According to the mailing lists, the current license (1.01) is changed slightly from the one that met OSD (1.0).
Among the changes was the export controls section.
It seems to me that Lucent is looking for someone in the Open Source community to take them up on this lisence and turn around and release it under a looser one, per the LPL. This would remove Lucent by an extra step from the Plan9 source and would probably make them less liable. I'll email them and ask if I read it correctly that this can be done.
Although the intent does not conflict with the GPL I think the requirment of commercial distributors to defend contributors against certain suits might be a show stopper beacause of how it's written. But IANAL; can someone comment on this?
As I understand it SCO is claiming that IBM broke a contract that forbid them to use derivatives of System V (i.e. AIX/w RCU, JFS, etc) in certain ways. If someone at IBM copied over the AIX version of this instead of rewriting (or even looked at the AIX code for guidance), SCO has a pretty solid case, assuming the contract is as SCO claims (according to IBM it is not).
This has noting to do with Linux running on 64 proc machines (execept that without the RCU it would me much slower).
SCO is claiming that Sequent's contract (which IBM is bound to), allows SCO to forbid them from using any code they added to System V in any other system.
IANAL and I havn't seen the contract but I'm thinking the claim is bull. Hopefully a judge will see this.
Fair enough, I hope you guys are having fun and do well. I've got some question's if you'd bother to answer them.
Linux internals are very messy. BSD is a lot cleaner, clean enough that researchers chop it up for use in experimental OSes. Why not start from something that works and has solid hardware support? Was it just more fun to do it from scratch or was there a design reson why reworking an existing system or just using large chunks of code wasn't an option?
I'm no UI expert but the code for X, KDE, and GNOME isn't pretty (and from a user's stand point, the UI isn't friendly). I'm sure that you guys can do a better job. Most people won't get to enjoy the results of your labor though, because your OS isn't compatible with the vast pool of Free and Open software out there. Asking people to take such a huge jump is hard (but not imposible). Why not make a UI to work on top of what's already there? What do current systems not support or do, that you felt compelled to rewrite? What advantages does your design offer over current systems? Can you still display remotely?
It seems a lot of people misunderstood what I was saying (and like I said I could be wrong):
Syllable needs to have a terminal emulator, a text editor, a web browser, etc. and a bunch of other generic apps which are basically the same as the stuff that's out there with any given linux distro or a BSD. For their kernel they have to have a scheduler, a VM system, drivers, file systems, etc. 99% of this code could be take from something already out there - leaving the developers to focus on what they seem to what to do: making something more useable then the horrible, inconsistant UIs that plauge open source today. It seems from the website that most of this code was rewritten. This wastes effort because instead of improving on a current VM system or driver, they wrote their own. They can use someone else's code and still have their own project, still have fun, and get more work done.
That said, the goal of the project seems to be to make a more useable system. Unless I misunderstand the plan of attack, I see no reason they couldn't make a UI (and other extenstions) that works with existing OSes instead of reinventing the wheel on everything else. A compleate OS is a huge undertaking, and I wish them the best of luck, but I don't understand why you need a new OS to have a better UI.
So we have yet another hobby OS with some very good ideas that will never end up going mainstream. After checking the site out, nothing they're doing couldn't be done on top of a BSD or Linux based kernel (with modification ofcourse). This would have solved their hardware problems, and given them a fully working OS to start from, progams and all.
For Open Source and Free Software to succeed people need to stop making "yet another peice of software written from scratch". The strength of having the source is that you can modify it for your own use (like syllable is doing with the GNU tool chain) and not have to re-invent the wheel. The argument of "what's out there isn't good enough" doesn't fly either. You have the source to fix it and make it better!
While this seems like a cool project, it is taking away developers who could be adding the same great features and abilities to our current systems. Then again, maybe I don't understand what they are trying to do.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most people don't have a problem with copyright infringment because the concept of "owning" and idea runs counter to human nature. For many people this is amoral.
