XFree86 could be a little more open
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XFree86 News
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· Score: 1
XFree could start by opening up its codebase a little. Last time I checked you had to be a developer to get early access to code. Nor could I find any public archives of the developers mailing lists.
"Being a developer" implies a commitment that may discourage occasional developers and patch submitters (such as myself).
Don't get me wrong; I respect and value the work that the XFree developers do.
1) Been stopped from going to your local house of worship.
Waco.
2) been stopped from haveing a Peacefull protest.
You must be joking - I can think of dozens of examples where peaceful protests have been broken up by force in the USA over the last few years alone. The first one that comes to mind in NYC mayor Guiliani's (sp?) using police to forcibly remove artists from central park *despite* a court ruling in their favour
3) Been denied freedom of speach press etc.
Hah! Your freedom to speak is directly proportional your financial situation. Do you think that a kid born into poverty has as much freedom of speech as a person such as yourself?
4) been made to self incrimate yourself in a criminal trial. etc
You don't think confessions aren't beaten out of suspected criminals? Please don't tell me you are so naive.
5) been denined legal council when you needed it.
Have you tried to access legal aid? If so, please share you experiences. Have you tried to get legal aid for a civil matter?
21st century democracy exists by the people for the elite
If you don't like ACs then raise your threshold so you don't see them. Don't bitch and whine.
Re:I'll wait for some independent benchmarks first
on
Athlon Benchmarks Out
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· Score: 2
The K6-III is the fastest chip at compiling the linux kernel (it beats everything except an overclocked Celeron), so it is useful for something - software development.
AMD's chips have also tended to be cheaper than the equivalent offerings from Intel.
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind the massive overvaluation of anything 'Internet' these days?
I can understand the desire of investors to want in on an expanding market, but how can anyone in their right mind value a "portal" in the hundreds of millions of dollars? How can this value be sustained for any period of time?
When _you_ develop and release software, _you_ can choose the packaging format.
Don't bitch about someone else's choice, especially when they are giving their work away for free. You should be grateful that someone has done it at all.
It is true though - it is all to easy to focus our attention on the superstars and ignore the cast of thousands who submit less visible contributions (such as bugfixes and documentation).
More exposure == more eyeballs == better software.
Right on. I challenge anyone to find another for-profit company which has done as much to advance open source software.
It seems that too many people cannot appreciate "good" without reference to a percieved "bad". This seems to happen at all levels of society. Complex issues are polarised and reduced to simple dichotomies so they can fit in small minds.
It is irrelevant that a sole owner can change the license. The GPL does not include a clause which allows an owner to revoke rights already granted (such a clause exists in IBM's public licenses, for example).
So even if a putative badguy was to close a previously GPL'd package, everyone else could continue development with the last GPL'd version. This would be little more than an inconvienience.
In reality it is even more difficult to close the source for an open package. Since most packages have several significant contributors and no one except the FSF bothers with copyright assignments, one contributor could not close the source for a package without either obtaining permission from all the other contributors or removing their contributions entirely. Not even Linus could close the source for Linux.
Cracking contests prove little. For a start they are usually rigged heavily in favour of the vendor, probably use closed systems and they generally target the wrong threat group.
The last point bears expanding: When you offer $10k to "crack a webserver" you are attracting amateurs. The people who you should be really worried about have a vested interest in your continuing belief that a system is secure, this belief can be worth far more that a one-off payment of $10k.
An excellent treatment of this topic can be found in Uber-cryptographer Bruce Schneier's excellent Cryptogram newsletter.
Reverse engineering is not piracy, what gave you that idea?
Reverse engineering is essential for competition in an environment dominated by closed standards, hardware, software and/or protocols.
Many large companies have been lobbying very hard against the right to reverse engineer commercial products and have already met with some success (cf the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US).
This right has made possible competing implementations of closed systems such as Windows filesharing (in the form of Samba).
I don't think Nintendo will be sitting on their hands for long. They are a large company with a vested interest and a track record of using legal and financial pressures to obtain what they destire.
Since the source code is available, it makes sense to mirror it ASAP. Pity it isn't under an open-source license.
I am afraid that this criticism is well founded. For a community supposedly predicated on 'Freedom', it is very intolerant of dissenting views.
Witness the flamefest that ensues whenever a slashdot poster dares state that they like commrecial software, or preferrs M$ products.
IMO 'the community' should realise that bludgeoning people with your attitudes is not an effective way to change their minds. Quite the reverse, in fact.
To act as a CA, all you need is OpenSSL (or its progenitor SSLeay). Both include scripts which, after a little tweaking, will allow you to sign certificate requests.
The difficulty in being a CA is not the software, but rather the business systems that must be developed and adhered to in order to insure correct authentication, legal accountability and strong security.
I suspect that a company looking to set up a CA would spend orders of magnitude more on Lawyers than on software.
Slashdot Mirror
XFree could start by opening up its codebase a little. Last time I checked you had to be a developer to get early access to code. Nor could I find any public archives of the developers mailing lists.
"Being a developer" implies a commitment that may discourage occasional developers and patch submitters (such as myself).
Don't get me wrong; I respect and value the work that the XFree developers do.
The first few instances of each new product line from Intel have always sucked:
- Pentium 60 & 75
- Pentium II 233 & 266
- Cacheless Celerons
- Pentium III (not much faster than a Celeron at the same clock speed)
Later revs will probably kick butt.1) Been stopped from going to your local house of worship.
Waco.
