Except the parent didn't mention Mozilla, Linux, or Open Source. For all you know, he might consider them all as equally inept at security as Microsoft. Nice straw man, though.
I really think this author is mistaking the natural diversification of open source for division. Of course everyone is going to go off in their own direction given the opportunity, but with standards like the LSB to keep everything in line, this experimentation should be encouraged - it's the heart of open source innovation. Why should every developer have to march in lockstep to the beat of one drum? Everyone who participates in open source development has a different motivation, and those differing motivations are reflected in the results.
Yes, you could make the point that too much diversity and thus too much choice is confusing to inexperienced users. That's why distributions that market themselves to inexperienced users should take care of technical decisions for the user. If they don't, their product is faulty.
I think this is just griping from someone who still thinks there can be One True OS(TM) that will somehow magically fill everyone's needs. His point about zealots who insist that their OS is the One True OS(TM) is fine, but then he insists that Windows is the One True Programming Environment(TM) and that everything else is too confusing. This is funny considering the free UNIXes all adhere to POSIX and SUS as a baseline, where the Windows platform is an ad hoc, de facto standard that changes and accumulates cruft with every release.
Funny, I haven't had a single Win98 application that refused to run on WinXP properly. Unless you are talking about in the reverse WinXP apps not running on Win98, anything designed for Linux 2.6 specifically will not run on 2.4 or 2.2 either.
What the hell are you talking about? Windows has entire _libraries_ that won't be backported to Win98 because the kernel interface has changed so much. Yes, you could theoretically write an application that specifically looks for a Linux 2.6 kernel and refuses to run on anything lower, but the syscall interface has not changed since 1.x and the POSIX syscall library is a stable standard. Where are these so-called problems you're "seeing the light" on?
From your Windows-centric viewpoint, it probably doesn't matter, but OO runs on many platforms and architectures, has many features built-in that require third-party support in Office (such as PDF export), and has not only provided us with a standard word processor document format for data interchange, but also unraveled most of the mystery that is the Microsoft Office file formats. It's a massive distributed development effort meeting a demand that you probably didn't even know existed: a standard, supportable, interoperable, platform-independent office suite.
If you want a more succinct answer, it would be "choice". The choice to move to another office suite if MS Office does not continue to be the best value for you, not simply because of its availability for a low/no price, but so you can get your data out of MS Office formats if need be. This choice is the only thing what will keep Microsoft on their toes and innovating if they want to keep selling Office, so even as an Office only user, you still benefit from OO's existence.
No, the analogy is not apt, because a knife has many non-trivial uses. Breaking the encryption that makes AirPort Express work would have no non-trivial uses that didn't relate directly to stealing music.
The author already named one. You don't get to judge whether it's trivial or not. And you certainly don't get to assume that everyone would use the tool in the manner you would use it (i.e., to "steal music").
We have to weigh the potential good that can come of breaking the encryption against the potential ill.
Who's 'we'? It's an individual moral decision. If you don't want to break the encryption, don't download the tool and break it. The program is just a set of instructions. Do you also have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to pick locks?
Apple's success as a company is hindered, which is bad because Apple gives us wonderful things.
Your mouth seems to be foaming. Reality check: Apple doesn't give you anything. Apple offers you products and services in exchange for your money. If your argument is that people who break encryption schemes cost you money as an Apple customer, it'd be much more honest to frame your arugment that way instead of pretending to have some kind of moral high ground. Then it's the author's option to be a nice guy and not release a public tool to break the encryption. Somehow your attitude makes me think that you'd rather have a law that forces him to be a nice guy, under threat of prison.
Dealing with content security issues is a cost of doing business in the media industry. Underpinning the technological approaches to security is an assumption that most people agree with the copyright bargain, and that technological methods will keep them on the honest side of the line. If people are clamoring to violate copyrights and just looking for the tools to do so, that's a social problem - and the solution is not to outlaw the tools, it's to reexamine the copyright framework and bring it more in line with popular sentiment. I'm sure shareholders and fanboys of media companies would disagree, but fortunately, you only get one vote just like the rest of us.
