I realize that AOL does not own the Mozilla Project or the Mozilla Foundation (please see my other posts).
Maybe those items are what Open Source is about for you. You seem to have more pragmatic concerns in mind. However, other people feel differently. OSS, for me, is an idealistic venture as well as a pragmatic one. I really like the idea of freedom of ideas and information. OSS seems likes the best implementation yet of my ideals. However, pressing legal action for trademark violation is certainly not something that I can support in good conscience.
I respect your viewpoint of OSS and its purpose, but realize that many would disagree.
They are not tained, but they certainly have a much greater propensity towards being more mercenary about the foundation. The question is not whether they have the right under the law, but whether they should do what they're going as a proponent of OSS. I, of course, believe that this action is contrary to ideals of OSS.
Clearly, we have differing opinions concerning the freedom of information (and the enforcability of trademarks), so I don't think we will really be able to agree on this point.
Yes, I realize that, and you'll notice that I used the word "Involvement" rather than another that might imply ownership. According to their Press Release, they are still involved with AOL.
We're grateful for the past and ongoing support of America Online, and we look forward to continuing to work with AOL over coming years.
Besides all this, there is an element of influence that AOL has had on the foundation after having owned the Mozilla Project for many years. According to the slashdot post you linked to, the Mozilla Foundation considers it their responsibility to "raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival". Obviously, they have decided that threating legal action is a good step towards that goal. That kind of thinking certainly demostrates a great deal of Corporate America influence.
One could offer value-added services for a GNU/Linux distribution that they have invested no time in, or burn Debian CDs and sell them for a profit, use the Linux kernel to build evil devices for one's own sadistic pleasure (within the bounds of the law). That's what it is to be free! When something becomes truely free, those kinds of restrictions are nullified. So, if I release music for free (and I have), you have the right to brazenly sell them in your business for a profit and give nothing back to me.
Those are the costs of freedom. Live with it or don't. But don't pretend to support OSS when you aren't willing to suffer the cost.
True freedom will also empower people with the ability to abuse that freedom (unfortunately). Just because people are profiting off the hard work of others doesn't mean that the OSS ideal of freedom is wrong.
The better course of action for Mozilla (in the spirit of freedom) would have been to send an open letter to consumers notifying them of unofficial resalers and politly asking them to suppport the Mozilla Foundation rather than imposters with their money.
I totally agree. Of course, it shouldn't be unexpected. This is what happens when Large Corporations get involved with OSS projects. Lets face it, they're out to make money. When they see a possible revenue source is in jeopardy, they will bare their claws no matter what the idealogical costs are.
Yes, IE does reference Mozilla in its "User-Agent" header, but no, it is not generic; it is still refering to the Mozilla foundation (or a Netscape standard of somekind, anyway). Even if it was generic, there is still the matter of the logo; that is certainly not generic.
Debian will probably always be hardcore and somewhat cryptic for unexperienced computer users. If you want a pleasant, pretty, somewhat intuitive installer with most the power of the Debian distro, check out some of the Debian Based Distributions.
The Debian Project has a great many factors to balance in creating their distribution. Firstly, their adherance to free-software principles. Secondly, their commitment to multiple platforms. Finally, their legendary configurability. Given all these factors, I think they've done an amazing job, and changing almost anything about the distribution would probably take a little away from the delicate balance that they have.
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.
If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.
That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.
It doesn't seem to me like that would nullify the effect described in the article. If the effect of hitting the ground has a 50% chance of favoring either side, the initial bias would still show through in the final result.
I never claimed that Ardour was a sampler; just that it was a DAW (digital audio workstation).
That being said, thank you for the link. Another up-and-coming project to watch is the Linux Sampler Project. They don't seem to have any major releases yet, but it looks promising (also built on Jack).
Audacity is a fantasic wave editor, but it is neither a sampler (like the s900) nor a multitracker (like cubase) nor a proprietary hardware money-making machine (like protools). If you're looking for a computer based DAW, check out Ardour; it's quite nice, and its all graphical (so long as you have jack running somewhere).
I hear the argument about faster executables a great deal, and it isn't a bad argument. However, Gentoo will allow you to install binary packages, and similarly Debian will allow you to install from source packages. More than that, you can actually find or create apt repositories with dependencies that are multiplexed across a set of architectures (for example, the nerim.net Mplayer repository; just tell it "mplayer-k7" and you get all the nice optimizations for Athlons with it).
