SCO is basically a puppet for interests that can't be seen as directly attacking the Linux business. Smashing SCO would not be a significant discouragement to those interests. They'll just find another sock puppet. IBM is just following the money. Dumb bulls charge the cape (SCO). Smart bulls go immediately for the matador.
The kernel doesn't make much difference as far as binary compatibility goes. Very few binaries directly interact with the kernel. Going from a 2.4 to 2.6 kernel didn't cause a single piece of software I use to quit functioning. Neither did going from 2.2 to 2.4. I once dropped a RedHat kernel onto a Mandrake machine. Everything worked.
I've seen several posts that advocate "Become a nurse!!". The grass isn't particularly green on that side either. The medical economy is increasingly in the hands of bottom-line-at-any-cost HMOs and other insurance providers. The resulting pressure is causing a trend to replace "expensive" nurses with $8.00/hr medical assistants. Since you still need a few nurses, the few nurses that remain get crushing patient loads. I tell you, I'm comforted to know that if I'm ever in the hospital for a major problem that the nurses will have all of a minute to glance at my chart and then pass the correct meds.
The "shortage" in nursing is the exact type of "shortage" we were told IT had before all of the dot bombs exploded. The result was to generate a surplus of workers and to drive the wages down. Of course, outsourcing is cheaper but since you can't outsource everything its best to keep ITT and DeVry pumping out too many graduates.
Overwork isn't the only problem either. The office politics in hospitals tend to be the most toxic sort. I'm not talking about ER type drama either, just lots and lots of backstabbing and cronyism. The administration of most medical facilities could give an IT PHB tons of pointers.
All that said, there is money to made in nursing. The quickest to get jobs are from agencies. The model for many of these is to pay >$20/hr wages with no benefits; you may even have to allow for your own tax withholding. The pay will likely be adequate in any case. However, agency nurses are very low status workers in hospitals and will get even less realistic workloads and worse patients than the regular staff. The pay in a regular staff position is comparable to a decent IT job but it will be far more stressful.
Outside of work, I could care less what other people use. If they want to use Windows or a Mac, fine. If MS wants to abuse the patent system so that I can't productively use Linux then I'm going to be pissed. I'd even give money to any politician or legal campaign that had a credible shot at deterring MS from doing that sort of thing. I'd also support the worst possible consequences for MS in that case. In the long term MS needs to quit creating implacable enemies out of people who would rather ignore them.
I've had Linux boxes install easily with all hardware working with a minimum of work; I've also had some machines be a real PITA to get everything working. Oddly enough, various versions of Windows behaved the same way. Let's call this one a wash.
Now maybe for a functioning system then freedoms must be TEMPERED with responsibility
Semantics and sidetracks aside, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. I suppose we could have "perfectly free" societies where one could sell himself into slavery or freely murder and steal but I don't think it would last very long. Any kind of "workable freedom" will have some sort of reponsibility, consequences, or obligations.
Free is when you give me the code and I have absolutely no obligation upon use.
Then there very little "free" code. The thing that comes closest is public domain code and even that may (depending on the law) come with obligations not to plagiarize. The closest FOSS licenses to what you call freedom are the BSD style licenses and they indeed come with obligations. They're trivial obligations in some ways but mandatory for all that.
You're perfectly free not to use even the tiniest bit of GPLed work in your project in the first place. You and many others seem to be confusing "freedom" with "utter lack of obligation". The GPL is intended to preserve certain freedoms for both users and developers.
A developer with no obligations to others can impose any condition he wishes on a user who desires to use his creation. If you wrote it all yourself and didn't put that tiniest bit of GPLed code in then by all means exercise that freedom.
A user with no obligations to developers can claim any benefit of the code for himself, up and to and including claims of authorship and invention. A user in that position can profit from that code in any way he wishes and return nothing to the developer....not acknowledgement, not improvements, absolutely nothing he doesn't feel like doing.
