> This guy probably has a statue of RMS in his backyard
No. I don't believe in fanboy hero worship. Stallmans not infallible, and I disagree with him on occasion, but he's the smartest and most dedicated man I know, and I have a lot of respect for him.
I'll defend him when people make accusations in a forum where he is not present to defend himself. Such accusers are mostly cowards, and some, even worse, are people with accounts that repeatedly reply to my posts as an AC.
As for making his living from free source, bullshit! he lives mostly for free off MIT and picks up occasional speaking engagements through his celebrity status.
I couldn't dispute your previous claims because they had no evidence which I could question, but I know the above statement to be a lie.
Richard doesn't live in MIT anymore. For a start, he spends 6-8 months of the year outside of the US. He gives a lot of talks in india and south america. I doubt that all his venues can afford to fly him from the US to india, cover his living, accomadation, car rental, food, etc. expenses for the duration of his stay.
And who pays his expenses when he goes to UN summits? no one. WSIS? no one. FTC discussions? no one. List of other non-invited engagements? no one.
From 1990 - 1994 he was funded by a MacArthur grant, and from 2001 - present he's living off a Takeda award, but From 1984 - 1990, and from 1995 - 2001 how did he pay his way? teaching classes about Lisp and GCC, and doing contract customisations of GCC.
> Stallman won a MacArthur "genius" grant, so presumably that's what he is living off of.
That grant was $250,000, and he got it in ~1990, so it's probably all gone by now. He was also awarded a Takeda award of $800,000 at the start of 2001. He must still have some of that, but from 1984 - 1990 he supported himself entirely through Free Software, and if the MacArthur grant lasted him 5 years, then he supported himself again from 1995 - 2001.
FSF don't pay him at all, they don't even pay his traveling, accomadation, or car rental expenses. Given that in 1992 he spent only 116 days in the US, these costs must be quite high for him.
RMS doesn't live in his office. He lived there for 11 years (IIRC) and then they told him he had to move out.
I've never heard the housed/bought/burned story before, can it be backed up with any references? (It does sound believeable, I've just never heard of it)
I don't accept his dogma blind, nor to I blindly accept the opinion of universities, but it would be really unusual if three honorary doctorates, and honorary professorship, and numerous other social/academic awards were given to a barking mad nut.
Finally, he does believe in money. FSF doesn't pay his travel expenses (which are very costly), in fact FSF doesn't pay him at all. So he finds many ways to fund his work and his life. Since he spends most of the year out of the US, he must have substantial living costs. (and he doesn't have a donate-to-stallman page anywhere).
AC writes: they contribute because the licenses for the libraries are LGPL, so as you put they have the "right to abuse"
No. You haven't read the LGPL. With LGPL, Sun can keep the source for their applications proprietary, but any changes they make to GNOME (which is mostly LGPL'd), they have to contribute back. So companies can benefit from use LGPL'd code, but they cannot abuse the code. This "all must play fair" rule has created a common ground where Ximian, Sun, IBM, SuSE, RedHat, HP, GNU developers, Debian developers, and hordes of others are happy to contribute.
The GPL v2 talks about the code being re-licensable under later versions of the GPL. It seems to me that if I wanted to not include that term [...] my code would then not be GPL compatable
The "version 2 or any later version" clause is not part of the GPL, it's part of the standard licensing notice. You can use it, or leave it out, it's up to you. The reason why people use it is so that when GPLv3 comes out, there will be no incompatability.
Because it includes "the freedom to abuse". Companies say the GPL is anti-commercial, but the free OS with the most commercial interest is GNU/Linux.
Would Sun contribute to GNOME if the GNOME license allowed IBM to take Suns work, modify it and not give back? GPL makes a level playing field, everyone has to play by the rules, and history has proved that companies prefer that situation to the BSD situation.
In an ideal world, yes we would all use the BSD license, but while were in this world, copyleft seems to be preferable.
Please give proper credit to the GNU developers by calling the OS "GNU/Linux", since the largest component is GNU. (wheew, that feels much better.)
I've actually never seen a *BSD system, but I do plan to try one out some day. I'll stay GNU-faithful since I believe in Stallmans crusade, but FreeBSD and GNU should be friends. MS and other proprietary software vendors are the enemy, and they'd just love to see us splinter into waring factions.
The point of my original comment was to show that some people who read BSD section stories will mod up anything that praises BSD, regardless of how little interesting information it actually contains. I'm glad other modders have shown a sense of humor and not modded my original post down after I came clean.
