They don't get *any* government money. the BBC in the uk are funded by licencing fees from tv viewers. The only real difference between the BBC and a typical pay-to-view cable company in the US is that in the UK, the licence isn't optional - if you own a TV set, you must pay for the licence every year. The BBC have a monopoly on the right to receive TV broadcasts.
They can't even prove that he viewed them - after all, the computer downloaded the images at those times, it can't state either way if those images were ever rendered to the screen
Worse yet though, the uk has an even *worse* trick up its sleeve - because the images are copied to the hard drive, they prosecute under the more strict rules of "making" pornography - so anyone caught with even a single illegal image of a child on their hard drive - even if they never saw it - gets the same sentence as someone who regularly abuses children and films this for his friends....
Given the purpose of a directory service it seems a reasonable exception - you may not take the code and use it in a non-gpl package, but you *can* use the published api (this is at a similar level to being able to use SQL to access a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, but not actually use any of the code in your own non-gplled programs)
Personally, I wonder how many of the "he must have hacked it when he left" stories are actually the fact that, absent the geek, nobody actually knows what the software does or how to fix it if they mess it up (which was frequent, but they weren't going to report that to their bosses if the geek could fix it for them) - and if the geek was undervalued because his boss thought he did nothing all day, while he was fixing other people's mistakes.
Not that I have ever been in that position of course:)
Obviously, it doesn't - however, slander and libel are specific torts which are challengable (for substantial damages) in court. Its quite possible that the charter schools have a good case against one or more individuals posting for posting incorrect accusations (or ones incapable of proof either way) but this is apparently a takedown attempt (with SLAPP) against the board itself, to try and prevent any accusations (libellous or otherwise) from being heard. As charter schools are federally funded, this is of course enough to make it a first amendment issue - while of course actually suing individuals for posts they have made would not be.
Or how about just NOT using RFID in passports and instead using tried and tested chips or strips?
There are lots of good reasons for not using barcodes or magnetic strips; for example
Chips have much, much higher storage capacity
Chips can have onboard processing ability - so could be updated with a digital passport stamp to show what countries have been visited lately, or upload changes to the passport without having to send in and obtain a new one.
Passwords can be short enough the customs officer can manually type it from the printed barcode if he can't get it to read; retyping several K of biometric info would be awkward.
Once *one* station has acquired the passphrase, it can be passed digitally to other stations along the chain - so it is feasible to have a couple of minimum-wage employees whose only job is to scan the barcode on a passport, and that code can then be used further downstream without having to be rescanned.
getting a clean read from a large 2D barcode is a major pain - on some shipping labels it can take several minutes. plain old barcodes are readable using children's toys, reliably and with a damaged/dirty bar to scan; similar restrictions apply to dense magnetic strips.
Problem is - this solves one problem, but moves it downstream; before, the RFIDs could be read by anyone, at any time; now they have to arrange for the barcode "passphrase" to be available too (which will of course happen wherever the RFID is being legitimately accessed - so imagine someone using a RFID-Rifle aimed at (say) a hotel inprocessing desk, and picking up both the transmissions from the desk (thus giving them the code) but also the reply (thus giving them the data entirely passively, without a tracable query transmission).
The contactless aspect of the chip is another matter though. contact style chips are now in common use (credit cards, employee cards, tv decoder cards...) and there would be nothing stopping the digital aspect of the card being a contact chip placed an inch or so from the edge of the data page (which would then have to be in addition the back cover, for ease of use), and read by sliding that entire page into a reader, which then displays a scanned image of the data page, the digital data, and any recommendation the computer system makes about that particular user. I don't want a passport check to be a case of waving a passport (or a repeater disguised as a passport) at a bored custom official, I want one customs officer to be looking at the one passport the person in front of them just handed over.
Sure, OSDL would probably not have chosen to be a customer, but that wouldn't have changed the market price of the BitKeeper product (ie the price those who choose to be BitMover customers are paying), which is the best measure of its value.
True, but irrelevant - the fact that it would have cost $500,000 for OSDL to buy those licences doesn't matter if OSDL would not have bought them. What did it cost BitKeeper for the software alone? effectively nothing. they almost certainly supplied some media and printed docs (which would have had a cost to them) but if it broke $500 in the real-world costs to Bitkeeper to supply those physical components and/or issue keys, I would be very much surprised.
