keep my anti-virus software up to date I am truly amazed that anyone who purports to comment on a security related issue places such trust in anti-virus software. Have you thought about how anti-virus software works? Have you thought about what a virus definition is? A virus is a patch to program code or a library. A virus definition is like the command "patch", only it doesn't apply the patch, it just runs the check to see if the patch has been applied. Now think about it seriously for a moment. If any hacker took enough interest in you personally to take the time to drop a keylogger on your system, they would probably take the most ubiquitous virus available which suits their purpose and then modify it in such a way that it is not identified by the virus definition. You can run your anti-virus software 24/7/365 and it'll never show up. What's better is that, in the case I've presented using the most ubiquitous virus available, the anti-virus authors and maintainers have already seen so many variants that they truly believe that they have found _all_ the variants and won't bother with the one custom variant that's secretly sending all of your passwords back to me.
Second, someone could break the encryption used on the database I use a plain text database written nice and neatly on a tab of paper right out in the open on my desk both at work and at home. I keep the encryption algorithm in my head. It's not the most complicated algorithm but I doubt highly that anyone's going to look at my tab of paper and randomly guess that I've decided to switch case on every even numbered position and go two off (negative) on every odd numbered position.
Honestly though you're probably a-okay. 99% of this security stuff is hype and paranoia. Other than nuking processes, killing performance, and sending spam viruses and trojans don't do a whole lot. Real identity theft or online harassment takes a dedicated effort that script-kiddies just don't have the will to apply to just one person. Script-kiddies want to see something big. Now your boss, however... he just might be interested in tanking you. That trojan gives him a convenient window to your world to let him know just which buttons he can push tomorrow to frizzle your frazzle be-dizzle dazzle.
X directories alone are garbage./usr/X/lib/X11/fonts WTF, I've always hated how X puts files that are not libs in/lib I agree with the sentiment but I wouldn't go so far as to say "garbage".:) There is a method to the madness... somewhere.
And this/share directory, how about a simple/fonts directory for the entire system I used to think much the same thing but have sat in the corners of developers' chat rooms long enough to know that the/share,/usr/share,/usr/local,/usr/local/share, etc. redundancy actually has particular usefulness to people who either have many many different users on the system from different vectors (ssh, ftp, http, console, other hosted services), work with several different revisions of the same app at the same time for bug testing, or especially both. The current FHS leans towards pleasing the developers. GoboLinux, and what you would like, is an FHS which pleases the users and admins. The filesystem is is somewhat like a rubik's cube and, as hard drive technology is right now, can't be very easily rearranged.
What we really need is a dynamically addressable filesystem--like kernel memory. When User or Admin logs on the filesystem presents itself with.../lib and.../bin and.../etc directories arranged by application. When Dev logs on the filesystem arranges itself according to the current FHS. I see it as switching pages according to which app is currently in control. I imagine that the overhead for something like this would wreak havoc on drive heads, however, especially if 25 users are logged in at the same time. Perhaps each user needs a.map file not only for kernel hooks but for fs arrangement.
If all applications are in their own directories, where do fonts go? How about fonts that come with one app but you want them available to others? What about libraries? What if you want to be able to search all libraries on the system for a struct which has a particular form or functionality? From a developer's pov, separation by function is logical and useful.
Then there's the user's and admin's pov. For them it would be great if the font manager could simply scan for the all the "font" subfolders in a particular tree. For them it would be great if the linker could scan for all "lib" subfolders in a particular tree. Adding and removing programs would become trivial.
Then there's the registry's pov. Linux may not have a registry but both Gnome and KDE are growing one and Win already has it. The developer's FHS makes the need for a registry dubious while the user/admin's ideal FHS makes a registry a clear necessity. I personally would rather work with a developer's FHS and deal with th idiosyncracies than have to wonder how much crap is accumulating in some cryptic cancerous database of proprietary keys.
We demanded 'unconditional' surrender. The Japanese had one condition: Let us keep our Emperor. We said no to that condition
May you live long, have wealth, and many many happy and productive children.
This is the single most telling, truthful, disgusting, and horrific point in the consideration to drop the atomic bomb. A nation pleads for the preservation of the icon of its culture and they get nuked for it.
Even after we dropped the bombs, we accepted Japan's single condition in an 'unconditional surrender.'
I wasn't aware that the US had relented after dropping the bomb. It reminds me of trying to steal a lollipop from a child, beating the child to oblivion when they hold fast, and then ruffling their hair and letting them keep the lollipop when they're laying bloody on the ground. WTF?
Brown's argument seems to be that we can't draw on concepts from other pieces of code or from books. Its illeagal in his world, or immoral.
In the scientific industry every employee agreement that I've signed since graduating college contains language which allows for the same type of ownership. Every concept, technique, method, or piece of knowledge that I pick up while employed with company XYZ, according to strict interpretation of the employee agreement, is still property of XYZ. If the attorneys from my employer six years ago get bored they could try to say that anything I do with my current employer is property of my first employer.
Happily no former employer has asked for me to send back brain tissue.
One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...
