Re:Just for the balance
on
Vim 6.3 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Learning new things does take a certain amount of effort. Emacs drove me mad for two whole days as I didn't know how to perform even basic tasks, but it was worth the effort though. (an additional two weeks was required to become properly comfortable).
notepad -> ViM -> Emacs.
I clung to ViM longer than I should have because I had learned it and I didn't want to discard that knowledge. I suspect many people are the same. Learning ViM (all those years ago) was such a pain, who'd want to throw out that effort? Do it. Emacs is much more useful.
Typing Alt-v isn't such a big deal. Emacs has almost 30 years of development put into it, it's a great editor.
Just for the balance
on
Vim 6.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
GNU/Hurd does boot - I dual boot GNU/Hurd and GNU/Linux, but Linux is a superior kernel.
FSF work on whatever is the important issue for freedom. Sometimes that's the DMCA, software patents, SCO, GPL enforcement, GnuPG etc. Finishing Hurd is not the most important issue for software freedom today, so they put no work into it (some volunteers still work on it from time to time).
When you run the-OS-called-Linux, you are running the OS designed, planned, and mostly written by GNU programmers - but it was finished by a third party.
The name was an unfair mistake, journalists propegated it because they research nothing, and MS, IBM, Corel, etc. pushed it because they don't ever want anyone to ask "What's GNU?".
(I'm not going to let them win that one. For calling the system "GNU/Linux", it's not all-or-nothing, it's the-more-the-merrier.)
people don't use an "X/Linux" system, they use a "X/GLibc" system. Linux can be swapped out in favour of the FreeBSD kernel if you like. Your user space apps call GNU Libc, not Linux.
In 1983, X and TeX existed, RMS decided we needed a free OS. So he started writing one. He personnally wrote GCC, Emacs, and GDB. He recruited volunteers, he founded FSF (who hired 15 programmers), he wrote the GNU GPL, he asked people to help again and again and he gave them the tools to write free software. He gave talks, he spoke to the media, he answered slashdots questions, he has worked and worked, and produced more than anyone else has for this OS.
Linus Torvalds found the tools made by RMS and wrote some free software (it was proprietary initially but Linus GPL'd it in 1992). Linus (accidently) finished the GNU project, the pure GNU OS didn't have to be finished because a variant using Linux as it's kernel was ready.
You can call it "GNU/Linux" out of respect for the GNU programmers that wrote the largest chunk of the OS, or you can call it "GNU/Linux" because that's the only name that keeps the topic of freedom in the conversation. (IBM and MS have neither of these goals, so they call it "Linux", please don't just copy the Megacorps.)
> "This idea that everybody has to release his source under GPL or something complaint is getting to my nerves."
free vs. unfree is a line in the sand, we could spend time debating it, or we could just use the GPL. The G is for General - there was an EmacsPL, a GCC-PL, etc. But RMS realised that it would be nice for other people to be able to share code between projects, so he made a General license for all software. If you use it, your software can be integrated with other peoples software easier - allowing more programming and less lawyering.
Don't worry, using a General license doesn't prevent you from being a unique little snowflake.
If you want more info about Lessig losing that big copyright case, you can read his account of it. (very interesting, it half reads like an apology.)
Here, in Lessigs style, is an anecdote (from the 80's) : A Microsoft sales rep messed up a 1.5million dollar deal - so the rep is called in to Gates' office and he says to Gates' "I guess I'm fired, yeh?", Gate's replies: "What? you just learned a big lesson and we footed a 1.5million dollar bill for that lesson - there's no way I'm gonna fire and have some other company gain that experience you just gained."
Lessig is a good smart guy, and FSF/GNU have been doing the impossible for 20+ years now. Lessig lost a failed a big test, there'll be other tests, and he'll try again because he cares about the subject matter.
(yes, this is my second time replying to the parent, the first reply was knee-jerk. This post is hopefully more considered - or at the least, it's longer.)
(bleh, this post needs more thinking, but I should go do something else instead.)