In terms of staff investment of time in supporting linus and the kernel developers on BK Bitkeeper probably spent more - but TBH that is probably written off against their marketing budget - what better advertisement could there be for BK than that the Linux kernel is maintained on it?
oh definitely - if your employer signs 'xxx' then you are bound to that during working hours, as long as it is reasonable for a person in your role (ie, you couldn't be expected to pick potatoes if you were a file clerk even during working hours, unless your job description actually included farm labour and you weren't smart enough to read it before you signed up)
Its rare (to non-existent, apart from some companies who try to claim all IP originating from an employee even out of hours is theirs) that conduct out of working hours is covered. That isn't always true (for example, people sacked recently for having a blog their employers didn't like) but I would expect anyone actually sacked for their out of hours conduct to have a fair case for unfair dismissal and compensation.
Like I said "The only thing people are "doing without" is the "paying for" part " Weither the content providers would have gotten paid or not, is incidental to the fact that people are benefiting from the having. which is of course true. however, the question wasn't "are they having this for free?" but "would they still have it if the only way they could get it would be to pay $15" for which the answer is no. It doesn't matter how much the "cover price" is, if you aren't going to pay it - it only matters if that is your only choice, in which case you have to decide - is this purchase worth the price?
I would be astonished if the OSDL would have been willing to cough up $500,000 for software Linus wasn't even sure he wanted to use, and which prevented him from managing the tree in the way he used to (Linus formerly pulled just those patches he wanted from any given submission and left the rest alone; BK forces him to accept or reject a submitted patch as a whole - which he freely admits took him time to get used to, and meant he had to give up some control over his source tree)
Which of course gets us down to cases - to whit - if OSDL had been required to stump up $500,000 for this software, would they have paid that? I suspect an answer of "yes" would be hard to justify.
Was this software worth more than $0? Definitely. How much more? no way to know, but probably equal to the effort required to get an open-source replacement under way - which will now have to take place anyway.
In all fairness, how many CIFS vendors are there for unix now? Sun has Cascade, and that seems to be about it.
Indeed so. I recently read a book called "Implimenting CIFS - The common internet file system" (Prentice-Hall, Christopher R Hertel) which I heartily recommend btw - its an entertaining and informative read - and a common thread though both his text and several contributions from other people is the almost complete of documentation about the protocol - which is pretty much a defacto MS standard, and subject to change at any point MS thinks is a good idea. MS have recently released an "official" spec for CIFS - and not surprisingly, the team that developed CIFS.NET had to go look at the samba source to figure out some of the areas where the documented protocol seemed to fall short of reality....
Actually I rather wish Samba were ported to Windows as well -- there's features in it that are useful on any platform. might want to look at these Java and Dot Net projects then - libraries that add either new or additional functionality, based on samba code.
I don't think that matters. OSDL has a BK license. As Tridge was employed by OSDL, it appears Larry (and possibly Linus) thought he was bound by their license terms. Tridge didn't feel that way. Because it was Larry's license, he got to interpret it as applying to Tridge's work. End of story.
I would hate to work for your employer - if he signed an agreement that all male employees were required to spend non-working hours picking potatoes in a field, would you go get fitted for wellingtons?
If Tridge's contract has an explicit clause in it forbidding him to perform such research outside of working hours, then that is one thing - but I would be astonished if OSDL had such a clause in ANY of their employment contracts. And regardless, as I understand it, there was not some magical "company wide" agreement to be bound by the T&C of the BK free licence, regardless of if you use BK or not, but an individual requirement for anyone using BK to conform to the agreed licence. Now, its possible that there was a non-standard contract requiring that OSDL protect the IP rights of McVoy, but I dont' see how that could apply to random employees of OSDL unless their work required them to be in contact with BK or their contract with OSDL explicitly stated this to be the case. Of course, if you have access to some contract or licence that grants OSDL the right to enforce restrictions on what their workers do in their free time, feel free to post it - I am sure we will be fascinated and astonished.....