I use FreeBSD every day as a desktop, and it works great for me. At least the reviewer appreciated the integrated feel that come from a real Unix, that was planned rather than hobbled together. It's also good that they noticed how solid FreeBSD is as a server. *BSD performance under heavy loads is something that can't always be proved by benchmarks. It has to be seen to be believed.
My main dissagreement though, is his complaint about the ports system. Debians apt-get system is the only thing that comes close, but with ports I find it much easier to maintain my own changes to the source tree.
I moved to FreeBSD after bad experiences on Linux, with licensing, the ad-hoc design, and spagetti code. Now I stay with FreeBSD because of it's engineered design, and because it's nice to have a truly free system.
Yes, you like *BSD, I'm not trying to convert you or question your *BSD loyalty.
I'm saying that the kernel of FreeBSD might be superior to Linux. And since GNU users consider both to be Free Software, they should consider giving the FreeBSD kernel a try.
There's also a GNU/KNetBSD project, but it has less momentum.
GNU/KFreeBSD is a project that doesn't get enough press.
Most GNU systems use Linux as their kernel, but this doesn't have to be the case. The porting of GNU to the FreeBSD kernel is almost complete. (the project name changed from GNU/FreeBSD to GNU/KFreeBSD after a trademark discussion with some FreeBSD folks.)
FreeBSD people say that their kernel is rock solid, has the best uptimes, most robust networking, and now it's getting an improved scheduler. So it would make sense for GNU users to considering using the FreeBSD kernel instead of Linux.
Having everyone using the same kernel just makes life easier for worm writers, and corporate attacks such as the SCO fiasco.
Of course, adoption will be hampered by the marketing mistake of calling the whole OS "Linux", but I hope that choice of kernels will become more normal in the future. It would also help if they came up with a friendlier name than "GNU/KFreeBSD" (8 sylabyls!).
Anyway, I hope to start using the FreeBSD kernel soon.
A friend of mine was in Cuba a few years ago, and he says it's a great place. A brilliant medical system which is government funded, the streets are absolutely safe at night, and the people are friendly and inviting (twice he was invited in for dinner at the houses of two families he met while there).
And then you hear about Cubans trying to get to the US on crappy rafts etc.
Maybe some want to leave because they see American TV shows or movies and they think the whole continent is safe, nice, accepting, etc. Maybe if the Cuban govt. let the population see what the rest of the world is really like, they'd be less enthusiastic to leave Cuba.
I'm not suggesting that Cuba is heaven, but from only looking at TV it would be easy for Cubans to have a romantic grass-is-much-greener vision of what the US is like.
When I need a quick reference, I use --help, when I need in-depth documentation, I look at an Info manual.
If you don't like the command line 'info' utility, use one of the GNOME or KDE front ends, or try 'info --vi-keys', or try an alternative commandline info reader such as pinfo. (or write your own frontend, the GNU Info file format is very simlpe.)
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page? or how would you break it down into 300 individual pages? How do you turn 650 pages worth of manpages into a printable (and readable) book?
I hated info when I was a newbie, but once you get used to it, it's quite good.
I've been digging through archives, and it seems FSF's Eben Moglen hasn't made public comments about this version of the proposed ASL-2.0, BUT, he has commented on a previous version:
Well worth a read, he mentions some of the changes being considered for GPLv3.
For anyone interested in GPLv3. It was supposed to be ready for early 2003, but after a few delays it had to be delayed for a year as Eben had already arranged to have a year off. I think he'll be back soon, so maybe late 2004? (that information is from previous sources in my head, not from the above linked comment. Also, he was still working for FSF during his year off, just not full time. AFAIK.)
Most importantly, it won't come out 'til it's ready. Prof. Moglen deserves a lot more recognition than he gets. He really knows his stuff and the FS community is lucky to have him.
They tried "improving compatibility with GPL-based software", but is it compatible or not?
From a quick read it seems to be a valid Free Software license, but clause 4.d may make it incompatible with the GPL. This would be unfortunate for such a trivial condition. GPL doesn't allow placing additional restrictions on distribution, so is requiring a NOTICE file, and additional restriction?
The patents section might also be GPL-incompatible, but it might be GPLv3-compatible when GPLv3 comes out.
Has anyone seen of any comments from FSF about this?
Altogether, it's a good license, and vastly superior to the last proposal which was ~100 pages long. (slight exageration)
No, if the poor coutries wanted "more" of what the US deals out, they would have agreed to the Cancun trade round. They rejected it because it sucks, just like the TRIPS agreement.
(and America making use of foreign sweatshop labour is not a form of charity, y'know.)