If you have some sage advice for FSF, I suggest you write it on the back of a cheque and send it to them. (whether you do this or not - and whether you give up or not, they'll keep fighting for your freedom.)
For the last 5 years, while GNU/Linux was eating Microsofts lunch, Novell was fading out of the spotlight, hanging on through existing contracts.
Meanwhile, all the big players have realised that free software is the future. Business models based on control will be obsolete in a decade or two. Unfortuneatly, Microsofts business model - since they do little other than software sales - their model is based completely on control.
MS are trying to pretend that freedom is not inevitable, hoping that if they can postpone it for long enough, it won't happen. (Due to Trusted Computing or similar.)
Meanwhile the others (IBM, SUN, HP, etc. and now Novell) have accepted it, but they want to slow it down so because it will take time to port their business models to the new way of doing software.
SuSE was one of the big GNU/Linux vendors, but they were slowly declining. Their use of proprietary software showed a gap in their appreciation of how the free software economy will work. Novell seem to have a better grasp on the concept. I'm looking forward to what they do with SuSE.
ease-of-use will come in time. user-orientated free-as-in-cost trustable-as-in-viewable are all functions of free-as-in-freedom. I'm looking forward to all the distros now sharing installer&config code.
If a food copier existed - if you could create as much food as you wanted, for the same cost as producing one portion of food - there would be riots in any country that prohibited the copying of food. (and rightly so.)
Commerce, like creativity, is brownian motion. Don't hold back society because you're afraid the stock prices of last centuries monopolies will drop.
Copyright is simply artificial scarcity for software. We have enough scarcity in the world.
I was at the last meeting and it was very interesting. Eben Moglen gave a talk about what's happening to the GPLv3 and how it is handled. David Turner talked about enforcing the GPL. The board of directors took audience questions, and most of the FSF employees gave short talks about what they're working on.
The FSF staff are so busy that they rarely have time to publicise the work they are doing - so this was a great opertunity to find out what's inside the greatest black box in the free software world:-)
Developers have plently of summits, meetings, and conferences. Businesses have their tradeshows. FSF has an annual meeting to discuss freedom - how to create it, and how to legaly defend it. Well worth attending.
It's a members only meeting. XFree86 is not a member of the Free Software Foundation (otherwise known as GNU).
It's for Associate Members - anyone that pays their $120 per year membership fee. Developers or counsel for xfree86 may be associate members of FSF. (it's $60/year for students)
(also, (and I thought everyone knew this) FSF was set up to provide organisational and legal infrastructure for the free software community. In doing so, they are the prime sponsors of the GNU project. FSF and GNU were both founded by RMS, and the two projects are synergistic, but they are seperate.)
The idea you mention always reminds me of one of my favourite Free Software companies: Eazel
When they were in business, they wrote Nautilus, and when they died they left Nautilus as a legacy. Bad economics can kill a company - but it can't kill a good piece of free software.
That said, much of my favourite software was written by zealots not companies. (link to other comment on this page, possible scored too low for many people to see.)
> Hurd was the first big GNU package that RMS did *not* work > on. If zealotry was a problem, GCC, Emacs, GDB, and many of > the GNU command line utils would have failed long ago
But did Richards zealotry make the other projects work, or did his programming prowess make them work in spite of his zealotry?
The idea is that you want to reduce the average velocity of these atoms down to a very very low speed and that's what they really mean by cooling the temperatures and measuring the average motional energy of these atoms. You do this by shining light on the atoms.
As the light scatters from the atoms, they cool down. The trick is to arrange the light to preferentially scatter off of photons opposing the motion and this is done simply by tuning the frequency of the light so that when the atoms are moving towards this laser beam, it has a frequency shift called the Doppler shift that actually shifts it more into resonance.
He is a puppet - famous because some wealthy entities have an interest in giving fame to a "leader" that will compromise on core values. No cause for worship.
Then IBM should use the money to improve Access Database support in OO.o - or someone has to do it. This current proposal is simply enlarging the DRM control of MS.
