The others who release software under a BSD license generally aren't upset to see enterprises using their software.
With BSD licensed source, there is still a cost of not sharing modifications. There's a lot more maintenance involved merging changes from the main project with your proprietary fork than there is just submitting your changes back to the main project. What happens is that people share fixes and simple modifications that mostly apply to the original source, and hold back from sharing code that is mostly theirs and might have been uninteresting to the main project anyways.
Subscription support models don't work for everyone. For about $300 a year per desktop, you get security patches and the possibility of support, if your problem falls within the limited scope defined on their site and if you think they can respond with the answer faster than you can find it on Google.
It tries to be a 100% compatible RHEL clone. They're donation based and promise long term updates, basically just recompiling the upstream RHEL packages and rebranding whereever it's required by Red Hat's trademark license.
There goes my idea of logging all keystrokes, mouse movement, and monochrome screenshots every minute from every system on the network thru VNC. I calculated that I could get it all down to only 200mb per day for 25 systems. A 250gb hard drive could hold many years of this data.
People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.
Perhaps, but all this guy did was use someone's wifi. It's like calling a jaywalker a killer because sometimes killers jaywalk.
That might cut down on the mindless button clicks.
At my work we have about 25 desktops. Because our company is small, one of my side responsibilities is sysadmin stuff. The maintainance part is really small. If you leave a system with auto-updates and an under-targetted browser and email program, it almost maintains itself.
Most of our systems run XP Home with an extra script to properly mount everything on bootup. I have another script for easy installion of that script. We enable auto-update. It hasn't caused any problems and the extra bandwidth usage is too small to worry about. Users are admins of their own systems, but that hasn't caused many problems either. We haven't seen a virus in over a year, and spyware is rare. A new system with monitor, mouse, and keyboard costs about $400-$500, and takes about 2 hours of setup effort. We install OpenOffice on each machine, but those who need MS Office can get it. We'd spend $100k if we found an ERP we liked but we won't just spend needlessly.
Most of our file servers run Linux. They never give us trouble, except one time when two hard disks failed the same week. After that incident (luckily it was a backup server), I wrote a script that combines all our Linux server logs into one giant, but properly sorted log which I glance over each morning for signs of hardware failure. We have one Windows server for running Windows-only server software. We don't use Active Directory, but that hasn't been a problem. We use webmin to easily manage users and groups across multiple servers at once. All our file servers are grouped together onto one network drive using DFS, and each folder is restricted to only those who need access to it.
It seems that in some companies this sort of job involves as much or as little work as one is willing to commit to it. Admins can easily find ways to keep themselves busy, sometimes at the company's expense. There's always something more you can do, but you can often get away with very little. Just do what needs to be done.
I've been disabling them ever since I discovered why my system was nearly unusable for half an hour each day. The prelink job is pretty disruptive as well.
I guess it's more of a problem for people who turn their systems off at night. The job runs shortly after the next boot, which is often the worst possible time. I do use "locate" on occasion, but on a file server which has plenty of nightly idle time to spare.
You might disable some stuff in your/etc/cron.daily and weekly. They have a few very intensive, long running tasks in there that'll probably never benefit you. Makewhatis and slocate come to mind. Just mark them non-executable.
The vulerabilities they find now have usually been there for half a decade or longer. They weren't a threat until someone discovered them.
Now, figure the average time someone goes between applying patches. Some update daily, but a lot of people update weekly, if at all. And suppose a vulnerability is discovered every 3 days. If patches were released the day they were completed, you'd be exposed about 70% of the time, if someone took the time to use the patches to locate the vulnerabilities. Now, if patches were released monthly, and vulnerability details were kept secret until a patch was available, you'd ony be exposed about 12% of the time.
It seems alright to hold back a bunch of patches to release all at once after a couple months so long as they can be released early in the event of public discovery or disclosure of a vulnerability.
I bet some sort of randomizing compiler and linker would work wonders in preventing people from reverse engineering vulnerabilities from patches. Different addresses. Slightly different but equivalent machine code.