What the developing nations want, is for the US to take it's foot off their throats so that they can work on building their own economies. Instead, coutries without decent educational systems are currently sinking funds into the prevention of illegal sharing of software and music. Countries with AIDS epidemics are banned from producing the treatments. (and on a less serious note, countries without decent mass transport infrastructures cannot build maglev trains:)
> Do you think the maglev IP is actually patented in China?
China signed the TRIPS agreement. (as did every developed country and 95% of developing countries.)
The deal was: the rich countries will trade manufactured and agricultural goods with the poor countries, and the poor countries will enforce the patents and copyrights of the rich countries.
The proclaimed trade benefits for the poor countries never happened (and what power do they have to complain?), but the enforcement of patents, trademarks, and copyrights has been enforced (the US threatens to cease trade and cancel IMF and WorldBank funds when the poor get angry). This is why Africa can't manufacture AIDS treatments even though they cost less than 35 cents to manufacture each daily dose.
(For more info, and excellent book is Information Fuedalism, by Peter Drahos)
FSF have the "Award for the Advancement of Free Software". The award ceremony has been at FOSDEM for the last 3 years, not sure where it was held before that.
when we're finished patting ourselves on the back:
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
These statistics make us happy, but they're not the whole story.
When we bragg about these numbers, Microsoft respond with: "Our webserver is used by more Forbes/Fortune 500 companies and is used by more secure websites. Apaches numbers are only high because a lot of amateurs use it".
What is our argument to that? (we don't have one. We just ignore it and continue patting ourselves on the back.)
If we are to progress, it's better to look at what going *wrong*, and try to improve that.
For anyone that hasn't tried it out, the interface is much improved. Great news since this is most peoples biggest gripe.
toolboxes are now dockable with the main toolbox, so you just have one toolbox window, and a window for the image. Also, the image window has a menu bar now.
Slashdot Mirror
> This guy probably has a statue of RMS in his backyard
No. I don't believe in fanboy hero worship. Stallmans not infallible, and I disagree with him on occasion, but he's the smartest and most dedicated man I know, and I have a lot of respect for him.
I'll defend him when people make accusations in a forum where he is not present to defend himself. Such accusers are mostly cowards, and some, even worse, are people with accounts that repeatedly reply to my posts as an AC.
As for making his living from free source, bullshit! he lives mostly for free off MIT and picks up occasional speaking engagements through his celebrity status.
I couldn't dispute your previous claims because they had no evidence which I could question, but I know the above statement to be a lie.
Richard doesn't live in MIT anymore. For a start, he spends 6-8 months of the year outside of the US. He gives a lot of talks in india and south america. I doubt that all his venues can afford to fly him from the US to india, cover his living, accomadation, car rental, food, etc. expenses for the duration of his stay.
And who pays his expenses when he goes to UN summits? no one. WSIS? no one. FTC discussions? no one. List of other non-invited engagements? no one.
From 1990 - 1994 he was funded by a MacArthur grant, and from 2001 - present he's living off a Takeda award, but From 1984 - 1990, and from 1995 - 2001 how did he pay his way? teaching classes about Lisp and GCC, and doing contract customisations of GCC.
What's your motivation?
> Stallman won a MacArthur "genius" grant, so presumably that's what he is living off of.
That grant was $250,000, and he got it in ~1990, so it's probably all gone by now. He was also awarded a Takeda award of $800,000 at the start of 2001. He must still have some of that, but from 1984 - 1990 he supported himself entirely through Free Software, and if the MacArthur grant lasted him 5 years, then he supported himself again from 1995 - 2001.
FSF don't pay him at all, they don't even pay his traveling, accomadation, or car rental expenses. Given that in 1992 he spent only 116 days in the US, these costs must be quite high for him.
RMS doesn't live in his office. He lived there for 11 years (IIRC) and then they told him he had to move out.
I've never heard the housed/bought/burned story before, can it be backed up with any references? (It does sound believeable, I've just never heard of it)
I don't accept his dogma blind, nor to I blindly accept the opinion of universities, but it would be really unusual if three honorary doctorates, and honorary professorship, and numerous other social/academic awards were given to a barking mad nut.
Finally, he does believe in money. FSF doesn't pay his travel expenses (which are very costly), in fact FSF doesn't pay him at all. So he finds many ways to fund his work and his life. Since he spends most of the year out of the US, he must have substantial living costs. (and he doesn't have a donate-to-stallman page anywhere).