Right now we can tell our governments not to use MS Word doc format because it's only available to certain systems. If IBM port MS Office, governments will find it harder to understand the issues involved.
The Enemy isn't MS, it's unfree software. IBM's proposal is not a contribution.
but that's the point. ESR doesn't care if Sun ever see his silly letter - he knows they won't pay him any attention, especially after his last letter about how they are a dead company - but he has to make sure that slashdot sees it so if Sun ever liberate the Java source, he can credit himself for their actions.
I think the real point of this list is to get 5 great hackers and then stick in your favourite 10 to give them fame by association. It's like giving an award to "Stallman and John Doe" - wow, who is this amazing John Doe?.
A *decent* blurb on each would make this list newsworthy, but as it is - it looks like a few facts scraped together to make it look researched.
I'm glad they've cancelled. Right now, Google have control over their company, and they seem to be pretty nice guys. After floating the company they can face greater market pressure which could easily spoil it.
true freedom implies shunning mono-cultures
MS Windows is a mono-culture, it's owned & controlled by one entity. GNU/Linux is national/global culture, anyone can use/modify/distribute
particular model of Linux (say GNU)
Surely you troll? GNU is an OS, Linux is a kernel, GNU+Linux is an OS, many models of GNU/Linux and GNU exist such as those distributed by Debian, RedHat, & Mandrake. (non-Linux GNU OS's exist such as GNU/Hurd and GNU/KFreeBSD)
There's no way an experienced Emacs user can beat an experienced vi user in a file editing contest.
An experienced emacs user with mittens on would beat an experience vi user. You'll outgrow vi. You'll cling to it for as long as you can because you've invested so much time in using it, but emacs is the only editor that scales to very advanced usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Learning new things does take a certain amount of effort. Emacs drove me mad for two whole days as I didn't know how to perform even basic tasks, but it was worth the effort though. (an additional two weeks was required to become properly comfortable).
notepad -> ViM -> Emacs.
I clung to ViM longer than I should have because I had learned it and I didn't want to discard that knowledge. I suspect many people are the same. Learning ViM (all those years ago) was such a pain, who'd want to throw out that effort? Do it. Emacs is much more useful.
Typing Alt-v isn't such a big deal. Emacs has almost 30 years of development put into it, it's a great editor.
I had the opposite experience. Two years later I'm still finding new functionality in GNU Emacs.
GNU/Hurd does boot - I dual boot GNU/Hurd and GNU/Linux, but Linux is a superior kernel.
FSF work on whatever is the important issue for freedom. Sometimes that's the DMCA, software patents, SCO, GPL enforcement, GnuPG etc. Finishing Hurd is not the most important issue for software freedom today, so they put no work into it (some volunteers still work on it from time to time).
When you run the-OS-called-Linux, you are running the OS designed, planned, and mostly written by GNU programmers - but it was finished by a third party.
The name was an unfair mistake, journalists propegated it because they research nothing, and MS, IBM, Corel, etc. pushed it because they don't ever want anyone to ask "What's GNU?".
(I'm not going to let them win that one. For calling the system "GNU/Linux", it's not all-or-nothing, it's the-more-the-merrier.)
people don't use an "X/Linux" system, they use a "X/GLibc" system. Linux can be swapped out in favour of the FreeBSD kernel if you like. Your user space apps call GNU Libc, not Linux.
In 1983, X and TeX existed, RMS decided we needed a free OS. So he started writing one. He personnally wrote GCC, Emacs, and GDB. He recruited volunteers, he founded FSF (who hired 15 programmers), he wrote the GNU GPL, he asked people to help again and again and he gave them the tools to write free software. He gave talks, he spoke to the media, he answered slashdots questions, he has worked and worked, and produced more than anyone else has for this OS.
Linus Torvalds found the tools made by RMS and wrote some free software (it was proprietary initially but Linus GPL'd it in 1992). Linus (accidently) finished the GNU project, the pure GNU OS didn't have to be finished because a variant using Linux as it's kernel was ready.
