That's interesting. I find that hard to believe after hearing about their policy of Free Documentation, which in my view is extremist because it excludes the GNU FDL!
Is it really true that they are more extreme than RMS over Free Documentation, but compromised over Free Software?
The company I work at is desperately looking for an exit strategy from our current SCO-based offering; but we can't find any product comparable to Sentinel (block-level hot disk mirroring over a network to a standby system) on Linux.
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it sounds similar to RAID-1 over the network. I have used the free enbd module (Enhanced Network Block Device driver) and Linux's built-in software RAID to implement that. It's all free. Is that similar to what you were looking for?
And if you mistakenly accuse someone of being a spammer (hey, it happens sometimes) and they deny it, their denial means nothing because they're a spammer and therefore lying?
Well, yes. Unless they can provide a convincing reason why you're wrong. Would you want the police to be swayed by a suspect who said "Honest officer I didn't kill that man" when there was evidence linking the suspect to the murder?
Unfortunately people have this attitude I think partly because the mainstream media (especially in the US) is so uncritical about the misdeeds of the powerful. If someone denies a crime let's give them the benefit of the doubt! Um, no. Let's not. Let's consider the evidence, instead.
no bullshit. most problems with windows flakiness and crashing are influenced (not necessarily caused) by poorly-written or intentionally malicious software.
Actually, no. According to Microsoft's own monitoring, 50% of Windows crashes are the fault of Microsoft code. It was on Slashdot this week.
Yes, it could well do that, because Freenet caches other users requests (encrypted on disc, and anonymously). And Freenet is likely to become popular with fans of child pornography because it will make tracing them harder, unfortunately.
Gee, how about this? The government doesn't want to waste taxpayer money on software that would cost much more to buy from proprietary suppliers than if it were funded by a global coalition of pro-open-source governments (such as India, Brazil, Cuba, UK etc.)
Pennies to the dollar, mate, pennies to the dollar.
Government sponsored free software would be free software by definition. Or are you claiming that the government will never fund free software? That's false. It does already.
Wait, you're a libertarian, therefore there's no reasoning with you.
I am pretty certain you can make a non-GPL installer for GPL software. You probably should make the original software available, but since it is hard to install you have not reduced any of the demand for your installer.
Exactly. CodeWeavers is a good example of a company that does this. They sell CrossOver Office which is essentially an installer for wine, with a copy of wine and some patches bundled.
One of the big problems with wine is, or used to be, even knowing which versions would work for you! So, they make money out of actually making wine usable. Good luck to them! All of their changes will be made available under the GPL anyway - or at least, the GPL requires them to do so.
Yes, aegis is a mature tool (it's about the same age as Perl, i.e. very old in Internet terms), follows the UNIX philosophy well, and with many more features than CVS. More disciplined though, so not for everyone.
Actually that's not true. Even though it makes no moral or constitutional sense, in the US you can publish your invention up to one year before filing for a patent.
Sheer. Madness.
What's even more ludicrous is when people file patents knowing full well that there is prior art well over a year old, that they themselves has published.
[Sorry, no mirrors - I get charged for my bandwidth you know!]
NOTE: There's something very wrong with Acrobat for Linux. It shows this PDF document as blobs of grey, unintelligible text! If you're using Linux, use kghostview or similar - ghostscript renders it fine. So much for the idea that open source clones are inferior.
Of course, they better be careful that they're not distributing it [ibm.com] already:)
That depends. If the software was all written by IBM, they as authors are not bound by any license.
But - switching my brain into gear now - it would be pretty silly to file a patent suit against people for distributing their own code, so I guess your basic point still stands:)
The only other option is distributing a 50 meg JVM with every app, and increasing support costs by having to walk people through tedious installation procedures, for the JVM and your app.
For the record: Hitler was a socialist. The attempts by other socialists to distance themselves from his particular brand of socialism do not change the fact.
