I can't use BK because I use CVS and have sent them a patch for a bug once.
I can't use BK because I am a Debian project head, apply patches to lots of software including CVS, and hence I can't use it.
I'll pick a license which cannot be taken under my feet because LM feels like doing it.
You people have a problem, in that you mistake politics for what it really is. Politics is about seeing long ranged issues before they hit you and adjusting for it.
The rules are likely illegal, and LM kept changing the rules. Eventually they would have been broken. It is quite obvious he came into this deal with the intention of doing a bait and switch.
Actually the open source community is only against proprietary protocol and data storage formats. The software license being "open" is only a requirement in the free software community.
Whatever he uses in his home is his own problem. But once the tries to foist it on the kernel developers, which are a loosely knit community, it is another thing altogether.
It was a grave strategic mistake to rely on a proprietary product for storing and transmitting data which was in a proprietary format, which also had a revokeable license which even went to the point of forbidding someone who worked on a competing product to work on it or reverse-engineering for interoperability.
How would you like it if Microsoft's OS user license forbid you to work on any software development which could compete with their products? The terms are draconian, even more so than the license terms Microsoft usually uses.
It may have been a good tactical solution, to solve the tool problem he had at the moment, but you should never commit that mistake. It can lead you to winning a battle that will result in you losing the war. A Pyrrhic victory. Thankfully the consequences are bad, but not irrecuperable. Similar to the stupid tactics used by planners in WWI which led to massive waste of human life, albeith not costing the war, this ordeal will cost dearly in terms of transitioning costs, not to mention the costs to develop the alternative tools. This will surely delay Linux kernel development by several months.
Linus is still trying to spin this as if it was a good idea, that it increased the rate of development two times because he learned to trust other developers more, so it wasn't all bad. The problem is, this is self-delusion. Those are all social fixes which were problems in his working social model and are totally orthogonal to BK.
He could just as well be using CVS to get his social fix, and given rights to Morton to commit to the tree, plus some other personnel. If the problem was about bickering because of ego stroking, just wipe the kernel tree committers names from the output or the history so no one knows who has rights or who did what.
This is another example of not using tools which already exist for no good reason. If he cannot track his patches, he could have just made a ticket system available to the public.
Many other projects of the same size use these tools (e.g. CVS, Bugzilla) and they work. If he does not like their social model, fine. Use a different one. These tools will still work, just be a bit more clumbsy. But still orders of magnitude less clumbsy than a mailing-list, and handpicking patches from his mail box.
I still have not even seen him make a detailed public request list with what he wants on his model. I am certain someone in the community would work on it, if he wanted to help develop it, all the better. His main problem as a manager seems to be that he does not know how to delegate tasks and always wants to do everything by himself.
That is the problem. It is like catching up with a moving target. The manufacturers have the specs and lots of advance time before release to make the drivers. While an open source programmer's work would be for obsolete cards by the time he was finished reverse-engineering, implementing and debugging his own.
Drivers have software code paths in places either there is no GPU support for, or in cases where the CPU would beat the GPU doing that. Drivers also have a bundle of kludges around each particular chip revision quirks.
It is bogus. I have had discussions with NVIDIA people before. They seem to think that since they only design the chip, but send it off to manufacture on a foundry like TSMC, and that since most of their chips have a high degree of hardware ISA compatibility, if they released their drivers someone would make a compatible hardware design of their own and send it to a foundry to manufacture.
They think their biggest asset is their feature complete and quite stable drivers, and that anyone can easily compete with them for hardware in the market. They feel their whole business model is based on "IP", which is to mean chip designs and driver source code.
In other words, they rely on a proprietary business model, and they wish to keep it that way, because it makes them more money.
Indeed that is the main problem. Mobile power. Not just for things like power suits, but for other things like laser or plasma weapons, etc.
Unfortunately, the best we have in terms of density is hydrocarbon fuel. Nuclear would be nice, or anti-matter, provided someone gets it to work on a small unit.
