The UNIX underpinnings of OS X do allow for quite a bit of tinkering by skilled users.
Yes, I realize -- did you read my comment? I was digging around with Terminal.
The main problems I've described so far are with the UI, but they run deeper. For instance:
Because OS X underpinnings are based on UNIX, Macs have much in common with Linux.
Ok, leaving aside the fact that I can't really run my own window manager (and still run native OS X apps), there's the fact that there really isn't a good package manager. Either every app has to code its own autoupdate system (or embed one), or I have to manually check the ones that don't.
Add to that the fact that unlike the App Store, there isn't a central repository -- I can still install anything I want on Ubuntu, but most things will be installed via the package manager, meaning I can be reasonably sure they're legit, and will be kept up to date.
There are a few package managers for OS X, but they each cover different things, they don't talk to each other, and they all have rather large flaws. For instance, last I checked, MacPorts requires everything be compiled, and it'll still refuse to update the system -- it creates a new hierarchy under/sw.
These are all things that make it kind of a mess.
Most importantly, for me, is that it had to fit into a very tight spot
By "better" I mean the Dell case looks like cheap plastic, and the Mac one is fancy aluminum. It actually isn't much bigger.
It also had to have the faster 802.11n networking speed so that large movie files can be transferred to it quickly.
No it doesn't.
I mean, let's say you were streaming movies. Blu-Ray is the highest-bandwidth movie format you're likely to encounter -- higher than HD-DVD. It has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 50 megabits.
In other words: Plug in a cable, and you've already got the bandwidth to stream two movies at once, plus you won't be interrupted by nachos.
Or stick to the wireless. The b/g card only adds $25 to the price, the n card adds $40, and if you didn't have a router, you could add the n router for $80, or a gigabit n router for $160 -- and that's from Dell (third-party could be cheaper) -- still nowhere near the $500 or so extra you paid for a Mac. And let's talk about 802.11g -- that's 54 mbits, still faster than the theoretical maximum of Blu-Ray.
If you really want to transfer movies fast -- maybe you're ripping them in another room, for some strange reason -- plug in a cat6 cable. 802.11n is 160 mbits. Gigabit is 1000 mbits, and again, you won't be interrupted by nachos.
There is no other computer that does what the Mini does and yet suck only 14 W on standby.
I can do one better -- 0 W on hibernate. But idle (not standby, just idle) it's reported to use 30W, and the max consumption is somewhere closer to 60W. Compare that to, oh, a light bulb.
But I cannot stress enough -- $500 extra. How many years do you have to keep that same device for it to pay for itself in power usage?
A true Windows server is considerably more expensive
And why in the world would you want a "Windows Server" version? You've described this as a component in your media center, right? If you're going with Windows, why wouldn't you use the Media Center edition?
Dell doesn't offer that here, but they do offer Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), for $150 over the base price. So, add it all up (plus the most expensive wireless options), and it comes to $804. Still saves you $200, and that's if you get everything from Dell (without shopping around for components, or simply deciding that Windows 7 Home Premium is enough).
It also has to do with our tribe mentality, mostly a result of our evolutionary heritage.
If you're in a small tribe of fifty people or so, and one of them is eaten by a tiger, statistically, you're likely to be eaten next. The tribes which react with tighter security, or maybe a counterattack (kill the tiger!), are more likely to survive than the ones who shrug, figure it's an isolated incident, and get slowly picked off, one by one.
Our brains are simply not wired for evaluating the risk of things we see in the news in any sizable city, let alone national or world news.
Interesting, but that just leads to a mob mentality -- how long would it take for a bunch of cramped and cranky passengers to turn into Lord of the Flies?
the GPL is there to prevent something once free from turning non-free and thus limit people from using it as they want. Without copyright you could just 'liberate' it again. Disassemble and rewrite if need be.
The GPL goes further than that, though. If that was all, it would be legal to include GPL in freeware, so long as you didn't restrict people from disassembling it.
As it is, you are required to provide source. Obviously, someone thought "liberating" it through disassembly wasn't enough.
stating that the BSD license is somehow closer to "no copyright" is absurd, as both the GPL and the BSD License (and every other license) exists within the exact same copyright framework.
That is true, but it is quite clear that the BSD license imposes fewer restrictions on the user. No copyright imposes no restrictions on the user. By that metric, I claim fewer restrictions is closer to no restrictions.
Indeed, but saying "forcing to give back" is trying to intentionally put a bad spin on it.
My intention wasn't to spin it...
It's like saying you're forced to pay for the stuff you take from a shop.
Right. I've generally argued the other side of this -- it's a fair transaction, to say that if you take my code, you should give something back, or you should obey my wishes. I've gone so far as to argue in favor of GPLv3, or even something stricter.
One point I've made, though, is that we have this idea of "taken" -- we see plenty of people outraged when it's the fruit of their labors which are used against their will. Yet on the other hand, we see people who dislike copyright, who pirate and feel it should be legal, and we see the GPL's goal as being a world without copyright, where any digital media is free to use and remix.
My interpretation is, that GPL is about striving for a world where any(?) digitally copyable content is freely available for use, modification and re-distribution.
That is probably true. Unfortunately, in the short term, it has some nasty side effects of occasionally taking a step back from that goal -- for example, Linux can't use ZFS, because the licenses are incompatible, and specifically because of the use of the GPL on the Linux side.
Free software, as you've described, is software which provides the Four Freedoms. BSD-style licenses indeed provide these freedoms, as does the public domain.
What it doesn't do is force any derivative work to also provide the same freedoms. This means that someone could create a project which is derived from a BSD-licensed project, but which is proprietary and does not offer those freedoms -- but that fork would also no longer be BSD-licensed. The original code, under the original license, is still Free as in freedom.
But I don't think I have to say much more when the FSF itself disagrees with you.
Whenever anyone attributes "communist" aspects to the GPL (i.e., your repeated assertion that the GPL forces one to share/contribute/give back), it speaks more to the mindset of the poster than it does any insight into the GPL.
I never claimed it was communist, nor do I necessarily believe communism is bad. Your kneejerk reaction to any perceived kneejerk reaction is especially ironic.
No, but that's why, for example, it's the BSD-licensed kernels that have ZFS, which actually cannot be incorporated into the Linux kernel, for legal reasons. They're both open source, but the GPL puts up this wall of legal bullshit, so they can't actually exchange code.
Just think of the BSD network stack. Do you really think it's bullshit, that majority of open source crowd would be really really unhappy if their code was used like that?
Yes.
First, think of one of the primary motivations of open source, or of software development, or of any creative endeavor to begin with -- you want your creation to be appreciated. You want your code to be used.
But also, think of the BSD stack itself -- doesn't it make sense that this, of all things, should be free to reimplement? Certainly, any new network protocol or document specification should have a commercially-reusable implementation. Or, to put it another way: Would you rather we have the BSD stack re-used everywhere, or would you rather people keep inventing weird stuff like IPX?
And why would they release their code under license, if it may make them unhappy, especially if their code is good enough to be used by others?
First, I think there's a subset who actually don't realize it's an option to use something else, or haven't really thought about it thoroughly.
I also think there are a fair number who actually would be upset, as you've said. Certainly, there are projects I would hate to see lifted wholesale, rebranded, and released without so much as crediting me. And the fact that people do get outraged at GPL violations would tend to support your point.
But a large part of why people get outraged at GPL violations is simply the fact that the open source community was very clear about how they wanted their code to be used, and that's being exploited. I'm generally really unhappy when people violate the GPL, even if I don't always think the GPL should've been used in the first place.
