uh, no, Moby sold the rights to every song on Play, he didn't make anything free for commercial use.
And Moby's an exception, his music is very advertisement friendly. I think many bands would have trouble getting their music used for advertising campaigns even if they gave it away.
Is there any P2P sharing software where I can specify which people have access to my ogg & mp3 files? What I think would be nice (and in keeping with the home audio recording act) is a program where I explicitly enter my friends (any they explicitly enter me), and then we can browse through each other's collections and share music.
I realize there's a couple ways to do this at the filesystem level with Linux, but most of my friends are non-technical windows users, and a simple point and click interface would be a big gain for them.
Yeah "mission critical" is subject to definition. I tend to define it as if something goes wrong 1) people die, 2) something explodes, 3) $millions are lost. Brokerage firms will fall under #3, 99% of commercial web sites don't.
1- Fortran is still alive because it doesn't allow the user of pointers. While this makes it useless for modern application programming, it makes it possible to write good optimizing compilers for the language, so it's still used in the engineering/computational world. That being said, have you ever used a program written in Fortran? Probably not, even if you are an engineer.
2- COBOL was adopted decades ago by major finanical institutions as their language of choice. The result is a lot of legacy apps that are too expensive to convert to a new language. Not because of the cost of the programming, they just can't afford to go through even a single debug cycle.
3- As many times as I've heard the word "Smalltalk", I've never seen anything written in the language, I'd call that dead.
4- I've been forced to program in Scheme, let me tell you, it sucks. Comp. Scientists may think it's elegant, but Scheme (and Lisp) are close to useless in the real world. Ever try to write a real application in Lisp? Ever seen anything written in Scheme/Lisp besides Emacs macros? Ever try to understand an Emacs macro? Yeah, I'd call Lisp dead outside of academia.
5- Pascal? It's a learning tool, like Logo. No pointer arithmetic, so same problem as Fortrain but without the legacy of use. Again, have you ever used a program writtin pascal? Didn't think so. If you mean Ada as well as Pascal, that's a different story, but Ada's only alive because of government regulations.
Languages may not die, but most of the examples you gave are a close approximation to dead, and usually with good reasons.
You seem to be missing the point why Cobol programers are still in demand (or were right before Y2K). Cobol was used decades ago by many financial institutions as their programming language of choice. Why don't they convert these legacy apps to a different language? It's not because they can't offered the programming time, it's because they can't afford the debugging cycles, and it's far easier for them to incremently improve a program in a dead language then go through debugging cycles with $billions in transactions.
I think you'll find far fewer Java apps (perhaps none) in such mission critical positions.
The article got me fairly excited, so I rushed to try the intel c compiler with some medical image reconstruction code we use in the lab.
On a PIII-1GHz, I'm seeing ~5% improvement in speed versus gcc-3.0.3 (with all optimizations), and ~7% on a Celeron-400.
Decent improvement, but not that amazing, and not worth throwing away IEEE floating point compliance (as talked about in a post below) when we need to do data analysis on the results.
Yes, the Media Lab was a unique place, but even during my time at MIT (4 years ago already), it was considered an embarrassment by the majority of the MIT community. This is the place that could suck down $40 million a year and have only Lego Mindstorms to show off after a decade of work by the entire laboratory. This is the place that would hire fashion models to wear their wearable computer crap for the dog and pony shows they'd run to try to suck more money out of the industry suits. This is the place that would do non-novel, non-useful research as long as it looked cool and they could show it off to their corporate sponsors.
The majority of the research that was done at the Media Lab belonged in industry, and was of no academic significance (electronic ink being on of the few counter examples). The only real reason it was tolerated at MIT was 'cause the Media Lab brought in its own money (and a lot of it).
And no, HDTV was not created by the Media Lab, the EE department (Prof. Lim) worked on that.
