The fact that he mentions using Fedora core kind of discredits his whole argument against the "open source community" and the "CUPS Team" when what he is really denouncing is his linux vendor. It's been kind of an understanding for a long time that it was for the OSS community to build, and for the Commercial distro vendors to "clean up" for Joe and Jane End-User. It's a shame that he never makes that clear, and I'm sure if I were on the CUPS team I would be a little offended at the way ESR is explaining away his^H^H^H aunt tillie's failure to read the dox, search the list, and otherwise be completely "luxuriously" ignorant. Go buy windows. OSS isn't really a fair proposition if you don't have something to contribute.... or at least meet the developer half-way.
Besides doesn't the posting specify "non-pc" hacking? An Xbox is really just a neutered PC. Now if you made the Xbox actually DO something cool, other than just boot/run unsigned code, that might be worth mentioning.
My other Xbox is a Long-Range ballistic missile guidance system
Ok, I'll grant this is true. I was sort of boneheadedly assuming that anyone with esoteric enough hardware needs to really require 4.4 over 4.3 probably is willing to go to the trouble.
More to the point, after mandrake moves out of RC1 status and into release, it's rather trivial for them to add the package to their repositories so that users can upgrade to a binary package of 4.4, rather than further delay the release hunting and pecking new copyright notices. The only people who really get burned either way are dial-up users... and who cares about them?:)
People are saying this license change is "incompatible" with the GPL... however under the wording of the change it is still acceptable for individual files to be copyrighted, and included in the XFree86 base as licensed under the GPL. You're really RMSing if you are going to noodle about having to include an extra copyright notice in your documentation.
This has little to do with anything other than the fact that Mandrake team realizes it's not a valuble use of their time to go through adding all these new copyright notices when you're in RC1 state. Not sure how it compares with rolling back to 4.3 in terms of actual labor, but obviously the CBA came out on the side of rollback.
The biggest joke here is that people are crying about losing the features of 4.4, in a distribution that doesn't do anything to stop you from DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING THE BLEEDING EDGE FROM SOURCE whenever you feel like it. for crying out loud, people. DIY!
Perhaps I don't understand how hashkeys work at all, but wouldn't this only work in determining where files had been copied wholesale? if it's been edited even slightly, say having some program randomly insert whitespace into the code where it won't break things, would the hashkeys still match up?
Not a bad idea, except that it requires the maintainer of legitimate OSS applications to hold on to, and invariably expose themselves to, illicit, proprietary code.
Any code this person writes -- even completely original code -- is now subject to intellectual property claims. And since there are only so many logical ways to do any given programming task, this will undoubtedly corrupt the codebase and put the OSS movement at even greater risk of these lawsuits.
Attention US Congress and the USPTO: Nearly everyone (developers, engineers, luminaries, scholars, et al), with the exception of those swayed by deep-pocketed corporate interests, believe that software patents are wrong, bad, evil and ultimately unenforceable. If you continue to support such a foolish notion, it becomes ever clearer that you, too, are held by the sway of samesaid interests.
Step 1: 'accidentally' release windows source
Step 2: Secretly hire unafiliated programmer to copy blocks of windows source to OSS projects (comments intact)
Step 3: Sue IBM/RedHat/Novell into the ground
Step 4: Profit!
so you invent something new, and the USPTO posts details of your 'invention' online... how long before some arsehole decides to claim 'prior art' from copying exactly what you invented and claiming they did it the year before?
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: UnitedLinux is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered UnitedLinux community when recently IDC confirmed that UnitedLinux accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that UnitedLinux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. UnitedLinux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict UnitedLinux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: UnitedLinux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for UnitedLinux because UnitedLinux is dying. Things are looking very bad for UnitedLinux. As many of us are already aware, UnitedLinux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
SuSe leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of SuSe. How many users of Caldera are there? Let's see. The number of SuSe versus Caldera posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Caldera users. Connectiva posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Caldera posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Connectiva. A recent article put TurboLinux at about 80 percent of the UnitedLinux market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 TurboLinux users. This is consistent with the number of TurboLinux Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of SCO, abysmal sales and so on, TurboLinux went out of business and was taken over by SCO who sell another troubled OS. Now SCO is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that UnitedLinux has steadily declined in market share. UnitedLinux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If UnitedLinux is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. UnitedLinux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, UnitedLinux is dead.