There's also the subset who release code under the GPL because it's required by the project they're committing to, or because they're using some other GPL'd library -- maybe they wanted Qt, for example, before it went LGPL.
Then tehre are people who don't feel unhappy about it, or maybe feel their personal direct unhappiness is less than their happiness of indirectly benefitting mankind (even if it helps to put more cash into Bill Gates' bank account, at least some if may go to some charity of Bill's choosing...).
That's not it at all, and I have no particular love of Gates, nor do charities help that.
But I'd rather Windows support IP properly, even if they have to use my code, than see them decide to invent their own. If IE ever does support HTML5 local storage, I'd rather see it embed SQLite than see them try to build it on Access or something.
And that's assuming it's Microsoft who uses it. It could always be a startup who wants to challenge Microsoft. I like that some of my code might make it easy for some small startup to go from zero to competitive -- that it lowers the barrier of entry, that it makes it a more level playing field.
There's also the extent to which I care much more about actually building software than what license it's under. I have no problem releasing GPL code. The biggest reason I appreciate licenses like BSD and Apache, though, is that I can pretty much glance at the LICENSE file, or even read through all of it (it's tiny!), and then just get to work. I don't have to think about whether it's GPL, or whether the code I want to use is GPL-compatible, or how far the LGPL extends, or whether I really want to trust the FSF by using "any future version" (or if, conversely, I want to force contributors to cede copyright to me so I, or the project as a whole, can choose to switch licenses).
And it's far easier to go from an MIT license to the GPL than the other way around -- if I find a large number of developers really do want to use the GPL, I don't need anyone's permission to incorporate the old MIT code.
but the license is the biggest difference between Linux and BSD,
Actually, the sheer inertia is the biggest difference between Linux and BSD. As a developer and a user, I target Linux because it has more users and more developers than BSD -- among other things, this means it has more flexibility, because there's more ways to set up userspace, because there's just more userspace stuff in general. Plus it's going to have better hardware support, since they can't necessarily share drivers, but there are more developers for Linux.
In the open source world, popularity really can make something better, for two reasons: First, it means more developers, because every user is a potential developer -- by that I mean, some percentage of users will be developers. Windows doesn't necessarily have more developers than Linux (it may even have less?), but Linux almost necessarily has more developers than BSD or HURD.
And second, the big problems of monoculture don't apply as much -- if Windows is 90% of what I want, my only real recourse is to send Microsoft a suggestion, or switch to another OS. If Linux is 90% of what I want, I can code the other 10% -- or, most likely, someone else already has, so there will be dozens (hundreds!) of flavors, all of which have enough in common to exchange patches and ideas. So if Linux lacks something BSD has, I can actually help change that.
And the reason Linux has the marketshare is, it was in the right place at the right time -- HURD wasn't done, Minix was under a much more restrictive license (it wasn't even free-as-in-beer), and BSD was in a questionable legal state. BSD's legal status is no longer an issue, but by the time that was resolved, it was too late.
The fact that RoR, sqlite, etc don't use the GPL is not really relevant given that they are not competing with BSD|Linux for developer|user mindshare.
That is true, but if the GPL was such a huge factor, you'd expect some upstart framework/database to take over their marketshare simply by using GPL.
Re:Brains behind plane bomber was released from Gi
on
GSM Decryption Published
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
First problem:
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot...
Did you catch the key word?
Second problem:
Let's continue to hear the truth today instead of falling pray to the media whore known as Slashdot.
Yep -- you're a moron. Slashdot is a "Media Whore", yet you linked to ABC News? Just what media is Slashdot a whore to?
Put another way, it's possible to have a GPL'd programming language, but the programs aren't GPL'd.
This really isn't that easy to answer. It comes down to what the compiler does. I guess you can write a compiler that works that way. But I'd say most are not.
Like which?
It's possible to compile proprietary programs with gcc. It's also possible to compile GPL'd programs with icc or Microsoft Visual Studio.
Another point to consider is whether there is a compiler that is not GPL'd. If I can compile that language without a GPL compiler the code cannot be considered derivative work.
Think about what you're implying here, though. If I write a Javascript app that only runs in Konqueror, is the GPL forced on me? I can't imagine that would be the case -- especially when it would be resolved simply by fixing my porting bug.
The GPL doesn't say anything about linking. That really is part of the problem. It is all about derivative work.
Fair enough. I did come across an article indicating that the problem is that there isn't a tested legal definition of derivative work, with regards to software. However...
in general I'd say if your program requires another program it is derivative work.
Two problems with that:
First, "derivative work" here is likely a legal term. Legal terms tend to be fairly well defined, but not necessarily what you'd think they are -- consider the scientific definition of "theory".
And second, if I write a GPL'd web service, and you connect to that service, I really don't see why my program should be considered a derivative work. Think about that -- Firefox can pull information directly from various Google sources. Is Firefox a derivative work of whatever Google code is running behind those services?
For me it is absolutly unclear where to draw the line.
It seems that except for a few pathological cases, it's pretty obvious -- if your program links against something GPL'd, it's covered. If it links against something LGPL'd, you're fine so long as you can produce whatever's needed to take 100% of the LGPL'd code, edit it as you wish, recompile, and link against your app.
Why do people think the GPL restricts linking only, but no other means of interaction, including OS interupts?
I'm guessing that's a longstanding convention, but OS interrupts again seem to be quite similar to making a network call -- your program is not physically connected to the OS, but rather, it runs inside the OS.
Why is it accepted to link windows libraries (like MFC), but I cannot link to other GPL incompatible libraries?
I actually have no idea. If I had to guess, I'd say what's happening here is that your GPL'd program is a derivative work of the MFC, not the other way around -- but I'm not sure how much that helps. But I'd think that actually is a violation.
that doesn't mean that Apple could not extend the iTunes app store as an OPTION to their Macs and any possible upcoming tablet. If they did that, Apple users would have a guaranteed virus free source of paid and free programs from the Internet.
Great! Just like Linux repositories have been for the past decade or so.
Except, of course, incredibly more limiting. I can add third-party repositories, and I can create my own repository. You can't do either of these for iTunes or the App Store.
Users that wanted to take the chance to install dodgy software in their Macs would still be able to do so.
And you wanted to know what I dislike about Apple?
I should always have that choice -- but no one does on the iPhone. Software is not necessarily "dodgy" simply because it hasn't been blessed by Apple.
Pick any metric you want, sourceforge license types, Linux vs *BSD commits, gcc vs whatever BSD has, anything that reasonably pits them towards each other.
Firefox vs Konqueror. Even if you count Webkit, Firefox (and Gecko) still win in popularity on Windows.
jQuery vs YUI vs ExtJS. Remember ExtJS? It pretty much became irrelevant the second its author decided to switch to GPL -- the instant that happened was the instant many proprietary projects switched to other technologies. And the author was kind of a dick about it -- insisting that it applied not just to the source on the client, but to the server-side code as well.
Apache vs... wait... is there even a slightly notable GPL'd webserver?
Rails vs... um... hmm.
SQLite vs...
Seeing a pattern?
Copyright: We can't take their binaries, they can't take our source.
Well, or they can take your source, but under conditions you impose.
No copyright: We can take their binaries, they can take our source.
Then why not create a license that actually matches this ideal? As it is, they can take your source only if they release their source at all. They can't take your source and then give you the binaries.