In the real world, there isn't a way for both users and developers to have no responsibilities whatsoever regarding software. There are a lot of ways to balance the situation so that both sides can retain significant freedoms hence the spectrum of FOSS licenses. Most of these compromises between original developers and downstream recipients can reasonably be called free. ALL of them have restrictions or obligations for at least the recipient of a software package. Even the "truly free" BSD licenses absolutely require that the copyright notice be preserved. It also implictly requires acknowlegement that author had the right to license his work that a way and indeed still owns the original work. It is a dangerous subtlety for the likes of SCO to miss if they try to do to the BSD community what they are doing to the Linux community.
The GPL preserves certain liberties (the so-called "four freedoms") as long as certain responsibilities are accepted. You seem to want those liberties without the responsibility, that "tiniest bit of GPLed code". If you don't use that code then there isn't much argument is there?
I suppose that leaves room for the ongoing semantic debate over what freedom actually is. But there is no reasonable definition of freedom that doesn't include responsibility.
They don't call it a cowtown for nothing. Where else outside of Texas can you drive through major shopping districts and see cows and horses out pasturing?
Linux itself is happy with files named that way. All of the filesystems that are suitable to be the root filesystem support it. The only issues may come with apps built around shell scripts to stream the files or something. Some shellcode may throw a hissy over the spaces. That said there will be plethora of alternatives if the particular helper app you had in mind doesn't like it.
If you are just going to set up a Samba fileshare or something then no real issues are going to come up. Just chuck 'em in a directory and set up your share.
The filenames can be well over 64 characters long. If I'm not mistaken, I believe the limit is 256 characters.
For business use, hardware support is pretty much a red herring. Clueful purchasing by the IT department pretty much takes care of that and it isn't too hard to do. It is a problem for Joe Sixpack; I'll grant you that.
There will NEVER be a day when there is a utopian heaven on Earth. There will always be corruption, war, famine, greed and every other problem that is born from human failings. Earth's persistant failure to become a paradise is not a valid reason to postpone space exploration. And in 200 years, your great-great-great-great grandchildren will be saying "There is no reason to explore the Oort clouds until all problems on Earth have been solved....." With that attitude, we needn't have even bothered climbing out of the ocean. "There is no use exploring the land until there is enough plankton for everybody...." And it isn't as though vast amounts of money are being spent on space exploration. We spend a hell of a lot more on porkbarrel projects and foreign misadventures that won't have any sort of meaningful return at all. At least we get some knowledge and wonderment out of the deal.
I once heard about a job seeker looking for a technician job in a Best Buy service department. The seeker claimed he was given a Microsoft Purity Test as in: "What is your opinion of Microsoft?" Answer: "I think they would be a great company if they had some ethics." I know. I know. He should have just told them what they wanted to know. On the other hand, that isn't something they needed to ask.
If that is customary Best Buy practice then I'll be more than happy buy from their competitors. Their prices aren't that great anyway. 65 dollars for a 128MB stick of PC100 RAM? Give me a break.
Why not turn "the letter" over to a DA? It might even work better if the big boss does it at the country club. I think at least a decent case could be made for threatening and extortion.
I once saw a whole bin full of 16MB units at Microcenter for 18 bucks apiece. Even a 16 or 32 MB keychain kicks the crap out of a floppy.
I just wish floppies would hurry up and die. For anything less than 512 MB....and that number is climbing, moving parts aren't called for anymore.
I wouldn't mind floppies so much if the quality was better. Way back in the day, I used to boot machines from the same floppy for months on end without a hint of trouble. I'd use other floppies for storage and expect them to last a year or more. The QC on floppies and floppy drives is just pathetic now.
The intended audience for this set of IBM documents is System Administrators not Joe Sixpack Home User. Sysadmins should be no more afraid of a shell than they are of regedit.
A corporate user of Linux will not be doing any of the things you've mentioned. IT will do that for them. Also distros like Lindows and Mandrake are moving further and further in the "just stick it in" direction every day.
He may be locked into a contract and unabled to get out of it. There is one way he could make amends a heck of a lot better than saying "sorry".