AC writes: they contribute because the licenses for the libraries are LGPL, so as you put they have the "right to abuse"
No. You haven't read the LGPL. With LGPL, Sun can keep the source for their applications proprietary, but any changes they make to GNOME (which is mostly LGPL'd), they have to contribute back. So companies can benefit from use LGPL'd code, but they cannot abuse the code. This "all must play fair" rule has created a common ground where Ximian, Sun, IBM, SuSE, RedHat, HP, GNU developers, Debian developers, and hordes of others are happy to contribute.
I'm sure I've made a mistake there
yup. Here it is:
The GPL v2 talks about the code being re-licensable under later versions of the GPL. It seems to me that if I wanted to not include that term [...] my code would then not be GPL compatable
The "version 2 or any later version" clause is not part of the GPL, it's part of the standard licensing notice. You can use it, or leave it out, it's up to you. The reason why people use it is so that when GPLv3 comes out, there will be no incompatability.
LGPL can be a good thing, but it's not good for all libraries, it can be useful for tactical purposes.
Why doesn't everyone use the BSD license?
Because it includes "the freedom to abuse". Companies say the GPL is anti-commercial, but the free OS with the most commercial interest is GNU/Linux.
Would Sun contribute to GNOME if the GNOME license allowed IBM to take Suns work, modify it and not give back? GPL makes a level playing field, everyone has to play by the rules, and history has proved that companies prefer that situation to the BSD situation.
In an ideal world, yes we would all use the BSD license, but while were in this world, copyleft seems to be preferable.
How can programmers share code with each other when there are legal restrictions?
Stallman realised this problem 15 years ago, so he made a *General* license. ReadMe
linux is by no means a bad option
Please give proper credit to the GNU developers by calling the OS "GNU/Linux", since the largest component is GNU. (wheew, that feels much better.)
I've actually never seen a *BSD system, but I do plan to try one out some day. I'll stay GNU-faithful since I believe in Stallmans crusade, but FreeBSD and GNU should be friends. MS and other proprietary software vendors are the enemy, and they'd just love to see us splinter into waring factions.
The point of my original comment was to show that some people who read BSD section stories will mod up anything that praises BSD, regardless of how little interesting information it actually contains. I'm glad other modders have shown a sense of humor and not modded my original post down after I came clean.
ROFL, yeh, it's me alright but my post is satirical.
I'm testing something out
Pretty funny, IMHO. My comment made it to +5 in the last few minutes, so when I post this, compare the timestamps and see how long it took.
I use FreeBSD every day as a desktop, and it works great for me. At least the reviewer appreciated the integrated feel that come from a real Unix, that was planned rather than hobbled together. It's also good that they noticed how solid FreeBSD is as a server. *BSD performance under heavy loads is something that can't always be proved by benchmarks. It has to be seen to be believed.
My main dissagreement though, is his complaint about the ports system. Debians apt-get system is the only thing that comes close, but with ports I find it much easier to maintain my own changes to the source tree.
I moved to FreeBSD after bad experiences on Linux, with licensing, the ad-hoc design, and spagetti code. Now I stay with FreeBSD because of it's engineered design, and because it's nice to have a truly free system.
Yes, you like *BSD, I'm not trying to convert you or question your *BSD loyalty.
I'm saying that the kernel of FreeBSD might be superior to Linux. And since GNU users consider both to be Free Software, they should consider giving the FreeBSD kernel a try.
There's also a GNU/KNetBSD project, but it has less momentum.
GNU/KFreeBSD is a project that doesn't get enough press.
Most GNU systems use Linux as their kernel, but this doesn't have to be the case. The porting of GNU to the FreeBSD kernel is almost complete. (the project name changed from GNU/FreeBSD to GNU/KFreeBSD after a trademark discussion with some FreeBSD folks.)
FreeBSD people say that their kernel is rock solid, has the best uptimes, most robust networking, and now it's getting an improved scheduler. So it would make sense for GNU users to considering using the FreeBSD kernel instead of Linux.
Having everyone using the same kernel just makes life easier for worm writers, and corporate attacks such as the SCO fiasco.
Of course, adoption will be hampered by the marketing mistake of calling the whole OS "Linux", but I hope that choice of kernels will become more normal in the future. It would also help if they came up with a friendlier name than "GNU/KFreeBSD" (8 sylabyls!).
Anyway, I hope to start using the FreeBSD kernel soon.
A friend of mine was in Cuba a few years ago, and he says it's a great place. A brilliant medical system which is government funded, the streets are absolutely safe at night, and the people are friendly and inviting (twice he was invited in for dinner at the houses of two families he met while there).
And then you hear about Cubans trying to get to the US on crappy rafts etc.