You: Please bend over and give them the source anyway.
"Bend over" and also gain developers.
Again, consider: Are you going to have more or fewer developers under GPL vs MIT? Now, there are tons of other factors, so I doubt Sourceforge is going to show much -- but it's still an interesting question to ask, especially about your software, right now.
Also consider: What do you lose if they can take your source? For all the ranting about TiVo, I'm starting to think that the invention of the DVR was a good thing (and an idea whose time had come), and it isn't as if the Linux community lost anything. If the things they needed were GPL3'd, that would probably have slowed them down significantly -- it probably would not have resulted in them allowing access to the device.
Now, all that said, I do agree with the ideals of GPLv3. I certainly would like to see more open systems. I'm just not sure this is the right way to go about it, and I'm especially skeptical that it's helpful to the individual project.
Is it because you can't or don't want to afford their products?
I had a Powerbook. It cost somewhere between $2k and $3k, so yes, I can afford it. I actually really like the hardware, and the OS was pretty slick. It did a few things that I really miss -- I could open Terminal (as in, Terminal.app), I could set it to be translucent -- really translucent -- and I could set it to map a single keystroke to navigate around open terminals. That was really nice -- I could cycle through them as easily as if they were tabs, but they'd all be physically there, and command+tab would switch applications.
But, eventually, the backlight died. I had AppleCare, so I sent it in for service. It was really nice -- they overnighted me a box with all the packing, all I had to do was pull out the right little strips of foam and send it back.
They refused to fix it because it had a dent in the case. Apparently any physical damage at all voids the warranty, whether or not it's at all related -- that dent had been there for over a year.
They also wanted $1200, insisting that they had to replace basically the entire machine. It was a backlight.
A few other annoyances about that Powerbook -- it was a high-end, late-model Powerbook, which is to say, I got it only a few months before they announced the switch to Intel -- so I kind of got shafted by Apple's keep-everything-secret policy.
And there was a little annoyance -- a bug in the keyboard settings. I reported it to Apple, and not only was I basically sworn to secrecy by their bug report form, but as far as I know, to this day, they have not fixed the bug. I know I lived with it for over a year. But since the OS is proprietary, I couldn't fix it myself -- and because of the way it was designed, there wasn't really a good way to hack around it, as I might on Linux.
I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard, quite possibly the best keyboard I've used, except for its Apple-ness. I can only update its firmware (yes, it has firmware) on a Mac. The alt and Windows keys are swapped, because they're actually alt and command on OS X. And Apple, in their infinite wisdom, replaced the insert key (or what's supposed to be the insert key) with an fn key. Maybe you don't use insert, maybe it has no use on OS X, but there are a number of places on my current OS where it'd be useful.
So, Linux lets me remap keys easily enough -- so alt/command problem solved. But that fn key is apparently interpreted by the keyboard -- it never makes it down the USB cable, so I can't remap it. I can map one of the random other keys to insert, but my actual insert key will always be fn.
I could go on...
See, the Apple Way of doing things is cool, slick, easy, and powerful, as long as you want to do things Steve Jobs has thought of. The second you want to do something Steve Jobs didn't think of, or doesn't approve of, things get very rough. The keyboard settings was a perfect example of that -- I had custom keymappings, and some of them got screwed up.
So, I used Kubuntu on a company laptop. That died, so I had to use a shiny new iMac for about a week until my new laptop arrived. It had leopard, and it was awesome -- but there were still many things I missed.
I just got a Mac Mini with one TB (two 500G).
Good for you! How much did you pay for it?
I've got a Linux box with a terabyte SATA drive in it. The drive costs less than $100.
It runs unlimited Leopard Server
Again, how much did it cost? The box I have that terabyte drive in runs Ubuntu Server.
and is connected to our 47 inch LCD TV.
My laptop runs Kubuntu, and it can do that just fine -- over HDMI, no less.
AFAIK, nobody else sells anything remotely like this.
Check out the Dell Inspiron Zino HD. With a single terabyte drive
You left out one of the most important projects for Linux: Apache.
I wasn't going for a comprehensive list, mainly for things I know about intimately. For example, I know that SQLite is used in tons of places it never would've seen the light of day if it was proprietary, and I'm actually grateful for that -- it means I can quite often interact with random little databases with the sqlite commandline tool, for example.
Rails is another example, for about the same reasons -- tons of webapps, probably far more proprietary than open apps, but tons of plugins and patches sent upstream, because maintaining a fork is expensive. And it is helpful in that it spreads the ideas of REST, and even if you don't know a given page is running RAILS, if it's reasonably RESTful, it's much easier to write a client for.
I really don't know any of the background behind why Apache went with the license it did.
The only convincing reason why Linux is more often used than the BSDs is that it could be used earlier... I really cannot find any other convincing reason.
Well, a derivative of that is that driver support (at the very least) is better on Linux than on other systems, but that's a product of it being popular, and it's one of several benefits that kind of feeds itself. This is the reason why, for example, I'm probably going to continue to run Linux on my fileserver and just wait for btrfs, instead of using OpenSolaris and zfs.
MySQL thrived because sometimes the GPL is unbearable and people pay money to avoid it.
I'd actually be curious to know the numbers behind that -- but I think it's again a case of popularity feeding itself. PostgreSQL has a BSD-style license, and is better in many respects -- I suspect the biggest reason it doesn't catch on is that everyone's already using MySQL, so all the apps are written with MySQL in mind, so when people actually get to the level where they want to improve a database (maybe make it clustered, for instance), MySQL is what they think of.
The main reason it seems to be bad that Oracle owns MySQL is that we haven't really seen a coherent fork come out of it that isn't owned by Oracle, and Oracle has a vested interest in not improving MySQL to the point where it could compete with Oracle's own database.
In fact I think the only reason why not every binary package for Linux must be GPLed is because FreeBSD has Linux emulation,
Not at all, and it's kind of ridiculous to suggest that.
Put another way, it's possible to have a GPL'd programming language, but the programs aren't GPL'd. Take it a step back to something familiar -- if a word processor was GPL'd, and used its own format (not ODF), would that imply every document created was GPL'd?
The GPL is actually pretty explicit about this -- the LGPL only applies to stuff that's a derivative work, and actually part of the LGPL'd library. If you link against it, but keep the original library separate, you don't have to GPL (or LGPL) the result. How separate do you have to keep them? Well, you have to basically give you users all the tools they'd need to recompile the LGPL portion -- so, maybe a.a file of all your code.
And the GPL? It applies to stuff that your program is directly linked against.
So, in what way does the Linux kernel link against any software running in userspace?
Without that every program that calls Linux kernel routines is derivative work of the Linux kernel.
Well, technically, when I make an HTTP request to a machine supporting SOAP, I might be executing a routine on that machine. If all code on that machine is GPL'd, does the software making my HTTP request have to be?
For that matter, what about GPL'd software on Windows?
No, that'd be pretty obviously absurd.
I still don't get why NVidia can distribute drivers with binary blob
GPL is more than just about copyright. It's about giving back.
No, giving back is about giving back.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright -- or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it. It was created to counter the perceived (and very likely real) threat of people building a giant proprietary product out of what was once free, and everyone inevitably upgrading to the shiny new proprietary version, leaving everyone without the ability to change their own code.
But free software, as a concept, doesn't require the GPL. Nor does free software, as a movement, rely on the GPL at this stage.
how is having a problem with one part of a law mean you have a problem with the whole law.