I had to edit the installer script to skip an integrity check that was failing when it shouldn't have. Most users would give up at that point. Didn't have to do most of that other stuff though.
I've also tried running some Quake 3 based games on Wine. Q3 is very Wine friendly. It tends to be as simple as copy and run. I did have to mess with Wine a little to get sound though. Genuine Windows users typically have to download and install OpenGL drivers.
For lack of a better word, I use viral to describe the license's desire to take over new code that is not simply a modification/derivative of the original GPL'd code.
His front page listed it in a section entitled "musings", below a seperate section entitled "serious writings". Could we assume from the section titles that he wasn't being serious?
You still have to share their changes, but the license is almost entirely non-viral. Only changes to existing source files are covered. Mozilla releases their code under an MPL/LGPL/GPL triple license, with an optional clause that bridges the three for as long as you neglect to remove it from the source file.
I'm a fan of the GPL, and have released many small programs under it, but it gets a little scary if you want to release proprietary software which runs atop a GPL'd framework. You need to look at every library you use, see if it's BSD, LGPL, GPL with a linking exception, etc., or pure GPL which you just can't link to.
Regardless of anti-viral sentiments, there's not much that can or should be done. Software that is under the GPL will always be under the GPL, with rare exceptions. Switching to a less viral license would require rewriting almost everything, except the stuff that was just copied from BSD anyways. New software will be under whatever license the author pleases, but if it's not the GPL they will still run into some of the difficulties that proprietary software developers face, though to a lesser extent.
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The others who release software under a BSD license generally aren't upset to see enterprises using their software.
With BSD licensed source, there is still a cost of not sharing modifications. There's a lot more maintenance involved merging changes from the main project with your proprietary fork than there is just submitting your changes back to the main project. What happens is that people share fixes and simple modifications that mostly apply to the original source, and hold back from sharing code that is mostly theirs and might have been uninteresting to the main project anyways.
Subscription support models don't work for everyone. For about $300 a year per desktop, you get security patches and the possibility of support, if your problem falls within the limited scope defined on their site and if you think they can respond with the answer faster than you can find it on Google.
It tries to be a 100% compatible RHEL clone. They're donation based and promise long term updates, basically just recompiling the upstream RHEL packages and rebranding whereever it's required by Red Hat's trademark license.
There goes my idea of logging all keystrokes, mouse movement, and monochrome screenshots every minute from every system on the network thru VNC. I calculated that I could get it all down to only 200mb per day for 25 systems. A 250gb hard drive could hold many years of this data.
People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.
Perhaps, but all this guy did was use someone's wifi. It's like calling a jaywalker a killer because sometimes killers jaywalk.
That might cut down on the mindless button clicks.
At my work we have about 25 desktops. Because our company is small, one of my side responsibilities is sysadmin stuff. The maintainance part is really small. If you leave a system with auto-updates and an under-targetted browser and email program, it almost maintains itself.
Most of our systems run XP Home with an extra script to properly mount everything on bootup. I have another script for easy installion of that script. We enable auto-update. It hasn't caused any problems and the extra bandwidth usage is too small to worry about. Users are admins of their own systems, but that hasn't caused many problems either. We haven't seen a virus in over a year, and spyware is rare. A new system with monitor, mouse, and keyboard costs about $400-$500, and takes about 2 hours of setup effort. We install OpenOffice on each machine, but those who need MS Office can get it. We'd spend $100k if we found an ERP we liked but we won't just spend needlessly.
Most of our file servers run Linux. They never give us trouble, except one time when two hard disks failed the same week. After that incident (luckily it was a backup server), I wrote a script that combines all our Linux server logs into one giant, but properly sorted log which I glance over each morning for signs of hardware failure. We have one Windows server for running Windows-only server software. We don't use Active Directory, but that hasn't been a problem. We use webmin to easily manage users and groups across multiple servers at once. All our file servers are grouped together onto one network drive using DFS, and each folder is restricted to only those who need access to it.
