Bruce Perens's Open Source Definition (and the nearly identical Debian Free Software Guidelines) are perfectly fine - they are completely in concurrence with the ideals and goals of Free Software. The problem arises when licenses which are clearly not Free Software, such as the first version of the APSL, are certified as Open Source. If the APSL is indeed Open Source, it is still not Free Software, so it does a good job of highlighting the difference between the two terms.
Why is an obvious flame and ad hominem attack, with very little real content, promoted to 4? I thought moderation was supposed to be based on the content of the posts, not the bias of the moderators.
Read it again. He did not mean "taking" as "stealing," he meant it exactly as it is written. The various GNU/Linux OS makers did take the GNU system, combine it with the Linux kernel, and release it as a complete OS. They took it, but did not steal it.
Linux is not an OS. Linux is a kernel. Your analogy is correct - you say "I run Mac OS X" or "I run Windows 95," not "I run win32" or "I run Mach." Calling the GNU/Linux OS "Linux" would be as preposterous as calling Mac OS X "Mach."
It is the GNU System. The GNU project has been developing it since the mid-80s, and the only portion still not finished in the kernel. Since the kernel is still in the development stages, you can use the Linux kernel together with the rest of the GNU OS to get a stable, working OS today. Either that, or you can wait for the GNU OS to be completely finished, and just use that.
Except that JWZ is actually resigning, while ESR was just pretending to as a publicity stunt (read his follow-up, he has no intention of quitting any time soon).
Why should Bruce and RMS have gone to ESR first? The APSL was a public license released to the Free Software community. Bruce and RMS had problems with that license, and told the Free Software community about it. Their intent was not to criticize ESR/OSI, but to point out to the community at large the problems with the license. I appreciate that. I would not have been happy if Bruce and RMS and ESR had all sat behind closed doors and discussed this all amongst themselves, leaving the rest of us out of the loop without any input on the matter. Public debate on a public license is good.
First he starts by admitting that, no, he did not really mean "take my job please" when he said "take my job please." As many of us suspected, it was a slightly underhand way of saying "shut up and stop criticizing me."
Secondly, I disagree with his constant calls to stop criticising people. If somebody does something you disagree with, by all means, say so. Say so civilly, not with flames, but say so nonetheless.
His whole tone seems a bit condescending and presumptious. The constant references to "we," as if he speaks for the entire Free Software community, are annoying, and so are the references to "Slashdot kiddies" (many of whom include prominent people in the tech world).
His off-hand dismissal of Bruce Perens's well-written and well-reasoned essay is disappointing. None of the points in Perens's essay are addressed. It would seem that Mr. Raymond is afraid to take the points into consideration.
I wholeheartedly disagree with his entire premise regarding the APSL debate. He criticizes the Perens open letter and RMS's reply about it, and says they should've been private rather than public. That is incorrect. OSI's decision regarding the matter was public, so it follows that all commentary on that decision should be public. In addition, the APSL is a license that will impact the Free Software community, so it is important and desirable that the Free Software community be allowed to discuss the effects and possible problems of the license amongst itself. Stifling such discussion to save the ego of one man is not acceptable.
IIRC, I read somewhere that SAP is the largest software company in the world, in terms of revenues. They're the reason that Oracle advertises in their ads that they're the second largest software company.
And, no, the largest is not Microsoft. Microsoft has a lot of desktops, but one or two big-company installations of SAP's software bring them more revenue than all of Microsoft's sales of NT, 98, and IIS combined.
Nope...because the average nerd doesn't use M$ apps, and hence is immune to Melissa.
Incorrect. Look at the slashdot stats page - more than half the slashdot visitors read the page using Windows. That means that somewhere, either at home, at work, or both, they have Windows. Many of those Windows users also use MS Office (especially those at work), so it would be of interest to them.
Also, many slashdot readers are sysadmins. Any sysadmin whose network contains windows machines running Office (the majority of corporate networks) needs to be concerned about this, since thousands of messages propagating exponentially will take down their network.
Sure, it's their choice not to. They also are therefore not allowed to use the Mesa code, since the developers of Mesa made a clear decision that they did not want their code used in proprietary products - therefore it was placed under the GPL.
It wasn't clear to me from his "resignation" letter. It seemed to me more like a somewhat backwards way of saying "if you can't do a better job than I am, stop criticizing me," rather than an absolute "i'm resigning" sort of thing. It would seem that if nobody steps up to take his place, he's planning on staying.
Incorrect. L0pht Heavy Industries, among others, is not a "cracker" group. First of all, you are misusing the term "cracker," since that applies to the talented asm coders who remove copy protection from software. It has absolutely nothing to do with breaking into systems.