And also remember that fundamentally, humans think in a 2D planar world. Do we live in a 3D world, yes, but for all intents and purposes we can abstract our world down to a 2D map, and if you think about it, that's really how our brain works. All the 3D elements in our world (trees, houses, mountains) really just get in our way as we're trying to move around in 2 dimensions.
As an example, human buildings are not 3D environments, they consist of several 2D planes stacked on top of each other.
No, you don't have true color vision, your eyes do not sense the true optical spectrum of each object you look at. Instead, your eyes sample at 3 wavelengths (and only 2 for 5% of males), and integrate the information. Not true color, but good enough for telling the poisonous berry from the tasty one in most situations.
eh, good point on the home burgler thing, except maybe I'd have my own at home video system:)
Your credit report analog, though, is by far the best reason I've seen yet on this forum as to why we should be concerned about these systems. Then again, I think credit rating report systems are a good thing, and believe me, I've seen plenty of my friends get screwed over by these things. But in the end, the problem really isn't that the credit report exists, it's that there's no good system for removing an incorrect entry.
I think what these video recognition systems really need, is a legal incentive to insure that the cost of a false positive is very high. That way, it would be the burden of the seller to ensure that their databases/reports are correct, unlike the way it currently is with credit reports.
Does anyone else see waltmarker's two examples as potential benefits for your standard consumer (you and I).
I pay my bills on time, and I don't tie up service reps with stupid questions. Cool, they'll know not to make me wait 30 minutes while they're occupied with a nitwit or someone who doesn't pay their bills.
Additionally, their system recognizes me, and they know I absolutely can't stand sales people talkigng to me. Cool, they let me browse in peace until I have a question for them.
Do I trust the government not to share this information? Doesn't really matter for me, I have nothing to hide, and I don't plan on shoplifting or using bad credit cards anytime in the future... So this issue is sort of irrelevant from my perspective....
If a meteor hit or a fuel tank ruptured, you can bet his training would be the most useless thing in the world as his charred corpse along with the fragmented bodies of his fellow ISS compatriots slowly drifted in space.
And the CRV won't happen. Who the heck wants to spend billions of dollars developing the dang thing when the Russions already have something with the same exact functionality designed and in production. Yeah, so the Soyuz can't hold as many people, just bolt another Soyuz onto the ISS.
But we already have over a decade of information on zero-g construction and living in space. Real practical information too. Of course, that would mean NASA would have to acknolwedge the contributions of Russia/the Soviet Union to spaceflight.
And shuttles are by far the most expensive way to move cargo/materials into orbit.
but in fact, Tito is an expert in the field. He's an ex-Nasa engineer.
Re:What can we do to stop this from happening agai
on
Mandrake Shakeup
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· Score: 1
Allright, lets try to continue this metaphor then...
We pay taxes to the government, they provide us with services in return (roads, police, armed forces, the Smithsonian, tax shelters for the rich, etc.). In exchange for giving the government money, they try to make sure we're not invaded (I hear Canda has 90% of their population amassed within 100 miles of the border as we speak).
We can also pay money to Redhat, and they provide us with services in return (updates, support, etc.). In exchange for giving Redhat money, they try to insure we're not cracked.
The GPL does not prevent the charging of fees for service, but it does give more power to the consumer than many companies are comfortable with.
Let's hammer this metaphor to death. What if the Constitution had been proprietary? Right off, the Bill of Rights and addition amendments wouldn't exist, as users wouldn't be able to add onto the Constitution. On the other hand, the US government could have made a fortune licensing the technology known by the internal code named "Democracy" to other countries. Then again, Greece might of had prior art....
Re:What can we do to stop this from happening agai
on
Mandrake Shakeup
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· Score: 2
Ah, but Mandrake would have never existed if Redhat wasn't, in turn, GPL! I actually used Mandrake 5.3, and as many people here know, it was just Redhat 5.2 (same installer, same everything) with KDE added in and a couple of updates.