Executive Bob, who's paid IBM $150,000 for his enterprise liscence of webfountain, enters into his webfountain search box: "Pink the musician, not the color"
IBM's powerful software parses this command into "pink music -color" and passes it to google, retrieves the results, removes Google's paid ads and replaces them with IBM's paid ads. The content is then served to Executive Bob, who shouts: "EUREKA" since within the top ten search results he finds "NUDE PICTURES OF RAPPER PINK!"
IBM then lands a lucrative support contract with Exectutive Bob to remove all the viruses and spyware from his desktop PC. Rinse and Repeat.
The majority of the slashdot posts on the subject have had to deal with the GPL, the copyright issues involved and questions of code pedigree... e.g. "that's not SCO code, it's BSD code!"
While these comments have their merit, they miss the real issues here. SCO hasn't shown anything real yet... their code samples have been deceptively easy to debunk as not actually being "SCO Code".
With as much on the line as SCO has, they have to have an ace in the hole... maybe some former IBM employee that will testify he was asked by a manager to merge AIX code, maybe just a few incriminating lines here and there that can be removed, and they can still claim damages on IBM, but I refuse to believe that SCO, a company with a history of successful IP litigation, is going into this with as flimsy a case as it appears from the outside.
All this means to us as users is that we may have to downgrade kernels if Linux code is lost this way, and as a community we stand to lose one of the biggest commercial supporters of OSS... This will certainly have its damaging effects, but it's far from the end of the world.
Unlike your diving friend, however, we are not 300ft. down and we don't have upwards of 6 atmospheres of pressure bearing down on us. We're in a far-from-fatal situation, and thankfully, we'll have some resolution to this mess soon enough.
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. -- Marie Antoinette
...of utter crap. Don't all of you see that this is an obvious red herring? These aren't the actual files SCO is pursuing, they're just throwing out chaff to get the heat off of them for not "releasing the code". If they're going this far, Darl must know that if the claims are crap, he's going to jail. Ergo "evidence" this flimsy is nothing more than a parlor trick.
It's obvious the MS has started treating Linux as a serious competitor. For most people, Linux doesn't offer everything you need... there's a great deal of commercial content-creation software that only exists for windows or mac, that Linux cannot now, and probably will not for a long time, be able to touch.
So here's a product, that allows your customers to go ahead and run the competitor's software too, and all without you losing a cent in OS or Software revenue... Why not let it continue to work?
I'm not saying nanotech won't produce toxicity. I'm not even suggesting that nanotech is a Safe field of research.
The only thing I am sure of is that nanotech, like any other field of human endevour is a double-edge sword. The science itself cannot and should not be cast as evil, or we will lose out on a field of exploration that will over time prove to benefit humanity.
The agrument I make about natural processes is that we don't refer to plastics manufacturers as unethical because they contribute massively to human byproducs on this planet. Mercury, Lead, Cyanide, Bromine, Flourine... all toxic chemicals. Yet they exist in trace amounts all over your house, and you are FINE with that. We would be living in a much different world if their industrial applications were not researched and utilized.
if we don't have the ethics argument now, and without the inflamed tone of the science fiction fanatic, there will be no progress in this field, or much worse still, that progress will be unmoderated.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah. reading is hard and it makes my eyes go twitchy. is there anything good on tv?
The fact that he mentions using Fedora core kind of discredits his whole argument against the "open source community" and the "CUPS Team" when what he is really denouncing is his linux vendor. It's been kind of an understanding for a long time that it was for the OSS community to build, and for the Commercial distro vendors to "clean up" for Joe and Jane End-User. It's a shame that he never makes that clear, and I'm sure if I were on the CUPS team I would be a little offended at the way ESR is explaining away his^H^H^H aunt tillie's failure to read the dox, search the list, and otherwise be completely "luxuriously" ignorant. Go buy windows. OSS isn't really a fair proposition if you don't have something to contribute.... or at least meet the developer half-way.
That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?
I mean, if you don't run the risk of first degree electrical burns, is the hack really worth the effort?
I can't afford an Xbox, you Insensitive Clod!
Besides doesn't the posting specify "non-pc" hacking? An Xbox is really just a neutered PC. Now if you made the Xbox actually DO something cool, other than just boot/run unsigned code, that might be worth mentioning.