Secondly, the L0pht writes many extremely useful security programs, many of which are used by system administrators (you don't think script kiddies are the ones paying $100 to register L0phtcrack, do you?).
Whether or not you accept them as "hackers" is irrelevant. They have the knowledge, the skill, and the love of code that any true hacker should possess. I'd consider many of these "crackers," as you call them, to be more of "hackers" than your average contributor of 10 lines of code to the Linux kernel.
C++ is C with classes. And streams. And templates. And data hiding. And range-checked arrays. And a "string" class rather than those evil char arrays. And programs that are 2x as big as their C equivalents, and run slower.
1) I saw this around a year ago. 2) I disagree. While a script kiddie is most definitely not a hacker, being able to break security does in fact make one a hacker. Somebody who can sift through thousands of thousands of lines of kernel code finding bugs in the way the kernel reassembles fragmented packets is a hacker by any definition of the term. And as an added bonus, the write-ups of the security flaws can be viewed as glorified bug reports.
I'm not so sure about that. I've installed win95 three times on this computer (once was a clean install on an empty hard drive), and it's had no problems whatsoever. It auto-detected my video card, monitor, network card, and everything else, and auto-configured anything.
Linux, on the other hand, auto-detected nearly nothing, and it took me 3 or 4 tries in XF86Setup to finally get some video card/monitor settings that would work properly.
That makes sense. If it was indeed a real letter from Microsoft, I was trying to figure out where the "backhanded compliment" fit in, since nobody has paid any sort of compliments to Microsoft on either site, backhanded or otherwise.
Microsoft couldn't sue based on an "IE" trademark infringement, since they do not hold the trademark to either IE or "internet explorer." In fact, Microsoft itself is guilty of trademark infringement over the term and its abbreviation, and has been being sued by the trademark holder for the last few years, but their team of high-paid lawyers seems to be delaying things.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Perens's Open Source Definition (and the nearly identical Debian Free Software Guidelines) are perfectly fine - they are completely in concurrence with the ideals and goals of Free Software. The problem arises when licenses which are clearly not Free Software, such as the first version of the APSL, are certified as Open Source. If the APSL is indeed Open Source, it is still not Free Software, so it does a good job of highlighting the difference between the two terms.
Why is an obvious flame and ad hominem attack, with very little real content, promoted to 4? I thought moderation was supposed to be based on the content of the posts, not the bias of the moderators.
Read it again. He did not mean "taking" as "stealing," he meant it exactly as it is written. The various GNU/Linux OS makers did take the GNU system, combine it with the Linux kernel, and release it as a complete OS. They took it, but did not steal it.
Linux is not an OS. Linux is a kernel. Your analogy is correct - you say "I run Mac OS X" or "I run Windows 95," not "I run win32" or "I run Mach." Calling the GNU/Linux OS "Linux" would be as preposterous as calling Mac OS X "Mach."
It is the GNU System. The GNU project has been developing it since the mid-80s, and the only portion still not finished in the kernel. Since the kernel is still in the development stages, you can use the Linux kernel together with the rest of the GNU OS to get a stable, working OS today. Either that, or you can wait for the GNU OS to be completely finished, and just use that.
Except that JWZ is actually resigning, while ESR was just pretending to as a publicity stunt (read his follow-up, he has no intention of quitting any time soon).
Why should Bruce and RMS have gone to ESR first? The APSL was a public license released to the Free Software community. Bruce and RMS had problems with that license, and told the Free Software community about it. Their intent was not to criticize ESR/OSI, but to point out to the community at large the problems with the license. I appreciate that. I would not have been happy if Bruce and RMS and ESR had all sat behind closed doors and discussed this all amongst themselves, leaving the rest of us out of the loop without any input on the matter. Public debate on a public license is good.
You should at least have consulted SPI, the holders of the Open Source(tm) trademark.
First he starts by admitting that, no, he did not really mean "take my job please" when he said "take my job please." As many of us suspected, it was a slightly underhand way of saying "shut up and stop criticizing me."
Secondly, I disagree with his constant calls to stop criticising people. If somebody does something you disagree with, by all means, say so. Say so civilly, not with flames, but say so nonetheless.
His whole tone seems a bit condescending and presumptious. The constant references to "we," as if he speaks for the entire Free Software community, are annoying, and so are the references to "Slashdot kiddies" (many of whom include prominent people in the tech world).
His off-hand dismissal of Bruce Perens's well-written and well-reasoned essay is disappointing. None of the points in Perens's essay are addressed. It would seem that Mr. Raymond is afraid to take the points into consideration.
