A little evidence would be nice before one goes and cuts off a whole country from the 'net.
The fact that they denied it is irrelevant; anyone would deny it, especially knowing that the US is on the warpath. But it's pretty hard to see the US having an ulterior motive for shutting them down; Somalia isn't exactly a force to be reckoned with. Unless the motive is to use Somalia as a "test case" to see how the world reacts to US/Europe flexing its muscles a little....
OTOH, this doesn't affect me personally at all... no servers I use are in Somalia, I don't even know any sites there.
I am happy to give the code away if a team of developers want to continue developing it. I can act as a grandfather figure to the project to give guidance and wisdom, and to clarify what my vision was, and what the code does. I'd prefer it to be GPL'd or a similar license that won't shut the code up.
Your "vision"? My that sounds pompous. If someone else is willing to take over, they won't want the crutch of having to take orders from someone else; open source is about freedom. If they do take suggestions from you, be happy, but don't think you'll be able to sit there like a god and direct your minions how to code "your" project. When you hand it over, you hand it over. It's not yours any more. And depending on the quality of the code and how finished it is (I quote: "I had always intended to finish it"), perhaps nobody will want it. Think of it it as evolution in action:).
The first case is much different; it describes a project whose author has fulfilled all his goals for it and wants to pass it on to keep it "live", as I see it. TortoiseCVS may just require the occasional fix and feature addition; it sounds like a stable program. I'll probably try it out, as I currently use WinCVS at work.
The control over computer software that Microsoft has achieved through its dominance of
operating systems has limited competition and innovation throughout the computer field.
Through.NET, it is attempting to exert the same control over all Internet commerce. Just
as kings got to grant or deny royal charters to businesses, the Redmond giant, if
successful, may be able to say who can do business on the Net and who can't.
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor,
free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or
in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13:16-17)
Now... I'm not saying that Bill Gates (or anyone else, for that matter) is "the beast", but such an infrastructure as this brings us (as in "people" especially the ignorant sheep that are the majority) closer to (1) acceptance of complete centralized control over our finances, commerce, and eventually - when, e.g., you can only buy gas or a 'plane ticket, or even food through.NET, for example - our lives, and (2) the position of being able to technologically implement such control.
Sure, Microsoft may fail the first time. And the second time. But when governments and other megacorporations band together and get behind such an effort, then even Windows may be up to the job:).
Too radical? Too extreme? I'm sure people scoffed at the idea of Hitler bringing the world to war and exterminating 6 million Jews, too... and central control doesn't look half so bad on the surface, unless you value your freedom.
There's a course at my school (University of Waterloo - CS452 - the lab is the one that used to have the "All hope abandon, all ye who enter here" sign and the train in the noose in the window) and probably many others where you write an OS from scratch as a project. The code is written on a Solaris box and cross-compiled for Intel x86. The assignments involve building processes and multitasking, IPC (servers), various drivers (keyboard, serial, graphics), kernel/user services, etc., and it's a good idea to build a decent debugger. The final project involves controlling electric trains, through a pretty crappy interface (polling), and trying to make an interesting application that's robust enough to get around the train controller problems (and deal with things like evil TAs picking up trains and moving them). And of course students can add
other features too, such as threading and pretty graphics.
You do get some help, such as a tftp based image loader (so no boot sector coding to worry about) and the loader puts the system into pmode before it calls the start routine, but then you're pretty much on your own with the Intel docs and some
hardware spec sheets. It's only a regular four-month course (although the lab is pretty much never empty at any hour of the day or night during that time).
The most time consuming part of writing a "real" OS is standards compliance, as someone's already said, and writing all the drivers for all the different types of hardware out there (it's a lot easier when you know you have only one graphics card to worry about!) But it's not as if writing an OS was such a rare thing.
(Greets to all reading that have survived trains....)
Slashdot Mirror
A little evidence would be nice before one goes and cuts off a whole country from the 'net. The fact that they denied it is irrelevant; anyone would deny it, especially knowing that the US is on the warpath. But it's pretty hard to see the US having an ulterior motive for shutting them down; Somalia isn't exactly a force to be reckoned with. Unless the motive is to use Somalia as a "test case" to see how the world reacts to US/Europe flexing its muscles a little....
OTOH, this doesn't affect me personally at all... no servers I use are in Somalia, I don't even know any sites there.
But it's a disturbing precedent.
Your "vision"? My that sounds pompous. If someone else is willing to take over, they won't want the crutch of having to take orders from someone else; open source is about freedom. If they do take suggestions from you, be happy, but don't think you'll be able to sit there like a god and direct your minions how to code "your" project. When you hand it over, you hand it over. It's not yours any more. And depending on the quality of the code and how finished it is (I quote: "I had always intended to finish it"), perhaps nobody will want it. Think of it it as evolution in action :).
The first case is much different; it describes a project whose author has fulfilled all his goals for it and wants to pass it on to keep it "live", as I see it. TortoiseCVS may just require the occasional fix and feature addition; it sounds like a stable program. I'll probably try it out, as I currently use WinCVS at work.
The control over computer software that Microsoft has achieved through its dominance of operating systems has limited competition and innovation throughout the computer field. Through .NET, it is attempting to exert the same control over all Internet commerce. Just
as kings got to grant or deny royal charters to businesses, the Redmond giant, if
successful, may be able to say who can do business on the Net and who can't.
.NET, for example - our lives, and (2) the position of being able to technologically implement such control.
Sure, Microsoft may fail the first time. And the second time. But when governments and other megacorporations band together and get behind such an effort, then even Windows may be up to the job :).
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
(Revelation 13:16-17)
Now... I'm not saying that Bill Gates (or anyone else, for that matter) is "the beast", but such an infrastructure as this brings us (as in "people" especially the ignorant sheep that are the majority) closer to (1) acceptance of complete centralized control over our finances, commerce, and eventually - when, e.g., you can only buy gas or a 'plane ticket, or even food through
Too radical? Too extreme? I'm sure people scoffed at the idea of Hitler bringing the world to war and exterminating 6 million Jews, too... and central control doesn't look half so bad on the surface, unless you value your freedom.
Revelation 13.
There's a course at my school (University of Waterloo - CS452 - the lab is the one that used to have the "All hope abandon, all ye who enter here" sign and the train in the noose in the window) and probably many others where you write an OS from scratch as a project. The code is written on a Solaris box and cross-compiled for Intel x86. The assignments involve building processes and multitasking, IPC (servers), various drivers (keyboard, serial, graphics), kernel/user services, etc., and it's a good idea to build a decent debugger. The final project involves controlling electric trains, through a pretty crappy interface (polling), and trying to make an interesting application that's robust enough to get around the train controller problems (and deal with things like evil TAs picking up trains and moving them). And of course students can add other features too, such as threading and pretty graphics.
You do get some help, such as a tftp based image loader (so no boot sector coding to worry about) and the loader puts the system into pmode before it calls the start routine, but then you're pretty much on your own with the Intel docs and some hardware spec sheets. It's only a regular four-month course (although the lab is pretty much never empty at any hour of the day or night during that time).
The most time consuming part of writing a "real" OS is standards compliance, as someone's already said, and writing all the drivers for all the different types of hardware out there (it's a lot easier when you know you have only one graphics card to worry about!) But it's not as if writing an OS was such a rare thing.
(Greets to all reading that have survived trains....)