If all of the above is true (and that is a big if), then it could be that Linus is blaming Tridge and praising Larry in order to ensure that there is a smooth transition from Bitkeeper. If Linus came out rooting for Tridge isn't it likely that Larry would yank Bitkeeper immediately and not allow a smooth transition to some other solution?
Which is what I was implying by that paragraph, yes. but in a larger sense what I was saying is - while proprietary software need not be evil, due to lack of interoperability (and remember, this whole thing blew up purely to prevent the creation of an interoperable solution) evil appears to be the default setting <sigh>
The only thing people are "doing without" is the "paying for" part Because of course no casual home copying took place before kazaa was born. Nobody (for example) taped songs from the radio, from friend's vinyl, or from other tapes....
The fact still remains though - faced with a charge of (say) $15 for a premium CD containing just one new song (and a rehash of stuff you already have) you probably won't cough up the cash. If someone offers you a copy though, you won't refuse it - even if the quality isn't as good as the premium CD, and it doesn't come with a fancy cover. for the RIAA to then decide that you *would* have spent that $15 "if only you hadn't had a copy" is good for their business, but unrealistic.
You're terrible at analogies. This nothing of the sort. Was Microsoft donating Free Microsoft licenses to a company while one of said company's employees was reverse-engineering SMB protocols?
Certainly possible - Microsoft does donate free licences to educational establishments, and a fair amount of reverse engineering of protocols does go on at such establishments. Specifically samba? no.
Furthermore, you can still *buy* a license for Bitkeeper. Shocking suggestion to some, I'm sure. again true. if you had a word document, it is not unreasonable to require a paid copy of word to edit it; however, another analogy; Imagine an important document had been created on a free version of word; then imagine that because someone who worked at a site you have never heard of and who didn't use free word decided to make a compatability module for (for example) perfect office in his spare time, AND the same employer employed the guy who was using word to make that one large document of several hundred other people's small documents.Finally, imagine that microsoft had threatened to remove the free word licence, but said it would be OK provided the employer forced the guy to NOT do something like that in his own time, or terminated his employment - what would your opinion of Microsoft be?
And here is a genuine question. If Tridge was not a BK user...just whose wire transmissions was he sniffing to do his reverse engineering?
Now that is an interesting - and important - question. answer is, I don't know and a quick google doesn't show anyone else making the same point or giving an answer to it. Related questions would be - would it violate the licence to knowingly use the free version in an environment where it could be sniffed, or even to do so deliberately knowing it would be sniffed?
Wow you just invented a new branch of science - intellectual property maths.
Yup, its closely related to bistromathics - the idea that the value of something can be set, not based on what it is worth or what a user will pay, but on what you can decide arbitarily something is "worth" $xxx when in fact the user would have done without if it had cost even a tenth of that....
The Register has been completely biased about the matter so I wouldn't take their word on anything. Linus is pissed off at Tridge because he messed up the deal with McVoy and wasn't even trying to produce anything functional to replace BK.
This is of course true - but lets take an objective look at what has happened here.
Linus decides (with his friend McVoy) to use a proprietary product to manage the Linux kernel. He is well within his rights to do this, although it will cost him friends amongst the more fanatical GPL enthusiasts.
Tridge decides to clean-room reverse engineer the protocol that BK uses in the same way as the smb protocol was reverse-engineered, and for the same reasons - interoperability. Most countries that have laws against reverse engineering software have this as an exception - it would be legal, regardless. Tridge isn't a BK user, so can't be held to any software agreements that BK users do or don't sign.
The same company that Linus works for decides to hire Tridge for non-BK related work; Tridge does no BK research during his working hours, but continues to work on the interop project during his own time
McVoy insists that linus's employer "does something about" Tridge or he will withdraw Linus's licence to use BK, and indeed drop the free-beer version of BK entirely.
Linus is pissed off because his friend just put his employer in an impossible position - but strangely, this is not his friend's fault, and not his employer's fault, but that of a programmer doing a perfectly legal thing during his own time.
"He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about."
It was about as inevitable as Microsoft dropping SMB because samba was created, and blaiming samba.