Now, finally, do you understand why your knife analogy is the acme of stupidity? It's recklessly inapt.
I understand why you would think so, having revealed your underlying bias. It's understandable that a reasonable approach would be irrelevant when one's thoughts are dominated by the threat of having a higher sticker price. But you still have provided no convincing moral argument dictating that engineers should be responsible for how people use their tools, and furthermore to foresee all such uses.
The only convincing premise in your argument is that piracy costs media companies money, and that such a tool could be used for piracy. Kind of like how killing people is wrong, and that a knife can be used to kill people. You seem to think that by default things should be illegal unless it can be proved (in your moral domain) that they have a "good" use. That's not the spirit of freedom, but I'd have to admit it's becoming a more and more common approach in the US these days, since everyone has a moral agenda they want encoded into law now, because they can't stand the thought that anyone else would have a different value system from theirs.
By the way, you need to check your dictionary too before flaming others for improper verbage.
Publishers follow the majority install base. Developers follow whichever platform is easier for them to code for. WineX and other emulation technology increase the install base of Linux, attracting publishers. Developers follow whichever platform is easier for them to code for. WineX and other emulation technology allows developers to have Linux targets without having culture shock.
Yes, WineX is a half-baked alternative to native solutions. But you presume that the native solutions would have existed if it weren't for WineX. Truth be told, the market share of Linux is so miniscule that it is not on most publishers' radar, so the native ports we do get are unofficial and done by people like Ryan Gordon.
Live with it, or evangelize if you want to reap the spoils of a dominant market share. It's unfortunate that Microsoft goes out of their way to make it difficult for developers to migrate from Windows targets to Linux targets, but such is life when consumers buy Windows without thinking twice about the marketplace ramifications of their choice.
The knife analogy is quite adept. Someone has created a tool with multiple uses. The set of all uses of the tool can be partitioned two different ways - between right and wrong uses, and between legal and illegal uses. You seem to be arguing that because the tool has potential illegal use, that any legal use is thus irrelevant.
Unfortunately for your argument, the courts have repeatedly held up the right to engineer tools which have significant legal use, even if that happens to be paired unfortunately with significant illegal use. I happen to think making engineers liable for the use of their tools would have a chilling effect on new development, but that's just me.
Even worse, this bill might spell the end of humorous spoof sites. I think there has to be an intent to gain unauthorized access to confidential information of the client included. Otherwise this bill is just way too broad. Yahoo could shut down any Yahoo spoof site by claiming they are "phishing" for people who really wanted to go to Yahoo.
Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.
The story actually goes that Kildall fell in a bar and died slowly at home of some internal injury.
By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.
Then again, you had Phil Katz, who ripped off ARC from Thom Henderson, rocketed to fame and fortune with it, and then proceeded to drink himself to death. I would say that certain people can't handle failure, but certain others can't handle success either. Blaming one's individual choice to drink himself to death on another doesn't change where the responsibility for his suicide lies - with himself.
How long does it take for Linux people to jump all over Windows vulnerabilities that have already been patched as a reason not to use Microsoft products?
Try this one: What proportion of Windows vulnerabilities allow the attacker to obtain sensitive information or result in complete system compromises?
Risk minimisation is the most important part of engineering software for security. It involves assuming that your software will eventually be compromised somehow and ensuring through design that the damage will be controlled. Microsoft has largely ignored this, and they rightly take flak for it, because their most crucial security problems could have been minimized or even eliminated through risk minimisation.
If, however, you open that same document in OpenOffice and it renders it wrong because of some crazy layout (think table cells that span multiple pages...), then YOU are to blame.
Um, no, Microsoft's still to blame for not providing information necessary to interoperate with their products.
