"the Debian packagers *care*" Really? More than people who make rpms? How much more do they care?
I have three packages in Debian that I am personally responsible for. I'm very familiar with each of those packages, in a way that no one that packages a hundred packages can be. I'm also very responsible for each of those messages - Debian has a tracking system for bonehead mistakes (and other things) that I like to keep clean. Almost no RPM developers have that combination, and it functions the same way for many of my fellow developers.
> maybe Debian will have to seriously consider using RPM
We're committed to using Alien for this. The LSB was designed with that in mine. If it had been a matter of the LSB requiring us to change to RPM, Debian would have probably left.
> "Only update packages when all of their dependencies have been updated" is by definition a proper order.
What about dependency loops? How do you make sure that at no point does bash, or libc disappear or stop working? That's when fine grained dependencies come in handy.
But for mmv to do all the jobs I need it to, it's got to support some form of regular expressions. I don't think that regular expressions are ever going to usuable by someone who won't read the manual - they have a pretty step learning curve.
I find it interesting that you imply that a system that geeks like must not be easy-to-use, though. I'm an IT professional, but I'd still rather use a system that configured the hardware for me correctly, had a nice UI and so on.
A nice UI? I have a program that moved my mp3's into directores based on the artist name stored in the filename. A non-technical person would probably like a program that you run, it opens up a GUI, and you select which directory. A geek would probably prefer my way, using mmv and the shell. Much more difficult to learn, and I have to look at the manpages every so often. But it's completely general - if I want to change every ' ' in filenames to '_', I can do that, using the same tools. I can look at a bunch of zips, verify they are all fonts, and move them to the font directory much quicker on Unix, then if I had to wait for winzip to start up each time, and manually select the files. A geek's UI is max power, at the cost of ease of use.
So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'.
No. As hard as it is to understand for people who only know English, accents really matter -- they aren't just there for show -- there are words in many languages that only differ by an accent.
Sure, so a company that's named Micrasoft is legally okay too, because the name is different from Microsoft, right? There is possible legal overlap between the two; if one attempts to be excessively similar to the other or someone decides to complain about it, there may be a suit; what the law will say depends on how much they can pay their lawyers and who decides to cut a deal.
Accents really matter in other languages; they don't in English. I'd assume a court in America or Australia or England would be concerned about the potential confusion to the English speaking buyer. If they are Romanian trademarks and a case comes before a Romanian court, the accents would be given more importance.
> also the fact that stopping to use it will make you physically ill.
You make an arbitrary distinction between physical and mental. High levels of emotion can cause physical changes, and physical changes can certainly cause mental changes.
> addictions have some sort of physical cause
A gamer and a drug addict have many of the same pleasure neurons firing that give the sensation of enjoyment; the cravings share many of the same neurons also.
> In order for people to use Microsoft, they had to > switch operating systems (waaaaay back when).
Really? Part of Microsoft's success was tying their OS to a cheap, widely cloned system that was many peoples (non-geeks) first computer. In any case, there's a huge difference between changing between Commodore 64 and MS-DOS or MS-DOS and Win 3.1, and Windows and Linux.
If I buy a house and associated land, and I dig up a a chest of money on that land, it's mine. If I find an old forgotten manuscript of Mark Twain in the closet, it's mine. If I buy a Greek-English dictionary, and find it also handles German, I'm under no compuction not to translate into German, even if I don't know Greek.
Likewise, Apple sold me a CD. The CD is mine. The fact that they tossed a bonus OS on there is there problem, not mine.
> What, precisely, is the harm of someone borrowing your code and not publishing their modifications?
Do you really want to compete with someone who has access and permission to use everything you do, but you don't have access or permission for any of their stuff? If GCC had been that way, we wouldn't have the massively multi-target multi-frontend compiler we have now; we would have a compiler supporting a few languages and a handful of targets, and thousands of buggy limited proprietary compilers based off GCC. C++, ObjC and Ada were all added in part because the GPL compelled the freeing of the code.
> It seems to me that if you're going to give a gift to society at large, that it should be more in the style of the BSD license.
