Well, for one, their servers always seem to be up. www.microsoft.com going down would normally make news. Also, it's more than likely that someone cracking the MS site would do SOMETHING to let it be known that they did it. Few hackers are purely malicious, most want some sort of fame.
(Yes, I used hackers instead of crackers, get over it, the work hacker is used by popular culture that way)
That I agree with. But to say that universities are not doing research is just silly. Open source is fine for engineering purposes, but has nothing to do with research.
Your comment shows a complete lack on knowledge and intellect. Clearly, you haven't the slightest clue as to what research entails nor what "computer science" is.
Go take some basic university classes before you furthur embarras yourself. By the way, it's "universties", not "universitys". Maybe you could use some high school as well.
There's a reason why sendmail, samba, apache, etc. have been around so long.
They have been around because they work. Not because they are open source. Windows has been around just as long, as have tons of other commercial softwares. Ironically, many commerical products are much much easier to install and configure. And missing libraries? That's a non-issue for commercial software. All needed libraries are distributed with the software.
Unless, of course you are talking about "Linux" based commercial software. In which case you can blame Linux and the OSS world for your library troubles.
Nobody will try disputing an obviously bulletproof contract.
So then the GPL isn't obviously bulletproof? Seems SCO is disputing it. My point being, that licenses are not tested for a variety of reasons, and not always because they are 'good'. The GPL is probably a fine license and likely the courts will reflect that, but you're generalizations are still wrong.
Many licenses are not tested because A) they are not used on anything important B) they have been violated but nobody knows C) it's not worth going to court if it's easy to settle (many GPL violations are solved this way). D) they are not enforced so nobody challenges them
Microsoft's EULA's would be a mix of C and D probably.
Good questions. And that is just my point. This letter proves nothing. But it sure throws fuel on the Linux community fire.
But, everyone will jump to the immediate conclusion that MS is behind the whole SCO incident. Why can't people just be happy blaming SCO? Because this is slashdot, and MS is the evil satan here. So everything must be MSs fault.
The mail does not at all indicate that Microsoft "raised money for SCO's anti-linux campaign". All it shows is that Microsoft has *referred* some *other* companies to SCO, who then bought from SCO on their own.
Microsoft themselves also licensed much of SCO's ip, and have been doing so long before this "anti-linux" campaign started. This letter is typical of large business relationships.
Nothing to see here except more biased opinions from RMS.
The GPL imposes more restrictions and you could argue that the violations were more serious and caused actual damages.
How? If they fully complied with the license a GPL author would also not see one extra penny. The code that needs to be released is *public*, i.e. it's not attributed *to* the original author and hence it's fishy if it can even be considered some form of payment.
Also, another alternative might have been that they would not touch the GPL code at all, in which case GPL author also gets no extra penny.
It might be a little easier to prove damages with the GPL, but I think you're reaching.
Actually, I think you are trolling. Most licenses have not been "tested" in a court of law, and they don't need to be "tested" to be perfectly good.
You're awfully quick to jump on the *trolling* bandwagon there. It's true that licenses don't always need to be tested to be fine. Most licenses are very similar to things the court has dealt with before and hence there is no need to 'test' them. Also, well worded licenses can be good. But that doesn't mean that having a license be 'tested' isn't better.
In fact, a license that has never been disputed is probably stronger than one that has been challenged in court.
Now THAT's some conclusion! Care to give some reason why that statement isn't just a shovelfull from the dung pile?
I don't see too many people saying that Microsoft's EULA is unenforceable, because it clearly is.
And here we see your ignorance. Shrink wrap EULA's are probably one of the most grey areas of the law. No, one's never been challenged yet, but none have been enforced yet either. And EULA's are broken A LOT. Many people think that EULA's are not valid at all.
This is about the WORST example to attempt to prove your point that you could have chosen! And here is proof that you picked a bad example
That's like saying "Have a read of this page if you will be voting in the upcoming US election."
As a counter to your suggestion, may I suggest to everyone who reads gnu.org material that they compare the writing style and tricks of gnu.org with your favorite religous scripture? GNU.org is *highly* manipulative.