What's even more rich is that Microsoft has repeatedly claimed that its patent stockpile is for defense only, yet they are the biggest proponent of having software patents introduced in Europe. If their patents are going to be used for defense only, why would they want to introduce software patents "as a defense measure" into an area where they needed no defense to begin with? Their charade is so obvious, I can't believe people still take them at face value when they act benevolent and benign with respect to software patents.
Either distribution will give you an easy install, access to Debian packages and apt-based network updates, but with more advanced hardware support
I think what they meant to say here instead of "more advanced hardware support" is "more liberal support of hardware whose intended operation requires non-free software". The implication in the former is that Debian is somehow behind in hardware support, which is demonstrably false - every unsupported device that could be supported is invariably due to one of the following:
a license issue that prohibits redistribution entirely
contradictory licensing in the Linux kernel (e.g. a GPL-incompatible license in a Linux driver) that causes a driver to be removed from the Debian kernel
DFSG issues such as binary-only firmware forcing the package into non-free, even if it was otherwise freely redistributable and had a compatible license with whatever it linked with (since Debian policy requires freely redistributable source code for all programs in the archive)
Other distributions have more liberal policies with respect to software that supports hardware devices, but Debian's conservative stance attempts to guarantee that nobody further down the distribution chain can end up screwed by a license problem. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug.
I have had a few problems with the interpretation of Debian policy in the past.
The first was that the proposed firmware loader really sucked for certain applications. I'm not sure if this has changed. Because of this, I was originally really pissed off with the interpretation that the DFSG "program" applied to microcode and firmware because of the technical limitations of the loader interface. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this really was for the better though, but only after the following issue was also resolved:
There was a huge push to eliminate non-free from the archive around the beginning of last year. This sounded like a great idea at first, because then the FSF would endorse Debian as the reference GNU/Linux distribution (aside from the GFDL conflict). Unfortunately, once everyone started moving firmwares and microcode to non-free, it was becoming increasingly clear that if Debian was going to continue to support modern hardware, non-free was here to stay. Certain zealots continued to push for the removal of non-free, even when it was apparent that doing so would not serve the interests of free software in the long term due to the reduced mindshare growth of people not being able to install Debian on their existing systems. Eventually a GR was made, and non-free was kept around. This political decision, coupled with my realization that the long-term benefits of free firmware outweighed any temporary technical difficulties with a crappy firmware loader interface.
The final struggle for me is that certain zealots in the Debian community are still insisting that all strings of bits are to be interpreted as 'programs' under the DFSG, and thus the 'source' must be required. There are two gaping problems with this. The first is the level of abstraction (FA theory) at which one must view things in order to claim that, for example, a video file is a program - I think that's utterly impractical. The second follows from the first - what is the 'source code' for (for example) a video file? Raw DV? Raw uncompressed frames? Who determines whether a particular package is in compliance or not? What if the author deleted the raw source after processing it? What about the effect on the mirrors who suddenly have to host multi-GB raw video files?
There is some practicality to having such high-quality source files for multimedia, because it encourages reuse of the content, so I think making such things available whenever possible should be encouraged. But the idea that a piece of software could be placed in non-free because it included an intro AVI without a raw video source files is ludicrous and counter-productive, IMO.
On a plane you're on another owners property and yes, they're allowed to monitor.
I think you're missing the point here.
The ID requirement is not the problem. The claim that a secret law compels them to check ID, rather than a company policy, points to a problem with the government. We have to find out whether or not this secret law exists.
If it does, it is a big liberty issue - how can we be expected to be held accountable for laws which we could not read? I think the Soviets did something similar.
If the law does not exist, then privacy advocates can call for a boycott of airlines which require ID, which proves there is a demand for ID-less flight. If that demand is sufficient, the market will eventually satisfy it. But if a secret law exists, it's not possible for this to happen.
I assume you mean civil unions, or do you really want to continue official recognition of religious constructs?
Anti-racist-preferences
So you're against affirmative action and reparations, since they are racist against Caucasian people?