I wholeheartedly disagree with his entire premise regarding the APSL debate. He criticizes the Perens open letter and RMS's reply about it, and says they should've been private rather than public. That is incorrect. OSI's decision regarding the matter was public, so it follows that all commentary on that decision should be public. In addition, the APSL is a license that will impact the Free Software community, so it is important and desirable that the Free Software community be allowed to discuss the effects and possible problems of the license amongst itself. Stifling such discussion to save the ego of one man is not acceptable.
Hmm, after voting for my favorite RFC, now i need a site where I can vote for my favorite cDc text...
IIRC, I read somewhere that SAP is the largest software company in the world, in terms of revenues. They're the reason that Oracle advertises in their ads that they're the second largest software company.
And, no, the largest is not Microsoft. Microsoft has a lot of desktops, but one or two big-company installations of SAP's software bring them more revenue than all of Microsoft's sales of NT, 98, and IIS combined.
Nope...because the average nerd doesn't use M$ apps, and hence is immune to Melissa.
Incorrect. Look at the slashdot stats page - more than half the slashdot visitors read the page using Windows. That means that somewhere, either at home, at work, or both, they have Windows. Many of those Windows users also use MS Office (especially those at work), so it would be of interest to them.
Also, many slashdot readers are sysadmins. Any sysadmin whose network contains windows machines running Office (the majority of corporate networks) needs to be concerned about this, since thousands of messages propagating exponentially will take down their network.
Sure, it's their choice not to. They also are therefore not allowed to use the Mesa code, since the developers of Mesa made a clear decision that they did not want their code used in proprietary products - therefore it was placed under the GPL.
It wasn't clear to me from his "resignation" letter. It seemed to me more like a somewhat backwards way of saying "if you can't do a better job than I am, stop criticizing me," rather than an absolute "i'm resigning" sort of thing. It would seem that if nobody steps up to take his place, he's planning on staying.
No, that's an ad on transmetta's page. Note the extra t.
No, America gave us UNIX. Europe just reworked it and called it Linux.
Incorrect. L0pht Heavy Industries, among others, is not a "cracker" group. First of all, you are misusing the term "cracker," since that applies to the talented asm coders who remove copy protection from software. It has absolutely nothing to do with breaking into systems.
Secondly, the L0pht writes many extremely useful security programs, many of which are used by system administrators (you don't think script kiddies are the ones paying $100 to register L0phtcrack, do you?).
Whether or not you accept them as "hackers" is irrelevant. They have the knowledge, the skill, and the love of code that any true hacker should possess. I'd consider many of these "crackers," as you call them, to be more of "hackers" than your average contributor of 10 lines of code to the Linux kernel.
C++ is C with classes. And streams. And templates. And data hiding. And range-checked arrays. And a "string" class rather than those evil char arrays. And programs that are 2x as big as their C equivalents, and run slower.
Two things.
1) I saw this around a year ago.
2) I disagree. While a script kiddie is most definitely not a hacker, being able to break security does in fact make one a hacker. Somebody who can sift through thousands of thousands of lines of kernel code finding bugs in the way the kernel reassembles fragmented packets is a hacker by any definition of the term. And as an added bonus, the write-ups of the security flaws can be viewed as glorified bug reports.
I'm not so sure about that. I've installed win95 three times on this computer (once was a clean install on an empty hard drive), and it's had no problems whatsoever. It auto-detected my video card, monitor, network card, and everything else, and auto-configured anything.
Linux, on the other hand, auto-detected nearly nothing, and it took me 3 or 4 tries in XF86Setup to finally get some video card/monitor settings that would work properly.
That makes sense. If it was indeed a real letter from Microsoft, I was trying to figure out where the "backhanded compliment" fit in, since nobody has paid any sort of compliments to Microsoft on either site, backhanded or otherwise.
That's Rogue Squadron. I'm not quite sure what a Rouge Squadron game would be like, but it would probably be hard to play with all the reddish tints.
Microsoft couldn't sue based on an "IE" trademark infringement, since they do not hold the trademark to either IE or "internet explorer." In fact, Microsoft itself is guilty of trademark infringement over the term and its abbreviation, and has been being sued by the trademark holder for the last few years, but their team of high-paid lawyers seems to be delaying things.
Go to your preferences page and check the "Slashdot Lite" option.
If we wanted to make this a Bible study we could also analyze the word thanatos vs the word hypnos and how they are translated.
Well, I'm not great with ancient Greek, but I do speak modern Greek, and it would seem to me that, figuratively at least, they mean the same thing.
thanatos means, literally, "death"
hypnos means, literally, "sleep"
Now, unless it is talking about actually putting somebody to sleep, hypnos is probably a euphamism for thanatos.
Of course, I could be wrong.