The answer is simple: We Americans don't get the metric system. The article was obviously written by an American who divided incorrectly the second time.
But why is it the only option for people? The reason is simple: Windows just "works"... at least as far as Joe Blow is concerned. Joe Blow isn't going to want to cd/usr/pkgsrc/www/mozilla; make && make install and then wait a fairly long amount of time for it to compile and install.
As a developer, I *most* of the time enjoy doing builds from source, or using some of the more obscure switches for pkg_add or rpm. The *vast* majority of the population wouldn't even know where to begin.
(While I assume that the latter part of the above message is tongue in cheek...)
I guess it depends on what sort of enterprise application you are talking about. I am building a commercial router/content filtering system for corporations using NetBSD and am *very* happy with it.
NetBSD is small, robust, and fast. Creating customized installation media is a breeze and the networking code is fast (okay, I haven't benchmarked it against any of the 2.4 Linux kernels, but it *seems* faster). Hell, my full ISO to install NetBSD and all of the other supporting software is approximately 100MB, and that's with quite a bit of extra stuff thrown in, like the development tools, etc...
The one place that NetBSD needs some help is with the installation process ("you mean I need to know the geometry of my drive???!" and "what do you mean sshd isn't started by default from rc.conf???") but even that is easily overcome by creating simplified installation floppies.
As a recent convert to NetBSD (from FreeBSD from Linux), I have to say that I am very pleased with the NetBSD product... adding support for SMP can only make it better.
Bluetooth is great and all... if you happen to have a Bluetooth machine and Bluetooth peripherals. What I want to know is: when (if it doesn't already exist in CVS somewhere) can we see a fully functional IR stack? Part of the reason that I had to switch my corporate laptop away from FreeBSD is that I was not able to use the IR port on my phone while on the road.
Charging a second customer for software you've already developed seems to me simply dishonest, so we don't do it.
????!
Unless you are charging the initial customer a shitload of money, I don't see how you can stay in business. On top of that, I can't imagine any customer being happy with the fact that the software they just paid you good money to write is now freely available to everyone else. And, to me, that is the true shortcoming of the GPL.
WHAT!??? I have been under the impression for all of these years that there are only two operating systems in existence... one called Linux and one called Windows! Every once in a while I have heard people refer to something like Windows 98, but I secretly know that they have no clue... there is only one OS by MS and it is called "Windows". However, there are several Linuxes... RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, etc...
While we are on the subject, please, please, please stop using the terms Internet and email and ftp! You only show your ignorance. What you refer to as the 'Internet' is actually AOL and email/ftp are actually called 'The Web'.
It's not the merits of BitKeeper _per se_ which are at issue. Rather, it is the very idea of the use of it - even if it's technically better!
Why do FSF advocates insist on clouding the difference between the right to free-use and the right to change the source? BitKeeper is *free-to-use*, with the exception of a very reasonable clause for bug tracking. BitKeeper is not *free to change*, but really, whom does that affect? 0.00001% of the population? Less? Seriously, how many people actually give a rat's ass that they can get the source to a program?
Granted, *I* enjoy looking at the source for the programs I install, and I like building them from source. I don't believe that gives me a magic bullet (if the program is released under the GPL) to fork off some weird version of that code.
Joan wants to distribute copies of her browser statically linked to Postfix (a mail server)...
What in the hell is Joan thinking of linking a web browser to a mail server? I think Joan is automatically disqualified from ever developing software, much less having the ability to determine which license to use.
I have been trying to get my city (small suburban community north of Seattle) to do something like this for quite some time. It is definitely technically doable, but politically a no-go. My firm has discussed doing a guerilla-style implementation.
Anyone have any stories about pulling something like that off?
I worked for an ISP in Tokyo in the late 90's and we were paying over 20k USD/mo for our 128K frame relay line. Apparently that price had been reduced by NTT shortly before I arrived. By the time I left Japan, they were paying about 10k USD/mo for a 256K line.
As if to make things better, NTT began offering a service in conjunction with ATT (I believe it was JENS, but can't remember for sure) that was *much* cheaper. Problem is, NTT would only *guarantee* 9600kbps on the upstream.
Meanwhile, back in the US, I get 1.5Mbps down and 128Kb up for 40 USD/mo.