I saw OS/2 running at the same time that I saw some of my college buddies running unofficial alpha releases of Win95 (Chicago?). Windows seemed to be more responsive and OS/2 seemed to be more stable. MS responded to the stability issue by responding to consumers and pushing (slashing) the release date to six months earlier than initially expected. OS/2 was stable, but everyone was buying Win95 because it was on every market shelf.
No matter which opposing OS you choose (even if they could've put the AmigaOS on x86 at the time) MS had the resources to make a better marketing and sales campaign.
Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates. There's no way around it.
So Ken Brown is correct, in that the GPL is a hybrid license containing elements of both free and proprietary
I feel that it's a question of freedom. There are two definitions of freedom: freedom which is free to do anything and freedom which guarantees further freedom. I believe that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom can be limited to protect itself (GNU GPL) but freedom cannot be given away (BSD, employee agreements, power of attorney).
As a metaphorical example, how do we feel about American (freedom, liberty, rah rah rah and all that) made firearms being used to enslave or wrongfully imprison people in other nations? Not that there's any good way to tell a firearm purchaser,"Look, you can only use this for _GOOD_" but, back to the software world, the GNU GPL does indeed have this luxury on source code.
From the GNU GPL To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
Someone needs to reacquaint our politicians and employers with the concept of "forbid anyone to...ask you to surrender the rights." Define a natural right as anything which is physically possible. If you can do it then you have a right to do it. Theft is a natural right. Distance a natural right from a moral right. A moral right is something that you should do. Theft is not a moral right (ignore the Robin Hood red herring for a moment). Is the GNU GPL being hypocritical in asking the licensee to surrender their natural right to take a GPL work, compile it, and distribute it as a proprietary software package and legally restrict anyone from reverse-engineering or decompiling it to check the nature of the source? The moral right is never an issue since it's illegal to decompile most proprietary code. I would say "no", because GNU freedom which restricts greed is guaranteeing more GNU freedom.
Nice assessment of the political money game. It doesn't work so differently in corporate America, either. Names and faces of the games change, but the method is typically the same. Hype, profit, move on. Hype, profit, move on. Profit feeds ego, ego feeds hype, hype feeds profit.
AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it Name-calling "rabid" Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model The worst fears are confirmed. This is an assassination attempt on F/OSS using the political vector The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property (ignore the provocative "open source" vs. "hybrid source" labels for a moment) Here comes trouble... The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy. As long as the value of the IT economy is dependent on the preservation of intellectual property, it is counterproductive for the U.S. government to invest in Linux. Complete and utter FUD!!!
The "hybrid source" label is being used to invoke a psychological response in the politicians who are not familiar with the computing industry. "Hybrid" is a term that gives them headaches--hybrid cars, hybrid crops, hybrid tissues, hybrid vaccines, hybrid banks, hybrid businesses.
AdTI's hybrid source, as near as I can tell, is F/OSS as in GNU. Their open source is F/OSS as in BSD. I personally feel that they've mixed things up. Freedom, I feel, naturally strives to preserve freedom as in GNUs GPL stipulation that GNU GPL code can only be included with GNU GPL code. I feel that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom, according to AdTI, preserves the freedom to be greedy. This only ensures that, politically and legally, the upper levels of corporate America will always have a stranglehold on the wage slaves and Universities who are really writing good code.
F/OSS software is only a threat to MS because the selling price of $0.00 is forcing the upper levels of corporate America to turn the blistering eye of Quality Control on proprietary software. This is not something that proprietary software has ever experienced. Previously they have always been able to hide behind EULAs, smoke, mirrors, and play on the ignorance of the customer. The outlandish price of proprietary software has been justified by a witty saying (which proves nothing),"You get what you pay for." This is not to say that F/OSS inherently has no value. This is our last-ditch effort in a war that began 15 years ago--the infuriation, indignation, and humiliation of watching MS and their alliances live luxuriously on a good marketing pitch while many superior programmers, and their products, were left to watch a light bulb swing from the ceiling.
GNU GPL seeks to allow real free-market capitalism to set the price of software. The industry, and AdTI, is quite happy with the current model which allows them the freedom to pilfer code from any available sources, fund the marketing, and charge outrageous prices for poorly hacked together crap. I don't agree that all software under GNU GPL would be free because, if people weren't being raked over the hot coals for crap software, there would be enough fair-minded people who would have the available resources to contribute back to the projects that they use.
I dunno, maybe not. It's possible that an IT admin in a large corporate setting would have trouble convincing the executive board that yearly donations should be sent to F/OSS projects. The default setting is "No" and, unless the executive is a computer programmer, making a donation to a F/OSS project is perceived as little better than giving money to a beggar on the street. The upper echelon of corporate America has a beautiful corporate pyramid scheme running as long as they continue to side with proprietary software vendors. Company money is dumped into proprietary software, and MS, Norton, McAfee, etc. stock has a good return every year. Selling F/OSS as a cost-cutting measure isn't really the Right Thing (tm) to do because it doesn't
In a roundabout manner you were close to the turth as I've identified it:
sprinkle in another computer in case something breaks (ie something that can connect to the internet if you are having connection problems) ie. in case something broke b)(This is probably the biggest fear about switching OS's in general) fear of BREAKING In my experience, most people hate having their computer systems changed because they have been hard wired to do everything a certain way or it will break.