Everybody seems to forget that McVoy contributed more than $500 000 worth of software to the osdl. Without the contribution, Tridge would have never been able to even try to reverse engineer the program.
And? BK changed Linus's working practices, probably for the better, but possibly for the worse. McVoy pushed heavily for the use of BK for the linux kernel, contributing software and time to the project - but suddenly one engineer, not even a user of BK, decides it would be nice to get at this data *without being subject to a closed source licence* and everything must be scrapped.
Linus lost the use of the best SCM there is. Why shouldn't he be pissed?
Of course he should. But he should be pissed at his "friend" who is pissed at Tridge, but is actually beating at Linus....
Proprietary isn't (always) evil!
no, it isn't. but things like this show what the danger is of relying on a closed-source, proprietary solution - the owner can completely cripple
your use of his property at any time, and you may have to smile and be understanding to have a hope in hell of getting your own data back out of the proprietary solution and into something you can actually use, never mind actually working on whatever it is that you were trying to do with that data in the first place.
Yes, McVoy is understandably angry that someone wants to reverse-engineer his "crown jewels" and yes, it is likely that any company, ORACLE for example, would be equally pissed if their primary revenue stream was apparently targetted by an open-source programmer but guess what - most wouldn't spit their dummys this badly, if only because this one programmer trying to write an interop will be only the first of thousands who are now pissed off because BK was taken away and will have to write something as good or better themselves.
Except that doesn't apply here. Third party software running on Windows is not part of the Windows OS. GNU utilities ported to Windows is not the same thing as Windows. In fact, it's the opposite. It says GNU/Linux is so much better than Windows that in order to do comparable things in Windows you need to port things from GNU/Linux. So it was a valid point.
and WINE makes the opposite point........
Themes are a pathetic substitute for being able to totally switch desktop environments and/or window managers. My environment looks and acts nothing at all like Windows, and I prefer it that way. I've heard of alternate GUIs for Windows, but since Windows ties you down to using a GUI for nearly everything, I can't imagine that you'd ever have enough flexibility. (Control panels are for pussies.) A surprising amount of the admin tools are scriptable in one form or another - although some require the "resource kit" so really aren't available for use "out of the box".
[cygwin?] This is an add-on layer, not an integral part of the OS. Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones? (And yes, I do these things all the time.) I would consider neither of these good examples of superiority. Linux has no "native" SSH support - yes, OpenSSH is usually bundled with it, but that isn't part of linux (or indeed, directly part of any *nix). Worse yet, Apache has a native Windows port that obeys the same command line options that the Unix port does.
The "strengths" of Linux are not any magical array of tools or options - Linux is near-unusable without the non-linux GNU tools, some of which have native windows ports too. Linux's strengths are its flexability, its huge and dedicated developer base (and equally huge and knowledgeable beta tester base), its unbeatable price point, and the overall vision of Linus.
Last time i checked.. cygwin was GNU, so how does that make windows prevail? using linux (essentially) within windows.. makes windows the winner?
Not really. cygwin is a compatability shim to allow gnu (and other *nix) software to run on windows; cygwin+windows is a system able to run similar software to solaris, hpux, tru64... ie the largely platform-independent gnu tools. Linux is another platform that can have such tools "ported" to it, but isn't somehow magically their owner (just the most popular platform amongst non-corporate users)
Whatever happened to many eyes making typos shallow?:)
There are many obvious problems in the current version - blatently duplicate entries for example (companies listed twice, immediately after each other, as "limited" and "ltd" - the standard abbreviation - and the same contact details, address and website:)
all I can suggest is that we email these "bugfixes" to the Tony@ address on the third page - it is after all the Open Source way:)
If you can afford two strong oxen, then fine.
however, if I buy 200 chickens today, I will eventually get my field ploughed; maybe next quarter I can afford another 200 to get it done faster next time
Not going to get very far on 1/3 of an ox if that's all I can afford to start out with.
I think Yast is only one of the propretary components that ship with the suse full distro - although I suspect you could do without most of the others on a production machine (I think the sound subsystem is proprietary, amongst other stuff; it certainly was in the last three boxed sets I bought (and licenced for only a single pc too!)