Granted, the fact that Mandrake could just take Redhat 5.2 and sell a better version of it speaks against the GPL from the business standpoint, but that frame of thinking is the wrong way to look at the GPL. The GPL isn't about protecting business rights, it's about protecting the consumers.
Try to think of the United States Bill of Rights as a metaphor for the GPL. The Bill of Rights is stupid from a governmental perspective. Citizens who can speak out against the government? Citizens who can't be coerced into testifying against themselves? Citizens who can carry their own weapons? (allright, that one's pretty stupid today, but it made a lot of sense in the 1700's). The Bill of Rights isn't for the government, it's for the people. It helps keeps government honest, open, and democratic, and it assures citizens of their rights and freedoms.
In turn, we shouldn't expect business to have to justify the use of the GPL, rather, it should be consumers that demand the use of the GPL, and business in turn respecting their customer's wishes and needs.
I'll second you there. When I choose to write my app in Gnome/GTK+ rather than KDE/Qt, it really came done to just the C/C++ issue. If KDE/Qt was in C, and Gnome was the one written in C++, I would have gone the other way.
Yeah, but they can make their version of a BSDL'd software incompatible with what's in the open. And if they control 90% of the market, guess who's getting screwed?
For a different scenario, imagine a BSD licensed unix. Now imagine several large corporations taking that great technology and using it. Sounds great, right? Now fast forward a couple of years, and you find that every one of these corporations has expanded on the original BSD licensed unix in a proprietary fashion in attempts to maintain and expand their customer base. Even if most of the corporations would have preferred to maintain their software as BSD licensed, their hands are forced when the first of the corporations starts spitting out proprietary, incompatibly feature enhanced versions. Admins find themselves trapped, having to either understand and maintain several incompatible systems, or going with one vendor and getting gouged for prices. Suddenly, WinNT 3.51 pops up, and although much worse technology, it runs on cheap hardware, costs less, and is far easier to administer.
Sure, you can say the customer should have used the original, still BSD licensed software, but in reality, most customers can't code, and are going to go with the commercially supported software, because the added features and/or lower administrative costs of the commercial software is (at least initially) cheaper then going with the BSD stuff.
um, not quite. Chondrocytes (at least in adults) represent a terminally differentiated cell... so if you lose the cells, you can't grow back cartilage directly.
If the cells are still there, you can, of course, produce new cartilage, but when you damage cartilage you tend to kill the cells.
And, as you mentioned, even if the cells are still alive, nutrient delivery is very poor in cartilage. To give you some ideas of how slow cartilage turnover/regeneration is, the half-life of collagen II in articulating cartilage is somewhere around 2 years, and the half life of the proteoglycans (what gives the cartilage it's compressive stiffness) seems to be around 20.
I don't have the ORS abstract on hand (I've been out of the cartilage research business for a couple years now) but even the spoon-fed Reuters wire feed mentions that the researcher (Guilak) doesn't have a clue whether he's actually using adipose (fat) cells or other stroma cells.
Whether they're adipose cells or stroma cells, if you separate them out of the body and put them on a culture plate, you tend to get cells which look a lot like fibroblasts. When you put fibroblasts into a three dimension matrix (the article doesn't mention which one, probably alginate or collagen-gag scaffolding) they tend to assume chondrocytic (cartilage) like properties. This is absolutely nothing new, except that Guilak's getting these fibroblasts from fat tissue rather than any other tissue in the body (fibroblasts are everywhere).
The real question is whether the chondrocytes are producing type II collagen (i.e. what you find in articulating surfaces like your knee joint) or type I (which is most of the collagen in your body, but completely unsuited for making knee joints). I doubt his cells are making significant levels of type II collagen. Even if they were, seeding cells into a matrix and getting type II collagen expression is nothing new, this has been done for years by various different groups (Ragan/Grodzinky at MIT, Koichi Matsuda (sp?) at Chicago/Rush, etc.).