MS scare tactics, combined with "customer support" scare tactics, have been used to convince people that they know nothing, can learn nothing, and will achieve nothing unless they do things EXACTLY as told. Computers were mostly introduced to the common population by salesmen with a two-week crash course or customer service reps with a two-week crash course. When these two-week crash coursers encountered a moderately insightful user who would ask,"But, can't I do that by doing this?" their hard-wired response was,"Well, you can but it'll BREAK something else. Sure, you can stop it from breaking but it's too complicated to explain. Do it like I told you." Since Windows, especially in the early versions, has a high propensity to break randomly on its own the two-week crash-courser is always in the right. If the user complied willingly and something broke, it was Windows' fault. If the user ever deviated from exact instructions, even if the deviation in reality made no difference, it was the users' fault. The two-week crash-courser was never wrong and users are now psychologically conditioned to be afraid of changing anything in their computer. Changing operating systems would be a tremendous psychological ordeal because it involves cutting off the leech that has dominated their computing habits for the last 10 years or more.
New users to *NIX are intimidated by the operating system because it _is_ a complex (and powerful) operating system. Windows users are intimidated by MS and other customer support vendors because MS is a wannabe complex (and powerful) operating system. That and MS has been covering up its horrendous shortcomings for the last 15 years.
----- The almighty dollar is meant to be the driver behind everything. ----- I blame the government bloat for this. We're so top heavy with individuals who are infused with greed in this world that it's only logical that the rest of us are pressured into constantly chasing the almighty dollar. Those in power have plenty but are complete misers while the rest of us get horse-whipped at work to barely pay the bills. It's outrageous but looking back across history I guess I can't ever see a time when society ever did play fair.
I agree that we need to pursue things that we enjoy and find enjoyment in the simpler aspects of life but, at the same time, no one lives in this world rent free.
----- I would take the total opposite approach to what you suggest. Encourage kids that life is there to be enjoyed, and they should follow their dreams, and to hell with what anyone else thinks of them. ----- I would love to agree with you. You have read all the other posts on this topic, though, haven't you? The moment we enjoy what we do then we open ourselves up to working for free because it's a "hobby". Corporate management has a monopoly on guilt trips and browbeatings "You should be lucky to have a job you enjoy!" "You act like you deserve a promotion/raise!" "If you don't get this done you're going to lose your job!"
Ideally, in ages past, a person would find something that they enjoyed doing and the community around them would find a use for their skills. Nowadays the large corporations have everything pigeonholed, and refined, and plotted out, and mechanized, that there's no room for individual creativity or pursuit of personal goals. It's like the money misers at the top of the system don't care that people will do best what they enjoy doing. They don't want a happy population. They want unhappy ditch diggers who are so busy biting at each others' throats that we never notice who's really causing the misery.
I dunno. I'd like to _not_ be a pessimist but I've seen first hand how nonchalant the world is to stand by and watch a person get used, beat up, and thrown away like so much worthless trash. Once again it seems like only those who are independently well off have a leg to stand on when it comes to sitting at the bargaining table with the corporate/political masters.
I don't know what's the bigger travesty: The FOSS zealots that don't try to educate young kids about the real way the business world works or THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS which fill their heads full of all of this crap about the best product winning, and the fair opportunities in the business world, and all the same junk that the FOSS zealots are guilty of.
We should really just take the candy coating off of life and tell the kids as soon as they hit six years old,"Look, kid, unless your family is independently wealthy or you get lucky enough to win the lottery, expect to live a life which is boring and controlled by other people. You are nothing but a blowjob machine for whoever ends up being your manager. The sooner you accept that as the way the world works the easier life will be."
You didn't make any point using Marx's name and I am certainly not a Marx lover. Marx, as an idealist, was nice but he steadfastly ignored that any implementation of his ideas would certainly fail due to the fallibility of human nature.
You used Marx's name because you wanted to play on the ignorance of most readers. I'm calling you on it. Feel free to define "Marxism" and show me how the current government in the US doesn't justify 90% of what it does by using Marxist ideals.
----- And the FOSS zealots ARE partially responsible ----- No. You had it right the first time...
----- The big BIG problem for the FOSS business model for the little guy is some large company running off with the product and either offering it themselves, or in this case not bothering to contribute anything back. ----- This has been happening for years. Big companies produce crap which they charge way too much for. Some guy who makes a similar product in his free time produces something better and asks to be paid. The big company will either swamp him out of the business or leave him out to dry.
Big companies, since they've worked so closely with politicians to guarantee that they always have the upper hand, have a social responsibility to offer real paying jobs to these people. The people at the tops of the pyramids have never, not in ten thousand years, seen things from this point of view. The world is their circus and we are merely expendable entertainers. It's really nothing more than a carefully protected system of slavery.
Laying the blame on people who choose to advocate a full circle "play fair" policy is of the same mentality as destroying something you want if you can't own it.
----- If it's a hobby, then fine; treat it like one ----- This is an ages old argument and stinks like so much COW DUNG.