Pro-gun
You believe that the more guns the better, or simply to uphold the Second Amendment's intent?
Pro-low-taxes
Federal or state? I hope you also are pro-small-government too, otherwise you're going to run up a big deficit. What about allowing individual states to self-determine their own social programs and taxation policy?
Pro-war
You're an imperialist? You support arbitrary police actions without a declaration of war like Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq? Or do you mean you want a strong national defense, to be utilized only against imminent threats to life or liberty?
Pro-drug-legalization-with-regulation-and-taxati on
What kind of drugs? Do you include abolishing the FDA here? What about the DEA and the federal war on psychoactive drugs? How do you plan to inform consumers about the effects and purity of a particular product, whether it's a recreational or medicinal (or both) substance? Who is held acountable when someone overdoses or has an adverse reaction and either dies or is impaired for life? What about smuggling/imports? Is importing/smuggling pharmaceuticals from Canada different from importing/smuggling heroin from Afghanistan? If so/not, why?
Destroy-the-**AA
Destroy an advocacy organization because you disagree with its views? Or do you intend rather to cut out their supports by rolling back copyright lengths and exclusive privileges? If so, how do you plan to deal with the backlash from the (profit-producing) crowd that insists they need longer and more extensive copyright privileges in order to innovate?
I really think your views on these issues cannot be as simplistic as you put them across.
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
Irrelevant. Many felons are serving sentences for non-violent crimes which were made felonies as a deterrent (example: drug possession). If you can't vote from prison, this just encourages those in power to continue to criminalize their political opponents.
The second is the maximalist: The BIOS should provide abstract access to all hardware so that the OS does not have to have drivers.
then
If you look at the LinuxBIOS approach, it is more of a maximalist approach targeting the Linux kernel.
You are aware that LinuxBIOS does nothing more than put the machine into a state where Linux can be booted, and specifically delegates everything else including hardware setup to Linux?
And if so, how would you resolve the differences between a monolithic design like Linux and a microkernel design like HURD?
I don't see how this is even relevant. The BIOS is a boot loader that happens to also perform hardware setup, a user interface, and callback code (For APM/ACPI). How does the OS kernel even matter at that level?
Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
You're talking out your ass. As the copyright holder of the code, you can do whatever you damn well please with it.
Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game.
Again, you're wrong. Economics is _not_ a zero-sum game, which is why people bother to invest after all.
IMHO, GPL is not designed to increase free software but to get rid of commercial software.
It's designed to propagate the four freedoms that the FSF believes software users should have. It's nothing to do with some vague grudge against people making money. But feel free to blow the communist horn, it just weakens your argument is all.
As someone who's method of feeding my newborn baby is writing software you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any GPL'd code.
FOR THE CHILDREN! Please, this rhetoric is worn out. Yes, by working on others GPL software or software you intend to release under a free license yourself (GPL/BSD doesn't matter), you limit your options with respect to selling the software in exchange for having a self-supporting user community. Instead of whining, you could come up with a better business plan. How about WatTCP for example? Give away the library, sell the documentation.
I find it interesting that you have nothing better to do than putting words in my mouth since you have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion, then you accuse *me* of having no life.
By the way, the vendors I buy hardware from do care about Linux very much; that's why they get my money and the others lose.
But I thought the whole reason so few people write drivers for Linux is that it's hard to write binary Linux drivers. Wouldn't UDI make that easier, and therefore encourage binary drivers, and therefore encourage drivers in general?
I doubt it would make it any easier to write drivers. Depending how the whole thing was structured, maybe it could make the line between 'derived work' and 'aggregation' clearer with respect to the GNU license. I'd have to agree that not making things easier for binary-only drivers is probably on the agenda somewhere.
...couldn't do it because NT didn't support USB. I brought over my trusty Knoppix CD, rebooted, and everything was recognized - and K3B burned the data on a DVD in about an hour
Um, ok.. now try Linux circa 1996, because that's the only valid comparison against NT. Would your 1.2.13 kernel have been up to the task?
