I started my Linux experience with SLS and a 0.99 kernel. Then I switched to Slackware, then flirted with Caldera. Then for a while I ran RedHat on my servers, before switching in about 1999 to Mandrake on all machines.
And then I decided to experiment with Debian on a test box, and fell in love. I now have it on my desktop, my laptop, and three out of my five servers.
Why?
The package manager. It just works. It just works reliably, installing all the right stuff, resolving all the dependencies. When there are conflicts (not often) it reports them and suggests remedies. In short, the Debian package manager is to all other UN*X package systems I've ever seen as a computer is to a tally-stick. No-one who has used dselect will ever go back to RPM.
When I first went to University, I signed up for a Computing Science course. It was very, very bad. So, having averaged 80% on coursework through the year, when it came to the end of first year exam instead of answering any of the questions on the paper I wrote a detailed critique of what was wrong with the course.
Naturally, I got zero marks for that exam, and went on to take a degree in something completely different, including a Philosophy minor. Immediately on graduating I got head-hunted by the systems engineering department, and within two year was on the academic staff of the Computing Department.
That's fifteen years ago, and I've been getting paid for writing (and teaching people to write) interesting software ever since. I still don't have any computing qualification. The moral of the story: you don't take a course in quill-cutting to learn how to write great literature. In the Computing Department, when I was a student, they were teaching us to write bar-graph generators in PASCAL on punch-cards to be fed into mainframes; in the Philosophy department they were teaching us to write theorem provers and inference engines in LISP and PROLOG (with a side order on the meta-mathematical basis for the designs of the language interpreters themselves) on micro-computers. Guess which turned out to be more relevent in the real world?
Unfortunately, any StrongArm-based PDA (such as the iPaq) has no math coprocessor, IIRC, so it would make a pretty lousy host for any non-trivial math software. Basic graphing or spreadsheet-level calculations would be fine, but anything requiring a lot of floating-point math is going to get ugly.
People still don't get it about RISC, do they? When I got the very first ARM processor machine, back in 1988, it could outperform on mathematical stuff (and pretty much everything else) every machine the University I worked for owned, by up to two orders of magnitude. Yup, that's right, over a hundred times as fast on maths as the high end LISP machines I was paid to work on; over ten times as fast on maths as a Sun 2 or a DEC VAX. The ARM is a fast chip. Sure, you have to do your floating point in software. It does not really matter; a CISC chip which could outperform it on floating point maths would also require a battery you could not put in your pocket.
Your ignorance is exceeded only by your stupidity. CGI is, and I quote:
"A set of rules that describe how a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI program') talks to the web server."
Brother, you seem to have a beam in your eye.
Although it is possible to compile PHP to use the Common Gateway Interface, this is extremely rarely done (I do still have one server on which it is done, but that's because that particular server has had no software change since 1996). Almost all PHP is now run in process (as, indeed, can PERL be scripts if you use Apache's mod_perl). The Common Gateway Interface is now very rarely used in professional or production projects, although it remains appropriate for quick'n'dirty hacks.
But, assuming you hadn't been talking utter nonsence, a quick look at jobserve, one of the biggest UK jobs sites, shows 812 ASP-related jobs, 351 Perl-related jobs, and 70 PHP-related jobs.
... and 2002 Java related jobs, of which the majority will be server-side. So you're comprehensively wrong on all points.
CGI is, indeed,
"A set of rules that describe how a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI program') talks to the web server." However, it isn't the only set of rules or the best set of rules, and most server-side dynamic content is now produced in-process one way or another. CGI is just too inefficient for production use.
I don't want a device which has to be periodically synced to another device. I don't want a device which has large quantities of memory. I most particularly don't want to have to carry multiple devices when I'm on the move.
So a portable device has to be a phone. It also has to be (across the same cellphone link) a web browser - a web browser complying with normal Web standards, not a WAP device.
And it has to be able to run something equivalent to VNC over SSH across the same link.