Slashdot Mirror
They don't get *any* government money. the BBC in the uk are funded by licencing fees from tv viewers. The only real difference between the BBC and a typical pay-to-view cable company in the US is that in the UK, the licence isn't optional - if you own a TV set, you must pay for the licence every year. The BBC have a monopoly on the right to receive TV broadcasts.
Worse yet though, the uk has an even *worse* trick up its sleeve - because the images are copied to the hard drive, they prosecute under the more strict rules of "making" pornography - so anyone caught with even a single illegal image of a child on their hard drive - even if they never saw it - gets the same sentence as someone who regularly abuses children and films this for his friends....
Given the purpose of a directory service it seems a reasonable exception - you may not take the code and use it in a non-gpl package, but you *can* use the published api (this is at a similar level to being able to use SQL to access a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, but not actually use any of the code in your own non-gplled programs)
Not that I have ever been in that position of course :)
Obviously, it doesn't - however, slander and libel are specific torts which are challengable (for substantial damages) in court. Its quite possible that the charter schools have a good case against one or more individuals posting for posting incorrect accusations (or ones incapable of proof either way) but this is apparently a takedown attempt (with SLAPP) against the board itself, to try and prevent any accusations (libellous or otherwise) from being heard. As charter schools are federally funded, this is of course enough to make it a first amendment issue - while of course actually suing individuals for posts they have made would not be.
- There are lots of good reasons for not using barcodes or magnetic strips; for example
- Chips have much, much higher storage capacity
- Chips can have onboard processing ability - so could be updated with a digital passport stamp to show what countries have been visited lately, or upload changes to the passport without having to send in and obtain a new one.
- Passwords can be short enough the customs officer can manually type it from the printed barcode if he can't get it to read; retyping several K of biometric info would be awkward.
- Once *one* station has acquired the passphrase, it can be passed digitally to other stations along the chain - so it is feasible to have a couple of minimum-wage employees whose only job is to scan the barcode on a passport, and that code can then be used further downstream without having to be rescanned.
- getting a clean read from a large 2D barcode is a major pain - on some shipping labels it can take several minutes. plain old barcodes are readable using children's toys, reliably and with a damaged/dirty bar to scan; similar restrictions apply to dense magnetic strips.
Problem is - this solves one problem, but moves it downstream; before, the RFIDs could be read by anyone, at any time; now they have to arrange for the barcode "passphrase" to be available too (which will of course happen wherever the RFID is being legitimately accessed - so imagine someone using a RFID-Rifle aimed at (say) a hotel inprocessing desk, and picking up both the transmissions from the desk (thus giving them the code) but also the reply (thus giving them the data entirely passively, without a tracable query transmission). The contactless aspect of the chip is another matter though. contact style chips are now in common use (credit cards, employee cards, tv decoder cards...) and there would be nothing stopping the digital aspect of the card being a contact chip placed an inch or so from the edge of the data page (which would then have to be in addition the back cover, for ease of use), and read by sliding that entire page into a reader, which then displays a scanned image of the data page, the digital data, and any recommendation the computer system makes about that particular user. I don't want a passport check to be a case of waving a passport (or a repeater disguised as a passport) at a bored custom official, I want one customs officer to be looking at the one passport the person in front of them just handed over.Just had to add an update here. Groklaw has "broken" the secret of how he reverse engineered BK to extract data from it.
Apparently he telnetted to a BK server, typed "clone" and recorded the output he got back....
Don't worry, I will stop laughing about this massive violation of BK's IP at some point :)
True, but irrelevant - the fact that it would have cost $500,000 for OSDL to buy those licences doesn't matter if OSDL would not have bought them. What did it cost BitKeeper for the software alone? effectively nothing. they almost certainly supplied some media and printed docs (which would have had a cost to them) but if it broke $500 in the real-world costs to Bitkeeper to supply those physical components and/or issue keys, I would be very much surprised.
In terms of staff investment of time in supporting linus and the kernel developers on BK Bitkeeper probably spent more - but TBH that is probably written off against their marketing budget - what better advertisement could there be for BK than that the Linux kernel is maintained on it?