Even if you're getting type II collagen formation, you also got to hope that the collagen is being assembled and oriented correctly so that it won't fall apart after a couple years, and I know of no current evidence that explains how this can be done outside of a developing body.
Sorry, this isn't a huge advance. This is just someone (Guilak?) trying to make news out of nothing.
The field of cartilage research is advancing greatly, and quite likely in another 5-10 years people will be able to recreate functional articular cartilage in an ex-vivo system. But there's still a lot more work to be done, and you're more likely to get the cells from a quick mouth swab than liposuction anyway.
um, I'm not sure Redhat 6.2 will be falling off the face of the earth anytime soon.
Redhat 4.2 and 5.2 were both supported for years. And considering how bad 7.0 is, I wouldn't think you'd have to worry about 6.2 going unsupported for at least another two years. Hell, they're still supporting 6.0, and that came out close to two years ago.
Being an open-source developer myself, I would personally never release any of my code under anything but the GPL. And I encourage all the coders I talk with to do the same.
I see your point about making your code as free as possible, but I also don't want to see someone else taking my work, "embracing and extending" upon it, and then profiting off a piece of software that I originally intended to be free for everyone. The GPL guarantees that what I intended to be free will stay free.
And yes, communism has thankfully failed with politics, but socialism is doing quite well. Check out most of Europe, and then ponder why America, as the only developed nation without socialized medicine, has a higher infant mortality rate then Thailand.
The reason I will never use *BSD is entirely because of the license. Great technology, sure, but I don't want to see a return to the unix wars of the early 90's, and without a mechanism for enforcing freedom (i.e. the GPL) *BSD is doomed in our capitalistic system by standard corporate practice.
Yeah, MS may have used *BSD code for some of their TCP/IP utils, and great code it may be, but has *BSD gotten anything in return?
Slashdot Mirror
uh, no, Moby sold the rights to every song on Play, he didn't make anything free for commercial use.
And Moby's an exception, his music is very advertisement friendly. I think many bands would have trouble getting their music used for advertising campaigns even if they gave it away.
So, I've got a question.
Is there any P2P sharing software where I can specify which people have access to my ogg & mp3 files? What I think would be nice (and in keeping with the home audio recording act) is a program where I explicitly enter my friends (any they explicitly enter me), and then we can browse through each other's collections and share music.
I realize there's a couple ways to do this at the filesystem level with Linux, but most of my friends are non-technical windows users, and a simple point and click interface would be a big gain for them.
Any ideas?
Yeah "mission critical" is subject to definition. I tend to define it as if something goes wrong 1) people die, 2) something explodes, 3) $millions are lost. Brokerage firms will fall under #3, 99% of commercial web sites don't.
1- Fortran is still alive because it doesn't allow the user of pointers. While this makes it useless for modern application programming, it makes it possible to write good optimizing compilers for the language, so it's still used in the engineering/computational world. That being said, have you ever used a program written in Fortran? Probably not, even if you are an engineer.
2- COBOL was adopted decades ago by major finanical institutions as their language of choice. The result is a lot of legacy apps that are too expensive to convert to a new language. Not because of the cost of the programming, they just can't afford to go through even a single debug cycle.
3- As many times as I've heard the word "Smalltalk", I've never seen anything written in the language, I'd call that dead.
4- I've been forced to program in Scheme, let me tell you, it sucks. Comp. Scientists may think it's elegant, but Scheme (and Lisp) are close to useless in the real world. Ever try to write a real application in Lisp? Ever seen anything written in Scheme/Lisp besides Emacs macros? Ever try to understand an Emacs macro? Yeah, I'd call Lisp dead outside of academia.
5- Pascal? It's a learning tool, like Logo. No pointer arithmetic, so same problem as Fortrain but without the legacy of use. Again, have you ever used a program writtin pascal? Didn't think so. If you mean Ada as well as Pascal, that's a different story, but Ada's only alive because of government regulations.
