard is not one of those situations. Even SPAM is preferable to the world MS wants for us.
I've said more than once that the FSF would do well to use someone else as their public face. RMS could accomplish a lot more if he took to heart something like "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
You're being a zealot yourself. If this standard goes through unchanged, we'll all be paying royalties to MS if we want to use email. The mere mention of the initials RMS is all it takes to shut down all cognitive functions of most readers here. RMS' point is damned valid and wouldn't be very controversial if it came from anybody other than him.
There is no problem serious enough that the solution merits MS or any other company being allowed to hijack open infrastructures.
I run Unstable for desktops. That is comparable to Gentoo, Fedora, or any other "current" desktop distro you care to name.
Would you have considered this basic message if anyone other than RMS brought it up? Letting MS flibbertyhammer things so that you have to give MS money to use email is just plain rotten no matter who points it out. Bandwidth usage or not, Filtering gives me a spam free inbox right now and I didn't give MS one red cent to have it.
Letting MS jigger open protocols so they can say who can participate is just plain wrong. It's even wrong if they fix it so you can say "neener, neener" to RMS.
Unless I am mistaken, they are going to stick with the license used before XFree86 changed it. Changing the license to GPL would cause disruption for little good reason.
Anti-bong laws are dumb as hell. If the parody tune "Smoke-A-Bowla" is any indication, you can make bongs out of anything. Yeah, it won't look like a flowering tree or something but you could definitely put something in it and smoke it.
The best one I ever saw was a bowl fitted into a two-liter soda cap. This mated to the top half of a two liter bottle. You dunked the two-liter half into a bucket of water, screwed on the cap, lit your smokable and partially pulled up on the half-bottle. This creates a partial vacuum that draws smoke into the half-bottle. Then you unscrewed the cap and pushed down on the bottle to expel the smoke. Stoners call the things "gravity bongs" which is stupid. They're "vacuum bongs".
Unless I have the easily installable choice of X.Org, I'll have to switch distros. It sounds like a compatibility nightmare to me. Like or not, I have to use the nvidia drivers and occaisionally binaries from other systems. It looks very much to me that X.Org is the defacto Linux standard now.
From a pure architecture point of view, what Debian proposes sounds beautiful. But you still need to be able to run what everybody else is running. From what I understand, those modular trees don't even have 2D accelleration for most video cards. WTH are these guys doing?
Now if I can just apt-get install xorg and cause no dependency troubles with the rest of the apps then that is fine.
We don't need MS to fall over. It wouldn't break my heart if they did...and I think an IBM style market beating followed by reformation is more likely in the long run.
We just want to get enough market share that they can't push us around with polluted file formats and comm protocols. For that matter, we need enough share that buying politicians and filing frivolous patent suits would be a bad idea. SCO is a trial balloon as much as anything. Hopefully, they're getting the hint. As flaky as ESR is, his last little missive was right to point: We really don't care about destroying MS. We just want to write code and solve problems. On the other hand, MS DOES want to destroy us. Peaceful co-existance is still an option but it is their move.
Actually, most condoms are only around 95% effective.
For your typical slashdotter, those are betting odds. I mean seriously, how many of these guys are going to get enough partners for the virus with their name on it to come up?