How does this detract from my statement that I need open-source drivers because I use an esoteric operating system ( I happen to think it's the best OS out there, so I use it. This means to me that I'm limited to intel & nV cards, and if I were a fooBSD person or something, I might be limited only to intel )
What about people like me that use Solaris? or any othe esoteric operating system other than the big-3 ?
or if there's strange bugs that you think are the drivers fault, and you happen to know enough C to fix them right now instead of whenever the snail-slow vendor gets around to it?
as for your comment about giving away what you do for a living... AMD doesn't write drivers for money, they make hardware. Intel manages to make hardware and open-source a good majority of their drivers, so that's just a stupid argument.
"A plurality system inexorably pushes politicians towards the center, rather than the fringes."
Incorrect. A plurality system pushes politicians towards each other. If one party shifts right and is popular, the other party will shift right to catch up, which is what happens in the USA. Your Democrat party, in other countries, would be considered a fairly far right wing party.
The pressure is primarily from US insurance companies. IIRC there's a provision in NAFTA that if Canada goes private healthcare, the US insurance companies get first dibs at customers.
Why should they have given any care whatsoever about sharing code with Linux? They chose the license most acceptable to them with no regard to Linux whatsoever and that's that. OpenSolaris is not Linux, and should therefore not go out of it's way to either help or hinder Linux.
"Whatever else their relative merits, Linux has by far the wider hardware support. I don't know, maybe there's a few crucial drivers Solaris would have to give up for lack of available GPL drivers, but they're giving up access to a ton of Linux driver code."
Solaris driver support is actually quite good. Whatever obscure hardware that nobody cares about that Linux supports and Solaris doesn't is quite inconsequential to the project. If anyone cares about the hardware either OpenSolaris contributors directly, or one of the BSD's will support with a much more acceptable license anyways.
Solaris has very little of any consequence to gain from sharing code with Linux, but Linux stands to gain a lot from the wholesale looting out of Solaris' tree.
Is it any surprise that the only people you hear calling for GPL Solaris then are Linux users? Solaris users are quite fine with the way things are.
or they could avoid the hassle of managing a dual licensed project & the inevitable GPL-only fork ( what happens if someone wants to import a driver from linux? that's an instant fork ) by keeping the perfectly-fine license they have right now
relicensing Solaris as GPL is entirely unnecessary and doesn't help Sun or Solaris at all... the only people it helps is Linux, and that shouldn't be the primary concern of OpenSolaris.
If OpenSolaris happens to help Linux, great, but it shouldn't hurt itself & go out of it's way to do it
"Because the CDDL was deliberately made incompatible with the GPL, that's why. Also ask Sun about the needless patents they seem to want to hold on ZFS."
The CDDL is more or less the exact same license Firefox or Apache are under. Sun has a lot of ISV's and IHV's that want to be able to write code ( storage drivers, for example ) that can link against the Solaris kernel without having a team of lawyers analyze to see if it's okay.
It wasn't chosen to be incompatible with the GPL, it was chosen to provide some of the same protections ( share my code... ) without being incompatible with other licenses.
As for the patents, ask IBM how many patents they've got expressed in Linux
"People could still write non-GPL drivers for Solaris regardless. I take that to mean you don't understand the meaning of a GPL compatible license."
You can't link to GPL'ed code with an incompatible license. Hypothetically if EMC or Symantec wanted to write a closed-source driver for this hypothetical GPL Solaris, they'd have to pull an nVidia ( which is a lot of effort for purely non-technical reasons ), or stop supporting the platform.
Would that really be in Sun's best interests, if I(S|H)V's stopped supporting them?
The CDDL is a perfectly fine license, it's similar to what Apache & Mozilla use, and one that the current OpenSolaris community seems quite happy with.
How is it Sun's fault that the GPL is incompatible with anything other than itself?
The Right Thing(tm) is to keep the license as it is. It ensures the Solaris code has to be shared (like the GPL), but doesn't pollute source code around it ( GPL - viral clause = CDDL. Same license as firefox, or apache)
Linux wanting to pillage from the project isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for people to write non-GPL drivers for Solaris
"I can get a decent cup for $.89 at Circle-K or I can get a decent cup for $5 at Starbux"
A tall coffee from starbucks costs $1.75 canadian, and a small coffee from the gas station costs me $1 canadian, and is completely vile (as opposed to just mediocre but it'll do in a pinch, like starbucks), but nice try
"Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?"
ZFS on Solaris10
"How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?"
ZFS on Solaris10, again
"Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?"
Do you work for Sun or something? ZFS... it does that.
"How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)"
All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.
This particular problem, I imagine, will vanish quite soon. JDK is open-source now, should be short work to convert it to do what you're hoping.