It seems that in some companies this sort of job involves as much or as little work as one is willing to commit to it. Admins can easily find ways to keep themselves busy, sometimes at the company's expense. There's always something more you can do, but you can often get away with very little. Just do what needs to be done.
I've been disabling them ever since I discovered why my system was nearly unusable for half an hour each day. The prelink job is pretty disruptive as well.
I guess it's more of a problem for people who turn their systems off at night. The job runs shortly after the next boot, which is often the worst possible time. I do use "locate" on occasion, but on a file server which has plenty of nightly idle time to spare.
You might disable some stuff in your /etc/cron.daily and weekly. They have a few very intensive, long running tasks in there that'll probably never benefit you. Makewhatis and slocate come to mind. Just mark them non-executable.
The vulerabilities they find now have usually been there for half a decade or longer. They weren't a threat until someone discovered them.
Now, figure the average time someone goes between applying patches. Some update daily, but a lot of people update weekly, if at all. And suppose a vulnerability is discovered every 3 days. If patches were released the day they were completed, you'd be exposed about 70% of the time, if someone took the time to use the patches to locate the vulnerabilities. Now, if patches were released monthly, and vulnerability details were kept secret until a patch was available, you'd ony be exposed about 12% of the time.
It seems alright to hold back a bunch of patches to release all at once after a couple months so long as they can be released early in the event of public discovery or disclosure of a vulnerability.
I bet some sort of randomizing compiler and linker would work wonders in preventing people from reverse engineering vulnerabilities from patches. Different addresses. Slightly different but equivalent machine code.
2003 was my year, though I had been trying it off and on since 2000.
If I got a system with Linux preloaded I'd just wipe it and install my favorite distro over the top.
I had to edit the installer script to skip an integrity check that was failing when it shouldn't have. Most users would give up at that point. Didn't have to do most of that other stuff though.
I've also tried running some Quake 3 based games on Wine. Q3 is very Wine friendly. It tends to be as simple as copy and run. I did have to mess with Wine a little to get sound though. Genuine Windows users typically have to download and install OpenGL drivers.
Easier way to turn lead and radium into gold:
* Throw away the lead.
* Sell the radium.
* Buy a shitload of gold with the proceeds.
They're only 88 cents.
Do they have online sessions?
That's more like it. I've just been getting pissed off at people equating piracy to downloading copyrighted material.
Isn't everything copyrighted? And what if they payed the copyright owner for license to it?
For lack of a better word, I use viral to describe the license's desire to take over new code that is not simply a modification/derivative of the original GPL'd code.
I'm still waiting for the day when we find a teeny star orbiting a giant planet.
His front page listed it in a section entitled "musings", below a seperate section entitled "serious writings". Could we assume from the section titles that he wasn't being serious?
I guess it's probably true.
Snopes should have an article on this any day now.
You still have to share their changes, but the license is almost entirely non-viral. Only changes to existing source files are covered. Mozilla releases their code under an MPL/LGPL/GPL triple license, with an optional clause that bridges the three for as long as you neglect to remove it from the source file.
I'm a fan of the GPL, and have released many small programs under it, but it gets a little scary if you want to release proprietary software which runs atop a GPL'd framework. You need to look at every library you use, see if it's BSD, LGPL, GPL with a linking exception, etc., or pure GPL which you just can't link to.
Regardless of anti-viral sentiments, there's not much that can or should be done. Software that is under the GPL will always be under the GPL, with rare exceptions. Switching to a less viral license would require rewriting almost everything, except the stuff that was just copied from BSD anyways. New software will be under whatever license the author pleases, but if it's not the GPL they will still run into some of the difficulties that proprietary software developers face, though to a lesser extent.
Unless you're dealing with thousands of routers/switches, a simple spreadsheet ought to suffice.
The goverment can now spy on every citizen without a single reason.
They can, but they'd have no reason to, unless they had a reason.