No, it's not a much harder problem.
on
GPL for Books?
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· Score: 1
O'Reilly is happily publishing Open Source books, including the Linux manuals and Using Samba, so there isn't a problem getting stuff printed.
In fact, I strongly suspect that the combination of a traditional publisher, the open source licence it's published under and the active involvement of the Samba Team to swat bugs will produce a book that sells in greater quantity than a traditional "print and hope it's correct" publication.
Besides, Samba will change over time, and the openness of the process will help us keep the book up to date.
--dave c-b
Re:This is similar to an idea we have had
on
GPL for Books?
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· Score: 1
While we weren't expecting embedded questions, the O'Reilly / Samba Team did expect lots of bug-fixes and smem substantial changes in Using Samba.
I'd be quite interested in your question process: it sound cool...
--davecb
Re:RMS's situation (was: What a messy article ;)
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 1
I should comment that RMS is also famous for keeping a certain lisp-machine company software, which was effectively open source, as good as or better than a well-staffed but closed-source lisp-machine company's work.
A partial counter-example to Kipling's "left him, sweating and swearing, six months behind", you understand(;-))
I suspect he's less than concerned because he knows that one competent programmer (in the Knuthian sense!) can defeat a hundred corporations who don't know why and what they're doing.
I'm always being asked to "set up a computer for my nana". I'd prefer it to be Linux, and I suspect it wouldn't be all that hard.
However, I'm woefully ignorant of what's working well on Linux: how's Applix, Frame, Star Office and the like? What's a good image converter? Who has a bozotalk-to-ms-word filer so I can recover the user's old files?
And what am I missing? What else do we have that's usable right now, so I really can set up a Linux box for nana?
--dave
Re:Javalobby members lack of objectivity
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
I'm a member too, and have always seen the group as supporting a middle ground.
They don't approve of paying to use J2EE, as they don't see a lot of value in it for them.
Their (various!) opinions on the ECMA issue were different: they saw the rules being changed at the same time as MS was lobbying strongly for the power to change Java, and came out against MS. Which is entirely consistant with their unhappyness with the modified MS Java, the one MS got sued over.
That's not the same thing as agreeing with Sun: the Java Lobby was one of the groups which spoke harshly to Sun for the failure to credit Blackdown.
--dave [Warning: personally, I'm somewhat biased towards Sun. I have this S-bus connector sticking out of my neck, you see...]
Eric Belits raised the "no representation" problem, and R. Larson replied: In current circumstances there is a very real mechanism - if a country believes it is better off not participating it can simply not participate.
With respect, this is false.
In fact, if a country joins a body such as the WTO, one agrees to accept all their rulings, not just the ones you agree to.
The U.S. disgarees with the WTO overturning the ban on tuna-containing-dolphins, but was forced to submit, on pain of substantial fines. Canada disagreed with the similar forced importation of MMT (a gasoline additive which hasn't been proved safe yet) but had to not only allow it, but also pay a significant penalty to the manufacturer for trying to prevent it's import.
Do not assume these are not binding agreements: they are, and the only way to avoid honoring them is to close your borders... and neither Canada nor the U.S wishes to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Reprinting Unix source and providing a commentary on it was very much in the spirit of the times, and reflected to the credit of Dr. Lions.
It's also interesting that that was the public discussion of what was agreed to be Bell's intellectual property: v7 contained several improvements that were publically suggested by the Lions book. A win for both parties.
Finally, it's an existance proof that one need not take up the religious position that one's source code must be kept secret. In more modern times, it's an existance proof that it not be free in the Gnu sense to be worth publishing.
--dave (an author of a "free source" book) c-b
Re:does it cover smbmount at all?
on
Using Samba
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· Score: 2
Nope, although we do mention it. Smbmount was suffering from a lack of maintainers during almost the whole period that the book was being written. I'm glad to see support for it coming back.
Also, smbmount is Linux-specific. So Andrew wrote smbsh, the samba shell. It's an OS-agnostic alternative.
Please note that the significant results, the ones which actually tell one what happened, are buried two-thirds of the way down the body, in Figure 3.
Linux on a single-processor system was honestly outperformed by NT, with NT turning in 152% of the Linux performance on a single processor, server.
From this, Mindcraft conclude that their original comparison on 4-processor servers was fair, and that there is nothing wrong with claiming that NT will give you 200% of the performace of Linux.
The Linux (and Samba) team wished to reperat the test on a uniprocessor because Linux isn't particularly fast on a multiprocessor, and that was one of the concerns the team had with the first test.