Sure... if you redefine the word socialist to be so broad that it includes a vast number of people not normally thought of as socialist. Your definition seems to be "putting the collective above the individual and encouraging people to die for their country". Well, first off, "encouraging people to go and die for their country" is not exactly an innovation. It's as old as the hills. It's not exactly a good distinguishing characteristic. What monarchy, dictatorship, democracy or totalitarian system hasn't tried to dupe its population with patriotism?
Secondly, as for "putting the collective above the individual". If by that you mean putting the State above individual rights, sure, then Julius Caesar was a socialist, then notorious torturer General Pinochet was a socialist, then Dubya is a socialist.
But that's simply fatuous. That definition is way too broad.
If you mean putting the general welfare (i.e. the welfare of the whole population) above all individual rights, that's actually a self-contradictory definition! How can you assert that Hitler looked after the general welfare while persecuting the Jews, the communists, the gays, other political opponents, and generally striking fear into people's hearts?
It would be like calling a govenor who regularly rounds up and shoots 1% of the population of a state, a "benevolent ruler". It's rubbish. That's not looking after the general welfare, it's tyrrany.
For the same reason, I would argue that Stalin and Pol Pot, for example, were not socialists or communists, despite the fact that they used that kind of rhetoric.
For a better definition, I would refer you to the MSF:
"The Movement for a Socialist Future unites all those who oppose the rule of the global corporations and "Third Way" governments like New Labour. We support all those fighting injustice, people struggling everywhere for cultural independence, self-determination and diversity and in defence of the environment. We campaign for a new, not-for-profit society based on co-operation not competition, with mass democratic control of the economy and the state."
That, in a nutshell, is what contemporary socialism is all about. It's not terribly complicated. Hitler, as the leader of a racist, far-right-wing political party, was the very opposite of socialist.
I could also say "Hitler was a conservative. That's a fact."... if I define "conservative" as "racist bigot". You can say anything you like if you redefine the words... but that's not a very convincing form of argument.
As I've said before - companies should be made to come up with a prototype before they can patent it. If a company cannot prove they had a prototype then the patent should be revoked.
Um, I think you're missing the point. The problem with most of these type of patents (haven't looked at these specifically, but I'm assuming), is not that they are so hard to implement that the "inventors" are too incompetent to implement them. No, the main problem is the reverse - they are too easy to implement, and hence are obvious - which should prevent them becoming accepted at the patent office, but doesn't.
Companies have to spend large sums defending themselves against such patents and sometimes find it cheaper to settle, even when it doesn't make "logical sense". It seems clear to me that software patents do far more harm than good, on balance.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply download or upload /bin/su from another system to your home directory and run it from there.
So your chgrp is so easy to defeat, it's almost pointless.
Is it really true that they are more extreme than RMS over Free Documentation, but compromised over Free Software?
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it sounds similar to RAID-1 over the network. I have used the free enbd module (Enhanced Network Block Device driver) and Linux's built-in software RAID to implement that. It's all free. Is that similar to what you were looking for?
And if you mistakenly accuse someone of being a spammer (hey, it happens sometimes) and they deny it, their denial means nothing because they're a spammer and therefore lying?
Well, yes. Unless they can provide a convincing reason why you're wrong. Would you want the police to be swayed by a suspect who said "Honest officer I didn't kill that man" when there was evidence linking the suspect to the murder?
Unfortunately people have this attitude I think partly because the mainstream media (especially in the US) is so uncritical about the misdeeds of the powerful. If someone denies a crime let's give them the benefit of the doubt! Um, no. Let's not. Let's consider the evidence, instead.
Links to studies? Statistics?
Java bytecode is produced from source, but this bytecode, too, must be executed as data, not as a native instruction.
If you'd read the actual post you responded to, you'd learn that bytecode is nowadays compiled to native instructions.
All of this is relatively meaningless; arguing that Java's "virtual machine" is not an interpreter does not say anything for the language
Of course it does. It is a plank in the argument that the implementations are typically fairly efficient.
and I'm really disappointed that you would make random speed claims without code to back that up.