Modularity
Again, Debian can be quite modular. Have you heard of Knoppix or Morphix? They are very popular, and quite modular. There are probably more Debian derivitives than any other distro because they are so modular. I realize that Gentoo might also be good in this regard, but if it isn't provably better, I don't see a reason by Debian still wouldn't be a great choice for this project.
By caving in to his SCO-like demand to call the system "GNU/Linux", for starters.
Are you not aware that SCO has sued people over their claim to parts of the Linux kernel? Stallman, interestingly, hasn't sued anybody over this particular bit of minutiae concerning naming. And I sincerely doubt he ever will. So how is this anything like SCO?
It's just a request to people to give credit where credit is due, and Debian apparently thinks it is perfectly reasonable. Many other distributions use the term GNU/Linux in parts of their OS; do you believe they are "kowtowing to Stallman"?
The Debian project's goals and that of Stallman intersect in many ways; they both believe in Free Software to the extend possible today. They both true to further that concept by being scrict about what they allow and what they don't (which is also perfectly reasonable). However, If Stallman went off his rocker and started advocating submission to Corporate America, Debian would not follow him. What you consider "kowtowing" is nothing more than a cooindicental intersection of idealogies.
Finally, I don't think there are as many Stallmanites here as you think. There are conflicting ideologies here like anywhere else, and probably the majority of people that you'll see on Slashdot hold pragmatism above all else. Just ask people if they want Nvidia GLX drivers included in their favorite distro; that'll flush out all the non-Stallmanites.
Hmm, well, it seems you might be slow, so I'm going to state this just about as clearly as I can.
It's impossible for Gentoo to be as fast as binary-only distributions because it has to the job of the binary distribution (the "make install" part) in addition to the compilation. Which, by the way, is slow (with any program or reasable size) on any hardware. I do use an athlon XP 1600+ which is fairly old (and did indeed perform quite poorly at installing Gentoo packages), but even on a Dual Xeon system, I wouldn't want to have to compile KDE from source.
But the most important thing to note is that many people do use old hardware. Why not support them as well? My work computer is a P3 700, and it runs Debian quite smoothly, and installs even big packages in less than a minute (of course, it helps that my work connection gets > 1megabyte/second to MIT's Debian mirrors). Why should that hardware not be viable? Just because you think everybody should use source only distributions? I don't think so.
Never mind that Ian Murdock is also a founder of Debian, and that Progeny has always been built on Debian; what objective reason is there for building this kind of OS on Gentoo rather than Debian?
First of all, Debian is quite modular and simple. In fact, Lindows uses it behind their "click 'n' run" front end, and its supposed to be amazingly smooth. Debian can be used for more finely grained options, but can also be used for a modular system as described Murdock.
Plus, lets be honest; source distributions just aren't going to cut it in an environment where package installation speed is important.
I really don't think its necessary to respond to you, but I'll take the bait anyway. Debian's developers don't make the decision as to whether or not to package libcss. Usually, it's their lawyers.
Futhermore, those that do make the decision have enough balls to do what's right by (firstly) staying true to their founding idealogies and (secondly) keeping the distribution spottless from a legal standpoint. I for one am glad they've made the hard decisions like these -- and I'm VERY glad that YOU weren't the one making the decisions.
Perhaps you should watch who you accuse of not having balls Coward.
it's only been with corporate backing through the likes of Red Hat, Suse, IBM, HP and a whole slew of others that big projects like Linux & Apache have really caught fire.
One could also say, it's only with the support of Open Source that the likes of Red Hat and Suse have really caught fire. Even with larger corporations like IBM and Apple, open source has absolutely electrified their business model. Sun, on the other hand, has kept most of their software closed source and look where it got them; a rocket that launched during the tech boom and dropped right after. Not very impressive.
I open source could give to Sun what its given to so many other companies; salvation. And apprently, they think so to; they've already started producing JDS, and its been a pretty big success so far (as far as distros go).
Though I hope Sun doesn't die, because they can stand up against Microsoft.
They can't stand up to Microsoft. They can barely stand up for themselves! Don't get me wrong, I love Sun. I love Java (as a programmer), I love OpenOffice (a quite generous gift from Sun), and I like Sun hardware. However, they've been crashing quickly just as most other corporate competitors of Microsoft have, and they will continue to do so. If a victor is claimed against Microsoft, it will not come from the corporate sector. It will be decentralized Open Source hackers that beat them. Thus, through open-sourcing their technology, Sun can at least allow a part of them to live on posthumously. Otherwise, they'll drag Java down to the grave with them.