This issue isn't addressed by the article. And why not? Well, I'll suggest that it was one of the major ways in which the benchmark varied from fair. Since the paper on the retest was such a paen to Mindcraft's fairness, it wouldn't do to admit to any remaining unfairness.
Despite being able to beat Linux in a fair fight, Mindcraft implemented the benchmark in a manner that suggested they feared the very opposite. Sigh...
It's not the ads, it's the information you can gather. Let me give an example of the kind of thing you can find with an sql join.
Once upon a time, my employer did library systems and drugstore systems. In the drugstore system, customer adresses & phone numbers were protected, but they weren't protected in the library system
So a user selected for people who had a perscription for birth-control pills in the drugstore database, and joined for matching names in the library database. This gave him names and adresses, which he filtered to get ones nearby.
Anyone want to guess what he was planning to "sell" the selected customers?
While kings once granted monopolies to printers, copyright is quite a different beast, and one that is hardly related at all to royal grants to printers.
Copyright is based on the principles that
once published, information is free
encouraging broad publication requires a short-term grant of property rights to the publisher
In effect, this means that the originators of copyright like Emmanuel Kant had the same basic belief as Richard Stallman of "copyleft" fame: that information wants to be free. And it's that principle that makes copyleft acheivable, and puts the lie to the "abbreviated" history that Mr. Long has quoted to prejustify his conclusions.
Mr. Long could not legitimately conclude that copyright (freedom of infomation) should be replaced with civil law (perpetual ownership of information) if he knew or cited the real history of copyright.
See also The Atlantic magazine Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Copyright" for a non-revisionist view and a spirited debate on the subject, and Wired magazine, The Copyright Grab for an essay on (Mr. Long's preferred?) initiative to eliminate copyright.
Jeremy Lee suggested that "To get Linux on everyone's desktop, the release frequence will have to drop done to that kind of timescale" (ie, about once a year).
In fact, Multics (Unix's papa) permitted continuous maintenance: a friend worked on it. It's a solved problem in computer science to support continuous change. It is addmittedly hard enough that it wasn't considered as a goal of Unix, and so has been lost from the collective memory of the industry...
The unsolved problem is getting people to pay for something they can't see. Even now, Microsoft has to change the box, play with the user interface and add "features" in order to sell folks their box of bug fixes to Office every few years.
Slashdot Mirror
O'Reilly is happily publishing Open Source books, including the Linux manuals and Using Samba, so there isn't a problem getting stuff printed.
In fact, I strongly suspect that the combination of a traditional publisher, the open source licence it's published under and the active involvement of the Samba Team to swat bugs will produce a book that sells in greater quantity than a traditional "print and hope it's correct" publication.
Besides, Samba will change over time, and the openness of the process will help us keep the book up to date.
--dave c-b
While we weren't expecting embedded questions, the O'Reilly / Samba Team did expect lots of bug-fixes and smem substantial changes in Using Samba.
I'd be quite interested in your question process: it sound cool...
--davecb
I should comment that RMS is also famous for keeping a certain lisp-machine company software, which was effectively open source, as good as or better than a well-staffed but closed-source lisp-machine company's work.
A partial counter-example to Kipling's "left him, sweating and swearing, six months behind", you understand(;-))
I suspect he's less than concerned because he knows that one competent programmer (in the Knuthian sense!) can defeat a hundred corporations who don't know why and what they're doing.
--dave c-b
I'm always being asked to "set up a computer for my nana". I'd prefer it to be Linux, and I suspect it wouldn't be all that hard.
However, I'm woefully ignorant of what's working well on Linux: how's Applix, Frame, Star Office and the like? What's a good image converter? Who has a bozotalk-to-ms-word filer so I can recover the user's old files?
And what am I missing? What else do we have that's usable right now, so I really can set up a Linux box for nana?
--dave
I'm a member too, and have always seen the group as supporting a middle ground.
They don't approve of paying to use J2EE, as they don't see a lot of value in it for them.
Their (various!) opinions on the ECMA issue were different: they saw the rules being changed at the same time as MS was lobbying strongly for the power to change Java, and came out against MS. Which is entirely consistant with their unhappyness with the modified MS Java, the one MS got sued over.
That's not the same thing as agreeing with Sun: the Java Lobby was one of the groups which spoke harshly to Sun for the failure to credit Blackdown.
--dave [Warning: personally, I'm somewhat biased towards Sun. I have this S-bus connector sticking out of my neck, you see...]