BTW, I read that article now. It is a mere statistical study. It only says that people taking care of other people with dementia get dementia more easily. They forget, the dementia may be caused by environmental factors, and the people who got it first were simply more sensitive to it.
That reminds me an anedocte of last time someone I know tried to do a statistical study on incomplete medical data. The analysis tool coughed out that all male piano players had cavities. On closer inspection, it was revealed that the database had only twenty people in it and only one was a piano player.
That is his way of being self delusional about it. Some people pick up the pieces after doing something wrong and learn a lesson. Others just pick up the pieces and carry on business as usual. Even if he wanted proprietary, I am sure there are solutions with less obnoxious licenses than BitMovers.
He has the source, but he no longer has the revision history, from what I heard. This also means his schedule was interrupted and I suspect it will take a while to recover. People will have to re-learn their tools all over again and they cannot ease the transition because they lost access to the old tools.
As for the productivity gains claimed (2x), I suspect that was due to organizational, not technical differences. From what I read, Linus now delegates more responsibility to his lieutenants, that is probably what made the difference. If all that was necessary was a tree which his lieutenants could commit to and on which he had the final control, he could have just used CVS like everyone else. As for speed, CVS should be fast enough, or otherwise large projects like OpenOffice.org (from Sun Microsystems, for who Larry seemingly used to work doing on his SCM) or Mozilla wouldn't be using it.
If Linus wanted something better, he could have just asked for it or even better, started it. The BSD people seem to be creating their own CVS replacement for example.
Stress is overrated. People think they have it so hard these days. How about back when your food easily could kill you (mammoth trample), you had to run and struggle to catch your food, you had to walk miles everyday to get food, or move to a place with food or water, etc.
Stress is a symptom of other problems, not a cause, the way of your body telling you you are doing something very wrong in maintaining it. The sooner everyone realizes this, the happier they will be.
RMS was right and Linus was wrong this time. Next time someone calls RMS a paranoid or that Linus says the only thing that matters is if it works, not the license, you know what to do.
PS: I have also called RMS a paranoid before about licensing issues, but later I learned that he is usually right. The annoying git.:-)
Winning wars is not just about money. The Macedonians weren't that rich, but they easily defeated the whole Persian empire.
It is more about tactics, training, morale, in short, people. Large differences in technology have tilted the scales somewhat, but people are still the most important factor.
Slashdot Mirror
A good despot surrounds himself with experienced advisers and listens to them. Armed with the extra information, he makes a decision.
I can't use BK because I use CVS and have sent them a patch for a bug once.
I can't use BK because I am a Debian project head, apply patches to lots of software including CVS, and hence I can't use it.
I'll pick a license which cannot be taken under my feet because LM feels like doing it.
You people have a problem, in that you mistake politics for what it really is. Politics is about seeing long ranged issues before they hit you and adjusting for it.
The rules are likely illegal, and LM kept changing the rules. Eventually they would have been broken. It is quite obvious he came into this deal with the intention of doing a bait and switch.
Actually the open source community is only against proprietary protocol and data storage formats. The software license being "open" is only a requirement in the free software community.
Whatever he uses in his home is his own problem. But once the tries to foist it on the kernel developers, which are a loosely knit community, it is another thing altogether.
How would you like it if Microsoft's OS user license forbid you to work on any software development which could compete with their products? The terms are draconian, even more so than the license terms Microsoft usually uses.
It may have been a good tactical solution, to solve the tool problem he had at the moment, but you should never commit that mistake. It can lead you to winning a battle that will result in you losing the war. A Pyrrhic victory. Thankfully the consequences are bad, but not irrecuperable. Similar to the stupid tactics used by planners in WWI which led to massive waste of human life, albeith not costing the war, this ordeal will cost dearly in terms of transitioning costs, not to mention the costs to develop the alternative tools. This will surely delay Linux kernel development by several months.
Linus is still trying to spin this as if it was a good idea, that it increased the rate of development two times because he learned to trust other developers more, so it wasn't all bad. The problem is, this is self-delusion. Those are all social fixes which were problems in his working social model and are totally orthogonal to BK.