Maybe some want to leave because they see American TV shows or movies and they think the whole continent is safe, nice, accepting, etc. Maybe if the Cuban govt. let the population see what the rest of the world is really like, they'd be less enthusiastic to leave Cuba.
I'm not suggesting that Cuba is heaven, but from only looking at TV it would be easy for Cubans to have a romantic grass-is-much-greener vision of what the US is like.
> besides GNU, who else favors info over man?
When I need a quick reference, I use --help, when I need in-depth documentation, I look at an Info manual.
If you don't like the command line 'info' utility, use one of the GNOME or KDE front ends, or try 'info --vi-keys', or try an alternative commandline info reader such as pinfo. (or write your own frontend, the GNU Info file format is very simlpe.)
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page? or how would you break it down into 300 individual pages? How do you turn 650 pages worth of manpages into a printable (and readable) book?
I hated info when I was a newbie, but once you get used to it, it's quite good.
I've been digging through archives, and it seems FSF's Eben Moglen hasn't made public comments about this version of the proposed ASL-2.0, BUT, he has commented on a previous version:
Ebens November 16th comments
Well worth a read, he mentions some of the changes being considered for GPLv3.
For anyone interested in GPLv3. It was supposed to be ready for early 2003, but after a few delays it had to be delayed for a year as Eben had already arranged to have a year off. I think he'll be back soon, so maybe late 2004? (that information is from previous sources in my head, not from the above linked comment. Also, he was still working for FSF during his year off, just not full time. AFAIK.)
Most importantly, it won't come out 'til it's ready. Prof. Moglen deserves a lot more recognition than he gets. He really knows his stuff and the FS community is lucky to have him.
They tried "improving compatibility with GPL-based software", but is it compatible or not?
From a quick read it seems to be a valid Free Software license, but clause 4.d may make it incompatible with the GPL. This would be unfortunate for such a trivial condition. GPL doesn't allow placing additional restrictions on distribution, so is requiring a NOTICE file, and additional restriction?
The patents section might also be GPL-incompatible, but it might be GPLv3-compatible when GPLv3 comes out.
Has anyone seen of any comments from FSF about this?
Altogether, it's a good license, and vastly superior to the last proposal which was ~100 pages long. (slight exageration)
> Clearly, we need to do more.
:)
No, if the poor coutries wanted "more" of what the US deals out, they would have agreed to the Cancun trade round. They rejected it because it sucks, just like the TRIPS agreement.
(and America making use of foreign sweatshop labour is not a form of charity, y'know.)
What the developing nations want, is for the US to take it's foot off their throats so that they can work on building their own economies. Instead, coutries without decent educational systems are currently sinking funds into the prevention of illegal sharing of software and music. Countries with AIDS epidemics are banned from producing the treatments. (and on a less serious note, countries without decent mass transport infrastructures cannot build maglev trains
> Do you think the maglev IP is actually patented in China?
China signed the TRIPS agreement. (as did every developed country and 95% of developing countries.)
The deal was: the rich countries will trade manufactured and agricultural goods with the poor countries, and the poor countries will enforce the patents and copyrights of the rich countries.
The proclaimed trade benefits for the poor countries never happened (and what power do they have to complain?), but the enforcement of patents, trademarks, and copyrights has been enforced (the US threatens to cease trade and cancel IMF and WorldBank funds when the poor get angry). This is why Africa can't manufacture AIDS treatments even though they cost less than 35 cents to manufacture each daily dose.
(For more info, and excellent book is Information Fuedalism, by Peter Drahos)
FSF have the "Award for the Advancement of Free Software". The award ceremony has been at FOSDEM for the last 3 years, not sure where it was held before that.
Previous winners were: Lawrence Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall.
These statistics make us happy, but they're not the whole story.
When we bragg about these numbers, Microsoft respond with:
"Our webserver is used by more Forbes/Fortune 500 companies and is used by more secure websites. Apaches numbers are only high because a lot of amateurs use it".
What is our argument to that? (we don't have one. We just ignore it and continue patting ourselves on the back.)
If we are to progress, it's better to look at what going *wrong*, and try to improve that.
Don't be fooled. That photo is of a 1 meter tall man standing beside Steve Mann
For anyone that hasn't tried it out, the interface is much improved. Great news since this is most peoples biggest gripe.
toolboxes are now dockable with the main toolbox, so you just have one toolbox window, and a window for the image. Also, the image window has a menu bar now.
Is there anyone out there that doesn't use at least one of; email, ftp, irc, IM, streaming media, news or ssh outside of a browser at some time...
After performing an in-depth study of the article summary, I estimate that 24% of people don't do any of these things.