What does it look like? It needs to be small, to fit comfortably in a pocket. But at the same time to have the largest possible display. Provided the display is touch sensitive, it doesn't need any keyboard, jog-wheel, cursor keys or whatever implemented in hardware - all these can be soft. Handwriting recognition would be good, but isn't critical. It may be a one-piece unit with a flip-over keypad like the Sony/Ericsson P800; it could even be a clamshell like the Nokia 9120; but frankly it doesn't need either.
And the good news is that thanks to those very clever people in Scandinavia, it's all available now.
French, constantly try to impose ridiculous rules on the language. For instance, "chat" has taken hold as the French word for Internet chatting.
So let me get this right. The English translation of the French word for on line chatting is 'pussy'? This merely confirms what the English have always suspected about the French.
I like the way computer geeks think anyone who doesn't know as much about computers as they do are idiots. I freely admit that some people are idiots, but others are just ignorant.
Can you repair your own car?
yes
Build your own house?
yes
Hell, can you cook your own food?
yes
Then why are these people dumb because they aren't computer experts?/em>
There's nothing particularly complex about repairing a car. Building houses is, in fact, pretty simple. Cooking is easy. Managing a general purpose information processing device is genuinely hard.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: most people are too stupid to use a computer. More to the point, most people don't need a computer. They need an information appliance which is capable of performing a very limited range of functions with very limited user configurability. If people had devices which weren't capable of running arbitrary bits of code, they wouldn't get viruses and they wouldn't unknowingly publish their private information to the world.
They do these things because they're given access to extremely complicated, subtle and sophisticated machines and treat them as if they were toasters. This is stupid, but most people are too stopid or too ignorant to know better.
I know this sounds arrgant. It is arrogant. But it's also true. Not everyone is tall enough to play big-league basketball, and not everyone is clueful enough to use a computer.
Speaking as a person who used to use gopher quite a bit - how many gopher links are left on the WWW? Three?
That really isn't the point. It would not take many minutes to put up a gopher server with a Win 32 rootkit as content, and then put an innocent but interesting looking link into a web page ('free live world cup scores' would do nicely just now) with an href pointing to that server, and, ideally, one of those annoying JavaScript scrollers in the browser status display to prevent the user from noticing they're about to click a gopher link, and, hey! That's a few more suckers rooted. It will probably go through most firewalls, too.
If you (or your organisation) still use Internet Explorer, I would treat this as serious. Change your default IE install to have gopher point to a safe machine of your own; block gopher at your firewall; and, ideally, switch to Opera 6, Netscape 6, or Mozilla as your organisation's default browser.
This isn't going to be the last security hole found in IE.
Some Linux people will be able to live with this and they will stick with the operating system they helped build. Most however will probably move to some other fringe OS like AtheOS, OpenBEOS, QNX, or most likely a BSD variant.
Some of UL's methods may be questionable - but Linux really needs this kind of kick in the ass from a standardization standpoint.
Linux really needs this like a hole in the head. If the Linux project gets sufficiently hijacked by commercial interests, then yes, you're right, the people with the talent to write and maintain an operating system and the commitment and willingness to do it for love will drift off to other projects. Companies like the UnitedLinux conspirators cannot afford to pay for developing and maintaining an operating system. So if they succeed in shooting the geese that lay the golden eggs, they will die.
The UnitedLinux licensing proposals are stupid, blinkered, narrow minded, and ultimately self-defeating. They need to be dropped and dropped now.
It only takes me about 10-15 minutes the get my system back up if I had to reinstall. It's all my personal files that can't be replaced that would make the experience traumatic.
How many ELF files do you have in your personal partition, for heaven's sake? And even if you do, you presumably have the source code as well, or why is it in your personal partition? In any case a quick 'find $HOME -type f -perm +001 -exec chmod a-w {} \;' will solve the problem.
No it won't. In the next couple decades molecular nanotechnology will be quite mature.
Technofix.
When I was a kid, people built nuclear power stations. 'Don't worry', they said, 'in the next couple of decades nuclear reprocessing technology will be quite mature'. Now it's time to pull the bloody things down, and still no-one has come up with a safe solution to the waste problem. But never mind. Tachnology will fix everything. It's just around the corner.