If you want to give away a million dollars, do you throw it into the street, or do you carefully consider who to give it to and what conditions to put on it? Is it wrong to give a million dollars to a university to build a new library?
> it can also do the greatest good. (e.g., Open AND Closed Source developers benefit)
But the other 99% of the world - non-programmers - end up with more proprietary bugware and less working free software. If you want to do the greatest good, focuse on the largest number.
As long as there is thieves, there will be locks. Any successful social system has some way to prevent those who would just take and hurt the system in doing so. So long as you can chose to steal, we have to protect our stuff. I see no obligation for someone in the free software community to allow themselves to be ripped off.
> the company that owns the commercial version of TuxRacer copied the GPL code without the explicit consent of the 3rd party coders
They didn't. They just didn't use that code or got permission.
> I fail to see how the Open Source community can claim that knowledge can be shared without dimming your own
I fail to see how the proprietary software community can claim that they should be able to use anything the open source community puts out, but we can't use anything of theirs. If the author didn't give you permission to copy it in that way, then you don't have permission, proprietary or open source.
Richard Stallman had (has?) pretty bad carpal tunnel syndrome. He looked at the speech recognition software, and asked himself whether or not he would be using it to replace speech recognition software. Since he wouldn't, he chose not to use it.
If there's going to be a free replacement, then somebody has to write it. You can't just wait around, and sooner or later it will appear.
As if professors (worse yet, grad students) have any say in this. In public institutions, this is something that the public should have a say in, and in fact the public does have a say in. Last year, for example, Oklahoma citizens voted to let professors take their research private with a company.
It's all well and good to make fun, but this kind of attitude is really dangerous! I am very wary of any sentiment like "We should make laws against X kinds of people..."
(X = KKK members? Communists? Muslims?)
Oh, come on! Do you really object to us making laws against X kinds of people (X = Rapists? Murders? Thieves?)? No one has even mentioned suing spammers for what they believe, only for their actions. It's akin to littering - no one wants to see, and when there's dozens of idiots who do it, it gets to be a real problem.
> They carved out a place where they could could worship and rule themselves as free men
No, actually the Pilgrams carved out a place where they could run a theocracy that was harsher than anything in England but happened to agree with their religion.
The principles of free speech come not from the Bible, but instead from the European Enlightenment - John Locke, et la. Note they are largely upheld in India and Japan, two other non-Christian nations.
> It was a number going out of range after too many iterations and wrapping back to 0.
Which is impossible in Ada - wrap around semantics only happen if you specifically ask for them. The actual bug, as I've heard it told, was that the code wigged out when the physical environment became impossible for the Ariane 4 (since the code was written and designed soley for the Ariane 4.) Nothing could have found this bug without taking into consideration the differing enviroments of the Ariane 4 and 5, and that alone would have prevented the bug.
> It seems un-American, bordering on the Communist to suggest that Apple should simply give away their intellectual property.
Ignoring the whole "give away" and "intellectual property" parts of it, I'll point out that they aren't being asked to give away anything. They're being asked to stop trying to take something that doesn't belong to them. The idea was not their's, nor was it or its use exclusive to them. The purpose of patents was to encourage ideas, not direct money to big buisness who can afford to file dozens of supirious patents.
> 2)we use notation thats different then what mathmaticians use, but is better
Ken Iverson did a study of precendence among mathematicians. He found beyond the very basics, mathematicians couldn't agree on precendence. That's why APL has no precendence. GCC has an option to warn you when you're using precendence (outside the obvious) because too many C programmers don't remember the relative precedences of, say, the comparison operators and bit operators.
Also, when's the last time you saw a programming language that actually used mathematical notion? Most I've seen have a limited set of operators out of ASCII, and toss in several (e.g. the bit operators) that no mathematians's ever seen before. If they used matematical notion or arithmatic, that'd be different.
>> the main problem is that the community in general does nothing but take and in reality only a few individuals actually do the giving.
> I wonder how long it will take the open source community to learn the lessons of why communism in general doesn't work?
Libraries are more like communism than open source; people are compelled to support their local libraries through taxes. Why do libraries work? Why do charities work? Maybe there's more to life then a bogus dictomony of democracy and communism.