Donate an amount at least equal to what he paid SCO to one of the legal defense funds. That would at least counterbalance the extent to which he has enriched SCO.
It would probably be cheaper than the business he is going to lose if he doesn't patch things up with the FOSS community. Even the donation won't change everyone's mind but it would stop the bleeding.
I always thought that "elegance" and "clever hacks" tend to be miles apart. Here's a nice exposition on the subject of elegance. I disagree with the author about Unix but to each his own.
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/elesimp.pdf
Post prediction.
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
"At last! Gimp is as good as Photoshop!" "Is not!" "Is too, dork!" "Is not, crunchie!"
It's just a little corporate humor like Sun's offer of "assistance" to IBM for a Java Desktop migration. I suppose IBM's open source Java noises are a joke in return. I really doubt Messman believes there will be an open source Windows; he was just having a little fun.
I wouldn't bother with the microphone. I'd just slit the cones out and pull the coil wires out. A little snipping and impedance matching later gives me nice analog outputs from what is now an encrypted USB to analog converter.
My question is, is there any other software within the SUSE distro that Novell could leverage to keep the SUSE ISO's from being sold?
I don't think Novell is worried about it. Suse is just a platform for them to sell Directory Services and other middleware which they WON'T be giving away. More Suse installs means more data centers ready to give their payware a try.
The actual heavy lifting is shared, and the front-ends are only interfaces to use it.
This is HUGE point that a lot of whingers missed about Debian's new installer. Everyone is whining that "it looks just like their old one". It will be easy to hang whatever frontend you on top of it while having other features like hardware detection and modular maintainability. The new "installer" is really meant to be "installer infrastructure".
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SCO is basically a puppet for interests that can't be seen as directly attacking the Linux business. Smashing SCO would not be a significant discouragement to those interests. They'll just find another sock puppet. IBM is just following the money. Dumb bulls charge the cape (SCO). Smart bulls go immediately for the matador.
The kernel doesn't make much difference as far as binary compatibility goes. Very few binaries directly interact with the kernel. Going from a 2.4 to 2.6 kernel didn't cause a single piece of software I use to quit functioning. Neither did going from 2.2 to 2.4. I once dropped a RedHat kernel onto a Mandrake machine. Everything worked.
Now the userland libraries on the other hand....
I've seen several posts that advocate "Become a nurse!!". The grass isn't particularly green on that side either. The medical economy is increasingly in the hands of bottom-line-at-any-cost HMOs and other insurance providers. The resulting pressure is causing a trend to replace "expensive" nurses with $8.00/hr medical assistants. Since you still need a few nurses, the few nurses that remain get crushing patient loads. I tell you, I'm comforted to know that if I'm ever in the hospital for a major problem that the nurses will have all of a minute to glance at my chart and then pass the correct meds.
The "shortage" in nursing is the exact type of "shortage" we were told IT had before all of the dot bombs exploded. The result was to generate a surplus of workers and to drive the wages down. Of course, outsourcing is cheaper but since you can't outsource everything its best to keep ITT and DeVry pumping out too many graduates.
Overwork isn't the only problem either. The office politics in hospitals tend to be the most toxic sort. I'm not talking about ER type drama either, just lots and lots of backstabbing and cronyism. The administration of most medical facilities could give an IT PHB tons of pointers.
All that said, there is money to made in nursing. The quickest to get jobs are from agencies. The model for many of these is to pay >$20/hr wages with no benefits; you may even have to allow for your own tax withholding. The pay will likely be adequate in any case. However, agency nurses are very low status workers in hospitals and will get even less realistic workloads and worse patients than the regular staff. The pay in a regular staff position is comparable to a decent IT job but it will be far more stressful.
I wonder how green the grass is in construction?
Outside of work, I could care less what other people use. If they want to use Windows or a Mac, fine. If MS wants to abuse the patent system so that I can't productively use Linux then I'm going to be pissed. I'd even give money to any politician or legal campaign that had a credible shot at deterring MS from doing that sort of thing. I'd also support the worst possible consequences for MS in that case. In the long term MS needs to quit creating implacable enemies out of people who would rather ignore them.