You can call it "GNU/Linux" out of respect for the GNU programmers that wrote the largest chunk of the OS, or you can call it "GNU/Linux" because that's the only name that keeps the topic of freedom in the conversation. (IBM and MS have neither of these goals, so they call it "Linux", please don't just copy the Megacorps.)
> "This idea that everybody has to release his source under GPL or something complaint is getting to my nerves."
free vs. unfree is a line in the sand, we could spend time debating it, or we could just use the GPL. The G is for General - there was an EmacsPL, a GCC-PL, etc. But RMS realised that it would be nice for other people to be able to share code between projects, so he made a General license for all software. If you use it, your software can be integrated with other peoples software easier - allowing more programming and less lawyering.
Don't worry, using a General license doesn't prevent you from being a unique little snowflake.
If you want more info about Lessig losing that big copyright case, you can read his account of it. (very interesting, it half reads like an apology.)
Here, in Lessigs style, is an anecdote (from the 80's) : A Microsoft sales rep messed up a 1.5million dollar deal - so the rep is called in to Gates' office and he says to Gates' "I guess I'm fired, yeh?", Gate's replies: "What? you just learned a big lesson and we footed a 1.5million dollar bill for that lesson - there's no way I'm gonna fire and have some other company gain that experience you just gained."
Lessig is a good smart guy, and FSF/GNU have been doing the impossible for 20+ years now. Lessig lost a failed a big test, there'll be other tests, and he'll try again because he cares about the subject matter.
(yes, this is my second time replying to the parent, the first reply was knee-jerk. This post is hopefully more considered - or at the least, it's longer.)
(bleh, this post needs more thinking, but I should go do something else instead.)
yeh, let's give up.
If you have some sage advice for FSF, I suggest you write it on the back of a cheque and send it to them. (whether you do this or not - and whether you give up or not, they'll keep fighting for your freedom.)
For the last 5 years, while GNU/Linux was eating Microsofts lunch, Novell was fading out of the spotlight, hanging on through existing contracts.
Meanwhile, all the big players have realised that free software is the future. Business models based on control will be obsolete in a decade or two. Unfortuneatly, Microsofts business model - since they do little other than software sales - their model is based completely on control.
MS are trying to pretend that freedom is not inevitable, hoping that if they can postpone it for long enough, it won't happen. (Due to Trusted Computing or similar.)
Meanwhile the others (IBM, SUN, HP, etc. and now Novell) have accepted it, but they want to slow it down so because it will take time to port their business models to the new way of doing software.
SuSE was one of the big GNU/Linux vendors, but they were slowly declining. Their use of proprietary software showed a gap in their appreciation of how the free software economy will work. Novell seem to have a better grasp on the concept. I'm looking forward to what they do with SuSE.
ease-of-use will come in time. user-orientated free-as-in-cost trustable-as-in-viewable are all functions of free-as-in-freedom. I'm looking forward to all the distros now sharing installer&config code.
If a food copier existed - if you could create as much food as you wanted, for the same cost as producing one portion of food - there would be riots in any country that prohibited the copying of food. (and rightly so.)
Commerce, like creativity, is brownian motion. Don't hold back society because you're afraid the stock prices of last centuries monopolies will drop.
Copyright is simply artificial scarcity for software. We have enough scarcity in the world.
I was at the last meeting and it was very interesting. Eben Moglen gave a talk about what's happening to the GPLv3 and how it is handled. David Turner talked about enforcing the GPL. The board of directors took audience questions, and most of the FSF employees gave short talks about what they're working on.
:-)
The FSF staff are so busy that they rarely have time to publicise the work they are doing - so this was a great opertunity to find out what's inside the greatest black box in the free software world
Developers have plently of summits, meetings, and conferences. Businesses have their tradeshows. FSF has an annual meeting to discuss freedom - how to create it, and how to legaly defend it. Well worth attending.
It's a members only meeting. XFree86 is not a member of the Free Software Foundation (otherwise known as GNU).
