Re:Confessions ... -- or the reason OSS must win!
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On Red Hat Bashing...
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· Score: 1
You want people like me not to clone your product and create an open-source version, thereby forcing you out of the proprietary software business.
And there you have it. The reason that small vertical market closed source software is the only closed source software that will ever survive.
Anyplace where there is a sufficient market to draw programmers from OSS will necasarily triumph. Nothing can stop that. It's almost like natural selection.
What? We all wanna dedicate our computers to finding "intelligent life" elsewhere in the universe? We haven't found any on this planet yet, why are we looking elsewhere? Just look at the most popular writers like Jon Katz and Matt Drudge for evidence that planet earth contains no intelligent life. . .
Uhm. This wasn't being written for an audience of lawyers. It's being written for an audience of people on the street. I bet most of them don't even know what exactly a "friend-of-court" brief is much less an amicus curiae!
Well, they have to infringe on constitutionaly guaranteed rights for them to be repealed. And, the export rules aren't removed yet. They've only proven that the source is speach and therefore constitutionally protected. However, other forms of speech are NOT constitutionally protected, this means that if the government can show that the speach is an immediate threat then they can again restrict them.
But, this puts the burden of proof on the government, not the authors.
No decision was overturned, it was upheld. That is, Bernstein had won a previous case and the court upheld that ruling in the 9th district court. Professor Junger is the one who lost his case here in the 6th district (http://samsara.law.cwru.edu).
The difference is fairly important because 2 courts making the same ruling adds some credence. This will surely go to the Supreme Court next, where I believe Bernstein will win again.
So, as the article mentioned, there's not a lot of info on tuning linux, but it's easy to find for NT. Why? you ask? I did.
The only answer I came up with is that Linux actually requires little tuning. Probably 95% of the Linux boxes out there need virtually no tuning. It runs so well out of the box that tuning it is hardly necassary.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has basically acknowledged that out of the box, NT runs like crap. They've provided lots of information on how to make it run better. I could only see them doing this if people are unhappy with its performance.
I know I'm more than happy with the performance of my untuned Linux boxes and I'm not sure that spending lots of time tuning them would really make a big difference.
Source code is not functional. In order to be "functional" something must be done to it. A specific process must be applied, namely compiling or interpreting. Much in the same way that a recipe for a cake does not become a cake until someone puts the flour, sugar, eggs, etc together and puts them into the oven and waits an hour. If you don't have the compiler or interpreter on your system then you simply have a non functional text file.
However, as many people here noted, even if source code is deemed speech it still may not be safe. It does however put the burden for providing a real reason for controlling it on the government. That is, while not all speech is protected, when free speech is violated it becomes the government's duty to produce evidence of clear and present danger in the speech.
Clearly this is just a start, but it's a necessary one. Once the courts deem it as speech and protected then it becomes the government's job to give the courts reason to remove that protection. And that, we know, is hard to do.
Many suggestions where made here. All were good ideas. However, Firewalling and Masquarading are overkill for your needs. Being a network gestapo is also not worth it.
The single biggest thing you can do is to inform and educate admins on your network. To that end, you might be best off if your IT department sponsorred some users groups and regularly gave talks about network security. Also, after finding problems in people systems simply telling them they have one is not good enough. Tell them where to get the fixes and how to fix it. Few, if any users actually WANT their systems to be insecure but they just don't know how to go about fixing their problems. Make it easy for them.
That being said, you will run into the few that simply don't care. For those you will need some method of keeping them off the net till they learn to care. Combinations of DHCP and managed switches and the like are a good start.
And lastly, you will need an absolute policy regarding any and all university owned machines, whether they are department servers or personal workstations. Especially in regards to allowing trusts between them. For instance, in the case of a student admin over a departmental server allowing trusted access from his own system for admin purposes is bad. What if the students own system is compromised? It's then a simple step into a departmental server. This can cascade into a whole slew of compromised systems.
I come from a university that had no such policies. I also have ties into the hacker community in the area. Security at the university was a well known joke. We always had a good laugh is someone mentioned the two words together.
I recall reading an interview with Linus where he said "If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won." I just wish that I could find it. If anyone does, tell me. I wanna keep a link to that around.
How about using it for a true merging of voice, data and video? I'ld love to fire up my computer and have it deliver me whatever movie I want a the moment I want it and feed it off to my TV.
** Martin
please now, no GPL is not the end of the world
on
Rumours
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· Score: 1
Bah. ..What's the point?
If you're going to write something that's a modification of GPLed software, why bother not using it? Certainly you aren't the only people that thought of it! Why not let the other people who did all the original work get to see the changes?