As for the proprietary software, something has to be done to ensure that they survive. Otherwise, there will be only two Linux companies, and eventually there will only be IBM.
And there will still be Debian. Don't get me wrong: I run a company, and my company makes it's living from writing software. All the software we write is released under open license (in fact BSD, but recent events are pushing us more towards GPL). We make our money because the people who need the software in the first place pay us to develop it. That seems fine to me. Charging a second customer for software you've already developed seems to me simply dishonest, so we don't do it.
It doesn't seem to me to matter whether there are commercial Linux distributions or not. It certainly doesn't seem to me to be worth selling the principles of free software in order to allow these businesses to survive. There will continue to be high-quality volunteer maintained Debian distributions, and frankly that's all we need.
Back in 94 I started using Linux because the HURD wasn't ready. The HURD still isn't ready. That's OK, things take time. But what's not OK is for RMS to write:
If you can ignore the facts and believe that Linus Torvalds
developed the whole system starting in 1991, or if you can ignore your
ordinary principles of fairness and believe that Torvalds should get
the sole credit even though he didn't do that...
Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system,
and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at
these events and accuse the GNU Project of egotism.
Huh?
Well, no, Richard, I'm sorry. This is like saying 'this is out bridge, because we built the handrails'. Linus did the hard bit, the bit you couldn't do; and he did it brilliantly well. In fact he did three entirely different hard bits, all of which you couldn't do. The first is, he wrote an operating system kernel which worked. Now you're entitled to say that a kernel is not in and of itself an operating system, and that's true. But it is the critical structural element without which a heap of assorted parts don't constitute an operating system. So that's Linus' first achievement: a technical achievement, and a big one.
The second hard bit that Linus did which the Free Software Foundation has clearly failed to do is to evolve a development methodology which allows - encourages - very many people to take part, and which manages to integrate and exploit the fruits of all their labours. That's Linus' second achievement: a social achievement, and a big one.
But Linus third achievement is the key one, and it is key to your project of making Free Software available to ordinary people all over the world. He has brought the system to critical mass, where it's robust enough and stable enough for many people to use it, and in consequence many people are motivated to port many programs to it. This is Linus' third achievement. It's a cultural achievement, and it is an absolutely critical one without which any Free Software movement is ultimately vacuous and solipsistic.
Yes, Richard, my system is a GNU/Linux system. But it is also and equally a KDE/Linux system and an Apache/Linux system. Your contribution - the Free Software Foundation's contribution - is critical; but so is that of the Apache crew and of the KDE crew and the Debian crew and many others. And although I agree that your contributions - especially on the issues of licenses and of the underlying social principles of what we are doing - are critically important, without Linus achievement your achievement would be a footnote on the eccentric fringe of history.
Disparaging Linus not only does you no credit. It actually undermines what you are setting out to achieve. It not only distracts from the important work you are doing on defending the information commons on which we all depend: it undermines your authority to speak on our behalf.
I know that you are a great hacker. I use Emacs every day, and appreciate it greatly; much of what I do depends on things compiled with GCC. But you must realise that your philosophical work is much more important - much more critical - than your software. You were prescient in seeing the assault on the information commons and in making a stand against it, and that will be the contribution for which you will be remembered.
I have no doubt that one day the HURD will be usable. I have no doubt that the HURD, when usable, will be an interesting opererating system kernel. But the critical issue is that you, and your team, could not deliver it when it was needed, and that Linus could. It does you no harm - it diminishes you in no way - to recognise and give honour to that achievement. And it is peurile and childish to pretend that the conrtibution of the Free Software Foundation is any more important to the operating system on my desktop, on my servers, than the contribution of the Apache Foundation and its contributors or of the KDE project and its contributors. It is mean spirited to pretend that without the critical, fundamental contribution of Linus Torvalds, there would be a usable free operating system for ordinary people around the world to use.