My other Xbox is a Long-Range ballistic missile guidance system
All we need now is for the courts to rule that tin foil is somehow a violation of the DMCA under the "circumvention" provision.
When tin foil is outlawed, only the outlaws will have tin foil!
In Soviet Russia, RFID Blocks you!
Judging by all the flames the past SCO stories have generated, shouldn't this article itself be flagged as flamebait?
Are you new here? They'd have to flag every bloody article.
My debian distro grows every day. not sure how fast though.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
30 new packages installed, none removed and 2 held back.
Ok, I'll grant this is true. I was sort of boneheadedly assuming that anyone with esoteric enough hardware needs to really require 4.4 over 4.3 probably is willing to go to the trouble.
More to the point, after mandrake moves out of RC1 status and into release, it's rather trivial for them to add the package to their repositories so that users can upgrade to a binary package of 4.4, rather than further delay the release hunting and pecking new copyright notices. The only people who really get burned either way are dial-up users... and who cares about them? :)
People are saying this license change is "incompatible" with the GPL... however under the wording of the change it is still acceptable for individual files to be copyrighted, and included in the XFree86 base as licensed under the GPL. You're really RMSing if you are going to noodle about having to include an extra copyright notice in your documentation.
This has little to do with anything other than the fact that Mandrake team realizes it's not a valuble use of their time to go through adding all these new copyright notices when you're in RC1 state. Not sure how it compares with rolling back to 4.3 in terms of actual labor, but obviously the CBA came out on the side of rollback.
The biggest joke here is that people are crying about losing the features of 4.4, in a distribution that doesn't do anything to stop you from DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING THE BLEEDING EDGE FROM SOURCE whenever you feel like it. for crying out loud, people. DIY!
I thought it was perfectly legal to exceed the sound barrier in the US so long as you were not over a city's airspace.
Perhaps I don't understand how hashkeys work at all, but wouldn't this only work in determining where files had been copied wholesale? if it's been edited even slightly, say having some program randomly insert whitespace into the code where it won't break things, would the hashkeys still match up?
Not a bad idea, except that it requires the maintainer of legitimate OSS applications to hold on to, and invariably expose themselves to, illicit, proprietary code.
Any code this person writes -- even completely original code -- is now subject to intellectual property claims. And since there are only so many logical ways to do any given programming task, this will undoubtedly corrupt the codebase and put the OSS movement at even greater risk of these lawsuits.
Attention US Congress and the USPTO: Nearly everyone (developers, engineers, luminaries, scholars, et al), with the exception of those swayed by deep-pocketed corporate interests, believe that software patents are wrong, bad, evil and ultimately unenforceable. If you continue to support such a foolish notion, it becomes ever clearer that you, too, are held by the sway of samesaid interests.
I can't wait for DirectX on Linux. Or Linux on NTFS.
Yeah, who would want to be stuck with the vastly superior alternatives, SDL and EXT3.
Billy in the land of the underpants gnomes:
Step 1: 'accidentally' release windows source
Step 2: Secretly hire unafiliated programmer to copy blocks of windows source to OSS projects (comments intact)
Step 3: Sue IBM/RedHat/Novell into the ground
Step 4: Profit!
so you invent something new, and the USPTO posts details of your 'invention' online... how long before some arsehole decides to claim 'prior art' from copying exactly what you invented and claiming they did it the year before?
it's a good idea, but not without its flaws.
2)What about a toilet that 'knows' to flush automatically when I insert 'media'?
Is that what people are doing with their AOL cd's these days? Gosh am I behind the times... I've been using my microwave.
To be fair, it WAS novel and unique...
...When it was accomplished by the eight-track player in my old '77 Crown Vic LTD.
Is this all it requires to get /. to advertise a product? Release it under the Creative Commons?
you must be new here, right?It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: UnitedLinux is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered UnitedLinux community when
recently IDC confirmed that UnitedLinux accounts for less than a fraction of 1
percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft
survey which plainly states that UnitedLinux has lost more market share, this
news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. UnitedLinux is collapsing
in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in
the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict UnitedLinux's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: UnitedLinux faces a bleak future. In
fact there won't be any future at all for UnitedLinux because UnitedLinux is dying.
