I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something,...They don't have a lot of confidence that Congress will do the right thing
...people are fucked up. Yes, your sweet little grandmother too.
This is not true. Broadcasts provide receivers with anonymity.
You'd think so, but the broadcaster can be traced and shutdown, and the receiver can be triangulated via its signature radio signal that all electronics have. Assuming the tinfoil shielding doesn't hold Capt'n!;-)
And that is why, on balance, complete anonymity on the Internet is not a good idea.
This is why you'll never be voted in as dictator for life. There is and never will be complete anonymity as long as two points are the beginning and end of a communication. There is only obfuscation and misdirection. There will always be an un-obfuscator and un-misdirector, and a way to trace or triangulate. Any attempt to fend off snooping/tracking is another step closer to freedom and privacy (for whatever purpose people put it to, it's not up to you as an individual to decide for society as a whole, only for yourself), but only a limited privacy and temporary freedom.
There is a good reason why the old IT urban legend of the server being drywalled in for years before anyone noticed was running Netware.
Not an urban legend. We (IT) lost track of a NetWare 3.x server used by a small (less than 100) department in a large (more than 20,000) entertainment company.
When it was time to upgrade the department's LAN from TokenRing to Ethernet, we couldn't locate this server. The clients had no idea where it was. They only knew that the all-important J: drive on their PC was there before they were.
It turns out that there used to be a janitor's closet behind shelves, and a large desk pushed up against the shelves, that no one in that department had ever remembered being opened. Certainly no one had the key for it. When it was finally opened, there was the 3.x, chugging away without a care in the world. I don't remember what the box was, but I doubt it held more than 16 megs of RAM.
By that time, the company had pretty gone the Microsoft route, and we were all weary of dealing with the christmas lights like nature of a WindowsNT based network. Needless to say, we were amused and more than a little impressed by this little-engine-that-could.
You can remember it yourself with the help of the bestmemoryteacher around. If you don't like to read, there's always the software, but the books are cheaper.
Considering that most corporations have similar needs and often re-invent the software wheel internally cycle after cycle, your comment should be marked 'insightful', not 'redundant'. In time, the logical course for corporations will be to Open Source commonalities such as software based on scheduling, accounting, hr, inventory, payroll, time tracking, forecasting, marketing, space planning, customer relationship managment, contacts...etc. Sharing the burden of re-inventing the wheel will save costs and will allow them to spend more money on customizations.
You may even see Open Source Operating Systems, Web Browsers, Office Suites and Databases first being brought in, then being customized over time.
To the common person most anything that you take for granted as necessity today, was a luxury yesterday. Cars, TV, phones (now cellphones!), a standing police force, standing fire brigade, a 24 hour hospital, plumbing, a ready water supply you didn't have to pump into a bucket from a well, residential electricity for homes and not just industrial electricity for factories. These things were created for the purposes of "living a happy, productive, informed life". You can put them all under the general heading of what the majority of people would consider "progress", even if a minority of disgruntled luddites don't think so.
And what would be the benefit of Solaris being released under GPL ?
The benefit is clear: Solaris would have slowed its death spiral from its great height. Why else do you think they Open Sourced it in the first place? They just miscalculated, manouvered badly, and picked the wrong license. Jeers instead of cheers. Not a good marketing move, and certainly not something to garner the same community fervor as only the GPL-oriented can expend. They would have had a majority of defenders instead of detractors. Not something to take lightly in this slippery market. Public noise can make the difference between being independent, and being a subsidiary.
It may even have split the Linux community into adopters of Solaris in addition to Linux. It would have given Sun breathing space in the market, as even IBM would find it hard to argue the point of using Linux to their customers when another robust and battle-tested GPL OS was out there. But, even more importantly, it could have given Linux a real competitive fight, giving both a chance to evolve and surpass each other. The community could've benefited greatly.
Linus understands Sun very well when he says that:
"...from Sun's perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he wrote in an e-mail interview. Torvalds said he does not expect developers clamoring to start playing with that source code.
"Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," Torvalds wrote. "I think there are parallels with the Java 'we'll control the process' model. I personally think that their problem is that they want to control the end result too much, and because of that they won't get any of the real advantages of open source." "
"He contrasted Sun's CDDL with the wide-open nature of the GPL. "One of the beauties of the GPL," he said, is that "you have to totally give up control over the project (because everybody literally has the same rights to the whole project), but exactly because nobody can control it, it makes everybody feel like true owners.""
He's right, and Sun will have to learn it the hard way.