That sure beats the hell out of a certain other song [gnu.org] that gets mentioned around here now and then.
Shudder... that song must *never* be heard by the general public! In fact, I beseech RMS to immediately destroy all copies. I mean, how in the world can you take a movement seriously when it has such a ridiculous theme song(and off-key singing , and patchouli-invoking lyrics, etc, etc, etc...).
Gates must have a good laugh everytime a new BSD comes out - more quality code he can use for free leaving money free to shit on programmers everywhere.
That's a choice of the BSD teams. MS is, despite their many, many, many other shortcomings, doing absolutely nothing wrong when they use BSD code in Windows.
The philosophies of the BSD and Linux crowds (or, more specifically the BSD License vs. the GPL) are radically different. In the BSD world, people are more than happy to anonymously contribute code in the hopes that it might improve other projects, proprietary or not. The GPL crowd, while also wanting to improve the quality of other projects, is unwilling to allow their code to be used in anything *but* GPLed code (with LGPL exceptions, of course). I am not going to make a judgement call on which is better (at least not on/.) but I think it is imperative that people understand that difference before flaming companies for using BSD code in their proprietary projects... because the BSD people (the ones who actually *wrote* it) don't give a flying fuck... why should you?
Holy fuck... why do we continually have these "*BSD is dying" posts? The various BSDs are quality... high quality. Not as user-friendly as some of the Linux distros, but just as powerful and in most cases more secure. I have one machine (a laptop, nonetheless) on which I run FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE. It rocks... and is virtually indistinguishable from my RedHat 7.1 box.
Personally, I can see FreeBSD moving more into the embedded space (as evidenced by WindRiver), as it has a smaller overall footprint than Linux, seems (warning unscientific speculation ahead) to have a slightly more robust VM,and has more "out-of-the-box" security.
One more thing, don't forget that MS has threatened to build a reference implementation of.NET for FreeBSD. (slam away!)
I have had extensive experience with offshore development in Russia, India, Indonesia (don't even ask), and various Latin American countries. If I had to do it again, I would go with a Russian team over any of the others. A business associate of mine does a lot of work in Vietnam (he has a couple hundred developers there) and he seems pleased with the work quality and the *much* lower bottom line. Indian firms are now almost on par with American teams in regards to rates, so why even bother?
But, as has been pointed out here already, there are thousands and thousands of US developers out of work, which makes it a buyer's market. To put it into perspective, a top-gun Russian developer is going to charge 25/hr. I am certain that you can find a comparable US developer right now to do it for approximately the same; plus or minus 10% or so. It's amazing, but even software developers like to pay their mortgage...;-)
You obviously have not travelled much in Asia... particularly Japan. It is not at all uncommon to see a salaryman riding the train, his phone in one hand and his other hand firmly entrenched deep in his crotch.
So, to take an extreme example, you'd have no problem purchasing software made with slave labor? It's not absurd - search Google for "prison-industrial complex". This neoslavery is alread being used for routine data-entry tasks in some places.
Ok... that's a rather extreme example. Maybe I should clarify: not using a software product because you find its license ethically questionable is absurd (to me). Here's an example. I have a client that has hundreds of workstations all running MS. Their entire knowledge flow is based on shared calendars via Exchange.I hate Exchange.. with a brutal passion. However, it doesn't make any fiscal sense for me to change them over to something else just because I prefer the GPL to an MS EULA.
While it may be frustrating to receive countless emails and promotional mailers from MS and their associated counterparts, think of it this way: it keeps you up to speed with what they are doing.
Part of the problem with some *nix developers I know is that they honestly don't have a clue what the various Windows platforms are capable of. For all you know, you might come across an MS technology that is perfect for a project you are working on. Granted, this might be a rarity, but simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd... it should always be the best tool for the job... even if it is from MS.
We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?
FreeBSD is not as "user-friendly" as Linux... and by that I mean it is slightly more complicated to use Ports (cd/usr/ports/net/vnc; make && make install) than to walk through a package tree with GnoRPM. Well, actually it isn't more difficult but might be *perceived* to be more difficult. Want to recompile your kernel under FreeBSD? Edit a text file, run config on it then cd to the appropriate directory and compile... no make menuconfig here.
