The one thing that designers of programming languages have to accept is that programming languages do not have much to do with natural languages. No surprise - natural languages are meant to communicate with humans, computer languages are primarily (although this might be considered a bug) designed to give unanimous orders to deterministic systems. Big difference. There is no poetry in COBOL, and there is no way do completely specify an algorithm for a von-Neumann-machine in portugese.
Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.
On the other hand, most open source bugzillas do at least let you look at all the current security-related bugs. They do not hide them from a concerned user's view, like Microsoft and Mozilla do.
It seems that the prototypical Linux geek thinks that Debian, Gentoo and Fedora are plenty enough of deversity. At least their understanding of portability indicates that.
Yes, but having made very strong commitments hasn't stopped Sun before. Whatever their plans really are, people have a hard time trusting them after the back and forth regarding Solaris/x86 and their Linux strategy. It won't be easy for them to find early adopters in the enterprise space.
You don't have to start from scratch even if you don't use free software, you know? You can just buy a license for proprietary libraries. If this seems unbelievable to you, just ask the sales departments of Trolltech or MySQL AB, they'll happily explain.
I agree however that having access to the source is certainly valuable from a customer point of view, and would often justify a higher price. (The market seems to agree, just look at how expensive source access for proprietary software tends to be.) Then again, for me it doesn't always have to be free in the FSF, or open source in the OSI sense - for example, the right to distribute derived works is significantly less important (although nice to have) than the right to use a patched version internally, or just to be allowed to look at the source to find workarounds when something goes wrong.
Morale: It is not a very sensible position to think that OSS=good and proprietary=bad. It always depends on your specific needs.
First of all, the free binary license is only available for hardware with a capacity of at most one CPU (no matter how many it actually has), and has been bought from Sun or an authorized reseller (not eBay or something).
Second, you only get a 60-day trial, or a "developer" resp. "educational" license that allows you to use Solaris "for the sole purpose of designing, developing and testing your applets and applications to run on the Solaris platform". I.e. no legal web browsing or using StarOffice for you.
In other words, you cannot generally buy a cheap Ultra 5 from eBay, download a new Solaris version for free, and use it as a private workstation or home server. At least not legally, that is.
(That applies to the Sparc version. The terms for x86 tend to be slightly different (no "authorized reseller" clause, for example), but then again, they tend to change rather frequently.)
This is true today, but I think it will become less so in the future.
Using clusters of redundant, inexpensive servers has some really nice advantages (for example, not only can you "hot swap" complete servers in case of failure without downtime, it is also easier to throw some new boxes in if you need more power than it would be to upgrade a single big-ass server). The problem is that it is hard to design apps to support such a setting nicely, but I predict that more and more will be extended to support clustering (or replaced with alternatives that do).
Of course, that does not mean that big iron unix servers will completely go away, just like the mainframe refuses to die.
The "OSS movement" doesn't have much influence in this. The munich civil servants, SuSE and IBM have.
As for the fun and games - I don't see why I should care about munich, or IBM, or Joe User, adopting Linux. What made open source what it is today was a combination of enthusiastic hackers writing better software than the corporate drones were allowed to, and companies trying to make money off that software. The companies won't stop trying to earn money, and I don't see a reason why the hackers should stop hacking for fun.
Actually, the BSDs execute Linux binaries quite fine. Not all of them, but there are people running Oracle that way. Just don't expect any vendor support.
But the source for Linux is available both for attackers and for white hats to find and fix bugs. If anyone would find a security problem in the leaked Windows code, they cannot simply send a patch to Microsoft - they would admit to have illegally obtained the code doing so.
Open Source code is available for everyone. Only criminals can use the Windows code.
I didn't have much problems with figuring out which drivers I need yet - GENERIC always had all of them (well, except pcm, but its kldloadable these days), but then I don't use vary fancy hardware. If you worry about having only the drivers you need in your custom kernel, NetBSD has a nice port called "adjustkernel", basically a perl script that parses dmesg and comments out all drivers you don't need in a kernel config file. I don't know if anyone ported it to FreeBSD, it shouldn't be too hard in principle.
Basically, my experience with hardware and FreeBSD is that stuff either Just Works, or that it does not work at all, if it isn't supported. I never had the need to fiddle with arcane settings to make anything work (tuning aside, but then you obviously have to know your hardware pretty well anyway).
I don't have a copy of the dictionary handy, but he certainly deserves a lot of credit for edition of the jargon file, making it into a the-world-according-to-eric type monument of the ego of everyones favourite linux-focused speech-police hobby anthropologist. If I had anything to do with the original, I wouldn't complain too much about not having my name associated with it.
Good thing that a level-headed person like that is the president of the Open Source Initiative, it would loose a lot of credibility if it weren't for the flames^Wimportant information like the Halloween documents on its homepage.
Maybe its time for a "most annoying OS celebrity" slashdot poll?
This is ESR. He basically does nothing else but ranting, flaming and generally talking rubbish, mostly because he feels that he is the godlike prophet of some mythical geek tribe.