So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.
Any GPL developer would be in danger of contaminating his projects if he were to work on Open Solaris AND Linux due to Sun's questionable patent stance. Yes, witholding patents makes sense if you intend to hurt the users of what you consider a competing community. Why else withold from some and give to others? They've performed an action that doesn't require explanation.
Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.
Let's see, Unix source code was floating around and being shared by various universities and companies. Everyone was sharing their improvements. Now that was enlightenment. Sun relicenses what other people had worked on, decides to close their source and suddenly they were enlightened? Please, it's because of companies like Sun that GNU was started in the first place.
Nonsense. Sun's leadership developed a license that is almost GPL-like, yet they purposely went out of their way in making it incompatible with the GPL. This is a clear sign of contempt for the GPL. It may be too late for them to switch their other products over to this license, they'd lose all credibility, but if they could they would. They still aren't able to articulate a defense for their action, only that they don't see the big deal. This from a company that uses the GPL in other open source products. Most open source advocates haven't missed the message on this one.
...they are the largest commercial donator of code under GPL. We have discussed OpenOffice in detail but Sun has also made huge donations to NetBeans, Grid Engine and a whole host of other GPL or GPL compatible projects.
Don't confuse market tactics against a dangerous monopolistic rival (MS Office, Visual Studio) to be approval or acceptance of a license. Sun is fully aware which license is more effective (BSD or GPL) against M$, and have used it strategically. But, Sun's leadership is not how you make them out to be. They are the opposite. They could have easily made their license compatible with the GPL rather than exclude it, but they didn't.
I think you're on the same track as this insightful post.
Without the freedom of the BSD licence, things like Windows, NetApp filers, Cisco routers, etc wouldn't be where they are today. I think even Linux used a chunk of BSD networking code too.
There's no denying that BSD code has been integrated into commercial and GPL code, and that it has been a benefit to all developers. The same can be said of BSD developers using commercial and GPL'd code, though not perhaps in the same manner.
However, taking into account that more people are more likely to give if there is reciprocation, the GPL may be the more appropriate license in obtaining attention and garnering resources.
There's a reason why the free BSDs (as an OS) are no longer the dominant Unix variant after decades and billions of dollars of open source and commercial development. My guess is that Linux, as the poster child for the GPL, is on the rise and outstripping the BSDs because more people (and companies) are into "fairness" than into developer freedoms of non-reciprocity. BSD has been around longer, has had more commercial advertisement over the decades. And, yet among developers word of mouth spread the story of an immature operating system, possibly using the wrong architecture, using the GNU utilities, all under a strange license that enforces a common sense ideal taught to children. Why would more developers even bother with it, considering the number of free BSDs out there in various stages of maturity that still needed improvement? Because, lessons learned early in life are hard to break, or say the psychologists. You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. Not, you scratch my back, and I'd rather scratch someone elses...hey, where are you going?
Even after Berkeley assured the freedom of the BSDs against AT&T, the immature Linux code and its strangely familiar license obtained a wider mind share amongst developers and continues to do so. I believe it initially came down to the difference in the licenses.
I believe you've hit the point exactly. We are talking at cross purposes. Some are for the freedom of the code for the benefit of the larger populace, others are for the freedom of a wider range of developers as a minor segment within that larger population.
But, now that you've killed the debate, what are we going to flame over? I hope no one mods your insightful comment up. I'm afraid it would be at the expense of making slashdot a little less exciting.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective. From the GPL's view, the code is always free. From BSD's view, the non-closed branch of the code is always free.
The idea behind the GPL is that code should remain free at all times as it evolves. The idea behind the BSD license is that the code should remain free for all times, except when someone decides that their branch of the evolutionary tree will remain closed. Which is freer?
I think more people generally see the GPL as freer, or perhaps fairer, in that it seems to closely follow the Golden Rule (so close to common sense that it seems too fancy to call it a philosophy).
The new proposal would allow fines and a maximum penalty of three years in prison for violating copyrights and engaging in computer piracy.
Here's a long term solution. Governments should all pass just one law this year. Let's call it MISTUPID, and it should apply to punitive laws. If future punitive laws are discovered to be unconstitutional, or are repealed, then MISTUPID would state that the penalties given in those laws will automatically be applied to those who wrote them, and those who lobbied for them.
I wonder how many stupid laws would be passed after MISTUPID came into force.
Sure they are abrasive but lets face it in the face of the abuse they have received I would be pissed as hell as well, talk about biting the hand that feeds.