Life is not fair. It isn't fair that the Debian KDE/Apache/GNU/Linux operating system on my desk just gets called Linux, when it comprises 796 packages by literally thousands of different authors. After all, forty or so of those packages are GNU softare. Roughly one tenth, or to put it differently, 60% of the KDE project's contribution. But, I say again, the single, critical component that welds the work of the KDE project, and the Apache foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, and hundreds of other contributors contributions into a usable whole is Linus Torvald's contribution and it's only reasonable that he should get top billing.
Grow up. Give credit where it is due, and concentrate on the parts of your work which are really critical - not just to you but to all of us. Concentrate on articulating the principles which allow an information commons in software to exist, and defending that commons from all encroachments. That is your task to do, which you do uniquely well. The honour which Linus has earned does not diminish or detract from the honour which you have earned. It is your carping, your disparagement, your evident jealousy, which detracts and diminishes your honour. Grow up and stop it.
The Department of Defense may be prohibited from '...purchasing any software that has not undergone security testing by the NSA...', but it is prohibited from using software that has not undergone security testing?
You don't need to purchase open source software.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
I personally invented and used tabbed palettes in 1986
if this is true, then Macromedia's lawyers would LOVE to talk to you (Seriously! I am not being sarcastic here).
It is true, I can prove it, and I have written to them (more than six months ago). They didn't get back to me.
There are VERY strict requirements for obtaining patents and clearing them from prior art. These rules are applied without mercy by the PTO. Despite popular opinion, it is HARD to get a patent.
This is complete nonsense. Example: IBM have a US patent on stylesheets. If they had patented stylesheets back in the sixties when they were working on the beginnings of SGML this might have been reasonable, but they didn't; they patented them in the eighties, when stylesheets were widely used. Note that I'm not saying that IBM invented stylesheets; I don't know whether they did or not. But they were working in the field early enough and may have done so. In any case the patent should not have been granted, because the invention of stylesheets was obvious (just as, to return to my own case, the invention of tabbed palettes was obvious - I just happened to be one of the early people programming windowing systems on large bitmapped displays). Similarly, BT registered their notorious US patent on hyperlinks in the late seventies or early eighties - but hyperlinks had been described thirty years before and implemented fifteen years before (and, indeed, were obvious once you had the technology).
The claim that the US Patent Office are the least bit rigorous is laughable: they are grossly lax and irresponsible, and if this doesn't get sorted out it won't be long before EU states start refusing to recognise any US patents.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
One thing I've NEVER seen here is a CONSTRUCTIVE criticism of software patents. I've seen plenty of comments that reduce down to "patents are bad" but no one ever says why
Adobe recently sued Macromedia (and won) over their patent on tabbed palettes. What's wrong with that? Well, I personally invented and used tabbed palettes in 1986, over ten years before Adobe patented them. I'm not saying I was the first to invent them, but I hadn't seen anyone else's implementation when I wrote mine. I'm quite prepared to believe that the guy at Adobe who reinvented them ten years later hadn't seen my implementation, but that's not the point. The Adobe patent is only one of thirteen US software patents where I had personally used the technique described before the patent was applied for. Most of those techniques were techniques which were in common use - things every programmer did - so there can be no possibility that the companies which patented them did hnot know there was prior art.
This is the problem. If software patents are allowed, then no one can write any code without having it reviewed line-by-line by a specialist, up-to-date patent lawyer, and even that won't find every patent violation. Individuals and small companies can't write software without the risk of being sued over patents which have been granted by a lax and supine patent office to cynical and dishonest applicants (yes, IBM, BT, AT&T, this specifically means you). Even where you know there's prior art, you will have a very hard job of proving it. I have source code to some of my work in a sealed envelope in a bank vault, with a lawyer's dated signature over the seal. Have you?
I strongly believe that if patents are allowed, there should be a very high standard of checking for prior art, and if prior art is found which the applicant might reasonably be expected to have been aware of there should be savage consequences for the applicant - like revoking their entire patent portfolio and debarring them from registering any patents for the next five years.
Copyright was something an author sold a publisher, and didn't exist in any form, really, until it got put in the American constitiution.
Why are Americans so embarassingly ignorant of history? Are schools in the United States really that bad?