Slashdot Mirror
Except the parent didn't mention Mozilla, Linux, or Open Source. For all you know, he might consider them all as equally inept at security as Microsoft. Nice straw man, though.
Yes, you could make the point that too much diversity and thus too much choice is confusing to inexperienced users. That's why distributions that market themselves to inexperienced users should take care of technical decisions for the user. If they don't, their product is faulty.
I think this is just griping from someone who still thinks there can be One True OS(TM) that will somehow magically fill everyone's needs. His point about zealots who insist that their OS is the One True OS(TM) is fine, but then he insists that Windows is the One True Programming Environment(TM) and that everything else is too confusing. This is funny considering the free UNIXes all adhere to POSIX and SUS as a baseline, where the Windows platform is an ad hoc, de facto standard that changes and accumulates cruft with every release.
If you want a more succinct answer, it would be "choice". The choice to move to another office suite if MS Office does not continue to be the best value for you, not simply because of its availability for a low/no price, but so you can get your data out of MS Office formats if need be. This choice is the only thing what will keep Microsoft on their toes and innovating if they want to keep selling Office, so even as an Office only user, you still benefit from OO's existence.
Dealing with content security issues is a cost of doing business in the media industry. Underpinning the technological approaches to security is an assumption that most people agree with the copyright bargain, and that technological methods will keep them on the honest side of the line. If people are clamoring to violate copyrights and just looking for the tools to do so, that's a social problem - and the solution is not to outlaw the tools, it's to reexamine the copyright framework and bring it more in line with popular sentiment. I'm sure shareholders and fanboys of media companies would disagree, but fortunately, you only get one vote just like the rest of us.
I understand why you would think so, having revealed your underlying bias. It's understandable that a reasonable approach would be irrelevant when one's thoughts are dominated by the threat of having a higher sticker price. But you still have provided no convincing moral argument dictating that engineers should be responsible for how people use their tools, and furthermore to foresee all such uses.The only convincing premise in your argument is that piracy costs media companies money, and that such a tool could be used for piracy. Kind of like how killing people is wrong, and that a knife can be used to kill people. You seem to think that by default things should be illegal unless it can be proved (in your moral domain) that they have a "good" use. That's not the spirit of freedom, but I'd have to admit it's becoming a more and more common approach in the US these days, since everyone has a moral agenda they want encoded into law now, because they can't stand the thought that anyone else would have a different value system from theirs.
By the way, you need to check your dictionary too before flaming others for improper verbage.
Yes, WineX is a half-baked alternative to native solutions. But you presume that the native solutions would have existed if it weren't for WineX. Truth be told, the market share of Linux is so miniscule that it is not on most publishers' radar, so the native ports we do get are unofficial and done by people like Ryan Gordon.
Live with it, or evangelize if you want to reap the spoils of a dominant market share. It's unfortunate that Microsoft goes out of their way to make it difficult for developers to migrate from Windows targets to Linux targets, but such is life when consumers buy Windows without thinking twice about the marketplace ramifications of their choice.
Unfortunately for your argument, the courts have repeatedly held up the right to engineer tools which have significant legal use, even if that happens to be paired unfortunately with significant illegal use. I happen to think making engineers liable for the use of their tools would have a chilling effect on new development, but that's just me.
Even worse, this bill might spell the end of humorous spoof sites. I think there has to be an intent to gain unauthorized access to confidential information of the client included. Otherwise this bill is just way too broad. Yahoo could shut down any Yahoo spoof site by claiming they are "phishing" for people who really wanted to go to Yahoo.
Then again, you had Phil Katz, who ripped off ARC from Thom Henderson, rocketed to fame and fortune with it, and then proceeded to drink himself to death. I would say that certain people can't handle failure, but certain others can't handle success either. Blaming one's individual choice to drink himself to death on another doesn't change where the responsibility for his suicide lies - with himself.