Sun started the abuse. Abrasive is when you rub your beard stubble; Sun's top executives' open hostility and condescension towards the GPL and Linux has been well documented for years in various news outlets. A backlash from the community isn't only expected, but understandable.
What confuses the community is that there are Open Source engineers on Sun's payroll. There isn't much Sun's executives can do about that, if they could they would. But, irritating Sun engineers would only ease their transitions to positions at HP, IBM, Novell..etc.
Sun's applying of the GPL to many of their official products is certainly laudible, if somewhat schizophrenic behavior. However, if you consider that they have absolutely nothing to lose for each of those releases, and a slight chance of gain, it makes more sense. The Open Source world is used to receiving cast offs, and is grateful for them. But, make no mistake that this is altruism as you hint in your post. GPL'ing OpenOffice is a strategic attack on M$'s monopoly by allowing it to be added to all Linux distributions. GPL'ing NFS was a win-win situation for Sun as it was about to be relegated to the dustbin by the corporate world, but now they get Open Source points and maybe someone willing to secure it.
Personally, I don't think companies should be praised or denegrated for doing business any more than a lion should be for killing or not killing it's next meal. Sun and IBM are companies. A company must make money at all costs. If killing the GPL and Linux would make IBM and Sun money, they'd do their best to do it (see M$).
Don't trust companies, or acknowledge them one way or another. Trust people, since people aren't required to make money at all costs. People should be praised for their good deeds and denegrated for their misdeeds. With this philosophy, you can honestly say that Sun's McNeally is an ass, but Sun's engineers are brilliant.
A monopoly in what? Searching? No one pays Google to search Google. A monopoly in online advertising? I think the case can be made that E-bay, Yahoo, MSN and Amazon are the larger billboards. Google isn't the only way to look things up. In fact, the Web is over-saturated with search engines. Not a good way to represent a monopoly for something that costs nothing to the average searcher. Put another way, Google isn't bundled for free with the cost of Windows.
What do I suggest to stop this sort of sillyness ? Anyone who goes after google like this should quite simply have their pages removed from the index. "Got a problem with our system? then you dont need to be in it, goodbye". Now THAT is a strong deterrent. Those whiny bastards would think twice.
It would be similar to a village turning their collective backs on a miscreant in their midst as if he/she never existed. They've been shunned. Imagine, any reference whether it be a personal page, or a blog, or even a particular page from a store advertising the trademarked name completely being wiped off any possible combination of searches. The beauty of it is, they could just set the filter for France, just like they probably do or eventually will set up human-rights filters for China. That company would get no free advertising within their own country on Google. Pretty powerful statement. However, in America, Google could continue business as usual with the trademark since it's legal there.
...added it as part of their line of products. You can get the Genuine Fractals product here. However, I don't believe the product compressed images very well without loss. If I remember right, it was more for enlarging pictures so that the people could work in detail without over-pixelation, then shrinking the finished work back down to its original size without losing resolution. Something like that.
They have another imaging technology that they purchased from AT&T called DjVu. They've Open Sourced the viewer for that technology under the GPL.
I believe an encoder/decoder is also available under a GPL license, though LizardTech doesn't appear to be happy with the GPL because they are pro software patents, and the GPL is not. The encoder/decoder may or may not be a fractal engine, someone more knowledgeable will have to answer that question.
LizardTech may be involved in a squable over the JPEG2000 technology. Something to do with patent litigation.
Slashdot Mirror
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You'd think so, but the broadcaster can be traced and shutdown, and the receiver can be triangulated via its signature radio signal that all electronics have. Assuming the tinfoil shielding doesn't hold Capt'n! ;-)
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This is why you'll never be voted in as dictator for life. There is and never will be complete anonymity as long as two points are the beginning and end of a communication. There is only obfuscation and misdirection. There will always be an un-obfuscator and un-misdirector, and a way to trace or triangulate. Any attempt to fend off snooping/tracking is another step closer to freedom and privacy (for whatever purpose people put it to, it's not up to you as an individual to decide for society as a whole, only for yourself), but only a limited privacy and temporary freedom.
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What's your name little one?
A-a-a-a-a-a-bi N-o-o-o-ormal...Baaa Raaaam Eweeee!!!
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License: Other/Proprietary License
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Not an urban legend. We (IT) lost track of a NetWare 3.x server used by a small (less than 100) department in a large (more than 20,000) entertainment company.
When it was time to upgrade the department's LAN from TokenRing to Ethernet, we couldn't locate this server. The clients had no idea where it was. They only knew that the all-important J: drive on their PC was there before they were.