Just because someone enjoys what they do does not give big businesses a free pass to leave them in the cold when it comes time to have a home and eat. Should a farmer provide his crops for free just because he enjoys working with the earth? Why don't CEOs work for free? They seem to be enjoying themselves on the golf course often enough. How about politicians? Why don't they work for free? And the policemen... shouldn't they take pride and enjoy helping the community? Shouldn't they be working for free?
The fact of the matter is that the business community is more than happy to charge the population for every piece of crap that they want to cram onto store shelves, but when someone who's not in the select ordained inner circle of business networks puts together a superior product then it's all "best wishes on your hobby! When you go bankrupt, lose your family, and commit suicide because you don't feel like living in the sewer we'll happily pick it up and make money off of it."
Opportunistic b__tards.
If you were half as good at fishing as this guy was at writing security implementation maybe someone would pay you to do it. It remains that you use your mediocrity to justify taking a sick pleasure in watching someone else's efforts leave them penniless and at the end of their rope.
I read through the comments and it's all the same. People think it's a shame that this guy got shafted. Everyone agrees that what he did for Linux security was worthwhile and good work. Everyone also recognizes that large corporations are happily taking everything they want from open source without feeling obligated to support it.
While this guy paid "the ultimate price" by facing bankruptcy, or homelessness, and joblessness, this is not a new problem the US economic society. People who give 120% at their jobs have typically been seen as little more than rubes by middle and upper management. There's something to be taken from all of this.
If you are a true geek/nerd you will remember back to school days when you were busy acing tests and pushing the class. You will remember the disgusted looks from your average classmates when you were solving complex physics/math/political problems in your head and they were busy looking out the window wondering when the bell would ring. As it turns out, it is those average classmates who now sit in positions of middle and upper management. They never needed to overachieve. Their family was comfortable and there was no pressure to excel. Now that they are no longer in the same class as the overachievers, but rather sitting in a positon of control, they are ready to exact their revenge for years of intellectual humbling.
Middle managers and upper managers have no conscience. They see the world as something that they can milk dry without ever giving back. The system has become so skewed and top-heavy that, for the most part, they're right. Look at the average productivity of American workers. They've got us horse-whipped and scared sh_tless that we'll be the next ones scrambling to vacate before the bank forcloses on the mortgage and sends the repo man for the car. It would take years of happily firing overachievers before the actual impact of not getting any real productive work done begins to take any noticeable toll on them.
One previous poster pointed out,"At the end of the golfing day these guys still drive home in their Jags and BMWs to a $5 million dollar house on 30 acres of land and eat more caviar". It's the plain, unadultered, grim truth. Unless Society, in general, grows a conscience and begins to fairly compensate people like Spender and the Grsecurity team then they (the management and the government officials that they're sleeping with) will work us all over until every last vein is dry. This isn't up to the government to legislate or the universities to come up with research funding. This is about the social responsibility of big corporations to start giving back. For all the limos, and private planes, and tax deductions, and stock investments which are artificially inflated by the retirement investments of the workers, you'd think that someone could cough up $75k/year to fund this guy.
We have one party with two heads. One head looks like an elephant, the other head looks like a donkey. To say that we have "other smaller parties" as if that negates our single-party system is like saying that Pokemon cards may threaten the US Dollar as acceptable payment notes because a couple of third graders have been spotted trading cards for candy bars at lunch.
Before you spout off about "Marxism" would you care to define it? Marx was all about giving the government the freedom and ability to do whatever needed to be done in the interest of protecting and equalizing the citizens. Isn't that what every major law enforcement bill over the last 15 years has been justified as: protecting and equalizing the citizens?
Pretty much. The CEO knows better than to tell anyone else. It's not hard for the CEO to be hosting a "business meeting" with "potential partners" and take the potential partners on a tour when everyone else is out at lunch.
I think what the ACLU is doing is worthy of praise. But let's face it: the people in power have never given up that power easily. At no other point in history have men been so easily swindled out of their efforts as they are today. Even one hundred years ago, if the government wanted a new tax, it had to think about the implementation of collection. Nowadays, they just tack a new fee onto an electronic transaction. With this unlimited resource availability there is no check and balance on the ability to harass a particularly rights-conscious citizen into an asylum.
With the current spread of powers it's all too possible for the local authorities to drive someone nuts, literally. If some reformist begins to gain too much popularity or support they can be harassed to death. People who are independently wealthy and relatively safe from harassment know better than to open their mouths. They can enjoy life quietly.
I just don't think it's worth the effort to try and reform government anymore. They're too big, too powerful, with too many resources to do whatever they want. The best policy is to stay warm, keep breathing, and thank fate that I'm still employed on any given day. Sure, it's a pretty sad and grim way of looking at life, but it beats being harassed to death.