What benefits you seem to expect from a 64-bit browser, on the other hand, is a different problem
Meanwhile, genetically modified food, which may actually present a danger ( I'm not convinced one way or another, to be honest, so I chose to err on the side of caution and buy non-GM anyways ) remains unlabelled, because Monsanto generously donates to the political candidate they want to win ( both of them ) with no expectations of favoritism at all, we promsise
"If you start off with too much theory he'll decide it sucks and change to another curriculum"
And is that necessarily a bad thing? Do you, as the hypothetical head of a CS department somewhere, just want to churn out hackers, or would you rather follow Dijkstra's philosophy of the subject ( namely, that computer science ought to study computers the same way astrophysics studies telescopes ) and put out some fantastic researchers?
I'm quite happy my university chose the second option. You can train a monkey to program, but if you risk scaring off the hacker type, you may find quite a number more mathematically minded people enrolling in your program
It's terribly unfortunate to hear stories of mismanagement of nuclear materials...
I'm very much of the opinion that more nuclear power is a good thing, It's clean, generally safe, & could serve as a solution to the global warming problem, but the public'll never agree with it if monkeys like this keep screwing it up.
I think you misunderstand what the man pages are for...
You imagine them to be a "how do I do this" reference. In reality, they're a "what does this command do, and what exactly is the effect of each flag it takes"
manpages were created with the assumption that you knew exactly what you wanted to do, and just needed the syntax to do it
"the DRM Restriction crosses the line between, software freedom and telling the programmers what the can and can't program"
GPL already does that without any help of the DRM restrictions.
Personally, I like the software freedom bits of Mozilla ( use my code, share it ), it lacks the viral properties of the GPL ( use my code, share yours too ), and the "free-for-all" of the BSD ( use my code... period )
Slashdot Mirror
SunOS 5 ( aka Solaris ), the current version, isn't a BSD operating system at all and it never has been, it's a SysV operating system.
And Sun seems to have wanted a licence to keep the code free like the GPL does, but without polluting code that tries to link to it, like the GPL does
How does this detract from my statement that I need open-source drivers because I use an esoteric operating system ( I happen to think it's the best OS out there, so I use it. This means to me that I'm limited to intel & nV cards, and if I were a fooBSD person or something, I might be limited only to intel )
What about people like me that use Solaris? or any othe esoteric operating system other than the big-3 ?
or if there's strange bugs that you think are the drivers fault, and you happen to know enough C to fix them right now instead of whenever the snail-slow vendor gets around to it?
as for your comment about giving away what you do for a living... AMD doesn't write drivers for money, they make hardware. Intel manages to make hardware and open-source a good majority of their drivers, so that's just a stupid argument.
Left to the devices of God this girl would have died.
This was man's work, not God's.
If they weren't actually wanted in the community, the market wouldn't allow it. People wouldn't buy from them, and they would go out of business.
WalMart continues to exist because people continue to vote for them with their dollars. Welcome to capitalism
As long as there's teenage boys and companies that make guitars, there will be music;
As long as there's hippies that want to make a statement, there will be visual art.
So you won't have mass-market tripe and you'll need to rely on local artists when you want to see art... How is that a bad thing overall?
"A plurality system inexorably pushes politicians towards the center, rather than the fringes."
Incorrect. A plurality system pushes politicians towards each other. If one party shifts right and is popular, the other party will shift right to catch up, which is what happens in the USA. Your Democrat party, in other countries, would be considered a fairly far right wing party.
The pressure is primarily from US insurance companies. IIRC there's a provision in NAFTA that if Canada goes private healthcare, the US insurance companies get first dibs at customers.
Why should they have given any care whatsoever about sharing code with Linux? They chose the license most acceptable to them with no regard to Linux whatsoever and that's that. OpenSolaris is not Linux, and should therefore not go out of it's way to either help or hinder Linux.
"Whatever else their relative merits, Linux has by far the wider hardware support. I don't know, maybe there's a few crucial drivers Solaris would have to give up for lack of available GPL drivers, but they're giving up access to a ton of Linux driver code."
Solaris driver support is actually quite good. Whatever obscure hardware that nobody cares about that Linux supports and Solaris doesn't is quite inconsequential to the project. If anyone cares about the hardware either OpenSolaris contributors directly, or one of the BSD's will support with a much more acceptable license anyways.
Solaris has very little of any consequence to gain from sharing code with Linux, but Linux stands to gain a lot from the wholesale looting out of Solaris' tree.
Is it any surprise that the only people you hear calling for GPL Solaris then are Linux users? Solaris users are quite fine with the way things are.
or they could avoid the hassle of managing a dual licensed project & the inevitable GPL-only fork ( what happens if someone wants to import a driver from linux? that's an instant fork ) by keeping the perfectly-fine license they have right now
relicensing Solaris as GPL is entirely unnecessary and doesn't help Sun or Solaris at all... the only people it helps is Linux, and that shouldn't be the primary concern of OpenSolaris.