Eric Belits raised the "no representation" problem, and R. Larson replied:
In current circumstances there is a very real mechanism - if a country believes it is better off not participating it can simply not participate.
With respect, this is false.
In fact, if a country joins a body such as the WTO, one agrees to accept all their rulings, not just the ones you agree to.
The U.S. disgarees with the WTO overturning the ban on tuna-containing-dolphins, but was forced to submit, on pain of substantial fines. Canada disagreed with the similar forced importation of MMT (a gasoline additive which hasn't been proved safe yet) but had to not only allow it, but also pay a significant penalty to the manufacturer for trying to prevent it's import.
Do not assume these are not binding agreements: they are, and the only way to avoid honoring them is to close your borders... and neither Canada nor the U.S wishes to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
--Dave (in Toronto) C-B
Reprinting Unix source and providing a commentary on it was very much in the spirit of the times, and reflected to the credit of Dr. Lions.
It's also interesting that that was the public discussion of what was agreed to be Bell's intellectual property: v7 contained several improvements that were publically suggested by the Lions book. A win for both parties.
Finally, it's an existance proof that one need not take up the religious position that one's source code must be kept secret. In more modern times, it's an existance proof that it not be free in the Gnu sense to be worth publishing.
--dave (an author of a "free source" book) c-b
Nope, although we do mention it. Smbmount was suffering from a lack of maintainers during almost the whole period that the book was being written. I'm glad to see support for it coming back.
Also, smbmount is Linux-specific. So Andrew wrote smbsh, the samba shell. It's an OS-agnostic alternative.
--dave
Please note that the significant results, the ones which actually tell one what happened, are buried two-thirds of the way down the body, in Figure 3.
Linux on a single-processor system was honestly outperformed by NT, with NT turning in 152% of the Linux performance on a single processor, server.
From this, Mindcraft conclude that their original comparison on 4-processor servers was fair, and that there is nothing wrong with claiming that NT will give you 200% of the performace of Linux.
The Linux (and Samba) team wished to reperat the test on a uniprocessor because Linux isn't particularly fast on a multiprocessor, and that was one of the concerns the team had with the first test.
This issue isn't addressed by the article. And why not? Well, I'll suggest that it was one of the major ways in which the benchmark varied from fair. Since the paper on the retest was such a paen to Mindcraft's fairness, it wouldn't do to admit to any remaining unfairness.
Despite being able to beat Linux in a fair fight, Mindcraft implemented the benchmark in a manner that suggested they feared the very opposite. Sigh...
It's not the ads, it's the information you can gather. Let me give an example of the kind of thing you can find with an sql join.
Once upon a time, my employer did library systems and drugstore systems. In the drugstore system, customer adresses & phone numbers were protected, but they weren't protected in the library system
So a user selected for people who had a perscription for birth-control pills in the drugstore database, and joined for matching names in the library database. This gave him names and adresses, which he filtered to get ones nearby.
Anyone want to guess what he was planning to "sell" the selected customers?
---daveMind you, the contractors conceivably can ask to be considered employees after the first year, causing a tax issue for the company.
--daveWhile kings once granted monopolies to printers, copyright is quite a different beast, and one that is hardly related at all to royal grants to printers.
Copyright is based on the principles that
In effect, this means that the originators of copyright like Emmanuel Kant had the same basic belief as Richard Stallman of "copyleft" fame: that information wants to be free. And it's that principle that makes copyleft acheivable, and puts the lie to the "abbreviated" history that Mr. Long has quoted to prejustify his conclusions.
Mr. Long could not legitimately conclude that copyright (freedom of infomation) should be replaced with civil law (perpetual ownership of information) if he knew or cited the real history of copyright.
See also The Atlantic magazine Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Copyright" for a non-revisionist view and a spirited debate on the subject, and Wired magazine, The Copyright Grab for an essay on (Mr. Long's preferred?) initiative to eliminate copyright.
Jeremy Lee suggested that "To get Linux on everyone's desktop, the release frequence will have to drop done to that kind of timescale" (ie, about once a year).
In fact, Multics (Unix's papa) permitted continuous maintenance: a friend worked on it. It's a solved problem in computer science to support continuous change. It is addmittedly hard enough that it wasn't considered as a goal of Unix, and so has been lost from the collective memory of the industry...
The unsolved problem is getting people to pay for something they can't see. Even now, Microsoft has to change the box, play with the user interface and add "features" in order to sell folks their box of bug fixes to Office every few years.