Risk minimisation is the most important part of engineering software for security. It involves assuming that your software will eventually be compromised somehow and ensuring through design that the damage will be controlled. Microsoft has largely ignored this, and they rightly take flak for it, because their most crucial security problems could have been minimized or even eliminated through risk minimisation.
What's even more rich is that Microsoft has repeatedly claimed that its patent stockpile is for defense only, yet they are the biggest proponent of having software patents introduced in Europe. If their patents are going to be used for defense only, why would they want to introduce software patents "as a defense measure" into an area where they needed no defense to begin with? Their charade is so obvious, I can't believe people still take them at face value when they act benevolent and benign with respect to software patents.
35.6% times zero?
Look here. Several of the products that he mentions are addons for PostgreSQL.
- a license issue that prohibits redistribution entirely
- contradictory licensing in the Linux kernel (e.g. a GPL-incompatible license in a Linux driver) that causes a driver to be removed from the Debian kernel
- DFSG issues such as binary-only firmware forcing the package into non-free, even if it was otherwise freely redistributable and had a compatible license with whatever it linked with (since Debian policy requires freely redistributable source code for all programs in the archive)
Other distributions have more liberal policies with respect to software that supports hardware devices, but Debian's conservative stance attempts to guarantee that nobody further down the distribution chain can end up screwed by a license problem. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug.I have had a few problems with the interpretation of Debian policy in the past.
The first was that the proposed firmware loader really sucked for certain applications. I'm not sure if this has changed. Because of this, I was originally really pissed off with the interpretation that the DFSG "program" applied to microcode and firmware because of the technical limitations of the loader interface. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this really was for the better though, but only after the following issue was also resolved:
There was a huge push to eliminate non-free from the archive around the beginning of last year. This sounded like a great idea at first, because then the FSF would endorse Debian as the reference GNU/Linux distribution (aside from the GFDL conflict). Unfortunately, once everyone started moving firmwares and microcode to non-free, it was becoming increasingly clear that if Debian was going to continue to support modern hardware, non-free was here to stay. Certain zealots continued to push for the removal of non-free, even when it was apparent that doing so would not serve the interests of free software in the long term due to the reduced mindshare growth of people not being able to install Debian on their existing systems. Eventually a GR was made, and non-free was kept around. This political decision, coupled with my realization that the long-term benefits of free firmware outweighed any temporary technical difficulties with a crappy firmware loader interface.
The final struggle for me is that certain zealots in the Debian community are still insisting that all strings of bits are to be interpreted as 'programs' under the DFSG, and thus the 'source' must be required. There are two gaping problems with this. The first is the level of abstraction (FA theory) at which one must view things in order to claim that, for example, a video file is a program - I think that's utterly impractical. The second follows from the first - what is the 'source code' for (for example) a video file? Raw DV? Raw uncompressed frames? Who determines whether a particular package is in compliance or not? What if the author deleted the raw source after processing it? What about the effect on the mirrors who suddenly have to host multi-GB raw video files?
There is some practicality to having such high-quality source files for multimedia, because it encourages reuse of the content, so I think making such things available whenever possible should be encouraged. But the idea that a piece of software could be placed in non-free because it included an intro AVI without a raw video source files is ludicrous and counter-productive, IMO.
The ID requirement is not the problem. The claim that a secret law compels them to check ID, rather than a company policy, points to a problem with the government. We have to find out whether or not this secret law exists.
If it does, it is a big liberty issue - how can we be expected to be held accountable for laws which we could not read? I think the Soviets did something similar.
If the law does not exist, then privacy advocates can call for a boycott of airlines which require ID, which proves there is a demand for ID-less flight. If that demand is sufficient, the market will eventually satisfy it. But if a secret law exists, it's not possible for this to happen.
I really think your views on these issues cannot be as simplistic as you put them across.
By the way, the vendors I buy hardware from do care about Linux very much; that's why they get my money and the others lose.