As a software author, why would *I* ever release software under a BSD style license? If I'm going to pour hours and hours of work into software, why would I want to let someone else take MY work and change it and make money off it and not let me see what they did with it? Or even publicly credit me with doing the work that is making them money?
If your software is soooo great that it is not something that can be released, ok, then don't use GPL. But, why should we programmers be forced to continually reinvent the wheel just cuz someone else thinks their wheel is too good for us to see?
You don't like GPL, that's you're perogative, but from a programmer who's spent too damn much time rewriting code that's already been written, I think it's the only thing that will keep software moving forward at the rate it should.
First, off, I only spent 5 minutes with it and sound wasn't working. So, I probably didn't set something up right. . .
But the real point here. . . Porting old DOS based games to unix can yield several problems and heretic shows the most obvious one. The games rely on their own game loop to run. This means they take up 100% cpu for no good reason. The game loop should be made to work inside of the multitasking environment. . .
My K6II-300 shouldn't be at 100% on a game that can be played on a 486/33. . .
Of course, since you didn't read the rest of my post you didn't notice that it simply streams mp3. Almost any mp3 player that can handle mp3 streams will play audioactive.
There are a number of ways to broadcast live audio over the net without Windows. Real Audio has already been mentioned.
However, I'm the admin for WCSB's (http://www.wcsb.org) audioactive streaming linux server> The audioactive unit (http://www.audioactive.com) is a piece of hardware that does real time mpeg3 encoding in hardware. It is made by telos systems, a well known name in the radio business.
The system was designed to run with linux. The servers to stream the mp3 stream was originally designed to run on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
You want people like me not to clone your product and create an open-source version, thereby forcing you out of the proprietary software business.
And there you have it. The reason that small vertical market closed source software is the only closed source software that will ever survive.
Anyplace where there is a sufficient market to draw programmers from OSS will necasarily triumph. Nothing can stop that. It's almost like natural selection.
** Martin
What? We all wanna dedicate our computers to finding "intelligent life" elsewhere in the universe? We haven't found any on this planet yet, why are we looking elsewhere? Just look at the most popular writers like Jon Katz and Matt Drudge for evidence that planet earth contains no intelligent life. . .
** Martin
. . .as long as it's illegal to send ANY piece of email without a valid return email that goes to the sender of the mail.
I just wanna see how many spammers stick around after their first spam with a valid reply to address. . .
** Martin
Uhm. This wasn't being written for an audience of lawyers. It's being written for an audience of people on the street. I bet most of them don't even know what exactly a "friend-of-court" brief is much less an amicus curiae!
** Martin
Well, they have to infringe on constitutionaly guaranteed rights for them to be repealed. And, the export rules aren't removed yet. They've only proven that the source is speach and therefore constitutionally protected. However, other forms of speech are NOT constitutionally protected, this means that if the government can show that the speach is an immediate threat then they can again restrict them.
But, this puts the burden of proof on the government, not the authors.
** Martin
No decision was overturned, it was upheld. That is, Bernstein had won a previous case and the court upheld that ruling in the 9th district court. Professor Junger is the one who lost his case here in the 6th district (http://samsara.law.cwru.edu).
The difference is fairly important because 2 courts making the same ruling adds some credence. This will surely go to the Supreme Court next, where I believe Bernstein will win again.
** Martin
make that "sun controlling java" and continue on your merry way. . .
ISO doesn't like java controlling sun, yet they let Fraunhoffer's PATENTED mpeg compression be an ISO standard?
** Martin
So, as the article mentioned, there's not a lot of info on tuning linux, but it's easy to find for NT. Why? you ask? I did.
The only answer I came up with is that Linux actually requires little tuning. Probably 95% of the Linux boxes out there need virtually no tuning. It runs so well out of the box that tuning it is hardly necassary.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has basically acknowledged that out of the box, NT runs like crap. They've provided lots of information on how to make it run better. I could only see them doing this if people are unhappy with its performance.
I know I'm more than happy with the performance of my untuned Linux boxes and I'm not sure that spending lots of time tuning them would really make a big difference.
** Martin
Source code is not functional. In order to be "functional" something must be done to it. A specific process must be applied, namely compiling or interpreting. Much in the same way that a recipe for a cake does not become a cake until someone puts the flour, sugar, eggs, etc together and puts them into the oven and waits an hour. If you don't have the compiler or interpreter on your system then you simply have a non functional text file.
