It is absolutely vital that when companies engage in this sort of hatchet job on the Open Source software community that people contact the editors who ran the story and make our side of the story known. Kvetching about it in/. is not going to change these people's outlook, but a few hundred emails might.
http://www.expressresponse.com/cgi-bin/forbes/disp layArticleWebForm.cgi
It's absolutely critical that the Open Source Community counter one-sided stories like the one written by Reuters yesterday.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030909/tech_sco_linux_1. ht ml
I would encourage all/.'ers to write Reuters to get their editors to take a second look at their story:
Here's what I wrote them. Please feel free to send my letter verbatim, or something similar. The more feedback they get, the less likely they will be to do a one-sided treatment of this in the future.
To: editors@reuters.com
I am writing in reference to the September 9 article on SCO's current lawsuit and critique of the Open Source community.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030909/tech_sco_linux_1. ht ml
Your article failed to provide any response from members of the Open Source community, or to articulate the views of the community, and as such was an entirely one-sided treatment of the topic.
The author lamely suggested that Open Source leaders were "unavailable for comment" either unaware of, or deliberately ignoring the mountains of responses generated in recent days, weeks, and months regarding the lawsuit, and in particular, and McBride's letters. Given the lopsided nature of the article, I suspect that the author did not try very hard to find responses from the Open Source community regarding SCO's claims.
In the interest of balance, I would strongly encourage you to write another story articulating the Open Source movement's response to McBride's letter.
For references in which the Open Source, and other communities, notably the Open Group which holds the UNIX trademark, have responded to SCO's claims in general, and to the particular letter being reported on in yesterday's article please review the following references:
Please give the following email addresses to authors doing future research on SCO's claims regarding the Open Source community.
moglen [at] columbia [dot] edu Eben Moglen esr [at] thyrsus [dot] com Eric Raymond bruce [at] perens [dot] com Bruce Perens rms [at] stallman [dot] org Richard Stallman torvalds [at] transmeta [dot] com Linus Torvalds
And here I had thought that the reason why Mozilla created XUL was to provide an easy interface for people with web-related skills to control the user interface.
Gtk+ is used in all of my builds, but it involves a lower level of abstraction than XUL. One that actually involves actualy programming ( or at least configuring and patching _) as opposed to XUL, where the "programming" paradigm is a framework of markup language, style-sheets, and JavaScript. Mmmmmmm.... greppable.
That shift opens Mozilla up to a much broader base of potential developer-users than even toolkits with api's for scripting languages.
...that a $5 billion aircraft carrier that we really don't need during this time of budget crunches and economic weakness bears the name of the man who invented modern deficit spending in America.
You are suggesting that a $5 billion warship carrying a bevy of $300 million planes is not a valid weapon of choice for protecting our Republic against nearly two dozen terrorists wielding boxcutters?
Next, I suppose that you'll tell me that the Patriot Act really isn't about Patriotism and that the DMCA really isn't about protecting fair use.
If Microsoft is indeed right in saying that digital media will drive PC upgrade cycles, they are being quite shortsighted by releasing an OS which ties all of a consumer's digital media to their current machine.
Microsoft ties the OS to the user's current machine. Why should they treat the user's data any differently?
What good is having the option to look at the source code?
Just because you don't look at the source code doesn't mean that there aren't other people in the world who don't.
For example, Mozilla and Netscape 6 were released with a bug that prevents one from setting their geometry as a commandline argument in X. For most users, this is not a big deal. I used Mozilla for months and never felt the lack. But in my new job, it was huge.
We have a 15-20 terminals at work on which we are running netscape 4.x as a kiosk. My predecessor wrote some command triggers for old the application in C++ using Qt.
This summer, we wanted to upgrade our browser to Mozilla, but because we could not pass the geometry settings to Mozilla when we launch it, we could not use it in place of Netscape 4.x. If this were IE, there would be nothing we could do but hope that the vendor would fix the problem in a timely manner.
Not so with Mozilla.
Other users were facing the same problem and had a need to come up with a fix. A little research on Bugzilla revealed that a developer in Oregon had come up with a homegrown solution in which one merely sets the correct geometry as an environment variable and patches a portion of the original code... et voila! Problem circumvented.
One thing that Open Source has taught us is that debugging works best when it is a parallel process that extends beyond a given company's walls.
Slashdot Mirror
It is absolutely vital that when companies engage in this sort of hatchet job on the Open Source software community that people contact the editors who ran the story and make our side of the story known. Kvetching about it in /. is not going to change these people's outlook, but a few hundred emails might.
http://www.expressresponse.com/cgi-bin/forbes/disp layArticleWebForm.cgi
It's absolutely critical that the Open Source Community counter one-sided stories like the one written by Reuters yesterday.