What do you mean? Apple was following a course of action (a look-and-feel suit), that if it had been upheld in court, could have meant the end of a lot of free software. A lot free software has the look and feel of some other software, ranging from the Unix look and feel to trying to emulate some proprietary application. The FSF was almost obliged to take action, and I fail to understand why you think a boycott is immature.
Also, I don't they've changed much over the years. GNU/FSF software doesn't usually support Mac (pre-OSX) out of the box. It usually supports Mac OS/X as just another Unix. And the support is almost invariably added by a non-FSF person.
There will always be more people who take than give, in any community. Many people don't have the skills to give, and some people will just mooch no matter what.
One solution is to make sure anyone taking has already given, like I'm told some BBS's used to do.
The solution the free software community uses is ignoring the problem and shooing away the obnoxious takers. Which really isn't as bad a solution as it sounds - the thousands of quiet takers aren't usually a problem. The people who are problems are the ones who loudly demand support and the like, and you can usually tell them to get lost and add them to your killfile.
> * Tired of people that complain about bugs but won't help fix
There was a person on Linux Weekly News recently complaining that people wouldn't report bugs on his package. This is part of the reason why. I run across several bugs where I don't have the time or interest to deeply investigate. I can try to make a quick and clear bugreport, but why bother if all I'm going to get is crap for it, or it's just going to get ignored?
> Very few films are "ruined for the squeamish" by a single scene.
I've seen several movies that were, though. Wings of the Honneamise has three minutes cut from the UK and German versions, with respect to the US version. The scene, a rape scene by one of the heros, may have been acceptable in Japan, but can make seriously unplatable to the American audience. I'm considering buying the UK version, just so I don't have that 3 minutes, because it is otherwise a great movie.
In lesser cases, there's a lot of movies that have brief sex scenes or the like that could be cut, minimally changing the movie, but making it more platable to some audiences. Yes, some movies can't be cut in this way; but many can, and frequently manually are already.
Slashdot Mirror
"the Debian packagers *care*" Really? More than people who make rpms? How much more do they care?
I have three packages in Debian that I am personally responsible for. I'm very familiar with each of those packages, in a way that no one that packages a hundred packages can be. I'm also very responsible for each of those messages - Debian has a tracking system for bonehead mistakes (and other things) that I like to keep clean. Almost no RPM developers have that combination, and it functions the same way for many of my fellow developers.
Damn, that's cool. I may have to install RedHat some day just to try that.
> maybe Debian will have to seriously consider using RPM
We're committed to using Alien for this. The LSB was designed with that in mine. If it had been a matter of the LSB requiring us to change to RPM, Debian would have probably left.
> "Only update packages when all of their dependencies have been updated" is by definition a proper order.
What about dependency loops? How do you make sure that at no point does bash, or libc disappear or stop working? That's when fine grained dependencies come in handy.
But for mmv to do all the jobs I need it to, it's got to support some form of regular expressions. I don't think that regular expressions are ever going to usuable by someone who won't read the manual - they have a pretty step learning curve.
I find it interesting that you imply that a system that geeks like must not be easy-to-use, though. I'm an IT professional, but I'd still rather use a system that configured the hardware for me correctly, had a nice UI and so on.
A nice UI? I have a program that moved my mp3's into directores based on the artist name stored in the filename. A non-technical person would probably like a program that you run, it opens up a GUI, and you select which directory. A geek would probably prefer my way, using mmv and the shell. Much more difficult to learn, and I have to look at the manpages every so often. But it's completely general - if I want to change every ' ' in filenames to '_', I can do that, using the same tools. I can look at a bunch of zips, verify they are all fonts, and move them to the font directory much quicker on Unix, then if I had to wait for winzip to start up each time, and manually select the files. A geek's UI is max power, at the cost of ease of use.
So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'.
No. As hard as it is to understand for people who only know English, accents really matter -- they aren't just there for show -- there are words in many languages that only differ by an accent.