Copyright is a way of expressing what you want done with copies of your intellectual property.
If you have a problem with copyright, or with the idea of intellectual property, I can certainly see a case for that -- and I'd love free-as-in-beer and DRM-free movies. I can certainly see piracy inevitably crushing those who cling to draconian DRM.
But to then turn around and suggest the GPL?
Think about your reaction when you see a gpl-violations story, versus an MPAA story. When it's the RIAA or MPAA, everyone (myself included) is quick to call them the MAFIAA and to defend piracy as "copyright infringement, not theft", and even suggest that there are no moral issues with it.
But when it's a GPL violation, suddenly copyright matters and everyone is morally outraged.
They both rely on the exact same part of the law -- they both rely on the assumption that just because you wrote something, you should be able to control what people do with it.
Actually, I'll play devil's advocate for a moment -- if you consider it as a social issue, rather than a legal one, the GPL is about forcing people to share. If you think sharing is good, then you probably see the GPL as a way to encourage more sharing than would happen otherwise -- and there would probably be even more sharing with no copyright, so you'd gladly give up the GPL if it meant copyright law is gone forever. This is probably why such licenses are referred to as "copyleft".
there are hordes of fanbois and code monkeys out there who do not.
This is true, and it's often the first defense of the serious PHP programmer that you can write decent programs using PHP -- just as the serious Perl programmer will argue that you can write good-looking Perl, it doesn't have to look like line noise. Even Visual Basic programmers will make this claim.
So, I choose a tool based on what I can do with it, and what it encourages, not how it can protect me from myself. Think about it -- rm is already dangerous. Some distros like to do this:
alias rm="rm -i"
While it's annoying in that it'll prompt you "are you sure" with every file, it still does nothing to prevent this:
rm -rf/
Anything can be abused. The question is, what does it look like when you're doing it right?
A lot of the younger developers and engineers I work with rush through things because they depend more on the features of a tool than good practice.
For the record, I'm 22, and going back to school after a couple of years in the field. While I don't always do this, I can and will do behavior-driven development, thorough regression testing, and thorough whiteboard sessions to plan everything out.
I agree that good practice should be emphasized over tool features -- that's why I tend to encourage things like a DVCS and automated testing over things like Eclipse.
But one is a prerequisite for the other. You can't have a Best Practice about when to fork the project for a few commits (versus just sending a patch) if you're using SVN. It's a lot harder to insist that all code come with ample documentation if you don't have something like JavaDoc (or RDoc), and it's kind of hard to insist that your project be cross-platform and vendor-neutral if it's built on ASP.NET.
Let's take another example. I really love Ruby, specifically duck typing -- no Interfaces to define, no need for a common superclass, no need to even care what the type of the object is. If it quacks like a duck, it may as well be a duck.
But rigid interfaces, explicit static type checking (and exception throwing), even contracts, are all tools to make your program more robust. How do you make sure you never get something that doesn't have a quack method, or something that has the wrong quack method? And that's before we even consider open classes -- how can you ensure your program is sane with a language where I can actually make 2+2==5?
The answer is testing. Many projects have twice as many lines of tests as they do of actual production code. In fact, those kinds of static type checks are actually a subset of the kind of checks you could do in proper tests. You're actually running all of your code, and you know it'll work. It's similar to the scientific method, actually -- you can "prove" something mathematically all you like, but the real proof is in actual empirical data from real experiments.
In fact, taken to an extreme, you can use tests to define your API and how you expect your program to work. Test-driven design, at an extreme, becomes Behavior-driven design, where your tests are your specs, and they define the behavior you expect. One advantage is that you'll write exactly the code you need to write to make the spec pass, which could be far less than you thought you needed.
You may or may not agree with the above, but you should at least be able to see the point -- there's an established best practice of testing your code, especially in dynamic languages.
And it shouldn't surprise you at all that legions of fanbois don't do this. In fact, as much as Ruby on Rails gets right, people often write Rails websites that don't scale (even if Rails itself can), and they very often neglect to write tests or put them off, when tests really should be written before the code in question.
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
To take another random example: Ruby on Rails. The license deliberately is not GPL, or even LGPL (which might have worked), but rather MIT. This means I could technically "take" it -- remember, it's not stealing, and it's not even copyright infringement here -- and build my own proprietary product.
It also means that unless I relish maintaining my own separate fork of Rails, I'll be sending patches upstream whenever I do something cool. Even monkeypatches are much easier to send in as formal patches than to maintain.
I used to think as you do, but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots who will actually refuse to contribute to a project because they don't like the license.
I can see people contributing to Linux instead of BSD if they prefer GPL, and if there are no other factors. But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
Yesterday, I sent a patch to a project hosted by Google. They wanted me to sign an agreement essentially giving them copyright and a patent grant (without removing those rights from me) -- and this isn't Google being evil, it's common for projects to request copyright for contributions. I wasn't exactly happy about it, but it again comes down to the same choice -- are the terms of that agreement so bad that I'm going to refuse to contribute at all, or worse, fork the entire project? Probably not, especially for the small patches I have in mind.
And by the way: If you believe in the GPL, and you pirate anything (movies, music, games...), you're a hypocrite. A term common among those who have a problem with current copyright law is, "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement," implying that it's not as bad. I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
If you're serious about configuration management, you shouldn't be rewriting history at all.
For the times when you need to, it makes sense -- especially if you do so before the code is shared. Almost as often as I create a new commit, I'll instead do 'git commit --amend'.
If you make a mistake that gets committed and pushed to your mainline tree, deal with it, submit a new patch fixing it, and leave the mistake showing what happened.
Absolutely. But not if you catch the mistake before you push. And it's not about this:
it isn't enterprise friendly at all.
It's not about me being embarrassed. It's about making things cleaner and more readable for everyone involved. It makes everyone's life easier if I push cleaner changes. (And, since it makes everyone's life harder to rewrite public history after they've pulled, I don't do that.)
While the tablet will be cool it is running iphoneOS which meansno flash.
First, youmay want to make sureyour spacebar is working.
It's very likely that this is not true -- my understanding is that there wasn't an ARM port of Flash for OS X, or something like that. But I don't really know. Still, keep in mind -- the iPhone OS is just a modified OS X.
How do I know it is running iphoneos? Apple putout a developers call to make sure iPhone apps wereusing resolution independant API and widgets.
Yes, because that's obviously conclusive evidence... Think about that for a second:
Dont assume the screensize is 320x240.
Do you really think the iPhone will only ever be 320x240, especially when most Android implementations seem to be higher resolution?
But let's say it's all true. Honestly, I'm glad there's no Flash -- that means web app developers will be forced to use actual open standard web technologies -- or pre-standards, if you insist on calling HTML5 that. No, the bigger disappointment would be the continuation of the stupidity that is the locked-down App Store, and the Apple-knows-best motto of actively attempting to prevent users from installing any software that hasn't been blessed by Apple.
Seriously, if they intend to extend that onto this tablet device, I'm guessing it's a step towards moving on the desktop. Right now, OS X allows free, open development, but that also means Apple doesn't get to veto competition, and they don't get a commission on every single OS X app.
Slashdot Mirror
The UNIX underpinnings of OS X do allow for quite a bit of tinkering by skilled users.
Yes, I realize -- did you read my comment? I was digging around with Terminal.
The main problems I've described so far are with the UI, but they run deeper. For instance:
Because OS X underpinnings are based on UNIX, Macs have much in common with Linux.