Most notably, the USA decided that the nuclear arms treaty it sign all those years ago is not worth anything anymore. This of course gave the go ahead for pretty much every one else who wasn't already building new bombs, to start.
Now, not only has the USA accelerated the failure of nuclear treaties by leading by example, but they are also accelrating, or even initiating, a new space based nuclear cold war.
If even one nuclear missle goes off in orbit, it could seal us off from space for millenia. The debrea from the blown up satillites would act as bullets detroying further satillites and eventually creating a wall of space junk. Any ships, or new satillites would fly into the debrea field and be destroyed. We might be looking at a new dark age soon. A very very long one.
I used to work in a genetics lab. Due to the use of radioactive chemicals, the people in the lab wore radiation badges. As an experiment, we had a guy who sits in front of a large (old) CRT all day where a badge. We also taped a badge directly to the CRT screen (in a corner).
The badge the guy was wearing came back from the testing department with no significant radiation detected. However, the badge that was taped to the monitor came back having detected a measurable dose of unknown radiation (they were looking for only specific types). I can't remember if it was flagged as dangerous or not.
Anyways, most people now use LCD's (and if they don't they should). The magnetic field of and LCD is much much smaller than that of a CRT, so dont' worry if you have LCDs.
Open source isn't 'communistic' -- it's capitalistic. Why? It increases competition.
Sure, and Russia increased competition with the US and other world powers. Yet the people who were doing all the work got very little, and the guys at the top got a lot. Contrasting this to open source, the open source programmers get mostly 0 income, yet Red Hat, get's a fair bit.
I should also point out that Red Hat employs a very small percentage of open source programmers.
We have an interesting 6 months ahead of us, folks.
This leak will not make the next 6 months any more interesting than the last six months. You find security flaws in old microsoft products interesting? I personally find the next generation of software much much more interesting. And I'm not talking about open source cloning of existing levels of integration in other operating systems (this should have been done long ago).
Blah blah blah. Spoken like a true sheep. Here's news for you. People in the rest of the world don't think their own coutries are bad. That's not why everyone hates the US. Try reading about the results of your forieng policy. Have any idea what the US managed to do in Vietnam?
Well, they helped a complete maniac, Polpot, to power. He proceeded to kill thousands upon thousands of his own people. Those deaths are in part on your governments hands. You also helped Osama in to power, and Hussein. Sure, innocent little US.
Personally, I think the next time there's a major disaster like a volcano or a hurricane, we ought to just keep our foriegn aid and assistence at home.
Sure, go ahead. Your assistence often has strings attached anyways. For instance, Bush decided that he won't give aid to contries that support abortion (even the abortion is fine in the US itself).
But go on, stick you head in the American tube an pretend your in la la land. No one expects anything different of you anymore.
ohh... don't get me started on unstable. I tried that for a while (around a year). Needless to say, it deserves it's name. Besides, XFree 4.3 isn't even in unstable, it's in experimental. I mean, come on! Most other distros have been running 4.3 as stable for a long while now.
Well, there is http://www.linuxbase.org. And as for apt putting things in/usr, this goes back to what you call my *troll* about old software. It might be a troll if it weren't true. And yes, you can get 3rd party.deb packages with *some* newer software, and if you install these, they all go in/usr and can cause conflicts with stuff that *is* in the base system. I've had first hand experience with this.
But whatever, I guess we can agree that the BSD layout *isn't* confusing after all. Neither is debians of course. There is no point in arguing which layout is better since I'm sure we are both very much happy with our respective fav. systems.
Have fun using Debian, and I'll stick with BSD where I have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, dont' use hotmail. But doesn't hotmail still run on FreeBSD? Or did they finally manage to migrate it to Windows Server?
Well, for one, their servers always seem to be up. www.microsoft.com going down would normally make news. Also, it's more than likely that someone cracking the MS site would do SOMETHING to let it be known that they did it. Few hackers are purely malicious, most want some sort of fame.
(Yes, I used hackers instead of crackers, get over it, the work hacker is used by popular culture that way)
That I agree with. But to say that universities are not doing research is just silly. Open source is fine for engineering purposes, but has nothing to do with research.