Unsurprisingly, copyright in the United Kingdom dates back to before the revolting colonies threw their tea out of the pram. And Alan is absolutely right that - in England, anyway - it was based on the 1662 Licensing Act, whose aim was primarily censorship.
I'm not claiming the United Kingdom had the first copyright laws; I think at least the French and the Dutch had them before we did. But we had them before the United States even existed.
Every time someone has to change some code, you've just forced them to double their workload, and change some comments too...
Inline comments are a major headache - they're painful to write, painful to maintain, and dangerous if they aren't maintained.
... and absolutely essential to the poor bastard who comes after you - without them he has zero chance. I spent some hours on the phone a couple of days ago talking some poor lad in the states through the trickier bits of one of my open source packages. Fortunately it is inline-commented, so I at least knew what I had been intending to do.
I agree with everything you say about the nuisance of maintaining comments, and I agree with everything you say about the problems that happen when you fail adequately to maintain comments. It's a chore; but it's a vital chore. It's got to be done.
many unstable countries need harsh dictatorships so they don't plunge into chaos. So what if a dictator kills 3,000 political enemies?
There was nothing unstable about Chile - it was a perfectly normal democracy, operating in a perfectly normal way, with a perfectly normal slightly left of centre government, until the United States destabilised it.
Slashdot Mirror
I started my Linux experience with SLS and a 0.99 kernel. Then I switched to Slackware, then flirted with Caldera. Then for a while I ran RedHat on my servers, before switching in about 1999 to Mandrake on all machines.
And then I decided to experiment with Debian on a test box, and fell in love. I now have it on my desktop, my laptop, and three out of my five servers.
Why?
The package manager. It just works. It just works reliably, installing all the right stuff, resolving all the dependencies. When there are conflicts (not often) it reports them and suggests remedies. In short, the Debian package manager is to all other UN*X package systems I've ever seen as a computer is to a tally-stick. No-one who has used dselect will ever go back to RPM.
Hey!
You can't suggest installing Windows on Slashdot!
Naturally, I got zero marks for that exam, and went on to take a degree in something completely different, including a Philosophy minor. Immediately on graduating I got head-hunted by the systems engineering department, and within two year was on the academic staff of the Computing Department.
That's fifteen years ago, and I've been getting paid for writing (and teaching people to write) interesting software ever since. I still don't have any computing qualification. The moral of the story: you don't take a course in quill-cutting to learn how to write great literature. In the Computing Department, when I was a student, they were teaching us to write bar-graph generators in PASCAL on punch-cards to be fed into mainframes; in the Philosophy department they were teaching us to write theorem provers and inference engines in LISP and PROLOG (with a side order on the meta-mathematical basis for the designs of the language interpreters themselves) on micro-computers. Guess which turned out to be more relevent in the real world?
People still don't get it about RISC, do they? When I got the very first ARM processor machine, back in 1988, it could outperform on mathematical stuff (and pretty much everything else) every machine the University I worked for owned, by up to two orders of magnitude. Yup, that's right, over a hundred times as fast on maths as the high end LISP machines I was paid to work on; over ten times as fast on maths as a Sun 2 or a DEC VAX. The ARM is a fast chip. Sure, you have to do your floating point in software. It does not really matter; a CISC chip which could outperform it on floating point maths would also require a battery you could not put in your pocket.
What? A grammar flame? On Slashdot? Moi? Perish the thought!
Simon, whose teachers did not use grammar checkers.
Which language would that be, then? Would it be BASIC, or COBOL or ADA or Python or FORTH or PASCAL or C or PERL or FORTRAN or LISP or Scheme or Smalltalk or one of these?
In fact, surprise, surprise, there are over 200 different programming languages you can use to write Java VM programs in.
Brother, you seem to have a beam in your eye.
Although it is possible to compile PHP to use the Common Gateway Interface, this is extremely rarely done (I do still have one server on which it is done, but that's because that particular server has had no software change since 1996). Almost all PHP is now run in process (as, indeed, can PERL be scripts if you use Apache's mod_perl). The Common Gateway Interface is now very rarely used in professional or production projects, although it remains appropriate for quick'n'dirty hacks.