Ok, leaving aside the fact that I can't really run my own window manager (and still run native OS X apps), there's the fact that there really isn't a good package manager. Either every app has to code its own autoupdate system (or embed one), or I have to manually check the ones that don't.
Add to that the fact that unlike the App Store, there isn't a central repository -- I can still install anything I want on Ubuntu, but most things will be installed via the package manager, meaning I can be reasonably sure they're legit, and will be kept up to date.
There are a few package managers for OS X, but they each cover different things, they don't talk to each other, and they all have rather large flaws. For instance, last I checked, MacPorts requires everything be compiled, and it'll still refuse to update the system -- it creates a new hierarchy under /sw.
These are all things that make it kind of a mess.
Most importantly, for me, is that it had to fit into a very tight spot
By "better" I mean the Dell case looks like cheap plastic, and the Mac one is fancy aluminum. It actually isn't much bigger.
It also had to have the faster 802.11n networking speed so that large movie files can be transferred to it quickly.
No it doesn't.
I mean, let's say you were streaming movies. Blu-Ray is the highest-bandwidth movie format you're likely to encounter -- higher than HD-DVD. It has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 50 megabits.
In other words: Plug in a cable, and you've already got the bandwidth to stream two movies at once, plus you won't be interrupted by nachos.
Or stick to the wireless. The b/g card only adds $25 to the price, the n card adds $40, and if you didn't have a router, you could add the n router for $80, or a gigabit n router for $160 -- and that's from Dell (third-party could be cheaper) -- still nowhere near the $500 or so extra you paid for a Mac. And let's talk about 802.11g -- that's 54 mbits, still faster than the theoretical maximum of Blu-Ray.
If you really want to transfer movies fast -- maybe you're ripping them in another room, for some strange reason -- plug in a cat6 cable. 802.11n is 160 mbits. Gigabit is 1000 mbits, and again, you won't be interrupted by nachos.
There is no other computer that does what the Mini does and yet suck only 14 W on standby.
I can do one better -- 0 W on hibernate. But idle (not standby, just idle) it's reported to use 30W, and the max consumption is somewhere closer to 60W. Compare that to, oh, a light bulb.
But I cannot stress enough -- $500 extra. How many years do you have to keep that same device for it to pay for itself in power usage?
A true Windows server is considerably more expensive
And why in the world would you want a "Windows Server" version? You've described this as a component in your media center, right? If you're going with Windows, why wouldn't you use the Media Center edition?
Dell doesn't offer that here, but they do offer Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit), for $150 over the base price. So, add it all up (plus the most expensive wireless options), and it comes to $804. Still saves you $200, and that's if you get everything from Dell (without shopping around for components, or simply deciding that Windows 7 Home Premium is enough).
That assumes Linux wouldn't work...
Linux can't run QuickTime or iTunes.
First, why does it matter? Lin
It also has to do with our tribe mentality, mostly a result of our evolutionary heritage.
If you're in a small tribe of fifty people or so, and one of them is eaten by a tiger, statistically, you're likely to be eaten next. The tribes which react with tighter security, or maybe a counterattack (kill the tiger!), are more likely to survive than the ones who shrug, figure it's an isolated incident, and get slowly picked off, one by one.
Our brains are simply not wired for evaluating the risk of things we see in the news in any sizable city, let alone national or world news.
Interesting, but that just leads to a mob mentality -- how long would it take for a bunch of cramped and cranky passengers to turn into Lord of the Flies?
the GPL is there to prevent something once free from turning non-free and thus limit people from using it as they want. Without copyright you could just 'liberate' it again. Disassemble and rewrite if need be.
The GPL goes further than that, though. If that was all, it would be legal to include GPL in freeware, so long as you didn't restrict people from disassembling it.
As it is, you are required to provide source. Obviously, someone thought "liberating" it through disassembly wasn't enough.
Fact: OS X is not dead. OS X is BSD.
More relevant fact: This is about the BSD license, and BSD-style licenses like MIT. It has little to nothing to do with the BSD software package.
stating that the BSD license is somehow closer to "no copyright" is absurd, as both the GPL and the BSD License (and every other license) exists within the exact same copyright framework.
That is true, but it is quite clear that the BSD license imposes fewer restrictions on the user. No copyright imposes no restrictions on the user. By that metric, I claim fewer restrictions is closer to no restrictions.
Indeed, but saying "forcing to give back" is trying to intentionally put a bad spin on it.
My intention wasn't to spin it...
It's like saying you're forced to pay for the stuff you take from a shop.
Right. I've generally argued the other side of this -- it's a fair transaction, to say that if you take my code, you should give something back, or you should obey my wishes. I've gone so far as to argue in favor of GPLv3, or even something stricter.
One point I've made, though, is that we have this idea of "taken" -- we see plenty of people outraged when it's the fruit of their labors which are used against their will. Yet on the other hand, we see people who dislike copyright, who pirate and feel it should be legal, and we see the GPL's goal as being a world without copyright, where any digital media is free to use and remix.
But these are contradictory.
My interpretation is, that GPL is about striving for a world where any(?) digitally copyable content is freely available for use, modification and re-distribution.
That is probably true. Unfortunately, in the short term, it has some nasty side effects of occasionally taking a step back from that goal -- for example, Linux can't use ZFS, because the licenses are incompatible, and specifically because of the use of the GPL on the Linux side.
I think you mean open source.
No, I don't.
Free software is an established term that very much relies on the GPL, and is in fact, founded on the GPL.
No it's not.
Free software, as you've described, is software which provides the Four Freedoms. BSD-style licenses indeed provide these freedoms, as does the public domain.
What it doesn't do is force any derivative work to also provide the same freedoms. This means that someone could create a project which is derived from a BSD-licensed project, but which is proprietary and does not offer those freedoms -- but that fork would also no longer be BSD-licensed. The original code, under the original license, is still Free as in freedom.
But I don't think I have to say much more when the FSF itself disagrees with you.
Whenever anyone attributes "communist" aspects to the GPL (i.e., your repeated assertion that the GPL forces one to share/contribute/give back), it speaks more to the mindset of the poster than it does any insight into the GPL.
I never claimed it was communist, nor do I necessarily believe communism is bad. Your kneejerk reaction to any perceived kneejerk reaction is especially ironic.
No, but that's why, for example, it's the BSD-licensed kernels that have ZFS, which actually cannot be incorporated into the Linux kernel, for legal reasons. They're both open source, but the GPL puts up this wall of legal bullshit, so they can't actually exchange code.
You failed to read my (now emphasized) word "more" above.
I read it, I just disagree.
Just think of the BSD network stack. Do you really think it's bullshit, that majority of open source crowd would be really really unhappy if their code was used like that?
Yes.
First, think of one of the primary motivations of open source, or of software development, or of any creative endeavor to begin with -- you want your creation to be appreciated. You want your code to be used.
But also, think of the BSD stack itself -- doesn't it make sense that this, of all things, should be free to reimplement? Certainly, any new network protocol or document specification should have a commercially-reusable implementation. Or, to put it another way: Would you rather we have the BSD stack re-used everywhere, or would you rather people keep inventing weird stuff like IPX?
And why would they release their code under license, if it may make them unhappy, especially if their code is good enough to be used by others?
First, I think there's a subset who actually don't realize it's an option to use something else, or haven't really thought about it thoroughly.
I also think there are a fair number who actually would be upset, as you've said. Certainly, there are projects I would hate to see lifted wholesale, rebranded, and released without so much as crediting me. And the fact that people do get outraged at GPL violations would tend to support your point.