Sure, so a company that's named Micrasoft is legally okay too, because the name is different from Microsoft, right? There is possible legal overlap between the two; if one attempts to be excessively similar to the other or someone decides to complain about it, there may be a suit; what the law will say depends on how much they can pay their lawyers and who decides to cut a deal.
Accents really matter in other languages; they don't in English. I'd assume a court in America or Australia or England would be concerned about the potential confusion to the English speaking buyer. If they are Romanian trademarks and a case comes before a Romanian court, the accents would be given more importance.
> also the fact that stopping to use it will make you physically ill.
You make an arbitrary distinction between physical and mental. High levels of emotion can cause physical changes, and physical changes can certainly cause mental changes.
> addictions have some sort of physical cause
A gamer and a drug addict have many of the same pleasure neurons firing that give the sensation of enjoyment; the cravings share many of the same neurons also.
> In order for people to use Microsoft, they had to > switch operating systems (waaaaay back when).
Really? Part of Microsoft's success was tying their OS to a cheap, widely cloned system that was many peoples (non-geeks) first computer. In any case, there's a huge difference between changing between Commodore 64 and MS-DOS or MS-DOS and Win 3.1, and Windows and Linux.
If I buy a house and associated land, and I dig up a a chest of money on that land, it's mine. If I find an old forgotten manuscript of Mark Twain in the closet, it's mine. If I buy a Greek-English dictionary, and find it also handles German, I'm under no compuction not to translate into German, even if I don't know Greek.
Likewise, Apple sold me a CD. The CD is mine. The fact that they tossed a bonus OS on there is there problem, not mine.
> What, precisely, is the harm of someone borrowing your code and not publishing their modifications?
Do you really want to compete with someone who has access and permission to use everything you do, but you don't have access or permission for any of their stuff? If GCC had been that way, we wouldn't have the massively multi-target multi-frontend compiler we have now; we would have a compiler supporting a few languages and a handful of targets, and thousands of buggy limited proprietary compilers based off GCC. C++, ObjC and Ada were all added in part because the GPL compelled the freeing of the code.
> It seems to me that if you're going to give a gift to society at large, that it should be more in the style of the BSD license.
If you want to give away a million dollars, do you throw it into the street, or do you carefully consider who to give it to and what conditions to put on it? Is it wrong to give a million dollars to a university to build a new library?
> it can also do the greatest good. (e.g., Open AND Closed Source developers benefit)
But the other 99% of the world - non-programmers - end up with more proprietary bugware and less working free software. If you want to do the greatest good, focuse on the largest number.
As long as there is thieves, there will be locks. Any successful social system has some way to prevent those who would just take and hurt the system in doing so. So long as you can chose to steal, we have to protect our stuff. I see no obligation for someone in the free software community to allow themselves to be ripped off.
> the company that owns the commercial version of TuxRacer copied the GPL code without the explicit consent of the 3rd party coders
They didn't. They just didn't use that code or got permission.
> I fail to see how the Open Source community can claim that knowledge can be shared without dimming your own
I fail to see how the proprietary software community can claim that they should be able to use anything the open source community puts out, but we can't use anything of theirs. If the author didn't give you permission to copy it in that way, then you don't have permission, proprietary or open source.
Richard Stallman had (has?) pretty bad carpal tunnel syndrome. He looked at the speech recognition software, and asked himself whether or not he would be using it to replace speech recognition software. Since he wouldn't, he chose not to use it.
If there's going to be a free replacement, then somebody has to write it. You can't just wait around, and sooner or later it will appear.
As if professors (worse yet, grad students) have any say in this. In public institutions, this is something that the public should have a say in, and in fact the public does have a say in. Last year, for example, Oklahoma citizens voted to let professors take their research private with a company.
It's all well and good to make fun, but this kind of attitude is really dangerous! I am very wary of any sentiment like "We should make laws against X kinds of people..."
(X = KKK members? Communists? Muslims?)
Oh, come on! Do you really object to us making laws against X kinds of people (X = Rapists? Murders? Thieves?)? No one has even mentioned suing spammers for what they believe, only for their actions. It's akin to littering - no one wants to see, and when there's dozens of idiots who do it, it gets to be a real problem.