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keep my anti-virus software up to date
I am truly amazed that anyone who purports to comment on a security related issue places such trust in anti-virus software. Have you thought about how anti-virus software works? Have you thought about what a virus definition is? A virus is a patch to program code or a library. A virus definition is like the command "patch", only it doesn't apply the patch, it just runs the check to see if the patch has been applied. Now think about it seriously for a moment. If any hacker took enough interest in you personally to take the time to drop a keylogger on your system, they would probably take the most ubiquitous virus available which suits their purpose and then modify it in such a way that it is not identified by the virus definition. You can run your anti-virus software 24/7/365 and it'll never show up. What's better is that, in the case I've presented using the most ubiquitous virus available, the anti-virus authors and maintainers have already seen so many variants that they truly believe that they have found _all_ the variants and won't bother with the one custom variant that's secretly sending all of your passwords back to me.
Second, someone could break the encryption used on the database
I use a plain text database written nice and neatly on a tab of paper right out in the open on my desk both at work and at home. I keep the encryption algorithm in my head. It's not the most complicated algorithm but I doubt highly that anyone's going to look at my tab of paper and randomly guess that I've decided to switch case on every even numbered position and go two off (negative) on every odd numbered position.
Honestly though you're probably a-okay. 99% of this security stuff is hype and paranoia. Other than nuking processes, killing performance, and sending spam viruses and trojans don't do a whole lot. Real identity theft or online harassment takes a dedicated effort that script-kiddies just don't have the will to apply to just one person. Script-kiddies want to see something big. Now your boss, however... he just might be interested in tanking you. That trojan gives him a convenient window to your world to let him know just which buttons he can push tomorrow to frizzle your frazzle be-dizzle dazzle.
X directories alone are garbage. /usr/X/lib/X11/fonts WTF, I've always hated how X puts files that are not libs in /lib :) There is a method to the madness... somewhere.
/share directory, how about a simple /fonts directory for the entire system /share, /usr/share, /usr/local, /usr/local/share, etc. redundancy actually has particular usefulness to people who either have many many different users on the system from different vectors (ssh, ftp, http, console, other hosted services), work with several different revisions of the same app at the same time for bug testing, or especially both. The current FHS leans towards pleasing the developers. GoboLinux, and what you would like, is an FHS which pleases the users and admins. The filesystem is is somewhat like a rubik's cube and, as hard drive technology is right now, can't be very easily rearranged.
.../lib and .../bin and .../etc directories arranged by application. When Dev logs on the filesystem arranges itself according to the current FHS. I see it as switching pages according to which app is currently in control. I imagine that the overhead for something like this would wreak havoc on drive heads, however, especially if 25 users are logged in at the same time. Perhaps each user needs a .map file not only for kernel hooks but for fs arrangement.
I agree with the sentiment but I wouldn't go so far as to say "garbage".
And this
I used to think much the same thing but have sat in the corners of developers' chat rooms long enough to know that the
What we really need is a dynamically addressable filesystem--like kernel memory. When User or Admin logs on the filesystem presents itself with
If all applications are in their own directories, where do fonts go? How about fonts that come with one app but you want them available to others? What about libraries? What if you want to be able to search all libraries on the system for a struct which has a particular form or functionality? From a developer's pov, separation by function is logical and useful.
Then there's the user's and admin's pov. For them it would be great if the font manager could simply scan for the all the "font" subfolders in a particular tree. For them it would be great if the linker could scan for all "lib" subfolders in a particular tree. Adding and removing programs would become trivial.
Then there's the registry's pov. Linux may not have a registry but both Gnome and KDE are growing one and Win already has it. The developer's FHS makes the need for a registry dubious while the user/admin's ideal FHS makes a registry a clear necessity. I personally would rather work with a developer's FHS and deal with th idiosyncracies than have to wonder how much crap is accumulating in some cryptic cancerous database of proprietary keys.
We demanded 'unconditional' surrender. The Japanese had one condition: Let us keep our Emperor. We said no to that condition
May you live long, have wealth, and many many happy and productive children.
This is the single most telling, truthful, disgusting, and horrific point in the consideration to drop the atomic bomb. A nation pleads for the preservation of the icon of its culture and they get nuked for it.
Even after we dropped the bombs, we accepted Japan's single condition in an 'unconditional surrender.'
I wasn't aware that the US had relented after dropping the bomb. It reminds me of trying to steal a lollipop from a child, beating the child to oblivion when they hold fast, and then ruffling their hair and letting them keep the lollipop when they're laying bloody on the ground. WTF?
Brown's argument seems to be that we can't draw on concepts from other pieces of code or from books. Its illeagal in his world, or immoral.
In the scientific industry every employee agreement that I've signed since graduating college contains language which allows for the same type of ownership. Every concept, technique, method, or piece of knowledge that I pick up while employed with company XYZ, according to strict interpretation of the employee agreement, is still property of XYZ. If the attorneys from my employer six years ago get bored they could try to say that anything I do with my current employer is property of my first employer.
Happily no former employer has asked for me to send back brain tissue.
One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...
I saw OS/2 running at the same time that I saw some of my college buddies running unofficial alpha releases of Win95 (Chicago?). Windows seemed to be more responsive and OS/2 seemed to be more stable. MS responded to the stability issue by responding to consumers and pushing (slashing) the release date to six months earlier than initially expected. OS/2 was stable, but everyone was buying Win95 because it was on every market shelf.