The interesting thing to me is that all of the "hardcore" *nix developers out there are now screaming for a desktop solution akin to Windows. Seems that some people have lost their way in regards to the command line and good old knowledge being necessary to make their machines perform.
um... copyrights do so have to be defended.If you publish a book and another publisher takes the contents of the book and puts it out as their own, is that not copyright infringement? Do you not have to defend against this by verifying that no one is using your copyrighted material?
I wasn't talking about the *validity* of the copyright, but one must still make a reasonable effort to protect them (from plagerism, etc...)
I like this. Perhaps it would stop developers from going with their knee-jerk reactions and slapping a GPL notice on every piece of code they write. It would make them think about the various ramifications of GPLing their code, and the fact that just because they can freely use the GPL for their projects, there is a cost to be paid, in that they a) won't make any money from their project, and, 2)have the same obligations of any other license holder in terms of defending their copyrighted works.
Personally, and I know this is horribly unpopular amongst the GPL crowd, I would like to see an extension to the GPL that allows for commercial use, so long as a royalty is paid to the developer. Heck, for those die-hard GPLers you could even make the royalty go straight to the FSF.
I wish more IDEs allowed for plugin editors. When I am forced to use MSDev, I use the Vim plugin, but it doesn't seem to support all of the *good* features of MSDev.
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The answer is simple: We Americans don't get the metric system. The article was obviously written by an American who divided incorrectly the second time.
As a developer, I *most* of the time enjoy doing builds from source, or using some of the more obscure switches for pkg_add or rpm. The *vast* majority of the population wouldn't even know where to begin.
Those aren't ports, those are binary packages you are trying to add.
If I remember correctly, I think I blew away the restore partition before the installation, but I didn't screw around with the BIOS at all.
Am very curious as to what might be causing your problem.
I guess it depends on what sort of enterprise application you are talking about. I am building a commercial router/content filtering system for corporations using NetBSD and am *very* happy with it.
NetBSD is small, robust, and fast. Creating customized installation media is a breeze and the networking code is fast (okay, I haven't benchmarked it against any of the 2.4 Linux kernels, but it *seems* faster). Hell, my full ISO to install NetBSD and all of the other supporting software is approximately 100MB, and that's with quite a bit of extra stuff thrown in, like the development tools, etc...
The one place that NetBSD needs some help is with the installation process ("you mean I need to know the geometry of my drive???!" and "what do you mean sshd isn't started by default from rc.conf???") but even that is easily overcome by creating simplified installation floppies.
As a recent convert to NetBSD (from FreeBSD from Linux), I have to say that I am very pleased with the NetBSD product... adding support for SMP can only make it better.
You are looking for something like XNS. There is a company called OneName in Seattle that is working on a solution to do exactly what you want.
Bluetooth is great and all... if you happen to have a Bluetooth machine and Bluetooth peripherals. What I want to know is: when (if it doesn't already exist in CVS somewhere) can we see a fully functional IR stack? Part of the reason that I had to switch my corporate laptop away from FreeBSD is that I was not able to use the IR port on my phone while on the road.
????!
Unless you are charging the initial customer a shitload of money, I don't see how you can stay in business. On top of that, I can't imagine any customer being happy with the fact that the software they just paid you good money to write is now freely available to everyone else. And, to me, that is the true shortcoming of the GPL.
While we are on the subject, please, please, please stop using the terms Internet and email and ftp! You only show your ignorance. What you refer to as the 'Internet' is actually AOL and email/ftp are actually called 'The Web'.
Jeez, some people.
Why do FSF advocates insist on clouding the difference between the right to free-use and the right to change the source? BitKeeper is *free-to-use*, with the exception of a very reasonable clause for bug tracking. BitKeeper is not *free to change*, but really, whom does that affect? 0.00001% of the population? Less? Seriously, how many people actually give a rat's ass that they can get the source to a program?
Granted, *I* enjoy looking at the source for the programs I install, and I like building them from source. I don't believe that gives me a magic bullet (if the program is released under the GPL) to fork off some weird version of that code.
What in the hell is Joan thinking of linking a web browser to a mail server? I think Joan is automatically disqualified from ever developing software, much less having the ability to determine which license to use.