Languages may not die, but most of the examples you gave are a close approximation to dead, and usually with good reasons.
You seem to be missing the point why Cobol programers are still in demand (or were right before Y2K). Cobol was used decades ago by many financial institutions as their programming language of choice. Why don't they convert these legacy apps to a different language? It's not because they can't offered the programming time, it's because they can't afford the debugging cycles, and it's far easier for them to incremently improve a program in a dead language then go through debugging cycles with $billions in transactions.
I think you'll find far fewer Java apps (perhaps none) in such mission critical positions.
The article got me fairly excited, so I rushed to try the intel c compiler with some medical image reconstruction code we use in the lab.
On a PIII-1GHz, I'm seeing ~5% improvement in speed versus gcc-3.0.3 (with all optimizations), and ~7% on a Celeron-400.
Decent improvement, but not that amazing, and not worth throwing away IEEE floating point compliance (as talked about in a post below) when we need to do data analysis on the results.
Yes, the Media Lab was a unique place, but even during my time at MIT (4 years ago already), it was considered an embarrassment by the majority of the MIT community. This is the place that could suck down $40 million a year and have only Lego Mindstorms to show off after a decade of work by the entire laboratory. This is the place that would hire fashion models to wear their wearable computer crap for the dog and pony shows they'd run to try to suck more money out of the industry suits. This is the place that would do non-novel, non-useful research as long as it looked cool and they could show it off to their corporate sponsors.
The majority of the research that was done at the Media Lab belonged in industry, and was of no academic significance (electronic ink being on of the few counter examples). The only real reason it was tolerated at MIT was 'cause the Media Lab brought in its own money (and a lot of it).
And no, HDTV was not created by the Media Lab, the EE department (Prof. Lim) worked on that.
And also remember that fundamentally, humans think in a 2D planar world. Do we live in a 3D world, yes, but for all intents and purposes we can abstract our world down to a 2D map, and if you think about it, that's really how our brain works. All the 3D elements in our world (trees, houses, mountains) really just get in our way as we're trying to move around in 2 dimensions.
As an example, human buildings are not 3D environments, they consist of several 2D planes stacked on top of each other.
No, you don't have true color vision, your eyes do not sense the true optical spectrum of each object you look at. Instead, your eyes sample at 3 wavelengths (and only 2 for 5% of males), and integrate the information. Not true color, but good enough for telling the poisonous berry from the tasty one in most situations.
eh, good point on the home burgler thing, except maybe I'd have my own at home video system :)
Your credit report analog, though, is by far the best reason I've seen yet on this forum as to why we should be concerned about these systems. Then again, I think credit rating report systems are a good thing, and believe me, I've seen plenty of my friends get screwed over by these things. But in the end, the problem really isn't that the credit report exists, it's that there's no good system for removing an incorrect entry.
I think what these video recognition systems really need, is a legal incentive to insure that the cost of a false positive is very high. That way, it would be the burden of the seller to ensure that their databases/reports are correct, unlike the way it currently is with credit reports.
Does anyone else see waltmarker's two examples as potential benefits for your standard consumer (you and I).
I pay my bills on time, and I don't tie up service reps with stupid questions. Cool, they'll know not to make me wait 30 minutes while they're occupied with a nitwit or someone who doesn't pay their bills.
Additionally, their system recognizes me, and they know I absolutely can't stand sales people talkigng to me. Cool, they let me browse in peace until I have a question for them.
Do I trust the government not to share this information? Doesn't really matter for me, I have nothing to hide, and I don't plan on shoplifting or using bad credit cards anytime in the future... So this issue is sort of irrelevant from my perspective....
well, if you want a slimmed down version of Linux, try: /usr/share
/home /usr /var
rm -rf
hell, even better, try this:
rm -rf
now you're down to a bare-bones, 10 MB linux install with all the cool commands left (ls, cp, sort, etc.). Pretty cool eh?