... and 2002 Java related jobs, of which the majority will be server-side. So you're comprehensively wrong on all points.
CGI is, indeed, " A set of rules that describe how a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI program') talks to the web server." However, it isn't the only set of rules or the best set of rules, and most server-side dynamic content is now produced in-process one way or another. CGI is just too inefficient for production use.
No, you've got that wrong: it's MS-PITA, the Microsft Protocol for Internet Telecommunications Access.
It's <URL:http://www.freeplay.net/newsite/product/fr eecharge.html>, actually.
So a portable device has to be a phone. It also has to be (across the same cellphone link) a web browser - a web browser complying with normal Web standards, not a WAP device. And it has to be able to run something equivalent to VNC over SSH across the same link.
What does it look like? It needs to be small, to fit comfortably in a pocket. But at the same time to have the largest possible display. Provided the display is touch sensitive, it doesn't need any keyboard, jog-wheel, cursor keys or whatever implemented in hardware - all these can be soft. Handwriting recognition would be good, but isn't critical. It may be a one-piece unit with a flip-over keypad like the Sony/Ericsson P800; it could even be a clamshell like the Nokia 9120; but frankly it doesn't need either.
And the good news is that thanks to those very clever people in Scandinavia, it's all available now.
So let me get this right. The English translation of the French word for on line chatting is 'pussy'? This merely confirms what the English have always suspected about the French.
yes
yes
yes
There's nothing particularly complex about repairing a car. Building houses is, in fact, pretty simple. Cooking is easy. Managing a general purpose information processing device is genuinely hard.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: most people are too stupid to use a computer . More to the point, most people don't need a computer. They need an information appliance which is capable of performing a very limited range of functions with very limited user configurability. If people had devices which weren't capable of running arbitrary bits of code, they wouldn't get viruses and they wouldn't unknowingly publish their private information to the world.
They do these things because they're given access to extremely complicated, subtle and sophisticated machines and treat them as if they were toasters. This is stupid, but most people are too stopid or too ignorant to know better.
I know this sounds arrgant. It is arrogant. But it's also true. Not everyone is tall enough to play big-league basketball, and not everyone is clueful enough to use a computer.
That really isn't the point. It would not take many minutes to put up a gopher server with a Win 32 rootkit as content, and then put an innocent but interesting looking link into a web page ('free live world cup scores' would do nicely just now) with an href pointing to that server, and, ideally, one of those annoying JavaScript scrollers in the browser status display to prevent the user from noticing they're about to click a gopher link, and, hey! That's a few more suckers rooted. It will probably go through most firewalls, too.
If you (or your organisation) still use Internet Explorer, I would treat this as serious. Change your default IE install to have gopher point to a safe machine of your own; block gopher at your firewall; and, ideally, switch to Opera 6, Netscape 6, or Mozilla as your organisation's default browser.
This isn't going to be the last security hole found in IE.
Linux really needs this like a hole in the head. If the Linux project gets sufficiently hijacked by commercial interests, then yes, you're right, the people with the talent to write and maintain an operating system and the commitment and willingness to do it for love will drift off to other projects. Companies like the UnitedLinux conspirators cannot afford to pay for developing and maintaining an operating system. So if they succeed in shooting the geese that lay the golden eggs, they will die.
The UnitedLinux licensing proposals are stupid, blinkered, narrow minded, and ultimately self-defeating. They need to be dropped and dropped now.
How many ELF files do you have in your personal partition, for heaven's sake? And even if you do, you presumably have the source code as well, or why is it in your personal partition? In any case a quick 'find $HOME -type f -perm +001 -exec chmod a-w {} \;' will solve the problem.
Technofix.
When I was a kid, people built nuclear power stations. 'Don't worry', they said, 'in the next couple of decades nuclear reprocessing technology will be quite mature'. Now it's time to pull the bloody things down, and still no-one has come up with a safe solution to the waste problem. But never mind. Tachnology will fix everything. It's just around the corner.
And there will be jam for tea tomorrow.