I use Debian, and generally speaking, if it isn't free enough for Debian, it isn't free enough for me. Beyond my hatred for the lack of JRE in the main unstable tree (which is really annoying), there is also an ethical ideal of truly free software that is being violated by Java.
Many people believe RMS is too hardcore about sticking to his guns on this issue, but I do believe he has a good point. Many programs are "free" for temporary use, and Java is one of them. Other examples of superficially free software are Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat, for which there are no guarantees of future freedom. These programs, like Java, introduce standards and structure that other people build on. If the freedom of these platforms was to be compromised, many poeple could stand to lose a great deal of work. The only way to guarantee the possibility of future support is to open source it.
Wrong. IE 4+ didn't crash when you looked at it the wrong way.
Wrong. Many variants of IE 4 and 5 were AMAZINGLY unstable. I remember being brought to tears by the mind-numbingly frequent crashes of IE on my otherwise-stable computer. It really wasn't until a few service packs into 5 that they started to get their act together.
You are right about that. I think that's generally what people complain about too; there are those who wish the groups intersected more. Prefferably, people would like to read and write, in that order.
However, even of those people who you claim would like to "read an interesting article," I still contend that the first four steps are usually followed. Of those people who don't post, the majority are still looking for pretty pictures. That's why sites like kde-look.org are so popular. That's also why almost any OSS software nowadays includes a screenshots section in their website.
Apparently, you don't understand the difference between a "page impression" and a "read". Now, here's what the normal slashdot user does: 1)clicks on link 2)looks for colorful photos 3)Presses Ctrl-F, then types "screeshots", then Enter 4)Clicks on any links he finds in that context. 5)If he finds nothing, clicks "Back", clicks "Reply", and makes an uninformed comment
Very little reading usually goes on; just viewage of pretty pictures. And, of course, this just makes the slashdot effect worse; text doesn't really hurt webservers as bad as big JPGs. That's why two hours after the posting on slashdot, the site admins are always back online with a text-only version of their site saying something like "I've never seen so much web activity in my life".
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that AOL does not own the Mozilla Project or the Mozilla Foundation (please see my other posts).
Maybe those items are what Open Source is about for you. You seem to have more pragmatic concerns in mind. However, other people feel differently. OSS, for me, is an idealistic venture as well as a pragmatic one. I really like the idea of freedom of ideas and information. OSS seems likes the best implementation yet of my ideals. However, pressing legal action for trademark violation is certainly not something that I can support in good conscience.
I respect your viewpoint of OSS and its purpose, but realize that many would disagree.
They are not tained, but they certainly have a much greater propensity towards being more mercenary about the foundation. The question is not whether they have the right under the law, but whether they should do what they're going as a proponent of OSS. I, of course, believe that this action is contrary to ideals of OSS.
Clearly, we have differing opinions concerning the freedom of information (and the enforcability of trademarks), so I don't think we will really be able to agree on this point.
Yes, I realize that, and you'll notice that I used the word "Involvement" rather than another that might imply ownership. According to their Press Release, they are still involved with AOL.
We're grateful for the past and ongoing support of America Online, and we look forward to continuing to work with AOL over coming years.
Besides all this, there is an element of influence that AOL has had on the foundation after having owned the Mozilla Project for many years. According to the slashdot post you linked to, the Mozilla Foundation considers it their responsibility to "raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival". Obviously, they have decided that threating legal action is a good step towards that goal. That kind of thinking certainly demostrates a great deal of Corporate America influence.
One could offer value-added services for a GNU/Linux distribution that they have invested no time in, or burn Debian CDs and sell them for a profit, use the Linux kernel to build evil devices for one's own sadistic pleasure (within the bounds of the law). That's what it is to be free! When something becomes truely free, those kinds of restrictions are nullified. So, if I release music for free (and I have), you have the right to brazenly sell them in your business for a profit and give nothing back to me.
Those are the costs of freedom. Live with it or don't. But don't pretend to support OSS when you aren't willing to suffer the cost.
True freedom will also empower people with the ability to abuse that freedom (unfortunately). Just because people are profiting off the hard work of others doesn't mean that the OSS ideal of freedom is wrong.
The better course of action for Mozilla (in the spirit of freedom) would have been to send an open letter to consumers notifying them of unofficial resalers and politly asking them to suppport the Mozilla Foundation rather than imposters with their money.