Its rare (to non-existent, apart from some companies who try to claim all IP originating from an employee even out of hours is theirs) that conduct out of working hours is covered. That isn't always true (for example, people sacked recently for having a blog their employers didn't like) but I would expect anyone actually sacked for their out of hours conduct to have a fair case for unfair dismissal and compensation.
Like I said "The only thing people are "doing without" is the "paying for" part " Weither the content providers would have gotten paid or not, is incidental to the fact that people are benefiting from the having.
which is of course true. however, the question wasn't "are they having this for free?" but "would they still have it if the only way they could get it would be to pay $15" for which the answer is no. It doesn't matter how much the "cover price" is, if you aren't going to pay it - it only matters if that is your only choice, in which case you have to decide - is this purchase worth the price?
I would be astonished if the OSDL would have been willing to cough up $500,000 for software Linus wasn't even sure he wanted to use, and which prevented him from managing the tree in the way he used to (Linus formerly pulled just those patches he wanted from any given submission and left the rest alone; BK forces him to accept or reject a submitted patch as a whole - which he freely admits took him time to get used to, and meant he had to give up some control over his source tree)
Which of course gets us down to cases - to whit - if OSDL had been required to stump up $500,000 for this software, would they have paid that? I suspect an answer of "yes" would be hard to justify.
Was this software worth more than $0? Definitely. How much more? no way to know, but probably equal to the effort required to get an open-source replacement under way - which will now have to take place anyway.
Indeed so. I recently read a book called "Implimenting CIFS - The common internet file system" (Prentice-Hall, Christopher R Hertel) which I heartily recommend btw - its an entertaining and informative read - and a common thread though both his text and several contributions from other people is the almost complete of documentation about the protocol - which is pretty much a defacto MS standard, and subject to change at any point MS thinks is a good idea. MS have recently released an "official" spec for CIFS - and not surprisingly, the team that developed CIFS.NET had to go look at the samba source to figure out some of the areas where the documented protocol seemed to fall short of reality....
Actually I rather wish Samba were ported to Windows as well -- there's features in it that are useful on any platform.
might want to look at these Java and Dot Net projects then - libraries that add either new or additional functionality, based on samba code.
I would hate to work for your employer - if he signed an agreement that all male employees were required to spend non-working hours picking potatoes in a field, would you go get fitted for wellingtons?
If Tridge's contract has an explicit clause in it forbidding him to perform such research outside of working hours, then that is one thing - but I would be astonished if OSDL had such a clause in ANY of their employment contracts. And regardless, as I understand it, there was not some magical "company wide" agreement to be bound by the T&C of the BK free licence, regardless of if you use BK or not, but an individual requirement for anyone using BK to conform to the agreed licence. Now, its possible that there was a non-standard contract requiring that OSDL protect the IP rights of McVoy, but I dont' see how that could apply to random employees of OSDL unless their work required them to be in contact with BK or their contract with OSDL explicitly stated this to be the case. Of course, if you have access to some contract or licence that grants OSDL the right to enforce restrictions on what their workers do in their free time, feel free to post it - I am sure we will be fascinated and astonished.....
If all of the above is true (and that is a big if), then it could be that Linus is blaming Tridge and praising Larry in order to ensure that there is a smooth transition from Bitkeeper. If Linus came out rooting for Tridge isn't it likely that Larry would yank Bitkeeper immediately and not allow a smooth transition to some other solution?
Which is what I was implying by that paragraph, yes. but in a larger sense what I was saying is - while proprietary software need not be evil, due to lack of interoperability (and remember, this whole thing blew up purely to prevent the creation of an interoperable solution) evil appears to be the default setting <sigh>
Because of course no casual home copying took place before kazaa was born. Nobody (for example) taped songs from the radio, from friend's vinyl, or from other tapes....
The fact still remains though - faced with a charge of (say) $15 for a premium CD containing just one new song (and a rehash of stuff you already have) you probably won't cough up the cash. If someone offers you a copy though, you won't refuse it - even if the quality isn't as good as the premium CD, and it doesn't come with a fancy cover. for the RIAA to then decide that you *would* have spent that $15 "if only you hadn't had a copy" is good for their business, but unrealistic.