No matter which opposing OS you choose (even if they could've put the AmigaOS on x86 at the time) MS had the resources to make a better marketing and sales campaign.
Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates. There's no way around it.
So Ken Brown is correct, in that the GPL is a hybrid license containing elements of both free and proprietary
I feel that it's a question of freedom. There are two definitions of freedom: freedom which is free to do anything and freedom which guarantees further freedom. I believe that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom can be limited to protect itself (GNU GPL) but freedom cannot be given away (BSD, employee agreements, power of attorney).
As a metaphorical example, how do we feel about American (freedom, liberty, rah rah rah and all that) made firearms being used to enslave or wrongfully imprison people in other nations? Not that there's any good way to tell a firearm purchaser,"Look, you can only use this for _GOOD_" but, back to the software world, the GNU GPL does indeed have this luxury on source code.
From the GNU GPL
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
Someone needs to reacquaint our politicians and employers with the concept of "forbid anyone to...ask you to surrender the rights." Define a natural right as anything which is physically possible. If you can do it then you have a right to do it. Theft is a natural right. Distance a natural right from a moral right. A moral right is something that you should do. Theft is not a moral right (ignore the Robin Hood red herring for a moment). Is the GNU GPL being hypocritical in asking the licensee to surrender their natural right to take a GPL work, compile it, and distribute it as a proprietary software package and legally restrict anyone from reverse-engineering or decompiling it to check the nature of the source? The moral right is never an issue since it's illegal to decompile most proprietary code. I would say "no", because GNU freedom which restricts greed is guaranteeing more GNU freedom.
No g-news is good g-news without Gary GNU.
Nice assessment of the political money game. It doesn't work so differently in corporate America, either. Names and faces of the games change, but the method is typically the same. Hype, profit, move on. Hype, profit, move on. Profit feeds ego, ego feeds hype, hype feeds profit.
Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch
Everyone knows that Linuxfromscratch is written by Beekmans.
AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it
Name-calling "rabid"
Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model
The worst fears are confirmed. This is an assassination attempt on F/OSS using the political vector
The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property
(ignore the provocative "open source" vs. "hybrid source" labels for a moment) Here comes trouble...
The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy. As long as the value of the IT economy is dependent on the preservation of intellectual property, it is counterproductive for the U.S. government to invest in Linux.
Complete and utter FUD!!!
The "hybrid source" label is being used to invoke a psychological response in the politicians who are not familiar with the computing industry. "Hybrid" is a term that gives them headaches--hybrid cars, hybrid crops, hybrid tissues, hybrid vaccines, hybrid banks, hybrid businesses.
AdTI's hybrid source, as near as I can tell, is F/OSS as in GNU. Their open source is F/OSS as in BSD. I personally feel that they've mixed things up. Freedom, I feel, naturally strives to preserve freedom as in GNUs GPL stipulation that GNU GPL code can only be included with GNU GPL code. I feel that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom, according to AdTI, preserves the freedom to be greedy. This only ensures that, politically and legally, the upper levels of corporate America will always have a stranglehold on the wage slaves and Universities who are really writing good code.
F/OSS software is only a threat to MS because the selling price of $0.00 is forcing the upper levels of corporate America to turn the blistering eye of Quality Control on proprietary software. This is not something that proprietary software has ever experienced. Previously they have always been able to hide behind EULAs, smoke, mirrors, and play on the ignorance of the customer. The outlandish price of proprietary software has been justified by a witty saying (which proves nothing),"You get what you pay for." This is not to say that F/OSS inherently has no value. This is our last-ditch effort in a war that began 15 years ago--the infuriation, indignation, and humiliation of watching MS and their alliances live luxuriously on a good marketing pitch while many superior programmers, and their products, were left to watch a light bulb swing from the ceiling.
GNU GPL seeks to allow real free-market capitalism to set the price of software. The industry, and AdTI, is quite happy with the current model which allows them the freedom to pilfer code from any available sources, fund the marketing, and charge outrageous prices for poorly hacked together crap. I don't agree that all software under GNU GPL would be free because, if people weren't being raked over the hot coals for crap software, there would be enough fair-minded people who would have the available resources to contribute back to the projects that they use.
I dunno, maybe not. It's possible that an IT admin in a large corporate setting would have trouble convincing the executive board that yearly donations should be sent to F/OSS projects. The default setting is "No" and, unless the executive is a computer programmer, making a donation to a F/OSS project is perceived as little better than giving money to a beggar on the street. The upper echelon of corporate America has a beautiful corporate pyramid scheme running as long as they continue to side with proprietary software vendors. Company money is dumped into proprietary software, and MS, Norton, McAfee, etc. stock has a good return every year. Selling F/OSS as a cost-cutting measure isn't really the Right Thing (tm) to do because it doesn't
In a roundabout manner you were close to the turth as I've identified it:
sprinkle in another computer
in case something breaks
(ie something that can connect to the internet if you are having connection problems)
ie. in case something broke
b)(This is probably the biggest fear about switching OS's in general) fear of
BREAKING
In my experience, most people hate having their computer systems changed because they have been hard wired to do everything a certain way
or it will break.