Things are looking very bad for UnitedLinux. As many of us are already aware,
UnitedLinux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of
blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
SuSe leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of SuSe. How
many users of Caldera are there? Let's see. The number of SuSe versus
Caldera posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there
are about 7000/5 = 1400 Caldera users. Connectiva posts on Usenet are about
half of the volume of Caldera posts. Therefore there are about 700 users
of Connectiva. A recent article put TurboLinux at about 80 percent of the UnitedLinux
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 TurboLinux users.
This is consistent with the number of TurboLinux Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of SCO, abysmal sales and so on, TurboLinux
went out of business and was taken over by SCO who sell another
troubled OS. Now SCO is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet
another charnel house.
All major surveys show that UnitedLinux has steadily declined in market share.
UnitedLinux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
UnitedLinux is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. UnitedLinux
continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this
point in time. For all practical purposes, UnitedLinux is dead.
Fact: UnitedLinux is dead
Here's how it works:
Executive Bob, who's paid IBM $150,000 for his enterprise liscence of webfountain, enters into his webfountain search box: "Pink the musician, not the color"
IBM's powerful software parses this command into "pink music -color" and passes it to google, retrieves the results, removes Google's paid ads and replaces them with IBM's paid ads. The content is then served to Executive Bob, who shouts: "EUREKA" since within the top ten search results he finds "NUDE PICTURES OF RAPPER PINK!"
IBM then lands a lucrative support contract with Exectutive Bob to remove all the viruses and spyware from his desktop PC. Rinse and Repeat.
The majority of the slashdot posts on the subject have had to deal with the GPL, the copyright issues involved and questions of code pedigree... e.g. "that's not SCO code, it's BSD code!"
While these comments have their merit, they miss the real issues here. SCO hasn't shown anything real yet... their code samples have been deceptively easy to debunk as not actually being "SCO Code".
With as much on the line as SCO has, they have to have an ace in the hole... maybe some former IBM employee that will testify he was asked by a manager to merge AIX code, maybe just a few incriminating lines here and there that can be removed, and they can still claim damages on IBM, but I refuse to believe that SCO, a company with a history of successful IP litigation, is going into this with as flimsy a case as it appears from the outside.
All this means to us as users is that we may have to downgrade kernels if Linux code is lost this way, and as a community we stand to lose one of the biggest commercial supporters of OSS... This will certainly have its damaging effects, but it's far from the end of the world.
Unlike your diving friend, however, we are not 300ft. down and we don't have upwards of 6 atmospheres of pressure bearing down on us. We're in a far-from-fatal situation, and thankfully, we'll have some resolution to this mess soon enough.
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. -- Marie Antoinette
...of utter crap. Don't all of you see that this is an obvious red herring? These aren't the actual files SCO is pursuing, they're just throwing out chaff to get the heat off of them for not "releasing the code". If they're going this far, Darl must know that if the claims are crap, he's going to jail. Ergo "evidence" this flimsy is nothing more than a parlor trick.
Let's think about this for a moment.
It's obvious the MS has started treating Linux as a serious competitor. For most people, Linux doesn't offer everything you need... there's a great deal of commercial content-creation software that only exists for windows or mac, that Linux cannot now, and probably will not for a long time, be able to touch.
So here's a product, that allows your customers to go ahead and run the competitor's software too, and all without you losing a cent in OS or Software revenue... Why not let it continue to work?
The simple solution to problems of this nature is to step out of the developer role and put the situation in business terms:
"I'm afraid that is going to run you way over budget in programming hours"
I'm not saying nanotech won't produce toxicity. I'm not even suggesting that nanotech is a Safe field of research.
The only thing I am sure of is that nanotech, like any other field of human endevour is a double-edge sword. The science itself cannot and should not be cast as evil, or we will lose out on a field of exploration that will over time prove to benefit humanity.
The agrument I make about natural processes is that we don't refer to plastics manufacturers as unethical because they contribute massively to human byproducs on this planet. Mercury, Lead, Cyanide, Bromine, Flourine... all toxic chemicals. Yet they exist in trace amounts all over your house, and you are FINE with that. We would be living in a much different world if their industrial applications were not researched and utilized.
if we don't have the ethics argument now, and without the inflamed tone of the science fiction fanatic, there will be no progress in this field, or much worse still, that progress will be unmoderated.