If a meteor hit or a fuel tank ruptured, you can bet his training would be the most useless thing in the world as his charred corpse along with the fragmented bodies of his fellow ISS compatriots slowly drifted in space.
And the CRV won't happen. Who the heck wants to spend billions of dollars developing the dang thing when the Russions already have something with the same exact functionality designed and in production. Yeah, so the Soyuz can't hold as many people, just bolt another Soyuz onto the ISS.
But we already have over a decade of information on zero-g construction and living in space. Real practical information too. Of course, that would mean NASA would have to acknolwedge the contributions of Russia/the Soviet Union to spaceflight.
And shuttles are by far the most expensive way to move cargo/materials into orbit.
but in fact, Tito is an expert in the field. He's an ex-Nasa engineer.
Allright, lets try to continue this metaphor then...
We pay taxes to the government, they provide us with services in return (roads, police, armed forces, the Smithsonian, tax shelters for the rich, etc.). In exchange for giving the government money, they try to make sure we're not invaded (I hear Canda has 90% of their population amassed within 100 miles of the border as we speak).
We can also pay money to Redhat, and they provide us with services in return (updates, support, etc.). In exchange for giving Redhat money, they try to insure we're not cracked.
The GPL does not prevent the charging of fees for service, but it does give more power to the consumer than many companies are comfortable with.
Let's hammer this metaphor to death. What if the Constitution had been proprietary? Right off, the Bill of Rights and addition amendments wouldn't exist, as users wouldn't be able to add onto the Constitution. On the other hand, the US government could have made a fortune licensing the technology known by the internal code named "Democracy" to other countries. Then again, Greece might of had prior art....
Ah, but Mandrake would have never existed if Redhat wasn't, in turn, GPL! I actually used Mandrake 5.3, and as many people here know, it was just Redhat 5.2 (same installer, same everything) with KDE added in and a couple of updates.
Granted, the fact that Mandrake could just take Redhat 5.2 and sell a better version of it speaks against the GPL from the business standpoint, but that frame of thinking is the wrong way to look at the GPL. The GPL isn't about protecting business rights, it's about protecting the consumers.
Try to think of the United States Bill of Rights as a metaphor for the GPL. The Bill of Rights is stupid from a governmental perspective. Citizens who can speak out against the government? Citizens who can't be coerced into testifying against themselves? Citizens who can carry their own weapons? (allright, that one's pretty stupid today, but it made a lot of sense in the 1700's). The Bill of Rights isn't for the government, it's for the people. It helps keeps government honest, open, and democratic, and it assures citizens of their rights and freedoms.
In turn, we shouldn't expect business to have to justify the use of the GPL, rather, it should be consumers that demand the use of the GPL, and business in turn respecting their customer's wishes and needs.
I'll second you there. When I choose to write my app in Gnome/GTK+ rather than KDE/Qt, it really came done to just the C/C++ issue. If KDE/Qt was in C, and Gnome was the one written in C++, I would have gone the other way.
Yeah, but they can make their version of a BSDL'd software incompatible with what's in the open. And if they control 90% of the market, guess who's getting screwed?
For a different scenario, imagine a BSD licensed unix. Now imagine several large corporations taking that great technology and using it. Sounds great, right? Now fast forward a couple of years, and you find that every one of these corporations has expanded on the original BSD licensed unix in a proprietary fashion in attempts to maintain and expand their customer base. Even if most of the corporations would have preferred to maintain their software as BSD licensed, their hands are forced when the first of the corporations starts spitting out proprietary, incompatibly feature enhanced versions. Admins find themselves trapped, having to either understand and maintain several incompatible systems, or going with one vendor and getting gouged for prices. Suddenly, WinNT 3.51 pops up, and although much worse technology, it runs on cheap hardware, costs less, and is far easier to administer.