MS scare tactics, combined with "customer support" scare tactics, have been used to convince people that they know nothing, can learn nothing, and will achieve nothing unless they do things EXACTLY as told. Computers were mostly introduced to the common population by salesmen with a two-week crash course or customer service reps with a two-week crash course. When these two-week crash coursers encountered a moderately insightful user who would ask,"But, can't I do that by doing this?" their hard-wired response was,"Well, you can but it'll BREAK something else. Sure, you can stop it from breaking but it's too complicated to explain. Do it like I told you." Since Windows, especially in the early versions, has a high propensity to break randomly on its own the two-week crash-courser is always in the right. If the user complied willingly and something broke, it was Windows' fault. If the user ever deviated from exact instructions, even if the deviation in reality made no difference, it was the users' fault. The two-week crash-courser was never wrong and users are now psychologically conditioned to be afraid of changing anything in their computer. Changing operating systems would be a tremendous psychological ordeal because it involves cutting off the leech that has dominated their computing habits for the last 10 years or more.
New users to *NIX are intimidated by the operating system because it _is_ a complex (and powerful) operating system. Windows users are intimidated by MS and other customer support vendors because MS is a wannabe complex (and powerful) operating system. That and MS has been covering up its horrendous shortcomings for the last 15 years.
My GUI works fine.
UDE running on LFS.
I don't know why everyone else has so much trouble.
Biodiesel...
Helping America lose weight by burning all the bad cholesterol.
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The almighty dollar is meant to be the driver behind everything.
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I blame the government bloat for this. We're so top heavy with individuals who are infused with greed in this world that it's only logical that the rest of us are pressured into constantly chasing the almighty dollar. Those in power have plenty but are complete misers while the rest of us get horse-whipped at work to barely pay the bills. It's outrageous but looking back across history I guess I can't ever see a time when society ever did play fair.
I agree that we need to pursue things that we enjoy and find enjoyment in the simpler aspects of life but, at the same time, no one lives in this world rent free.
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I would take the total opposite approach to what you suggest. Encourage kids that life is there to be enjoyed, and they should follow their dreams, and to hell with what anyone else thinks of them.
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I would love to agree with you. You have read all the other posts on this topic, though, haven't you? The moment we enjoy what we do then we open ourselves up to working for free because it's a "hobby". Corporate management has a monopoly on guilt trips and browbeatings "You should be lucky to have a job you enjoy!" "You act like you deserve a promotion/raise!" "If you don't get this done you're going to lose your job!"
Ideally, in ages past, a person would find something that they enjoyed doing and the community around them would find a use for their skills. Nowadays the large corporations have everything pigeonholed, and refined, and plotted out, and mechanized, that there's no room for individual creativity or pursuit of personal goals. It's like the money misers at the top of the system don't care that people will do best what they enjoy doing. They don't want a happy population. They want unhappy ditch diggers who are so busy biting at each others' throats that we never notice who's really causing the misery.
I dunno. I'd like to _not_ be a pessimist but I've seen first hand how nonchalant the world is to stand by and watch a person get used, beat up, and thrown away like so much worthless trash. Once again it seems like only those who are independently well off have a leg to stand on when it comes to sitting at the bargaining table with the corporate/political masters.
Alright. We agree.
I don't know what's the bigger travesty: The FOSS zealots that don't try to educate young kids about the real way the business world works or THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS which fill their heads full of all of this crap about the best product winning, and the fair opportunities in the business world, and all the same junk that the FOSS zealots are guilty of.
We should really just take the candy coating off of life and tell the kids as soon as they hit six years old,"Look, kid, unless your family is independently wealthy or you get lucky enough to win the lottery, expect to live a life which is boring and controlled by other people. You are nothing but a blowjob machine for whoever ends up being your manager. The sooner you accept that as the way the world works the easier life will be."
You didn't make any point using Marx's name and I am certainly not a Marx lover. Marx, as an idealist, was nice but he steadfastly ignored that any implementation of his ideas would certainly fail due to the fallibility of human nature.
You used Marx's name because you wanted to play on the ignorance of most readers. I'm calling you on it. Feel free to define "Marxism" and show me how the current government in the US doesn't justify 90% of what it does by using Marxist ideals.
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And the FOSS zealots ARE partially responsible
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No. You had it right the first time...
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The big BIG problem for the FOSS business model for the little guy is some large company running off with the product and either offering it themselves, or in this case not bothering to contribute anything back.
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This has been happening for years. Big companies produce crap which they charge way too much for. Some guy who makes a similar product in his free time produces something better and asks to be paid. The big company will either swamp him out of the business or leave him out to dry.
Big companies, since they've worked so closely with politicians to guarantee that they always have the upper hand, have a social responsibility to offer real paying jobs to these people. The people at the tops of the pyramids have never, not in ten thousand years, seen things from this point of view. The world is their circus and we are merely expendable entertainers. It's really nothing more than a carefully protected system of slavery.
Laying the blame on people who choose to advocate a full circle "play fair" policy is of the same mentality as destroying something you want if you can't own it.