I totally agree. Of course, it shouldn't be unexpected. This is what happens when Large Corporations get involved with OSS projects. Lets face it, they're out to make money. When they see a possible revenue source is in jeopardy, they will bare their claws no matter what the idealogical costs are.
Yes, IE does reference Mozilla in its "User-Agent" header, but no, it is not generic; it is still refering to the Mozilla foundation (or a Netscape standard of somekind, anyway). Even if it was generic, there is still the matter of the logo; that is certainly not generic.
Debian will probably always be hardcore and somewhat cryptic for unexperienced computer users. If you want a pleasant, pretty, somewhat intuitive installer with most the power of the Debian distro, check out some of the Debian Based Distributions.
The Debian Project has a great many factors to balance in creating their distribution. Firstly, their adherance to free-software principles. Secondly, their commitment to multiple platforms. Finally, their legendary configurability. Given all these factors, I think they've done an amazing job, and changing almost anything about the distribution would probably take a little away from the delicate balance that they have.
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.
If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.
That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.
It doesn't seem to me like that would nullify the effect described in the article. If the effect of hitting the ground has a 50% chance of favoring either side, the initial bias would still show through in the final result.
Perhaps you can explain how an AC post improves karma.
Don't forget Xen, VMWare, and Bochs (not as fast, but still cool).
There are already a ton of viable OS virtualizers out there. This news is seriously a real yawner.
I never claimed that Ardour was a sampler; just that it was a DAW (digital audio workstation).
That being said, thank you for the link. Another up-and-coming project to watch is the Linux Sampler Project. They don't seem to have any major releases yet, but it looks promising (also built on Jack).
Audacity is a fantasic wave editor, but it is neither a sampler (like the s900) nor a multitracker (like cubase) nor a proprietary hardware money-making machine (like protools). If you're looking for a computer based DAW, check out Ardour; it's quite nice, and its all graphical (so long as you have jack running somewhere).
Compilation Enhancements
I hear the argument about faster executables a great deal, and it isn't a bad argument. However, Gentoo will allow you to install binary packages, and similarly Debian will allow you to install from source packages. More than that, you can actually find or create apt repositories with dependencies that are multiplexed across a set of architectures (for example, the nerim.net Mplayer repository; just tell it "mplayer-k7" and you get all the nice optimizations for Athlons with it).
Modularity
Again, Debian can be quite modular. Have you heard of Knoppix or Morphix? They are very popular, and quite modular. There are probably more Debian derivitives than any other distro because they are so modular. I realize that Gentoo might also be good in this regard, but if it isn't provably better, I don't see a reason by Debian still wouldn't be a great choice for this project.
By caving in to his SCO-like demand to call the system "GNU/Linux", for starters.
Are you not aware that SCO has sued people over their claim to parts of the Linux kernel? Stallman, interestingly, hasn't sued anybody over this particular bit of minutiae concerning naming. And I sincerely doubt he ever will. So how is this anything like SCO?
It's just a request to people to give credit where credit is due, and Debian apparently thinks it is perfectly reasonable. Many other distributions use the term GNU/Linux in parts of their OS; do you believe they are "kowtowing to Stallman"?
The Debian project's goals and that of Stallman intersect in many ways; they both believe in Free Software to the extend possible today. They both true to further that concept by being scrict about what they allow and what they don't (which is also perfectly reasonable). However, If Stallman went off his rocker and started advocating submission to Corporate America, Debian would not follow him. What you consider "kowtowing" is nothing more than a cooindicental intersection of idealogies.
Finally, I don't think there are as many Stallmanites here as you think. There are conflicting ideologies here like anywhere else, and probably the majority of people that you'll see on Slashdot hold pragmatism above all else. Just ask people if they want Nvidia GLX drivers included in their favorite distro; that'll flush out all the non-Stallmanites.
Hmm, well, it seems you might be slow, so I'm going to state this just about as clearly as I can.
It's impossible for Gentoo to be as fast as binary-only distributions because it has to the job of the binary distribution (the "make install" part) in addition to the compilation. Which, by the way, is slow (with any program or reasable size) on any hardware. I do use an athlon XP 1600+ which is fairly old (and did indeed perform quite poorly at installing Gentoo packages), but even on a Dual Xeon system, I wouldn't want to have to compile KDE from source.