It's for Associate Members - anyone that pays their $120 per year membership fee. Developers or counsel for xfree86 may be associate members of FSF. (it's $60/year for students)
(also, (and I thought everyone knew this) FSF was set up to provide organisational and legal infrastructure for the free software community. In doing so, they are the prime sponsors of the GNU project. FSF and GNU were both founded by RMS, and the two projects are synergistic, but they are seperate.)
The idea you mention always reminds me of one of my favourite Free Software companies: Eazel
When they were in business, they wrote Nautilus, and when they died they left Nautilus as a legacy. Bad economics can kill a company - but it can't kill a good piece of free software.
That said, much of my favourite software was written by zealots not companies. (link to other comment on this page, possible scored too low for many people to see.)
> Hurd was the first big GNU package that RMS did *not* work
> on. If zealotry was a problem, GCC, Emacs, GDB, and many of
> the GNU command line utils would have failed long ago
But did Richards zealotry make the other projects work, or did his programming prowess make them work in spite of his zealotry?
Either way, that's a pretty weird observation
The idea is that you want to reduce the average velocity of these atoms down to a very very low speed and that's what they really mean by cooling the temperatures and measuring the average motional energy of these atoms. You do this by shining light on the atoms.
As the light scatters from the atoms, they cool down. The trick is to arrange the light to preferentially scatter off of photons opposing the motion and this is done simply by tuning the frequency of the light so that when the atoms are moving towards this laser beam, it has a frequency shift called the Doppler shift that actually shifts it more into resonance.
Do you even KNOW who Eric S. Raymond is?
He is a puppet - famous because some wealthy entities have an interest in giving fame to a "leader" that will compromise on core values. No cause for worship.
Then IBM should use the money to improve Access Database support in OO.o - or someone has to do it. This current proposal is simply enlarging the DRM control of MS.
Right now we can tell our governments not to use MS Word doc format because it's only available to certain systems. If IBM port MS Office, governments will find it harder to understand the issues involved.
The Enemy isn't MS, it's unfree software. IBM's proposal is not a contribution.
Since you mention the Communist Manifesto, I want to post a link to the The dotCommunist Manifesto.
And just so my comment is ontopic: ESR is a jackass.
> If you want a free, open language, try using c++
Ok, let's all calm down now. We can all have our opinions but there was no reason to mention c++.
.
but that's the point. ESR doesn't care if Sun ever see his silly letter - he knows they won't pay him any attention, especially after his last letter about how they are a dead company - but he has to make sure that slashdot sees it so if Sun ever liberate the Java source, he can credit himself for their actions.
I think the real point of this list is to get 5 great hackers and then stick in your favourite 10 to give them fame by association. It's like giving an award to "Stallman and John Doe" - wow, who is this amazing John Doe?.
A *decent* blurb on each would make this list newsworthy, but as it is - it looks like a few facts scraped together to make it look researched.
Another good Stallman quote from that conversation:
"The British did visit the imperialist here before colonisation, [MS] are trying for the same"
I'm glad they've cancelled. Right now, Google have control over their company, and they seem to be pretty nice guys. After floating the company they can face greater market pressure which could easily spoil it.
true freedom implies shunning mono-cultures
MS Windows is a mono-culture, it's owned & controlled by one entity. GNU/Linux is national/global culture, anyone can use/modify/distribute
particular model of Linux (say GNU)
Surely you troll? GNU is an OS, Linux is a kernel, GNU+Linux is an OS, many models of GNU/Linux and GNU exist such as those distributed by Debian, RedHat, & Mandrake. (non-Linux GNU OS's exist such as GNU/Hurd and GNU/KFreeBSD)
Now, hold on there a minute.
so his grammar is bad. Big deal, English isn't everyones first language.
Your post is just obnoxious. What's your excuse?
There's no way an experienced Emacs user can beat an experienced vi user in a file editing contest.
An experienced emacs user with mittens on would beat an experience vi user. You'll outgrow vi. You'll cling to it for as long as you can because you've invested so much time in using it, but emacs is the only editor that scales to very advanced usage.