But a large part of why people get outraged at GPL violations is simply the fact that the open source community was very clear about how they wanted their code to be used, and that's being exploited. I'm generally really unhappy when people violate the GPL, even if I don't always think the GPL should've been used in the first place.
There's also the subset who release code under the GPL because it's required by the project they're committing to, or because they're using some other GPL'd library -- maybe they wanted Qt, for example, before it went LGPL.
Then tehre are people who don't feel unhappy about it, or maybe feel their personal direct unhappiness is less than their happiness of indirectly benefitting mankind (even if it helps to put more cash into Bill Gates' bank account, at least some if may go to some charity of Bill's choosing...).
That's not it at all, and I have no particular love of Gates, nor do charities help that.
But I'd rather Windows support IP properly, even if they have to use my code, than see them decide to invent their own. If IE ever does support HTML5 local storage, I'd rather see it embed SQLite than see them try to build it on Access or something.
And that's assuming it's Microsoft who uses it. It could always be a startup who wants to challenge Microsoft. I like that some of my code might make it easy for some small startup to go from zero to competitive -- that it lowers the barrier of entry, that it makes it a more level playing field.
There's also the extent to which I care much more about actually building software than what license it's under. I have no problem releasing GPL code. The biggest reason I appreciate licenses like BSD and Apache, though, is that I can pretty much glance at the LICENSE file, or even read through all of it (it's tiny!), and then just get to work. I don't have to think about whether it's GPL, or whether the code I want to use is GPL-compatible, or how far the LGPL extends, or whether I really want to trust the FSF by using "any future version" (or if, conversely, I want to force contributors to cede copyright to me so I, or the project as a whole, can choose to switch licenses).
And it's far easier to go from an MIT license to the GPL than the other way around -- if I find a large number of developers really do want to use the GPL, I don't need anyone's permission to incorporate the old MIT code.
but the license is the biggest difference between Linux and BSD,
Actually, the sheer inertia is the biggest difference between Linux and BSD. As a developer and a user, I target Linux because it has more users and more developers than BSD -- among other things, this means it has more flexibility, because there's more ways to set up userspace, because there's just more userspace stuff in general. Plus it's going to have better hardware support, since they can't necessarily share drivers, but there are more developers for Linux.
In the open source world, popularity really can make something better, for two reasons: First, it means more developers, because every user is a potential developer -- by that I mean, some percentage of users will be developers. Windows doesn't necessarily have more developers than Linux (it may even have less?), but Linux almost necessarily has more developers than BSD or HURD.
And second, the big problems of monoculture don't apply as much -- if Windows is 90% of what I want, my only real recourse is to send Microsoft a suggestion, or switch to another OS. If Linux is 90% of what I want, I can code the other 10% -- or, most likely, someone else already has, so there will be dozens (hundreds!) of flavors, all of which have enough in common to exchange patches and ideas. So if Linux lacks something BSD has, I can actually help change that.
And the reason Linux has the marketshare is, it was in the right place at the right time -- HURD wasn't done, Minix was under a much more restrictive license (it wasn't even free-as-in-beer), and BSD was in a questionable legal state. BSD's legal status is no longer an issue, but by the time that was resolved, it was too late.
The fact that RoR, sqlite, etc don't use the GPL is not really relevant given that they are not competing with BSD|Linux for developer|user mindshare.
That is true, but if the GPL was such a huge factor, you'd expect some upstart framework/database to take over their marketshare simply by using GPL.
First problem:
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot...
Did you catch the key word?
Second problem:
Let's continue to hear the truth today instead of falling pray to the media whore known as Slashdot.
Yep -- you're a moron. Slashdot is a "Media Whore", yet you linked to ABC News? Just what media is Slashdot a whore to?
Put another way, it's possible to have a GPL'd programming language, but the programs aren't GPL'd.
This really isn't that easy to answer. It comes down to what the compiler does. I guess you can write a compiler that works that way. But I'd say most are not.
Like which?
It's possible to compile proprietary programs with gcc. It's also possible to compile GPL'd programs with icc or Microsoft Visual Studio.
Another point to consider is whether there is a compiler that is not GPL'd. If I can compile that language without a GPL compiler the code cannot be considered derivative work.
Think about what you're implying here, though. If I write a Javascript app that only runs in Konqueror, is the GPL forced on me? I can't imagine that would be the case -- especially when it would be resolved simply by fixing my porting bug.
The GPL doesn't say anything about linking. That really is part of the problem. It is all about derivative work.
Fair enough. I did come across an article indicating that the problem is that there isn't a tested legal definition of derivative work, with regards to software. However...
in general I'd say if your program requires another program it is derivative work.
Two problems with that:
First, "derivative work" here is likely a legal term. Legal terms tend to be fairly well defined, but not necessarily what you'd think they are -- consider the scientific definition of "theory".
And second, if I write a GPL'd web service, and you connect to that service, I really don't see why my program should be considered a derivative work. Think about that -- Firefox can pull information directly from various Google sources. Is Firefox a derivative work of whatever Google code is running behind those services?
For me it is absolutly unclear where to draw the line.
It seems that except for a few pathological cases, it's pretty obvious -- if your program links against something GPL'd, it's covered. If it links against something LGPL'd, you're fine so long as you can produce whatever's needed to take 100% of the LGPL'd code, edit it as you wish, recompile, and link against your app.
Why do people think the GPL restricts linking only, but no other means of interaction, including OS interupts?
I'm guessing that's a longstanding convention, but OS interrupts again seem to be quite similar to making a network call -- your program is not physically connected to the OS, but rather, it runs inside the OS.
Why is it accepted to link windows libraries (like MFC), but I cannot link to other GPL incompatible libraries?
I actually have no idea. If I had to guess, I'd say what's happening here is that your GPL'd program is a derivative work of the MFC, not the other way around -- but I'm not sure how much that helps. But I'd think that actually is a violation.
that doesn't mean that Apple could not extend the iTunes app store as an OPTION to their Macs and any possible upcoming tablet. If they did that, Apple users would have a guaranteed virus free source of paid and free programs from the Internet.
Great! Just like Linux repositories have been for the past decade or so.
Except, of course, incredibly more limiting. I can add third-party repositories, and I can create my own repository. You can't do either of these for iTunes or the App Store.
Users that wanted to take the chance to install dodgy software in their Macs would still be able to do so.
And you wanted to know what I dislike about Apple?
I should always have that choice -- but no one does on the iPhone. Software is not necessarily "dodgy" simply because it hasn't been blessed by Apple.
Pick any metric you want, sourceforge license types, Linux vs *BSD commits, gcc vs whatever BSD has, anything that reasonably pits them towards each other.
Firefox vs Konqueror. Even if you count Webkit, Firefox (and Gecko) still win in popularity on Windows.
jQuery vs YUI vs ExtJS. Remember ExtJS? It pretty much became irrelevant the second its author decided to switch to GPL -- the instant that happened was the instant many proprietary projects switched to other technologies. And the author was kind of a dick about it -- insisting that it applied not just to the source on the client, but to the server-side code as well.
Apache vs... wait... is there even a slightly notable GPL'd webserver?
Rails vs... um... hmm.
SQLite vs...
Seeing a pattern?
Copyright:
We can't take their binaries, they can't take our source.
Well, or they can take your source, but under conditions you impose.
No copyright:
We can take their binaries, they can take our source.