Anyone have any stories about pulling something like that off?
As if to make things better, NTT began offering a service in conjunction with ATT (I believe it was JENS, but can't remember for sure) that was *much* cheaper. Problem is, NTT would only *guarantee* 9600kbps on the upstream.
Meanwhile, back in the US, I get 1.5Mbps down and 128Kb up for 40 USD/mo.
Shudder... that song must *never* be heard by the general public! In fact, I beseech RMS to immediately destroy all copies. I mean, how in the world can you take a movement seriously when it has such a ridiculous theme song(and off-key singing , and patchouli-invoking lyrics, etc, etc, etc...).
That's a choice of the BSD teams. MS is, despite their many, many, many other shortcomings, doing absolutely nothing wrong when they use BSD code in Windows.
The philosophies of the BSD and Linux crowds (or, more specifically the BSD License vs. the GPL) are radically different. In the BSD world, people are more than happy to anonymously contribute code in the hopes that it might improve other projects, proprietary or not. The GPL crowd, while also wanting to improve the quality of other projects, is unwilling to allow their code to be used in anything *but* GPLed code (with LGPL exceptions, of course). I am not going to make a judgement call on which is better (at least not on /.) but I think it is imperative that people understand that difference before flaming companies for using BSD code in their proprietary projects... because the BSD people (the ones who actually *wrote* it) don't give a flying fuck... why should you?
Personally, I can see FreeBSD moving more into the embedded space (as evidenced by WindRiver), as it has a smaller overall footprint than Linux, seems (warning unscientific speculation ahead) to have a slightly more robust VM,and has more "out-of-the-box" security.
One more thing, don't forget that MS has threatened to build a reference implementation of .NET for FreeBSD. (slam away!)
But, as has been pointed out here already, there are thousands and thousands of US developers out of work, which makes it a buyer's market. To put it into perspective, a top-gun Russian developer is going to charge 25/hr. I am certain that you can find a comparable US developer right now to do it for approximately the same; plus or minus 10% or so. It's amazing, but even software developers like to pay their mortgage... ;-)
You obviously have not travelled much in Asia... particularly Japan. It is not at all uncommon to see a salaryman riding the train, his phone in one hand and his other hand firmly entrenched deep in his crotch.
Ok... that's a rather extreme example. Maybe I should clarify: not using a software product because you find its license ethically questionable is absurd (to me). Here's an example. I have a client that has hundreds of workstations all running MS. Their entire knowledge flow is based on shared calendars via Exchange.I hate Exchange.. with a brutal passion. However, it doesn't make any fiscal sense for me to change them over to something else just because I prefer the GPL to an MS EULA.
Part of the problem with some *nix developers I know is that they honestly don't have a clue what the various Windows platforms are capable of. For all you know, you might come across an MS technology that is perfect for a project you are working on. Granted, this might be a rarity, but simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd... it should always be the best tool for the job... even if it is from MS.
FreeBSD is not as "user-friendly" as Linux... and by that I mean it is slightly more complicated to use Ports (cd /usr/ports/net/vnc; make && make install) than to walk through a package tree with GnoRPM. Well, actually it isn't more difficult but might be *perceived* to be more difficult. Want to recompile your kernel under FreeBSD? Edit a text file, run config on it then cd to the appropriate directory and compile... no make menuconfig here.
The interesting thing to me is that all of the "hardcore" *nix developers out there are now screaming for a desktop solution akin to Windows. Seems that some people have lost their way in regards to the command line and good old knowledge being necessary to make their machines perform.
Conclusion: FreeBSD is *not* dying... in fact, it is *gaining* popularity.
I wasn't talking about the *validity* of the copyright, but one must still make a reasonable effort to protect them (from plagerism, etc...)
Personally, and I know this is horribly unpopular amongst the GPL crowd, I would like to see an extension to the GPL that allows for commercial use, so long as a royalty is paid to the developer. Heck, for those die-hard GPLers you could even make the royalty go straight to the FSF.
I wish more IDEs allowed for plugin editors. When I am forced to use MSDev, I use the Vim plugin, but it doesn't seem to support all of the *good* features of MSDev.