Your comment shows a complete lack on knowledge and intellect. Clearly, you haven't the slightest clue as to what research entails nor what "computer science" is.
Go take some basic university classes before you furthur embarras yourself. By the way, it's "universties", not "universitys". Maybe you could use some high school as well.
No, lack of standards and changing APIs every week to make it hard to use binary-only drivers really sucks.
There's a reason why sendmail, samba, apache, etc. have been around so long.
They have been around because they work. Not because they are open source. Windows has been around just as long, as have tons of other commercial softwares. Ironically, many commerical products are much much easier to install and configure. And missing libraries? That's a non-issue for commercial software. All needed libraries are distributed with the software.
Unless, of course you are talking about "Linux" based commercial software. In which case you can blame Linux and the OSS world for your library troubles.
Well, this particular bug has been a *feature* of Linux for a good number of years.
With bugs like that, who needs features!
Nobody will try disputing an obviously bulletproof contract.
So then the GPL isn't obviously bulletproof? Seems SCO is disputing it. My point being, that licenses are not tested for a variety of reasons, and not always because they are 'good'. The GPL is probably a fine license and likely the courts will reflect that, but you're generalizations are still wrong.
Many licenses are not tested because
A) they are not used on anything important
B) they have been violated but nobody knows
C) it's not worth going to court if it's easy to settle (many GPL violations are solved this way).
D) they are not enforced so nobody challenges them
Microsoft's EULA's would be a mix of C and D probably.
Good questions. And that is just my point. This letter proves nothing. But it sure throws fuel on the Linux community fire.
But, everyone will jump to the immediate conclusion that MS is behind the whole SCO incident. Why can't people just be happy blaming SCO? Because this is slashdot, and MS is the evil satan here. So everything must be MSs fault.
Maybe he saved up for years and bought a USED one. No?
The mail does not at all indicate that Microsoft "raised money for SCO's anti-linux campaign". All it shows is that Microsoft has *referred* some *other* companies to SCO, who then bought from SCO on their own.
Microsoft themselves also licensed much of SCO's ip, and have been doing so long before this "anti-linux" campaign started. This letter is typical of large business relationships.
Nothing to see here except more biased opinions from RMS.
The GPL imposes more restrictions and you could argue that the violations were more serious and caused actual damages.
How? If they fully complied with the license a GPL author would also not see one extra penny. The code that needs to be released is *public*, i.e. it's not attributed *to* the original author and hence it's fishy if it can even be considered some form of payment.
Also, another alternative might have been that they would not touch the GPL code at all, in which case GPL author also gets no extra penny.
It might be a little easier to prove damages with the GPL, but I think you're reaching.
Actually, I think you are trolling. Most licenses have not been "tested" in a court of law, and they don't need to be "tested" to be perfectly good.
You're awfully quick to jump on the *trolling* bandwagon there. It's true that licenses don't always need to be tested to be fine. Most licenses are very similar to things the court has dealt with before and hence there is no need to 'test' them. Also, well worded licenses can be good. But that doesn't mean that having a license be 'tested' isn't better.
In fact, a license that has never been disputed is probably stronger than one that has been challenged in court.
Now THAT's some conclusion! Care to give some reason why that statement isn't just a shovelfull from the dung pile?
I don't see too many people saying that Microsoft's EULA is unenforceable, because it clearly is.
And here we see your ignorance. Shrink wrap EULA's are probably one of the most grey areas of the law. No, one's never been challenged yet, but none have been enforced yet either. And EULA's are broken A LOT. Many people think that EULA's are not valid at all.
This is about the WORST example to attempt to prove your point that you could have chosen! And here is proof that you picked a bad example
http://lwn.net/2000/features/ncm-dvd.php3
And the DeCSS guy won by the way. Twice.
Your right, I should have posted as anonymous, but didn't think of it at the time. :)
Well, it kind of follows from the previous post, which follows from the previous, and originally there WAS an on topic post.
But to answer your question: YES, all BUSH SUCKS POSTS are insightful.
Umm... bush sucks!
Hmm... I'm not insightful yet.
Blah!
That's like saying "Have a read of this page if you will be voting in the upcoming US election."