Then why not create a license that actually matches this ideal? As it is, they can take your source only if they release their source at all. They can't take your source and then give you the binaries.
You:
Please bend over and give them the source anyway.
"Bend over" and also gain developers.
Again, consider: Are you going to have more or fewer developers under GPL vs MIT? Now, there are tons of other factors, so I doubt Sourceforge is going to show much -- but it's still an interesting question to ask, especially about your software, right now.
Also consider: What do you lose if they can take your source? For all the ranting about TiVo, I'm starting to think that the invention of the DVR was a good thing (and an idea whose time had come), and it isn't as if the Linux community lost anything. If the things they needed were GPL3'd, that would probably have slowed them down significantly -- it probably would not have resulted in them allowing access to the device.
Now, all that said, I do agree with the ideals of GPLv3. I certainly would like to see more open systems. I'm just not sure this is the right way to go about it, and I'm especially skeptical that it's helpful to the individual project.
I suppose the point is -- if there would be no need for GPL without copyright, why wouldn't you use a license which is closer to "no copyright"?
Why?
Several reasons, but...
Is it because you can't or don't want to afford their products?
I had a Powerbook. It cost somewhere between $2k and $3k, so yes, I can afford it. I actually really like the hardware, and the OS was pretty slick. It did a few things that I really miss -- I could open Terminal (as in, Terminal.app), I could set it to be translucent -- really translucent -- and I could set it to map a single keystroke to navigate around open terminals. That was really nice -- I could cycle through them as easily as if they were tabs, but they'd all be physically there, and command+tab would switch applications.
But, eventually, the backlight died. I had AppleCare, so I sent it in for service. It was really nice -- they overnighted me a box with all the packing, all I had to do was pull out the right little strips of foam and send it back.
They refused to fix it because it had a dent in the case. Apparently any physical damage at all voids the warranty, whether or not it's at all related -- that dent had been there for over a year.
They also wanted $1200, insisting that they had to replace basically the entire machine. It was a backlight.
A few other annoyances about that Powerbook -- it was a high-end, late-model Powerbook, which is to say, I got it only a few months before they announced the switch to Intel -- so I kind of got shafted by Apple's keep-everything-secret policy.
And there was a little annoyance -- a bug in the keyboard settings. I reported it to Apple, and not only was I basically sworn to secrecy by their bug report form, but as far as I know, to this day, they have not fixed the bug. I know I lived with it for over a year. But since the OS is proprietary, I couldn't fix it myself -- and because of the way it was designed, there wasn't really a good way to hack around it, as I might on Linux.
I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard, quite possibly the best keyboard I've used, except for its Apple-ness. I can only update its firmware (yes, it has firmware) on a Mac. The alt and Windows keys are swapped, because they're actually alt and command on OS X. And Apple, in their infinite wisdom, replaced the insert key (or what's supposed to be the insert key) with an fn key. Maybe you don't use insert, maybe it has no use on OS X, but there are a number of places on my current OS where it'd be useful.
So, Linux lets me remap keys easily enough -- so alt/command problem solved. But that fn key is apparently interpreted by the keyboard -- it never makes it down the USB cable, so I can't remap it. I can map one of the random other keys to insert, but my actual insert key will always be fn.
I could go on...
See, the Apple Way of doing things is cool, slick, easy, and powerful, as long as you want to do things Steve Jobs has thought of. The second you want to do something Steve Jobs didn't think of, or doesn't approve of, things get very rough. The keyboard settings was a perfect example of that -- I had custom keymappings, and some of them got screwed up.
So, I used Kubuntu on a company laptop. That died, so I had to use a shiny new iMac for about a week until my new laptop arrived. It had leopard, and it was awesome -- but there were still many things I missed.
I just got a Mac Mini with one TB (two 500G).
Good for you! How much did you pay for it?
I've got a Linux box with a terabyte SATA drive in it. The drive costs less than $100.
It runs unlimited Leopard Server
Again, how much did it cost? The box I have that terabyte drive in runs Ubuntu Server.
and is connected to our 47 inch LCD TV.
My laptop runs Kubuntu, and it can do that just fine -- over HDMI, no less.
AFAIK, nobody else sells anything remotely like this.
Check out the Dell Inspiron Zino HD. With a single terabyte drive
You left out one of the most important projects for Linux: Apache.
I wasn't going for a comprehensive list, mainly for things I know about intimately. For example, I know that SQLite is used in tons of places it never would've seen the light of day if it was proprietary, and I'm actually grateful for that -- it means I can quite often interact with random little databases with the sqlite commandline tool, for example.
Rails is another example, for about the same reasons -- tons of webapps, probably far more proprietary than open apps, but tons of plugins and patches sent upstream, because maintaining a fork is expensive. And it is helpful in that it spreads the ideas of REST, and even if you don't know a given page is running RAILS, if it's reasonably RESTful, it's much easier to write a client for.
I really don't know any of the background behind why Apache went with the license it did.
The only convincing reason why Linux is more often used than the BSDs is that it could be used earlier... I really cannot find any other convincing reason.
Well, a derivative of that is that driver support (at the very least) is better on Linux than on other systems, but that's a product of it being popular, and it's one of several benefits that kind of feeds itself. This is the reason why, for example, I'm probably going to continue to run Linux on my fileserver and just wait for btrfs, instead of using OpenSolaris and zfs.
MySQL thrived because sometimes the GPL is unbearable and people pay money to avoid it.
I'd actually be curious to know the numbers behind that -- but I think it's again a case of popularity feeding itself. PostgreSQL has a BSD-style license, and is better in many respects -- I suspect the biggest reason it doesn't catch on is that everyone's already using MySQL, so all the apps are written with MySQL in mind, so when people actually get to the level where they want to improve a database (maybe make it clustered, for instance), MySQL is what they think of.
The main reason it seems to be bad that Oracle owns MySQL is that we haven't really seen a coherent fork come out of it that isn't owned by Oracle, and Oracle has a vested interest in not improving MySQL to the point where it could compete with Oracle's own database.
In fact I think the only reason why not every binary package for Linux must be GPLed is because FreeBSD has Linux emulation,
Not at all, and it's kind of ridiculous to suggest that.
Put another way, it's possible to have a GPL'd programming language, but the programs aren't GPL'd. Take it a step back to something familiar -- if a word processor was GPL'd, and used its own format (not ODF), would that imply every document created was GPL'd?
The GPL is actually pretty explicit about this -- the LGPL only applies to stuff that's a derivative work, and actually part of the LGPL'd library. If you link against it, but keep the original library separate, you don't have to GPL (or LGPL) the result. How separate do you have to keep them? Well, you have to basically give you users all the tools they'd need to recompile the LGPL portion -- so, maybe a .a file of all your code.
And the GPL? It applies to stuff that your program is directly linked against.
So, in what way does the Linux kernel link against any software running in userspace?
Without that every program that calls Linux kernel routines is derivative work of the Linux kernel.
Well, technically, when I make an HTTP request to a machine supporting SOAP, I might be executing a routine on that machine. If all code on that machine is GPL'd, does the software making my HTTP request have to be?
For that matter, what about GPL'd software on Windows?
No, that'd be pretty obviously absurd.
I still don't get why NVidia can distribute drivers with binary blob
GPL is more than just about copyright. It's about giving back.
No, giving back is about giving back.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright -- or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it. It was created to counter the perceived (and very likely real) threat of people building a giant proprietary product out of what was once free, and everyone inevitably upgrading to the shiny new proprietary version, leaving everyone without the ability to change their own code.