I've had Linux boxes install easily with all hardware working with a minimum of work; I've also had some machines be a real PITA to get everything working. Oddly enough, various versions of Windows behaved the same way. Let's call this one a wash.
Now maybe for a functioning system then freedoms must be TEMPERED with responsibility
Semantics and sidetracks aside, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. I suppose we could have "perfectly free" societies where one could sell himself into slavery or freely murder and steal but I don't think it would last very long. Any kind of "workable freedom" will have some sort of reponsibility, consequences, or obligations.
Free is when you give me the code and I have absolutely no obligation upon use.
Then there very little "free" code. The thing that comes closest is public domain code and even that may (depending on the law) come with obligations not to plagiarize. The closest FOSS licenses to what you call freedom are the BSD style licenses and they indeed come with obligations. They're trivial obligations in some ways but mandatory for all that.
You're perfectly free not to use even the tiniest bit of GPLed work in your project in the first place. You and many others seem to be confusing "freedom" with "utter lack of obligation". The GPL is intended to preserve certain freedoms for both users and developers.
A developer with no obligations to others can impose any condition he wishes on a user who desires to use his creation. If you wrote it all yourself and didn't put that tiniest bit of GPLed code in then by all means exercise that freedom.
A user with no obligations to developers can claim any benefit of the code for himself, up and to and including claims of authorship and invention. A user in that position can profit from that code in any way he wishes and return nothing to the developer....not acknowledgement, not improvements, absolutely nothing he doesn't feel like doing.
In the real world, there isn't a way for both users and developers to have no responsibilities whatsoever regarding software. There are a lot of ways to balance the situation so that both sides can retain significant freedoms hence the spectrum of FOSS licenses. Most of these compromises between original developers and downstream recipients can reasonably be called free. ALL of them have restrictions or obligations for at least the recipient of a software package. Even the "truly free" BSD licenses absolutely require that the copyright notice be preserved. It also implictly requires acknowlegement that author had the right to license his work that a way and indeed still owns the original work. It is a dangerous subtlety for the likes of SCO to miss if they try to do to the BSD community what they are doing to the Linux community.
The GPL preserves certain liberties (the so-called "four freedoms") as long as certain responsibilities are accepted. You seem to want those liberties without the responsibility, that "tiniest bit of GPLed code". If you don't use that code then there isn't much argument is there?
I suppose that leaves room for the ongoing semantic debate over what freedom actually is. But there is no reasonable definition of freedom that doesn't include responsibility.
They don't call it a cowtown for nothing. Where else outside of Texas can you drive through major shopping districts and see cows and horses out pasturing?
Linux itself is happy with files named that way. All of the filesystems that are suitable to be the root filesystem support it. The only issues may come with apps built around shell scripts to stream the files or something. Some shellcode may throw a hissy over the spaces. That said there will be plethora of alternatives if the particular helper app you had in mind doesn't like it.
If you are just going to set up a Samba fileshare or something then no real issues are going to come up. Just chuck 'em in a directory and set up your share.
The filenames can be well over 64 characters long. If I'm not mistaken, I believe the limit is 256 characters.
For business use, hardware support is pretty much a red herring. Clueful purchasing by the IT department pretty much takes care of that and it isn't too hard to do. It is a problem for Joe Sixpack; I'll grant you that.
Wal-Mart can also threaten physical CD sales in their stores. They have zero problems coercing vendors by any means at their disposal.
There will NEVER be a day when there is a utopian heaven on Earth. There will always be corruption, war, famine, greed and every other problem that is born from human failings. Earth's persistant failure to become a paradise is not a valid reason to postpone space exploration. And in 200 years, your great-great-great-great grandchildren will be saying "There is no reason to explore the Oort clouds until all problems on Earth have been solved....." With that attitude, we needn't have even bothered climbing out of the ocean. "There is no use exploring the land until there is enough plankton for everybody...." And it isn't as though vast amounts of money are being spent on space exploration. We spend a hell of a lot more on porkbarrel projects and foreign misadventures that won't have any sort of meaningful return at all. At least we get some knowledge and wonderment out of the deal.