As a counter to your suggestion, may I suggest to everyone who reads gnu.org material that they compare the writing style and tricks of gnu.org with your favorite religous scripture? GNU.org is *highly* manipulative.
Most notably, the USA decided that the nuclear arms treaty it sign all those years ago is not worth anything anymore. This of course gave the go ahead for pretty much every one else who wasn't already building new bombs, to start.
Now, not only has the USA accelerated the failure of nuclear treaties by leading by example, but they are also accelrating, or even initiating, a new space based nuclear cold war.
If even one nuclear missle goes off in orbit, it could seal us off from space for millenia. The debrea from the blown up satillites would act as bullets detroying further satillites and eventually creating a wall of space junk. Any ships, or new satillites would fly into the debrea field and be destroyed. We might be looking at a new dark age soon. A very very long one.
I used to work in a genetics lab. Due to the use of radioactive chemicals, the people in the lab wore radiation badges. As an experiment, we had a guy who sits in front of a large (old) CRT all day where a badge. We also taped a badge directly to the CRT screen (in a corner).
The badge the guy was wearing came back from the testing department with no significant radiation detected. However, the badge that was taped to the monitor came back having detected a measurable dose of unknown radiation (they were looking for only specific types). I can't remember if it was flagged as dangerous or not.
Anyways, most people now use LCD's (and if they don't they should). The magnetic field of and LCD is much much smaller than that of a CRT, so dont' worry if you have LCDs.
Cool, does wine also run the spyware? ;)
(People should use KazaaLite, or a spyware free client!)
Open source isn't 'communistic' -- it's capitalistic. Why? It increases competition.
Sure, and Russia increased competition with the US and other world powers. Yet the people who were doing all the work got very little, and the guys at the top got a lot. Contrasting this to open source, the open source programmers get mostly 0 income, yet Red Hat, get's a fair bit.
I should also point out that Red Hat employs a very small percentage of open source programmers.
We have an interesting 6 months ahead of us, folks.
This leak will not make the next 6 months any more interesting than the last six months. You find security flaws in old microsoft products interesting? I personally find the next generation of software much much more interesting. And I'm not talking about open source cloning of existing levels of integration in other operating systems (this should have been done long ago).
Yes yes, *everybody* is crazy except you. That's logical. Americans are the only sentient beings left.
Whatever bud. You're in the minority, and continually exposed to American bullshit.
Blah blah blah. Spoken like a true sheep. Here's news for you. People in the rest of the world don't think their own coutries are bad. That's not why everyone hates the US. Try reading about the results of your forieng policy. Have any idea what the US managed to do in Vietnam?
Well, they helped a complete maniac, Polpot, to power. He proceeded to kill thousands upon thousands of his own people. Those deaths are in part on your governments hands. You also helped Osama in to power, and Hussein. Sure, innocent little US.
Personally, I think the next time there's a major disaster like a volcano or a hurricane, we ought to just keep our foriegn aid and assistence at home.
Sure, go ahead. Your assistence often has strings attached anyways. For instance, Bush decided that he won't give aid to contries that support abortion (even the abortion is fine in the US itself).
But go on, stick you head in the American tube an pretend your in la la land. No one expects anything different of you anymore.
the US forces were crushed in Iraq
Nah, instead the US forces are trying blood letting. You know, a few lives here, a few lives there. Hip hip hurray for rightous occupation.
ohh... don't get me started on unstable. I tried that for a while (around a year). Needless to say, it deserves it's name. Besides, XFree 4.3 isn't even in unstable, it's in experimental. I mean, come on! Most other distros have been running 4.3 as stable for a long while now.
Well, there is http://www.linuxbase.org. And as for apt putting things in /usr, this goes back to what you call my *troll* about old software. It might be a troll if it weren't true. And yes, you can get 3rd party .deb packages with *some* newer software, and if you install these, they all go in /usr and can cause conflicts with stuff that *is* in the base system. I've had first hand experience with this.
But whatever, I guess we can agree that the BSD layout *isn't* confusing after all. Neither is debians of course. There is no point in arguing which layout is better since I'm sure we are both very much happy with our respective fav. systems.
Have fun using Debian, and I'll stick with BSD where I have a choice.