It turns out that there used to be a janitor's closet behind shelves, and a large desk pushed up against the shelves, that no one in that department had ever remembered being opened. Certainly no one had the key for it. When it was finally opened, there was the 3.x, chugging away without a care in the world. I don't remember what the box was, but I doubt it held more than 16 megs of RAM.
By that time, the company had pretty gone the Microsoft route, and we were all weary of dealing with the christmas lights like nature of a WindowsNT based network. Needless to say, we were amused and more than a little impressed by this little-engine-that-could.
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You may even see Open Source Operating Systems, Web Browsers, Office Suites and Databases first being brought in, then being customized over time.
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To the common person most anything that you take for granted as necessity today, was a luxury yesterday. Cars, TV, phones (now cellphones!), a standing police force, standing fire brigade, a 24 hour hospital, plumbing, a ready water supply you didn't have to pump into a bucket from a well, residential electricity for homes and not just industrial electricity for factories. These things were created for the purposes of "living a happy, productive, informed life". You can put them all under the general heading of what the majority of people would consider "progress", even if a minority of disgruntled luddites don't think so.
= 9J =
The benefit is clear: Solaris would have slowed its death spiral from its great height. Why else do you think they Open Sourced it in the first place? They just miscalculated, manouvered badly, and picked the wrong license. Jeers instead of cheers. Not a good marketing move, and certainly not something to garner the same community fervor as only the GPL-oriented can expend. They would have had a majority of defenders instead of detractors. Not something to take lightly in this slippery market. Public noise can make the difference between being independent, and being a subsidiary.
It may even have split the Linux community into adopters of Solaris in addition to Linux. It would have given Sun breathing space in the market, as even IBM would find it hard to argue the point of using Linux to their customers when another robust and battle-tested GPL OS was out there. But, even more importantly, it could have given Linux a real competitive fight, giving both a chance to evolve and surpass each other. The community could've benefited greatly.
Linus understands Sun very well when he says that:
"...from Sun's perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he wrote in an e-mail interview. Torvalds said he does not expect developers clamoring to start playing with that source code.
"Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," Torvalds wrote. "I think there are parallels with the Java 'we'll control the process' model. I personally think that their problem is that they want to control the end result too much, and because of that they won't get any of the real advantages of open source." "
And...
"He contrasted Sun's CDDL with the wide-open nature of the GPL. "One of the beauties of the GPL," he said, is that "you have to totally give up control over the project (because everybody literally has the same rights to the whole project), but exactly because nobody can control it, it makes everybody feel like true owners.""
He's right, and Sun will have to learn it the hard way.
So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.
Any GPL developer would be in danger of contaminating his projects if he were to work on Open Solaris AND Linux due to Sun's questionable patent stance. Yes, witholding patents makes sense if you intend to hurt the users of what you consider a competing community. Why else withold from some and give to others? They've performed an action that doesn't require explanation.
Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.
Let's see, Unix source code was floating around and being shared by various universities and companies. Everyone was sharing their improvements. Now that was enlightenment. Sun relicenses what other people had worked on, decides to close their source and suddenly they were enlightened? Please, it's because of companies like Sun that GNU was started in the first place.
Nonsense. Sun's leadership developed a license that is almost GPL-like, yet they purposely went out of their way in making it incompatible with the GPL. This is a clear sign of contempt for the GPL. It may be too late for them to switch their other products over to this license, they'd lose all credibility, but if they could they would. They still aren't able to articulate a defense for their action, only that they don't see the big deal. This from a company that uses the GPL in other open source products. Most open source advocates haven't missed the message on this one.
Don't confuse market tactics against a dangerous monopolistic rival (MS Office, Visual Studio) to be approval or acceptance of a license. Sun is fully aware which license is more effective (BSD or GPL) against M$, and have used it strategically. But, Sun's leadership is not how you make them out to be. They are the opposite. They could have easily made their license compatible with the GPL rather than exclude it, but they didn't.
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Without the freedom of the BSD licence, things like Windows, NetApp filers, Cisco routers, etc wouldn't be where they are today. I think even Linux used a chunk of BSD networking code too.
There's no denying that BSD code has been integrated into commercial and GPL code, and that it has been a benefit to all developers. The same can be said of BSD developers using commercial and GPL'd code, though not perhaps in the same manner.
However, taking into account that more people are more likely to give if there is reciprocation, the GPL may be the more appropriate license in obtaining attention and garnering resources.