Ditto.
Actually, no. According to Microsoft's own monitoring, 50% of Windows crashes are the fault of Microsoft code. It was on Slashdot this week.
Examples?
For tar, there are about 100,000,000,000 legacy scripts worldwide to take into consideration. It Ain't Gonna Happen.
Pennies to the dollar, mate, pennies to the dollar.
Wait, you're a libertarian, therefore there's no reasoning with you.
Exactly. CodeWeavers is a good example of a company that does this. They sell CrossOver Office which is essentially an installer for wine, with a copy of wine and some patches bundled.
One of the big problems with wine is, or used to be, even knowing which versions would work for you! So, they make money out of actually making wine usable. Good luck to them! All of their changes will be made available under the GPL anyway - or at least, the GPL requires them to do so.
Sheer. Madness.
What's even more ludicrous is when people file patents knowing full well that there is prior art well over a year old, that they themselves has published.
[Sorry, no mirrors - I get charged for my bandwidth you know!]
NOTE: There's something very wrong with Acrobat for Linux. It shows this PDF document as blobs of grey, unintelligible text! If you're using Linux, use kghostview or similar - ghostscript renders it fine. So much for the idea that open source clones are inferior.
The unofficial term is kuro5hitted.
That depends. If the software was all written by IBM, they as authors are not bound by any license.
But - switching my brain into gear now - it would be pretty silly to file a patent suit against people for distributing their own code, so I guess your basic point still stands :)
Ehh... Bad choice of words, don'cha think? ;-)
Everything? Hardly.
This is the vision, which has not actually been realised. But reiserfs is picking up the torch and getting closer.
Three words: Java Web Start.
Sure... if you redefine the word socialist to be so broad that it includes a vast number of people not normally thought of as socialist. Your definition seems to be "putting the collective above the individual and encouraging people to die for their country". Well, first off, "encouraging people to go and die for their country" is not exactly an innovation. It's as old as the hills. It's not exactly a good distinguishing characteristic. What monarchy, dictatorship, democracy or totalitarian system hasn't tried to dupe its population with patriotism?
Secondly, as for "putting the collective above the individual". If by that you mean putting the State above individual rights, sure, then Julius Caesar was a socialist, then notorious torturer General Pinochet was a socialist, then Dubya is a socialist.
But that's simply fatuous. That definition is way too broad.
If you mean putting the general welfare (i.e. the welfare of the whole population) above all individual rights, that's actually a self-contradictory definition! How can you assert that Hitler looked after the general welfare while persecuting the Jews, the communists, the gays, other political opponents, and generally striking fear into people's hearts?
It would be like calling a govenor who regularly rounds up and shoots 1% of the population of a state, a "benevolent ruler". It's rubbish. That's not looking after the general welfare, it's tyrrany.
For the same reason, I would argue that Stalin and Pol Pot, for example, were not socialists or communists, despite the fact that they used that kind of rhetoric.
For a better definition, I would refer you to the MSF:
That, in a nutshell, is what contemporary socialism is all about. It's not terribly complicated. Hitler, as the leader of a racist, far-right-wing political party, was the very opposite of socialist.I could also say "Hitler was a conservative. That's a fact."... if I define "conservative" as "racist bigot". You can say anything you like if you redefine the words... but that's not a very convincing form of argument.
Um, I think you're missing the point. The problem with most of these type of patents (haven't looked at these specifically, but I'm assuming), is not that they are so hard to implement that the "inventors" are too incompetent to implement them. No, the main problem is the reverse - they are too easy to implement, and hence are obvious - which should prevent them becoming accepted at the patent office, but doesn't.
Companies have to spend large sums defending themselves against such patents and sometimes find it cheaper to settle, even when it doesn't make "logical sense". It seems clear to me that software patents do far more harm than good, on balance.
Yeah, that's right, lets settle IP disputes with gun battles! That would sure be better than an exploitable legal system!
I've been using plasticfs to do that.