. ht ml
/.'ers to write Reuters to get their editors to take a second look at their story:
. ht ml
- 09 -10-016-26-OS-CD-CYl _eben_moglen_position _paper.pdfw .htmla ckgroun der.htmm l
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030909/tech_sco_linux_1
I would encourage all
Here's what I wrote them. Please feel free to send my letter verbatim, or something similar. The more feedback they get, the less likely they will be to do a one-sided treatment of this in the future.
To: editors@reuters.com
I am writing in reference to the September 9 article on SCO's current lawsuit and critique of the Open Source community.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030909/tech_sco_linux_1
Your article failed to provide any response from members of the Open Source community, or to articulate the views of the community, and as such was an entirely one-sided treatment of the topic.
The author lamely suggested that Open Source leaders were "unavailable for comment" either unaware of, or deliberately ignoring the mountains of responses generated in recent days, weeks, and months regarding the lawsuit, and in particular, and McBride's letters. Given the lopsided nature of the article, I suspect that the author did not try very hard to find responses from the Open Source community regarding SCO's claims.
In the interest of balance, I would strongly encourage you to write another story articulating the Open Source movement's response to McBride's letter.
For references in which the Open Source, and other communities, notably the Open Group which holds the UNIX trademark, have responded to SCO's claims in general, and to the particular letter being reported on in yesterday's article please review the following references:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2003
http://www.osdl.org/docs/osd
http://www.perens.com/SCO/SCOSlideSho
http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/unix-b
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sco/sco.ht
Please give the following email addresses to authors doing future research on SCO's claims regarding the Open Source community.
moglen [at] columbia [dot] edu Eben Moglen
esr [at] thyrsus [dot] com Eric Raymond
bruce [at] perens [dot] com Bruce Perens
rms [at] stallman [dot] org Richard Stallman
torvalds [at] transmeta [dot] com Linus Torvalds
The mouse on my Mac is defective. It appears to be missing a few buttons.
And here I had thought that the reason why Mozilla created XUL was to provide an easy interface for people with web-related skills to control the user interface.
Gtk+ is used in all of my builds, but it involves a lower level of abstraction than XUL. One that actually involves actualy programming ( or at least configuring and patching _) as opposed to XUL, where the "programming" paradigm is a framework of markup language, style-sheets, and JavaScript. Mmmmmmm.... greppable.
That shift opens Mozilla up to a much broader base of potential developer-users than even toolkits with api's for scripting languages.
You are suggesting that a $5 billion warship carrying a bevy of $300 million planes is not a valid weapon of choice for protecting our Republic against nearly two dozen terrorists wielding boxcutters?
Next, I suppose that you'll tell me that the Patriot Act really isn't about Patriotism and that the DMCA really isn't about protecting fair use.
...they've conceded that GNU/Hurd is dead in the water.
If Microsoft is indeed right in saying that digital media will drive PC upgrade cycles, they are being quite shortsighted by releasing an OS which ties all of a consumer's digital media to their current machine.
Microsoft ties the OS to the user's current machine. Why should they treat the user's data any differently?
First he bashes Open Source advocates in their attempts to lobby government:
Next he says,
"Apple may be wise to target Unix/Linux rather than Windows in their switch campaign."
From this, we may conclude that the ways of the Dark Side are indeed seductive and powerful...
Just because you don't look at the source code doesn't mean that there aren't other people in the world who don't.
For example, Mozilla and Netscape 6 were released with a bug that prevents one from setting their geometry as a commandline argument in X. For most users, this is not a big deal. I used Mozilla for months and never felt the lack. But in my new job, it was huge.
We have a 15-20 terminals at work on which we are running netscape 4.x as a kiosk. My predecessor wrote some command triggers for old the application in C++ using Qt.
This summer, we wanted to upgrade our browser to Mozilla, but because we could not pass the geometry settings to Mozilla when we launch it, we could not use it in place of Netscape 4.x. If this were IE, there would be nothing we could do but hope that the vendor would fix the problem in a timely manner.
Not so with Mozilla.
Other users were facing the same problem and had a need to come up with a fix. A little research on Bugzilla revealed that a developer in Oregon had come up with a homegrown solution in which one merely sets the correct geometry as an environment variable and patches a portion of the original code... et voila! Problem circumvented.
One thing that Open Source has taught us is that debugging works best when it is a parallel process that extends beyond a given company's walls.