But the most important thing to note is that many people do use old hardware. Why not support them as well? My work computer is a P3 700, and it runs Debian quite smoothly, and installs even big packages in less than a minute (of course, it helps that my work connection gets > 1megabyte/second to MIT's Debian mirrors). Why should that hardware not be viable? Just because you think everybody should use source only distributions? I don't think so.
Never mind that Ian Murdock is also a founder of Debian, and that Progeny has always been built on Debian; what objective reason is there for building this kind of OS on Gentoo rather than Debian?
First of all, Debian is quite modular and simple. In fact, Lindows uses it behind their "click 'n' run" front end, and its supposed to be amazingly smooth. Debian can be used for more finely grained options, but can also be used for a modular system as described Murdock.
Plus, lets be honest; source distributions just aren't going to cut it in an environment where package installation speed is important.
I really don't think its necessary to respond to you, but I'll take the bait anyway. Debian's developers don't make the decision as to whether or not to package libcss. Usually, it's their lawyers.
Futhermore, those that do make the decision have enough balls to do what's right by (firstly) staying true to their founding idealogies and (secondly) keeping the distribution spottless from a legal standpoint. I for one am glad they've made the hard decisions like these -- and I'm VERY glad that YOU weren't the one making the decisions.
Perhaps you should watch who you accuse of not having balls Coward.
it's only been with corporate backing through the likes of Red Hat, Suse, IBM, HP and a whole slew of others that big projects like Linux & Apache have really caught fire.
One could also say, it's only with the support of Open Source that the likes of Red Hat and Suse have really caught fire. Even with larger corporations like IBM and Apple, open source has absolutely electrified their business model. Sun, on the other hand, has kept most of their software closed source and look where it got them; a rocket that launched during the tech boom and dropped right after. Not very impressive.
I open source could give to Sun what its given to so many other companies; salvation. And apprently, they think so to; they've already started producing JDS, and its been a pretty big success so far (as far as distros go).
Though I hope Sun doesn't die, because they can stand up against Microsoft.
They can't stand up to Microsoft. They can barely stand up for themselves! Don't get me wrong, I love Sun. I love Java (as a programmer), I love OpenOffice (a quite generous gift from Sun), and I like Sun hardware. However, they've been crashing quickly just as most other corporate competitors of Microsoft have, and they will continue to do so. If a victor is claimed against Microsoft, it will not come from the corporate sector. It will be decentralized Open Source hackers that beat them. Thus, through open-sourcing their technology, Sun can at least allow a part of them to live on posthumously. Otherwise, they'll drag Java down to the grave with them.
I use Debian, and generally speaking, if it isn't free enough for Debian, it isn't free enough for me. Beyond my hatred for the lack of JRE in the main unstable tree (which is really annoying), there is also an ethical ideal of truly free software that is being violated by Java.
Many people believe RMS is too hardcore about sticking to his guns on this issue, but I do believe he has a good point. Many programs are "free" for temporary use, and Java is one of them. Other examples of superficially free software are Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat, for which there are no guarantees of future freedom. These programs, like Java, introduce standards and structure that other people build on. If the freedom of these platforms was to be compromised, many poeple could stand to lose a great deal of work. The only way to guarantee the possibility of future support is to open source it.
Wrong. IE 4+ didn't crash when you looked at it the wrong way.
Wrong. Many variants of IE 4 and 5 were AMAZINGLY unstable. I remember being brought to tears by the mind-numbingly frequent crashes of IE on my otherwise-stable computer. It really wasn't until a few service packs into 5 that they started to get their act together.
You are right about that. I think that's generally what people complain about too; there are those who wish the groups intersected more. Prefferably, people would like to read and write, in that order.
However, even of those people who you claim would like to "read an interesting article," I still contend that the first four steps are usually followed. Of those people who don't post, the majority are still looking for pretty pictures. That's why sites like kde-look.org are so popular. That's also why almost any OSS software nowadays includes a screenshots section in their website.
Apparently, you don't understand the difference between a "page impression" and a "read". Now, here's what the normal slashdot user does:
1)clicks on link
2)looks for colorful photos
3)Presses Ctrl-F, then types "screeshots", then Enter
4)Clicks on any links he finds in that context.
5)If he finds nothing, clicks "Back", clicks "Reply", and makes an uninformed comment
Very little reading usually goes on; just viewage of pretty pictures. And, of course, this just makes the slashdot effect worse; text doesn't really hurt webservers as bad as big JPGs. That's why two hours after the posting on slashdot, the site admins are always back online with a text-only version of their site saying something like "I've never seen so much web activity in my life".