And there will still be Debian. Don't get me wrong: I run a company, and my company makes it's living from writing software. All the software we write is released under open license (in fact BSD, but recent events are pushing us more towards GPL). We make our money because the people who need the software in the first place pay us to develop it. That seems fine to me. Charging a second customer for software you've already developed seems to me simply dishonest, so we don't do it.
It doesn't seem to me to matter whether there are commercial Linux distributions or not. It certainly doesn't seem to me to be worth selling the principles of free software in order to allow these businesses to survive. There will continue to be high-quality volunteer maintained Debian distributions, and frankly that's all we need.
Back in 94 I started using Linux because the HURD wasn't ready. The HURD still isn't ready. That's OK, things take time. But what's not OK is for RMS to write:
If you can ignore the facts and believe that Linus Torvalds developed the whole system starting in 1991, or if you can ignore your ordinary principles of fairness and believe that Torvalds should get the sole credit even though he didn't do that... Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the GNU Project of egotism.Huh?
Well, no, Richard, I'm sorry. This is like saying 'this is out bridge, because we built the handrails'. Linus did the hard bit, the bit you couldn't do; and he did it brilliantly well. In fact he did three entirely different hard bits, all of which you couldn't do. The first is, he wrote an operating system kernel which worked. Now you're entitled to say that a kernel is not in and of itself an operating system, and that's true. But it is the critical structural element without which a heap of assorted parts don't constitute an operating system. So that's Linus' first achievement: a technical achievement, and a big one.
The second hard bit that Linus did which the Free Software Foundation has clearly failed to do is to evolve a development methodology which allows - encourages - very many people to take part, and which manages to integrate and exploit the fruits of all their labours. That's Linus' second achievement: a social achievement, and a big one.
But Linus third achievement is the key one, and it is key to your project of making Free Software available to ordinary people all over the world. He has brought the system to critical mass, where it's robust enough and stable enough for many people to use it, and in consequence many people are motivated to port many programs to it. This is Linus' third achievement. It's a cultural achievement, and it is an absolutely critical one without which any Free Software movement is ultimately vacuous and solipsistic.
Yes, Richard, my system is a GNU/Linux system. But it is also and equally a KDE/Linux system and an Apache/Linux system. Your contribution - the Free Software Foundation's contribution - is critical; but so is that of the Apache crew and of the KDE crew and the Debian crew and many others. And although I agree that your contributions - especially on the issues of licenses and of the underlying social principles of what we are doing - are critically important, without Linus achievement your achievement would be a footnote on the eccentric fringe of history.
Disparaging Linus not only does you no credit. It actually undermines what you are setting out to achieve. It not only distracts from the important work you are doing on defending the information commons on which we all depend: it undermines your authority to speak on our behalf.
I know that you are a great hacker. I use Emacs every day, and appreciate it greatly; much of what I do depends on things compiled with GCC. But you must realise that your philosophical work is much more important - much more critical - than your software. You were prescient in seeing the assault on the information commons and in making a stand against it, and that will be the contribution for which you will be remembered.
I have no doubt that one day the HURD will be usable. I have no doubt that the HURD, when usable, will be an interesting opererating system kernel. But the critical issue is that you, and your team, could not deliver it when it was needed, and that Linus could. It does you no harm - it diminishes you in no way - to recognise and give honour to that achievement. And it is peurile and childish to pretend that the conrtibution of the Free Software Foundation is any more important to the operating system on my desktop, on my servers, than the contribution of the Apache Foundation and its contributors or of the KDE project and its contributors. It is mean spirited to pretend that without the critical, fundamental contribution of Linus Torvalds, there would be a usable free operating system for ordinary people around the world to use.
Life is not fair. It isn't fair that the Debian KDE/Apache/GNU/Linux operating system on my desk just gets called Linux, when it comprises 796 packages by literally thousands of different authors. After all, forty or so of those packages are GNU softare. Roughly one tenth, or to put it differently, 60% of the KDE project's contribution. But, I say again, the single, critical component that welds the work of the KDE project, and the Apache foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, and hundreds of other contributors contributions into a usable whole is Linus Torvald's contribution and it's only reasonable that he should get top billing.