He could just as well be using CVS to get his social fix, and given rights to Morton to commit to the tree, plus some other personnel. If the problem was about bickering because of ego stroking, just wipe the kernel tree committers names from the output or the history so no one knows who has rights or who did what.
This is another example of not using tools which already exist for no good reason. If he cannot track his patches, he could have just made a ticket system available to the public.
Many other projects of the same size use these tools (e.g. CVS, Bugzilla) and they work. If he does not like their social model, fine. Use a different one. These tools will still work, just be a bit more clumbsy. But still orders of magnitude less clumbsy than a mailing-list, and handpicking patches from his mail box.
I still have not even seen him make a detailed public request list with what he wants on his model. I am certain someone in the community would work on it, if he wanted to help develop it, all the better. His main problem as a manager seems to be that he does not know how to delegate tasks and always wants to do everything by himself.
BitKeeper, not BitTorrent.
Hint: They have Bastard Operator from Hell articles too.
That isn't even the worst of it. The worst is, from that I understand, that he is still self-deluding himself that this is the right thing to do.
SiS and VIA are both Taiwanese companies, and rival companies at that.
That is the problem. It is like catching up with a moving target. The manufacturers have the specs and lots of advance time before release to make the drivers. While an open source programmer's work would be for obsolete cards by the time he was finished reverse-engineering, implementing and debugging his own.
Drivers have software code paths in places either there is no GPU support for, or in cases where the CPU would beat the GPU doing that. Drivers also have a bundle of kludges around each particular chip revision quirks.
They think their biggest asset is their feature complete and quite stable drivers, and that anyone can easily compete with them for hardware in the market. They feel their whole business model is based on "IP", which is to mean chip designs and driver source code.
In other words, they rely on a proprietary business model, and they wish to keep it that way, because it makes them more money.
Unfortunately, the best we have in terms of density is hydrocarbon fuel. Nuclear would be nice, or anti-matter, provided someone gets it to work on a small unit.
That reminds me an anedocte of last time someone I know tried to do a statistical study on incomplete medical data. The analysis tool coughed out that all male piano players had cavities. On closer inspection, it was revealed that the database had only twenty people in it and only one was a piano player.
A fever is also a symptom and fever also kills. A symptom can get to the point where it is worse than the problem it is signalling.
He has the source, but he no longer has the revision history, from what I heard. This also means his schedule was interrupted and I suspect it will take a while to recover. People will have to re-learn their tools all over again and they cannot ease the transition because they lost access to the old tools.
As for the productivity gains claimed (2x), I suspect that was due to organizational, not technical differences. From what I read, Linus now delegates more responsibility to his lieutenants, that is probably what made the difference. If all that was necessary was a tree which his lieutenants could commit to and on which he had the final control, he could have just used CVS like everyone else. As for speed, CVS should be fast enough, or otherwise large projects like OpenOffice.org (from Sun Microsystems, for who Larry seemingly used to work doing on his SCM) or Mozilla wouldn't be using it.
If Linus wanted something better, he could have just asked for it or even better, started it. The BSD people seem to be creating their own CVS replacement for example.
Stress is a symptom of other problems, not a cause, the way of your body telling you you are doing something very wrong in maintaining it. The sooner everyone realizes this, the happier they will be.
There are other cheap alternatives, like the superguns. The problem is they are high-G, so some types of cargo may not survive the launch.
Gosling Emacs (1981) is posterior to Stallman's Emacs (1976). See this history timeline. At best you may say it started as something based on TECO.
PS: I have also called RMS a paranoid before about licensing issues, but later I learned that he is usually right. The annoying git. :-)
Find all about Hot Dry Rock geothermal energy here.
It is more about tactics, training, morale, in short, people. Large differences in technology have tilted the scales somewhat, but people are still the most important factor.
War is the pursuit of diplomacy by more vigorous means.
War is a regulatory instrument between states, that enables economically weaker states to feed on someone else's wealth and hence achieve balance.
Whatever is cheaper. For a totalitarian state with food shortages, I can guess at which will be cheaper.