> They carved out a place where they could could worship and rule themselves as free men
No, actually the Pilgrams carved out a place where they could run a theocracy that was harsher than anything in England but happened to agree with their religion.
The principles of free speech come not from the Bible, but instead from the European Enlightenment - John Locke, et la. Note they are largely upheld in India and Japan, two other non-Christian nations.
> It was a number going out of range after too many iterations and wrapping back to 0.
Which is impossible in Ada - wrap around semantics only happen if you specifically ask for them. The actual bug, as I've heard it told, was that the code wigged out when the physical environment became impossible for the Ariane 4 (since the code was written and designed soley for the Ariane 4.) Nothing could have found this bug without taking into consideration the differing enviroments of the Ariane 4 and 5, and that alone would have prevented the bug.
> It seems un-American, bordering on the Communist to suggest that Apple should simply give away their intellectual property.
Ignoring the whole "give away" and "intellectual property" parts of it, I'll point out that they aren't being asked to give away anything. They're being asked to stop trying to take something that doesn't belong to them. The idea was not their's, nor was it or its use exclusive to them. The purpose of patents was to encourage ideas, not direct money to big buisness who can afford to file dozens of supirious patents.
> 2)we use notation thats different then what mathmaticians use, but is better
Ken Iverson did a study of precendence among mathematicians. He found beyond the very basics, mathematicians couldn't agree on precendence. That's why APL has no precendence. GCC has an option to warn you when you're using precendence (outside the obvious) because too many C programmers don't remember the relative precedences of, say, the comparison operators and bit operators.
Also, when's the last time you saw a programming language that actually used mathematical notion? Most I've seen have a limited set of operators out of ASCII, and toss in several (e.g. the bit operators) that no mathematians's ever seen before. If they used matematical notion or arithmatic, that'd be different.
>> the main problem is that the community in general does nothing but take and in reality only a few individuals actually do the giving.
> I wonder how long it will take the open source community to learn the lessons of why communism in general doesn't work?
Libraries are more like communism than open source; people are compelled to support their local libraries through taxes. Why do libraries work? Why do charities work? Maybe there's more to life then a bogus dictomony of democracy and communism.
> the way the FSF has matured over the years
What do you mean? Apple was following a course of action (a look-and-feel suit), that if it had been upheld in court, could have meant the end of a lot of free software. A lot free software has the look and feel of some other software, ranging from the Unix look and feel to trying to emulate some proprietary application. The FSF was almost obliged to take action, and I fail to understand why you think a boycott is immature.
Also, I don't they've changed much over the years. GNU/FSF software doesn't usually support Mac (pre-OSX) out of the box. It usually supports Mac OS/X as just another Unix. And the support is almost invariably added by a non-FSF person.
There will always be more people who take than give, in any community. Many people don't have the skills to give, and some people will just mooch no matter what.
One solution is to make sure anyone taking has already given, like I'm told some BBS's used to do.
The solution the free software community uses is ignoring the problem and shooing away the obnoxious takers. Which really isn't as bad a solution as it sounds - the thousands of quiet takers aren't usually a problem. The people who are problems are the ones who loudly demand support and the like, and you can usually tell them to get lost and add them to your killfile.
> * Tired of people that complain about bugs but won't help fix
There was a person on Linux Weekly News recently complaining that people wouldn't report bugs on his package. This is part of the reason why. I run across several bugs where I don't have the time or interest to deeply investigate. I can try to make a quick and clear bugreport, but why bother if all I'm going to get is crap for it, or it's just going to get ignored?
> Very few films are "ruined for the squeamish" by a single scene.
I've seen several movies that were, though. Wings of the Honneamise has three minutes cut from the UK and German versions, with respect to the US version. The scene, a rape scene by one of the heros, may have been acceptable in Japan, but can make seriously unplatable to the American audience. I'm considering buying the UK version, just so I don't have that 3 minutes, because it is otherwise a great movie.
In lesser cases, there's a lot of movies that have brief sex scenes or the like that could be cut, minimally changing the movie, but making it more platable to some audiences. Yes, some movies can't be cut in this way; but many can, and frequently manually are already.