If OpenSolaris happens to help Linux, great, but it shouldn't hurt itself & go out of it's way to do it
"Because the CDDL was deliberately made incompatible with the GPL, that's why. Also ask Sun about the needless patents they seem to want to hold on ZFS."
The CDDL is more or less the exact same license Firefox or Apache are under. Sun has a lot of ISV's and IHV's that want to be able to write code ( storage drivers, for example ) that can link against the Solaris kernel without having a team of lawyers analyze to see if it's okay.
It wasn't chosen to be incompatible with the GPL, it was chosen to provide some of the same protections ( share my code... ) without being incompatible with other licenses.
As for the patents, ask IBM how many patents they've got expressed in Linux
"People could still write non-GPL drivers for Solaris regardless. I take that to mean you don't understand the meaning of a GPL compatible license."
You can't link to GPL'ed code with an incompatible license. Hypothetically if EMC or Symantec wanted to write a closed-source driver for this hypothetical GPL Solaris, they'd have to pull an nVidia ( which is a lot of effort for purely non-technical reasons ), or stop supporting the platform.
Would that really be in Sun's best interests, if I(S|H)V's stopped supporting them?
Sun made no such promise.
Sun said they might look in to it, nothing more.
The CDDL is a perfectly fine license, it's similar to what Apache & Mozilla use, and one that the current OpenSolaris community seems quite happy with.
How is it Sun's fault that the GPL is incompatible with anything other than itself?
The Right Thing(tm) is to keep the license as it is. It ensures the Solaris code has to be shared (like the GPL), but doesn't pollute source code around it ( GPL - viral clause = CDDL. Same license as firefox, or apache)
Linux wanting to pillage from the project isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for people to write non-GPL drivers for Solaris
"I can get a decent cup for $.89 at Circle-K or I can get a decent cup for $5 at Starbux"
A tall coffee from starbucks costs $1.75 canadian, and a small coffee from the gas station costs me $1 canadian, and is completely vile (as opposed to just mediocre but it'll do in a pinch, like starbucks), but nice try
"Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?"
ZFS on Solaris10
"How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?"
ZFS on Solaris10, again
"Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?"
Do you work for Sun or something? ZFS... it does that.
"How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)"
All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.
All that, plus it's open-source
This particular problem, I imagine, will vanish quite soon. JDK is open-source now, should be short work to convert it to do what you're hoping. What benefits you seem to expect from a 64-bit browser, on the other hand, is a different problem
Right, because it offends religious folks,
Meanwhile, genetically modified food, which may actually present a danger ( I'm not convinced one way or another, to be honest, so I chose to err on the side of caution and buy non-GM anyways ) remains unlabelled, because Monsanto generously donates to the political candidate they want to win ( both of them ) with no expectations of favoritism at all, we promsise
"If you start off with too much theory he'll decide it sucks and change to another curriculum"
And is that necessarily a bad thing? Do you, as the hypothetical head of a CS department somewhere, just want to churn out hackers, or would you rather follow Dijkstra's philosophy of the subject ( namely, that computer science ought to study computers the same way astrophysics studies telescopes ) and put out some fantastic researchers?
I'm quite happy my university chose the second option. You can train a monkey to program, but if you risk scaring off the hacker type, you may find quite a number more mathematically minded people enrolling in your program
It's terribly unfortunate to hear stories of mismanagement of nuclear materials...
I'm very much of the opinion that more nuclear power is a good thing, It's clean, generally safe, & could serve as a solution to the global warming problem, but the public'll never agree with it if monkeys like this keep screwing it up.
An IP for everyone. Bah!
why, That's Communism!
I think you misunderstand what the man pages are for...
You imagine them to be a "how do I do this" reference. In reality, they're a "what does this command do, and what exactly is the effect of each flag it takes"
manpages were created with the assumption that you knew exactly what you wanted to do, and just needed the syntax to do it
That surplus isn't anywhere near high enough to drive wages down to commodity levels, and I think that's the "problem" Bill was getting at there...
"Since when is freedom communist?"
Since mccarthy. It's also terroristic more recently.
Especially when they've read so much Engels, yet they still manage to misspell his name
"the DRM Restriction crosses the line between, software freedom and telling the programmers what the can and can't program"
GPL already does that without any help of the DRM restrictions.
Personally, I like the software freedom bits of Mozilla ( use my code, share it ), it lacks the viral properties of the GPL ( use my code, share yours too ), and the "free-for-all" of the BSD ( use my code... period )