2) been stopped from haveing a Peacefull protest.
You must be joking - I can think of dozens of examples where peaceful protests have been broken up by force in the USA over the last few years alone. The first one that comes to mind in NYC mayor Guiliani's (sp?) using police to forcibly remove artists from central park *despite* a court ruling in their favour
3) Been denied freedom of speach press etc.
Hah! Your freedom to speak is directly proportional your financial situation. Do you think that a kid born into poverty has as much freedom of speech as a person such as yourself?4) been made to self incrimate yourself in a criminal trial. etc
You don't think confessions aren't beaten out of suspected criminals? Please don't tell me you are so naive.
5) been denined legal council when you needed it.
Have you tried to access legal aid? If so, please share you experiences. Have you tried to get legal aid for a civil matter?
21st century democracy exists by the people for the elite
If you don't like ACs then raise your threshold so you don't see them. Don't bitch and whine.
The K6-III is the fastest chip at compiling the linux kernel (it beats everything except an overclocked Celeron), so it is useful for something - software development.
AMD's chips have also tended to be cheaper than the equivalent offerings from Intel.
There are many things which are good about Star Wars and The X-Files (though the new season sucks), but the science fiction isn't one of them.
Star Wars may be set in a futuristic universe, but it is ultimatly a Campbellian passage-of-the-hero story.
I wouldn't call X-Files sci-fi by any measure. It might borrow a little from the genre, but again it isn't really part of the story.
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind the massive overvaluation of anything 'Internet' these days?
I can understand the desire of investors to want in on an expanding market, but how can anyone in their right mind value a "portal" in the hundreds of millions of dollars? How can this value be sustained for any period of time?
not for long :(
When _you_ develop and release software, _you_ can choose the packaging format.
Don't bitch about someone else's choice, especially when they are giving their work away for free. You should be grateful that someone has done it at all.
It is true though - it is all to easy to focus our attention on the superstars and ignore the cast of thousands who submit less visible contributions (such as bugfixes and documentation).
More exposure == more eyeballs == better software.
Redhat is *free*. If you don't like the price that they charge for the nice boxed set (including support), then don't buy it.
Download it, borrow it of a friend, get a $2 copy from cheapbytes, whatever. Just don't whine about it like they are ripping you off, they aren't.
Right on. I challenge anyone to find another for-profit company which has done as much to advance open source software.
It seems that too many people cannot appreciate "good" without reference to a percieved "bad". This seems to happen at all levels of society. Complex issues are polarised and reduced to simple dichotomies so they can fit in small minds.
It is irrelevant that a sole owner can change the license. The GPL does not include a clause which allows an owner to revoke rights already granted (such a clause exists in IBM's public licenses, for example).
So even if a putative badguy was to close a previously GPL'd package, everyone else could continue development with the last GPL'd version. This would be little more than an inconvienience.
In reality it is even more difficult to close the source for an open package. Since most packages have several significant contributors and no one except the FSF bothers with copyright assignments, one contributor could not close the source for a package without either obtaining permission from all the other contributors or removing their contributions entirely. Not even Linus could close the source for Linux.
Cracking contests prove little. For a start they are usually rigged heavily in favour of the vendor, probably use closed systems and they generally target the wrong threat group.
The last point bears expanding: When you offer $10k to "crack a webserver" you are attracting amateurs. The people who you should be really worried about have a vested interest in your continuing belief that a system is secure, this belief can be worth far more that a one-off payment of $10k.
An excellent treatment of this topic can be found in Uber-cryptographer Bruce Schneier's excellent Cryptogram newsletter.
Reverse engineering is not piracy, what gave you that idea?
Reverse engineering is essential for competition in an environment dominated by closed standards, hardware, software and/or protocols.
Many large companies have been lobbying very hard against the right to reverse engineer commercial products and have already met with some success (cf the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US).
This right has made possible competing implementations of closed systems such as Windows filesharing (in the form of Samba).
I don't think Nintendo will be sitting on their hands for long. They are a large company with a vested interest and a track record of using legal and financial pressures to obtain what they destire.
Since the source code is available, it makes sense to mirror it ASAP. Pity it isn't under an open-source license.
This cannot happen. If Redhat or anyone else added a "killer feature" to a GPL package then it too must be released as GPL.
The GPL was explicitly designed to prevent that sort of abuse.
This is why I find all the anti-Redhat paranoia so amusing - even if they wanted to become a MS, the can't. They are prevented by the GPL.
Apart from slightly newer software version, what does this give me that Redhat 6.0 does not?
I am afraid that this criticism is well founded. For a community supposedly predicated on 'Freedom', it is very intolerant of dissenting views.
Witness the flamefest that ensues whenever a slashdot poster dares state that they like commrecial software, or preferrs M$ products.
IMO 'the community' should realise that bludgeoning people with your attitudes is not an effective way to change their minds. Quite the reverse, in fact.
I don't see what everyone is whining about - Xanim is not open-source either.
To act as a CA, all you need is OpenSSL (or its progenitor SSLeay). Both include scripts which, after a little tweaking, will allow you to sign certificate requests.
The difficulty in being a CA is not the software, but rather the business systems that must be developed and adhered to in order to insure correct authentication, legal accountability and strong security.
I suspect that a company looking to set up a CA would spend orders of magnitude more on Lawyers than on software.
It is all very nice to have GGI drivers, but Linus has stated that they will never be included in the standard kernel.
What about X drivers so the rest of us can use them? (these would also be portable to other free unices)