Certainly possible - Microsoft does donate free licences to educational establishments, and a fair amount of reverse engineering of protocols does go on at such establishments. Specifically samba? no.
Furthermore, you can still *buy* a license for Bitkeeper. Shocking suggestion to some, I'm sure.
again true. if you had a word document, it is not unreasonable to require a paid copy of word to edit it; however, another analogy; Imagine an important document had been created on a free version of word; then imagine that because someone who worked at a site you have never heard of and who didn't use free word decided to make a compatability module for (for example) perfect office in his spare time, AND the same employer employed the guy who was using word to make that one large document of several hundred other people's small documents.Finally, imagine that microsoft had threatened to remove the free word licence, but said it would be OK provided the employer forced the guy to NOT do something like that in his own time, or terminated his employment - what would your opinion of Microsoft be?
And here is a genuine question. If Tridge was not a BK user...just whose wire transmissions was he sniffing to do his reverse engineering?
Now that is an interesting - and important - question. answer is, I don't know and a quick google doesn't show anyone else making the same point or giving an answer to it. Related questions would be - would it violate the licence to knowingly use the free version in an environment where it could be sniffed, or even to do so deliberately knowing it would be sniffed?
"He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about."
Everybody seems to forget that McVoy contributed more than $500 000 worth of software to the osdl. Without the contribution, Tridge would have never been able to even try to reverse engineer the program.
Linus lost the use of the best SCM there is. Why shouldn't he be pissed?
Proprietary isn't (always) evil!
Yes, McVoy is understandably angry that someone wants to reverse-engineer his "crown jewels" and yes, it is likely that any company, ORACLE for example, would be equally pissed if their primary revenue stream was apparently targetted by an open-source programmer but guess what - most wouldn't spit their dummys this badly, if only because this one programmer trying to write an interop will be only the first of thousands who are now pissed off because BK was taken away and will have to write something as good or better themselves.
Except that doesn't apply here. Third party software running on Windows is not part of the Windows OS. GNU utilities ported to Windows is not the same thing as Windows. In fact, it's the opposite. It says GNU/Linux is so much better than Windows that in order to do comparable things in Windows you need to port things from GNU/Linux. So it was a valid point. and WINE makes the opposite point........
A surprising amount of the admin tools are scriptable in one form or another - although some require the "resource kit" so really aren't available for use "out of the box".
[cygwin?]
This is an add-on layer, not an integral part of the OS. Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones? (And yes, I do these things all the time.)
I would consider neither of these good examples of superiority. Linux has no "native" SSH support - yes, OpenSSH is usually bundled with it, but that isn't part of linux (or indeed, directly part of any *nix). Worse yet, Apache has a native Windows port that obeys the same command line options that the Unix port does.
The "strengths" of Linux are not any magical array of tools or options - Linux is near-unusable without the non-linux GNU tools, some of which have native windows ports too. Linux's strengths are its flexability, its huge and dedicated developer base (and equally huge and knowledgeable beta tester base), its unbeatable price point, and the overall vision of Linus.
Last time i checked.. cygwin was GNU, so how does that make windows prevail? using linux (essentially) within windows.. makes windows the winner?
Not really. cygwin is a compatability shim to allow gnu (and other *nix) software to run on windows; cygwin+windows is a system able to run similar software to solaris, hpux, tru64... ie the largely platform-independent gnu tools. Linux is another platform that can have such tools "ported" to it, but isn't somehow magically their owner (just the most popular platform amongst non-corporate users)
There are many obvious problems in the current version - blatently duplicate entries for example (companies listed twice, immediately after each other, as "limited" and "ltd" - the standard abbreviation - and the same contact details, address and website :)
all I can suggest is that we email these "bugfixes" to the Tony@ address on the third page - it is after all the Open Source way :)
Not going to get very far on 1/3 of an ox if that's all I can afford to start out with.
And indeed, look at the #3 slot - which is also a cluster, albeit Mac/OsX rather than Intel/Linux but...
I think Yast is only one of the propretary components that ship with the suse full distro - although I suspect you could do without most of the others on a production machine (I think the sound subsystem is proprietary, amongst other stuff; it certainly was in the last three boxed sets I bought (and licenced for only a single pc too!)