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If it's a hobby, then fine; treat it like one
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This is an ages old argument and stinks like so much COW DUNG.
Just because someone enjoys what they do does not give big businesses a free pass to leave them in the cold when it comes time to have a home and eat. Should a farmer provide his crops for free just because he enjoys working with the earth? Why don't CEOs work for free? They seem to be enjoying themselves on the golf course often enough. How about politicians? Why don't they work for free? And the policemen... shouldn't they take pride and enjoy helping the community? Shouldn't they be working for free?
The fact of the matter is that the business community is more than happy to charge the population for every piece of crap that they want to cram onto store shelves, but when someone who's not in the select ordained inner circle of business networks puts together a superior product then it's all "best wishes on your hobby! When you go bankrupt, lose your family, and commit suicide because you don't feel like living in the sewer we'll happily pick it up and make money off of it."
Opportunistic b__tards.
If you were half as good at fishing as this guy was at writing security implementation maybe someone would pay you to do it. It remains that you use your mediocrity to justify taking a sick pleasure in watching someone else's efforts leave them penniless and at the end of their rope.
I read through the comments and it's all the same. People think it's a shame that this guy got shafted. Everyone agrees that what he did for Linux security was worthwhile and good work. Everyone also recognizes that large corporations are happily taking everything they want from open source without feeling obligated to support it.
While this guy paid "the ultimate price" by facing bankruptcy, or homelessness, and joblessness, this is not a new problem the US economic society. People who give 120% at their jobs have typically been seen as little more than rubes by middle and upper management. There's something to be taken from all of this.
If you are a true geek/nerd you will remember back to school days when you were busy acing tests and pushing the class. You will remember the disgusted looks from your average classmates when you were solving complex physics/math/political problems in your head and they were busy looking out the window wondering when the bell would ring. As it turns out, it is those average classmates who now sit in positions of middle and upper management. They never needed to overachieve. Their family was comfortable and there was no pressure to excel. Now that they are no longer in the same class as the overachievers, but rather sitting in a positon of control, they are ready to exact their revenge for years of intellectual humbling.
Middle managers and upper managers have no conscience. They see the world as something that they can milk dry without ever giving back. The system has become so skewed and top-heavy that, for the most part, they're right. Look at the average productivity of American workers. They've got us horse-whipped and scared sh_tless that we'll be the next ones scrambling to vacate before the bank forcloses on the mortgage and sends the repo man for the car. It would take years of happily firing overachievers before the actual impact of not getting any real productive work done begins to take any noticeable toll on them.
One previous poster pointed out,"At the end of the golfing day these guys still drive home in their Jags and BMWs to a $5 million dollar house on 30 acres of land and eat more caviar". It's the plain, unadultered, grim truth. Unless Society, in general, grows a conscience and begins to fairly compensate people like Spender and the Grsecurity team then they (the management and the government officials that they're sleeping with) will work us all over until every last vein is dry. This isn't up to the government to legislate or the universities to come up with research funding. This is about the social responsibility of big corporations to start giving back. For all the limos, and private planes, and tax deductions, and stock investments which are artificially inflated by the retirement investments of the workers, you'd think that someone could cough up $75k/year to fund this guy.
You're joking, right?
We have one party with two heads. One head looks like an elephant, the other head looks like a donkey. To say that we have "other smaller parties" as if that negates our single-party system is like saying that Pokemon cards may threaten the US Dollar as acceptable payment notes because a couple of third graders have been spotted trading cards for candy bars at lunch.
Before you spout off about "Marxism" would you care to define it? Marx was all about giving the government the freedom and ability to do whatever needed to be done in the interest of protecting and equalizing the citizens. Isn't that what every major law enforcement bill over the last 15 years has been justified as: protecting and equalizing the citizens?
Please don't use Marx's name ever again.
I want to put you in jail because
All Your Property ARE BELONG TO US!
Democracy isn't a government, though. It's just a method of making a decision.
Plato must've been on some good crack.
Pretty much. The CEO knows better than to tell anyone else. It's not hard for the CEO to be hosting a "business meeting" with "potential partners" and take the potential partners on a tour when everyone else is out at lunch.
No. You've got me pegged all wrong.
I think what the ACLU is doing is worthy of praise. But let's face it: the people in power have never given up that power easily. At no other point in history have men been so easily swindled out of their efforts as they are today. Even one hundred years ago, if the government wanted a new tax, it had to think about the implementation of collection. Nowadays, they just tack a new fee onto an electronic transaction. With this unlimited resource availability there is no check and balance on the ability to harass a particularly rights-conscious citizen into an asylum.
With the current spread of powers it's all too possible for the local authorities to drive someone nuts, literally. If some reformist begins to gain too much popularity or support they can be harassed to death. People who are independently wealthy and relatively safe from harassment know better than to open their mouths. They can enjoy life quietly.
I just don't think it's worth the effort to try and reform government anymore. They're too big, too powerful, with too many resources to do whatever they want. The best policy is to stay warm, keep breathing, and thank fate that I'm still employed on any given day. Sure, it's a pretty sad and grim way of looking at life, but it beats being harassed to death.