However, as many people here noted, even if source code is deemed speech it still may not be safe. It does however put the burden for providing a real reason for controlling it on the government. That is, while not all speech is protected, when free speech is violated it becomes the government's duty to produce evidence of clear and present danger in the speech.
Clearly this is just a start, but it's a necessary one. Once the courts deem it as speech and protected then it becomes the government's job to give the courts reason to remove that protection. And that, we know, is hard to do.
** Martin
Many suggestions where made here. All were good ideas. However, Firewalling and Masquarading are overkill for your needs. Being a network gestapo is also not worth it.
The single biggest thing you can do is to inform and educate admins on your network. To that end, you might be best off if your IT department sponsorred some users groups and regularly gave talks about network security. Also, after finding problems in people systems simply telling them they have one is not good enough. Tell them where to get the fixes and how to fix it. Few, if any users actually WANT their systems to be insecure but they just don't know how to go about fixing their problems. Make it easy for them.
That being said, you will run into the few that simply don't care. For those you will need some method of keeping them off the net till they learn to care. Combinations of DHCP and managed switches and the like are a good start.
And lastly, you will need an absolute policy regarding any and all university owned machines, whether they are department servers or personal workstations. Especially in regards to allowing trusts between them. For instance, in the case of a student admin over a departmental server allowing trusted access from his own system for admin purposes is bad. What if the students own system is compromised? It's then a simple step into a departmental server. This can cascade into a whole slew of compromised systems.
I come from a university that had no such policies. I also have ties into the hacker community in the area. Security at the university was a well known joke. We always had a good laugh is someone mentioned the two words together.
** Martin
Uhm. You'll note that the GPL requires them to release any changes they make to the kernel. So, MS Linux won't be. . .
** Martin
I recall reading an interview with Linus where he said "If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won." I just wish that I could find it. If anyone does, tell me. I wanna keep a link to that around.
** Martin
How about using it for a true merging of voice, data and video? I'ld love to fire up my computer and have it deliver me whatever movie I want a the moment I want it and feed it off to my TV.
** Martin
Bah. . .What's the point?
If you're going to write something that's a modification of GPLed software, why bother not using it? Certainly you aren't the only people that thought of it! Why not let the other people who did all the original work get to see the changes?
As a software author, why would *I* ever release software under a BSD style license? If I'm going to pour hours and hours of work into software, why would I want to let someone else take MY work and change it and make money off it and not let me see what they did with it? Or even publicly credit me with doing the work that is making them money?
If your software is soooo great that it is not something that can be released, ok, then don't use GPL. But, why should we programmers be forced to continually reinvent the wheel just cuz someone else thinks their wheel is too good for us to see?
You don't like GPL, that's you're perogative, but from a programmer who's spent too damn much time rewriting code that's already been written, I think it's the only thing that will keep software moving forward at the rate it should.
** Martin
First, off, I only spent 5 minutes with it and sound wasn't working. So, I probably didn't set something up right. . .
But the real point here. . .
Porting old DOS based games to unix can yield several problems and heretic shows the most obvious one. The games rely on their own game loop to run. This means they take up 100% cpu for no good reason. The game loop should be made to work inside of the multitasking environment. . .
My K6II-300 shouldn't be at 100% on a game that can be played on a 486/33. . .
** Martin
Go to mp3.com. Click on a genre. Click on instant play. Huh? .ra files?
I'm sorry, but this is mp3.com. I'm looking for mp3 for a reason, and it certainly isn't cuz I think that RealAudio files are better quality. . .
** Martin
Uh. The FSF is exactly that. Though, they might take some restructuring for this purpose. . .
** Martin
Can't live stream via http? Odd. Audioactive does exactly that. WCSB uses it. It can be done.
** Martin
xaudio works.
it'ld be a breeze to add it to x11amp if they'ld just release the source code or give it to me to add. . .
I should add streaming to freeamp. . .
** Martin
Of course, since you didn't read the rest of my post you didn't notice that it simply streams mp3. Almost any mp3 player that can handle mp3 streams will play audioactive.
** Martin
There are a number of ways to broadcast live audio over the net without Windows. Real Audio has already been mentioned.
However, I'm the admin for WCSB's (http://www.wcsb.org) audioactive streaming linux server> The audioactive unit (http://www.audioactive.com) is a piece of hardware that does real time mpeg3 encoding in hardware. It is made by telos systems, a well known name in the radio business.
The system was designed to run with linux. The servers to stream the mp3 stream was originally designed to run on Linux.
** Martin
Problem Exists Between Wheel And Seat?
Sounds like a case of user error to me. . .