There's a reason why the free BSDs (as an OS) are no longer the dominant Unix variant after decades and billions of dollars of open source and commercial development. My guess is that Linux, as the poster child for the GPL, is on the rise and outstripping the BSDs because more people (and companies) are into "fairness" than into developer freedoms of non-reciprocity. BSD has been around longer, has had more commercial advertisement over the decades. And, yet among developers word of mouth spread the story of an immature operating system, possibly using the wrong architecture, using the GNU utilities, all under a strange license that enforces a common sense ideal taught to children. Why would more developers even bother with it, considering the number of free BSDs out there in various stages of maturity that still needed improvement? Because, lessons learned early in life are hard to break, or say the psychologists. You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. Not, you scratch my back, and I'd rather scratch someone elses...hey, where are you going?
Even after Berkeley assured the freedom of the BSDs against AT&T, the immature Linux code and its strangely familiar license obtained a wider mind share amongst developers and continues to do so. I believe it initially came down to the difference in the licenses.
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But, now that you've killed the debate, what are we going to flame over? I hope no one mods your insightful comment up. I'm afraid it would be at the expense of making slashdot a little less exciting.
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I think more people generally see the GPL as freer, or perhaps fairer, in that it seems to closely follow the Golden Rule (so close to common sense that it seems too fancy to call it a philosophy).
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Here's a long term solution. Governments should all pass just one law this year. Let's call it MISTUPID, and it should apply to punitive laws. If future punitive laws are discovered to be unconstitutional, or are repealed, then MISTUPID would state that the penalties given in those laws will automatically be applied to those who wrote them, and those who lobbied for them.
I wonder how many stupid laws would be passed after MISTUPID came into force.
= 9J =
Sun started the abuse. Abrasive is when you rub your beard stubble; Sun's top executives' open hostility and condescension towards the GPL and Linux has been well documented for years in various news outlets. A backlash from the community isn't only expected, but understandable.
What confuses the community is that there are Open Source engineers on Sun's payroll. There isn't much Sun's executives can do about that, if they could they would. But, irritating Sun engineers would only ease their transitions to positions at HP, IBM, Novell..etc.
Sun's applying of the GPL to many of their official products is certainly laudible, if somewhat schizophrenic behavior. However, if you consider that they have absolutely nothing to lose for each of those releases, and a slight chance of gain, it makes more sense. The Open Source world is used to receiving cast offs, and is grateful for them. But, make no mistake that this is altruism as you hint in your post. GPL'ing OpenOffice is a strategic attack on M$'s monopoly by allowing it to be added to all Linux distributions. GPL'ing NFS was a win-win situation for Sun as it was about to be relegated to the dustbin by the corporate world, but now they get Open Source points and maybe someone willing to secure it.
Personally, I don't think companies should be praised or denegrated for doing business any more than a lion should be for killing or not killing it's next meal. Sun and IBM are companies. A company must make money at all costs. If killing the GPL and Linux would make IBM and Sun money, they'd do their best to do it (see M$).
Don't trust companies, or acknowledge them one way or another. Trust people, since people aren't required to make money at all costs. People should be praised for their good deeds and denegrated for their misdeeds. With this philosophy, you can honestly say that Sun's McNeally is an ass, but Sun's engineers are brilliant.
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It would be similar to a village turning their collective backs on a miscreant in their midst as if he/she never existed. They've been shunned. Imagine, any reference whether it be a personal page, or a blog, or even a particular page from a store advertising the trademarked name completely being wiped off any possible combination of searches. The beauty of it is, they could just set the filter for France, just like they probably do or eventually will set up human-rights filters for China. That company would get no free advertising within their own country on Google. Pretty powerful statement. However, in America, Google could continue business as usual with the trademark since it's legal there.
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One: It's another proprietary crap-pile from Apple.
Two: You're forced to pay for MacOS X, when you'd rather just put your own Linux distro in for Free.
Three: It's $499. Considering items one and two, that's highway fucking robbery for vendor lock-in.
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Wal-Mart Offers $498 Linux Notebook
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They have another imaging technology that they purchased from AT&T called DjVu. They've Open Sourced the viewer for that technology under the GPL.
I believe an encoder/decoder is also available under a GPL license, though LizardTech doesn't appear to be happy with the GPL because they are pro software patents, and the GPL is not. The encoder/decoder may or may not be a fractal engine, someone more knowledgeable will have to answer that question.
LizardTech may be involved in a squable over the JPEG2000 technology. Something to do with patent litigation.
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