Grow up. Give credit where it is due, and concentrate on the parts of your work which are really critical - not just to you but to all of us. Concentrate on articulating the principles which allow an information commons in software to exist, and defending that commons from all encroachments. That is your task to do, which you do uniquely well. The honour which Linus has earned does not diminish or detract from the honour which you have earned. It is your carping, your disparagement, your evident jealousy, which detracts and diminishes your honour. Grow up and stop it.
You don't need to purchase open source software.
It is true, I can prove it, and I have written to them (more than six months ago). They didn't get back to me.
This is complete nonsense. Example: IBM have a US patent on stylesheets. If they had patented stylesheets back in the sixties when they were working on the beginnings of SGML this might have been reasonable, but they didn't; they patented them in the eighties, when stylesheets were widely used. Note that I'm not saying that IBM invented stylesheets; I don't know whether they did or not. But they were working in the field early enough and may have done so. In any case the patent should not have been granted, because the invention of stylesheets was obvious (just as, to return to my own case, the invention of tabbed palettes was obvious - I just happened to be one of the early people programming windowing systems on large bitmapped displays). Similarly, BT registered their notorious US patent on hyperlinks in the late seventies or early eighties - but hyperlinks had been described thirty years before and implemented fifteen years before (and, indeed, were obvious once you had the technology).
The claim that the US Patent Office are the least bit rigorous is laughable: they are grossly lax and irresponsible, and if this doesn't get sorted out it won't be long before EU states start refusing to recognise any US patents.
Then you want WM2 .
Very small, very simple, very fast, very elegant.
Adobe recently sued Macromedia (and won) over their patent on tabbed palettes. What's wrong with that? Well, I personally invented and used tabbed palettes in 1986, over ten years before Adobe patented them. I'm not saying I was the first to invent them, but I hadn't seen anyone else's implementation when I wrote mine. I'm quite prepared to believe that the guy at Adobe who reinvented them ten years later hadn't seen my implementation, but that's not the point. The Adobe patent is only one of thirteen US software patents where I had personally used the technique described before the patent was applied for. Most of those techniques were techniques which were in common use - things every programmer did - so there can be no possibility that the companies which patented them did hnot know there was prior art.
This is the problem. If software patents are allowed, then no one can write any code without having it reviewed line-by-line by a specialist, up-to-date patent lawyer, and even that won't find every patent violation. Individuals and small companies can't write software without the risk of being sued over patents which have been granted by a lax and supine patent office to cynical and dishonest applicants (yes, IBM, BT, AT&T, this specifically means you). Even where you know there's prior art, you will have a very hard job of proving it. I have source code to some of my work in a sealed envelope in a bank vault, with a lawyer's dated signature over the seal. Have you?
I strongly believe that if patents are allowed, there should be a very high standard of checking for prior art, and if prior art is found which the applicant might reasonably be expected to have been aware of there should be savage consequences for the applicant - like revoking their entire patent portfolio and debarring them from registering any patents for the next five years.
Why are Americans so embarassingly ignorant of history? Are schools in the United States really that bad?
Unsurprisingly, copyright in the United Kingdom dates back to before the revolting colonies threw their tea out of the pram. And Alan is absolutely right that - in England, anyway - it was based on the 1662 Licensing Act, whose aim was primarily censorship.
I'm not claiming the United Kingdom had the first copyright laws; I think at least the French and the Dutch had them before we did. But we had them before the United States even existed.
... and absolutely essential to the poor bastard who comes after you - without them he has zero chance. I spent some hours on the phone a couple of days ago talking some poor lad in the states through the trickier bits of one of my open source packages. Fortunately it is inline-commented, so I at least knew what I had been intending to do.
I agree with everything you say about the nuisance of maintaining comments, and I agree with everything you say about the problems that happen when you fail adequately to maintain comments. It's a chore; but it's a vital chore. It's got to be done.
There was nothing unstable about Chile - it was a perfectly normal democracy, operating in a perfectly normal way, with a perfectly normal slightly left of centre government, until the United States destabilised it.
Read your own history, for heaven's sake!