Sure, you can say the customer should have used the original, still BSD licensed software, but in reality, most customers can't code, and are going to go with the commercially supported software, because the added features and/or lower administrative costs of the commercial software is (at least initially) cheaper then going with the BSD stuff.
Sorry, the article has absolutely nothing to do with replenishing bones in space.... sorry.
um, not quite. Chondrocytes (at least in adults) represent a terminally differentiated cell... so if you lose the cells, you can't grow back cartilage directly.
If the cells are still there, you can, of course, produce new cartilage, but when you damage cartilage you tend to kill the cells.
And, as you mentioned, even if the cells are still alive, nutrient delivery is very poor in cartilage. To give you some ideas of how slow cartilage turnover/regeneration is, the half-life of collagen II in articulating cartilage is somewhere around 2 years, and the half life of the proteoglycans (what gives the cartilage it's compressive stiffness) seems to be around 20.
Uh, you gotta read the article closer.
I don't have the ORS abstract on hand (I've been out of the cartilage research business for a couple years now) but even the spoon-fed Reuters wire feed mentions that the researcher (Guilak) doesn't have a clue whether he's actually using adipose (fat) cells or other stroma cells.
Whether they're adipose cells or stroma cells, if you separate them out of the body and put them on a culture plate, you tend to get cells which look a lot like fibroblasts. When you put fibroblasts into a three dimension matrix (the article doesn't mention which one, probably alginate or collagen-gag scaffolding) they tend to assume chondrocytic (cartilage) like properties. This is absolutely nothing new, except that Guilak's getting these fibroblasts from fat tissue rather than any other tissue in the body (fibroblasts are everywhere).
The real question is whether the chondrocytes are producing type II collagen (i.e. what you find in articulating surfaces like your knee joint) or type I (which is most of the collagen in your body, but completely unsuited for making knee joints). I doubt his cells are making significant levels of type II collagen. Even if they were, seeding cells into a matrix and getting type II collagen expression is nothing new, this has been done for years by various different groups (Ragan/Grodzinky at MIT, Koichi Matsuda (sp?) at Chicago/Rush, etc.).
Even if you're getting type II collagen formation, you also got to hope that the collagen is being assembled and oriented correctly so that it won't fall apart after a couple years, and I know of no current evidence that explains how this can be done outside of a developing body.
Sorry, this isn't a huge advance. This is just someone (Guilak?) trying to make news out of nothing.
The field of cartilage research is advancing greatly, and quite likely in another 5-10 years people will be able to recreate functional articular cartilage in an ex-vivo system. But there's still a lot more work to be done, and you're more likely to get the cells from a quick mouth swab than liposuction anyway.
um, I'm not sure Redhat 6.2 will be falling off the face of the earth anytime soon.
Redhat 4.2 and 5.2 were both supported for years. And considering how bad 7.0 is, I wouldn't think you'd have to worry about 6.2 going unsupported for at least another two years. Hell, they're still supporting 6.0, and that came out close to two years ago.
Being an open-source developer myself, I would personally never release any of my code under anything but the GPL. And I encourage all the coders I talk with to do the same.
I see your point about making your code as free as possible, but I also don't want to see someone else taking my work, "embracing and extending" upon it, and then profiting off a piece of software that I originally intended to be free for everyone. The GPL guarantees that what I intended to be free will stay free.
And yes, communism has thankfully failed with politics, but socialism is doing quite well. Check out most of Europe, and then ponder why America, as the only developed nation without socialized medicine, has a higher infant mortality rate then Thailand.
I completely agree with you here.
The reason I will never use *BSD is entirely because of the license. Great technology, sure, but I don't want to see a return to the unix wars of the early 90's, and without a mechanism for enforcing freedom (i.e. the GPL) *BSD is doomed in our capitalistic system by standard corporate practice.
Yeah, MS may have used *BSD code for some of their TCP/IP utils, and great code it may be, but has *BSD gotten anything in return?