Why would you want that, even assuming that making Microsoft look bad
would somehow be more important then the security of thousands of users
and the internet as a whole? If something like that would happen, they
could just sell it as a demonstration of the bad things that happen
when source code is publicly available, like that of certain other
systems...
They would have to release it public. Releasing a program source under the GPL, then not releasing the next version under the same cannot be done AFAIK.
The copytight owner can release his work under any license he wishes, he is not bound by any license himself. Of course he can use the GPL for one version and another license for another, just as he can give out different licenses to different people (like all the mutli-licensed projects do, e.g. Qt, MySQL,...).
The only problem would be if they accepted patches, and the patches are GPLed themselves. The "core group" has to follow the license of anyone who has rights on the code they distribute, i.e. they'd have to get rid of the contribution or comply with its license.
Slashdot Mirror
Human languages dying may be a pity (or not), but it does not have anything to do with computer programming.
On the other hand, most open source bugzillas do at least let you look at all the current security-related bugs. They do not hide them from a concerned user's view, like Microsoft and Mozilla do.
It seems that the prototypical Linux geek thinks that Debian, Gentoo and Fedora are plenty enough of deversity. At least their understanding of portability indicates that.
Yes, but having made very strong commitments hasn't stopped Sun before. Whatever their plans really are, people have a hard time trusting them after the back and forth regarding Solaris/x86 and their Linux strategy. It won't be easy for them to find early adopters in the enterprise space.
I agree however that having access to the source is certainly valuable from a customer point of view, and would often justify a higher price. (The market seems to agree, just look at how expensive source access for proprietary software tends to be.) Then again, for me it doesn't always have to be free in the FSF, or open source in the OSI sense - for example, the right to distribute derived works is significantly less important (although nice to have) than the right to use a patched version internally, or just to be allowed to look at the source to find workarounds when something goes wrong.
Morale: It is not a very sensible position to think that OSS=good and proprietary=bad. It always depends on your specific needs.
First of all, the free binary license is only available for hardware with a capacity of at most one CPU (no matter how many it actually has), and has been bought from Sun or an authorized reseller (not eBay or something).
Second, you only get a 60-day trial, or a "developer" resp. "educational" license that allows you to use Solaris "for the sole purpose of designing, developing and testing your applets and applications to run on the Solaris platform". I.e. no legal web browsing or using StarOffice for you.
In other words, you cannot generally buy a cheap Ultra 5 from eBay, download a new Solaris version for free, and use it as a private workstation or home server. At least not legally, that is.
(That applies to the Sparc version. The terms for x86 tend to be slightly different (no "authorized reseller" clause, for example), but then again, they tend to change rather frequently.)
Using clusters of redundant, inexpensive servers has some really nice advantages (for example, not only can you "hot swap" complete servers in case of failure without downtime, it is also easier to throw some new boxes in if you need more power than it would be to upgrade a single big-ass server). The problem is that it is hard to design apps to support such a setting nicely, but I predict that more and more will be extended to support clustering (or replaced with alternatives that do).
Of course, that does not mean that big iron unix servers will completely go away, just like the mainframe refuses to die.
As for the fun and games - I don't see why I should care about munich, or IBM, or Joe User, adopting Linux. What made open source what it is today was a combination of enthusiastic hackers writing better software than the corporate drones were allowed to, and companies trying to make money off that software. The companies won't stop trying to earn money, and I don't see a reason why the hackers should stop hacking for fun.
Actually, the BSDs execute Linux binaries quite fine. Not all of them, but there are people running Oracle that way. Just don't expect any vendor support.
Well, we'll see. If IBM really has such plans, they will surely not keep them a secret.
If they can port Office without help from Microsoft, maybe they could also implement compatibility with open standards.
So interpreters are equivalent to living in a cardbox?
We are not talking about mere copyright here, but trade secrets.
Open Source code is available for everyone. Only criminals can use the Windows code.
Basically, my experience with hardware and FreeBSD is that stuff either Just Works, or that it does not work at all, if it isn't supported. I never had the need to fiddle with arcane settings to make anything work (tuning aside, but then you obviously have to know your hardware pretty well anyway).
Good thing that a level-headed person like that is the president of the Open Source Initiative, it would loose a lot of credibility if it weren't for the flames^Wimportant information like the Halloween documents on its homepage.
Maybe its time for a "most annoying OS celebrity" slashdot poll?
They still have a chance to announce the final 5.2.1 release before releng@ does.
Sure you can. Just ask the RIAA for some tips.
Well, he is a gun nut...
He never needed a point before.
Why would you want that, even assuming that making Microsoft look bad would somehow be more important then the security of thousands of users and the internet as a whole? If something like that would happen, they could just sell it as a demonstration of the bad things that happen when source code is publicly available, like that of certain other systems...
Like SharpDevelop for example?
The only problem would be if they accepted patches, and the patches are GPLed themselves. The "core group" has to follow the license of anyone who has rights on the code they distribute, i.e. they'd have to get rid of the contribution or comply with its license.