But free software, as a concept, doesn't require the GPL. Nor does free software, as a movement, rely on the GPL at this stage.
how is having a problem with one part of a law mean you have a problem with the whole law.
Copyright is a way of expressing what you want done with copies of your intellectual property.
If you have a problem with copyright, or with the idea of intellectual property, I can certainly see a case for that -- and I'd love free-as-in-beer and DRM-free movies. I can certainly see piracy inevitably crushing those who cling to draconian DRM.
But to then turn around and suggest the GPL?
Think about your reaction when you see a gpl-violations story, versus an MPAA story. When it's the RIAA or MPAA, everyone (myself included) is quick to call them the MAFIAA and to defend piracy as "copyright infringement, not theft", and even suggest that there are no moral issues with it.
But when it's a GPL violation, suddenly copyright matters and everyone is morally outraged.
They both rely on the exact same part of the law -- they both rely on the assumption that just because you wrote something, you should be able to control what people do with it.
Actually, I'll play devil's advocate for a moment -- if you consider it as a social issue, rather than a legal one, the GPL is about forcing people to share. If you think sharing is good, then you probably see the GPL as a way to encourage more sharing than would happen otherwise -- and there would probably be even more sharing with no copyright, so you'd gladly give up the GPL if it meant copyright law is gone forever. This is probably why such licenses are referred to as "copyleft".
there are hordes of fanbois and code monkeys out there who do not.
This is true, and it's often the first defense of the serious PHP programmer that you can write decent programs using PHP -- just as the serious Perl programmer will argue that you can write good-looking Perl, it doesn't have to look like line noise. Even Visual Basic programmers will make this claim.
So, I choose a tool based on what I can do with it, and what it encourages, not how it can protect me from myself. Think about it -- rm is already dangerous. Some distros like to do this:
While it's annoying in that it'll prompt you "are you sure" with every file, it still does nothing to prevent this:
Anything can be abused. The question is, what does it look like when you're doing it right?
A lot of the younger developers and engineers I work with rush through things because they depend more on the features of a tool than good practice.
For the record, I'm 22, and going back to school after a couple of years in the field. While I don't always do this, I can and will do behavior-driven development, thorough regression testing, and thorough whiteboard sessions to plan everything out.
I agree that good practice should be emphasized over tool features -- that's why I tend to encourage things like a DVCS and automated testing over things like Eclipse.
But one is a prerequisite for the other. You can't have a Best Practice about when to fork the project for a few commits (versus just sending a patch) if you're using SVN. It's a lot harder to insist that all code come with ample documentation if you don't have something like JavaDoc (or RDoc), and it's kind of hard to insist that your project be cross-platform and vendor-neutral if it's built on ASP.NET.
Let's take another example. I really love Ruby, specifically duck typing -- no Interfaces to define, no need for a common superclass, no need to even care what the type of the object is. If it quacks like a duck, it may as well be a duck.
But rigid interfaces, explicit static type checking (and exception throwing), even contracts, are all tools to make your program more robust. How do you make sure you never get something that doesn't have a quack method, or something that has the wrong quack method? And that's before we even consider open classes -- how can you ensure your program is sane with a language where I can actually make 2+2==5?
The answer is testing. Many projects have twice as many lines of tests as they do of actual production code. In fact, those kinds of static type checks are actually a subset of the kind of checks you could do in proper tests. You're actually running all of your code, and you know it'll work. It's similar to the scientific method, actually -- you can "prove" something mathematically all you like, but the real proof is in actual empirical data from real experiments.
In fact, taken to an extreme, you can use tests to define your API and how you expect your program to work. Test-driven design, at an extreme, becomes Behavior-driven design, where your tests are your specs, and they define the behavior you expect. One advantage is that you'll write exactly the code you need to write to make the spec pass, which could be far less than you thought you needed.
You may or may not agree with the above, but you should at least be able to see the point -- there's an established best practice of testing your code, especially in dynamic languages.
And it shouldn't surprise you at all that legions of fanbois don't do this. In fact, as much as Ruby on Rails gets right, people often write Rails websites that don't scale (even if Rails itself can), and they very often neglect to write tests or put them off, when tests really should be written before the code in question.
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
To take another random example: Ruby on Rails. The license deliberately is not GPL, or even LGPL (which might have worked), but rather MIT. This means I could technically "take" it -- remember, it's not stealing, and it's not even copyright infringement here -- and build my own proprietary product.
It also means that unless I relish maintaining my own separate fork of Rails, I'll be sending patches upstream whenever I do something cool. Even monkeypatches are much easier to send in as formal patches than to maintain.
I used to think as you do, but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots who will actually refuse to contribute to a project because they don't like the license.
I can see people contributing to Linux instead of BSD if they prefer GPL, and if there are no other factors. But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
Yesterday, I sent a patch to a project hosted by Google. They wanted me to sign an agreement essentially giving them copyright and a patent grant (without removing those rights from me) -- and this isn't Google being evil, it's common for projects to request copyright for contributions. I wasn't exactly happy about it, but it again comes down to the same choice -- are the terms of that agreement so bad that I'm going to refuse to contribute at all, or worse, fork the entire project? Probably not, especially for the small patches I have in mind.
And by the way: If you believe in the GPL, and you pirate anything (movies, music, games...), you're a hypocrite. A term common among those who have a problem with current copyright law is, "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement," implying that it's not as bad. I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
along with some security to make sure that clutzoide Luser couldn't drop it into root by mistake,
Doesn't OS X already have this in the form of sudo?
If you're serious about configuration management, you shouldn't be rewriting history at all.
For the times when you need to, it makes sense -- especially if you do so before the code is shared. Almost as often as I create a new commit, I'll instead do 'git commit --amend'.
If you make a mistake that gets committed and pushed to your mainline tree, deal with it, submit a new patch fixing it, and leave the mistake showing what happened.
Absolutely. But not if you catch the mistake before you push. And it's not about this:
it isn't enterprise friendly at all.
It's not about me being embarrassed. It's about making things cleaner and more readable for everyone involved. It makes everyone's life easier if I push cleaner changes. (And, since it makes everyone's life harder to rewrite public history after they've pulled, I don't do that.)
While the tablet will be cool it is running iphoneOS which meansno flash.
First, youmay want to make sureyour spacebar is working.
It's very likely that this is not true -- my understanding is that there wasn't an ARM port of Flash for OS X, or something like that. But I don't really know. Still, keep in mind -- the iPhone OS is just a modified OS X.
How do I know it is running iphoneos? Apple putout a developers call to make sure iPhone apps wereusing resolution independant API and widgets.
Yes, because that's obviously conclusive evidence... Think about that for a second:
Dont assume the screensize is 320x240.
Do you really think the iPhone will only ever be 320x240, especially when most Android implementations seem to be higher resolution?
But let's say it's all true. Honestly, I'm glad there's no Flash -- that means web app developers will be forced to use actual open standard web technologies -- or pre-standards, if you insist on calling HTML5 that. No, the bigger disappointment would be the continuation of the stupidity that is the locked-down App Store, and the Apple-knows-best motto of actively attempting to prevent users from installing any software that hasn't been blessed by Apple.
Seriously, if they intend to extend that onto this tablet device, I'm guessing it's a step towards moving on the desktop. Right now, OS X allows free, open development, but that also means Apple doesn't get to veto competition, and they don't get a commission on every single OS X app.