I once heard about a job seeker looking for a technician job in a Best Buy service department. The seeker claimed he was given a Microsoft Purity Test as in: "What is your opinion of Microsoft?"
Answer: "I think they would be a great company if they had some ethics." I know. I know. He should have just told them what they wanted to know. On the other hand, that isn't something they needed to ask.
If that is customary Best Buy practice then I'll be more than happy buy from their competitors. Their prices aren't that great anyway. 65 dollars for a 128MB stick of PC100 RAM? Give me a break.
Why not turn "the letter" over to a DA? It might even work better if the big boss does it at the country club. I think at least a decent case could be made for threatening and extortion.
though admittedly they are really expensive
I once saw a whole bin full of 16MB units at Microcenter for 18 bucks apiece. Even a 16 or 32 MB keychain kicks the crap out of a floppy.
I just wish floppies would hurry up and die. For anything less than 512 MB....and that number is climbing, moving parts aren't called for anymore.
I wouldn't mind floppies so much if the quality was better. Way back in the day, I used to boot machines from the same floppy for months on end without a hint of trouble. I'd use other floppies for storage and expect them to last a year or more. The QC on floppies and floppy drives is just pathetic now.
Que up some cheezy 80s cartoon sound effects for this one:
"Copyright!"
"Trademarks!"
"Trade Secrets!"
"Patents!"
" 'IP!' " -- The kid with "Heart" had a really lame power too didn't he?
"When your powers combine they form Captain Nocompetition!"
"Go Nocompetition!!"
IBM isn't giving z-series machines or the service contracts that go with them away......
The intended audience for this set of IBM documents is System Administrators not Joe Sixpack Home User. Sysadmins should be no more afraid of a shell than they are of regedit.
A corporate user of Linux will not be doing any of the things you've mentioned. IT will do that for them. Also distros like Lindows and Mandrake are moving further and further in the "just stick it in" direction every day.
He may be locked into a contract and unabled to get out of it. There is one way he could make amends a heck of a lot better than saying "sorry".
Donate an amount at least equal to what he paid SCO to one of the legal defense funds. That would at least counterbalance the extent to which he has enriched SCO.
It would probably be cheaper than the business he is going to lose if he doesn't patch things up with the FOSS community. Even the donation won't change everyone's mind but it would stop the bleeding.
I always thought that "elegance" and "clever hacks" tend to be miles apart. Here's a nice exposition on the subject of elegance. I disagree with the author about Unix but to each his own.
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/elesimp.pdf
"At last! Gimp is as good as Photoshop!"
"Is not!"
"Is too, dork!"
"Is not, crunchie!"
"blah....blah....whinge...blah....."
It's just a little corporate humor like Sun's offer of "assistance" to IBM for a Java Desktop migration. I suppose IBM's open source Java noises are a joke in return. I really doubt Messman believes there will be an open source Windows; he was just having a little fun.
I wouldn't bother with the microphone. I'd just slit the cones out and pull the coil wires out. A little snipping and impedance matching later gives me nice analog outputs from what is now an encrypted USB to analog converter.
My question is, is there any other software within the SUSE distro that Novell could leverage to keep the SUSE ISO's from being sold?
I don't think Novell is worried about it. Suse is just a platform for them to sell Directory Services and other middleware which they WON'T be giving away. More Suse installs means more data centers ready to give their payware a try.
The actual heavy lifting is shared, and the front-ends are only interfaces to use it.
This is HUGE point that a lot of whingers missed about Debian's new installer. Everyone is whining that "it looks just like their old one". It will be easy to hang whatever frontend you on top of it while having other features like hardware detection and modular maintainability. The new "installer" is really meant to be "installer infrastructure".