Asside from the morality, in any industry with high profit margins there will be a black market of some sort. Companies try to maximize profits by balancing the money they make with a higher margin against the money they don't make when people decide (in this case) to "steal." Recently companies have tried to skirt this choice by making it harder to make copies. Ideally, they would adjust their bussiness model to counter the threat of cheep information processing, but there is strong pressure from the market(an olygopoly) to not change. This causes companies to spend insane amounts of cash in the short term to avoid changing, even when it would benifit them in the long-run.
I think you misunderstood his claim: The automotive industry does not design something only for luxury cars. Whenever something is designed there is a roadmap that has it get moved down to cheeper cars as kinks are worked out.
There are some very cool active safty systems in the pipes that go way beyond voice control and huds.
Example: Automakers are doing research into safe cruise control systems that keep you from drifting in your lane and from hitting the person in front of you. Timeframe = ~10years
42V cars will save auto makers money. Since cars are built with the idea of "we need a car that costs x and can at least do y", you'll still pay the same but you'll get more.
I don't think that's why he's saying. I'll use an example:
In my office there is an SGI system we bought ~6 year ago for doing visualization work. After about 1 year of using it, we needed more power. Did we go with a new SGI? No we went with a Linux box and an NVidia graphics card. The system was over 8 times as fast. It also cost 1/4 as much.
I think what the grandparent was says was that Sun should use Linux and make cheep, powerful x86 based workstations much like they are doing with servers.
First off where are you going and what are you doing? For reference I go to Kettering University and I'm an Electrical Engineer.
Most schools have pretty good computer labs (including Unix ones). Unless you want to do your work in your room, you can rely on the schools pcs for getting school work done.
There really are only 2 things having your own computer is good for:
1. You can take it to class and use it there for doing circuits, solving diff eqs, notes, etc.
2. You can use it for entertainment (movies, games, music, p2p). If you are into this, go on and get a computer that can do what you want, and learn to excercise a little self control. Plus not having to go to the lab to do VHDL stuff is nice. I've known guys who couldn't get their act together and played games and failed out; but these guys would have failed out even without the games, they wern't serious or interested and would have found another way to not do work. Don't let the parrent convince you games are bad, not being able to manage your time that you should watch out for.
Laptop vs. Desktop:
Laptops cost a lot more and don't have the power. I looked into it and decided to spend my money on a desktop instead. I spent a lot of cash and went from having a 400Mhz PII to having dual Xeons. Making CS levels and doing 3d modeling (my hobbies) was a lot easier. Now that I'm in higher engineering courses, not having to go to school (I live off campus) to do work is nice, and I wouldn't have much use for a laptop in class. I'd still go with the desktop (actually I'd get a shuttle system since they are small).
Other things to bring/think about:
Calculator: I recomend the HP-49. Make sure you get one that has graphing, matrix manipulation, imaginary numbers, easy vector handling (all function and conversion), and understands differential equations. If you must get a TI, go with the 89 but you'll probably be happier with an HP-49.
Pack light, don't bring stuff you won't use: i.e. get a tv-in card for your pc instead of bringing a tv.
Get out and do other things, college is a great time for learning who you are and trying new things. Go to different meetings of clubs and see if what they do interests you. Meet people, and make friends; don't confine yourself to a small group. Go out for greek rush even if you have no desire to join! It's free food and events. You'll have a good time. Look around campus and find a fraternity that seems to mesh with you (there'll be a few), grab some friends and show up for one of their events. Not all greek letter orgs are about drinking and partying (for example the Kettering Chapter of Delta Chi has a dry house, and a bunch of members into gaming (we still maintain the highest grades on campus and have more members in clubs, and government then anyone else).
Remember, to have fun and try new things, the most important parts of college are in the social skills and experiences you have outside of the classroom.
> Where I live it's two houses. You, by your own
> voluntary choice, want a house in an area where
> houses are expensive, whose fault is that?
When my dad bought his house he paid less then $30,000 for it. Land values have gone up faster then income. If he leaves me the house, I won't be able to afford the $1,000,000 tax on it. I'll have to sell it. Somehow the land costing more is my fault?
There are loopholes in the tax law that let someone who can afford an army of lawyers get around it. This tax encourages large corporations and trust funds while punishing the little guy.
I have had friends who lost their family bussinesses or farms because of the "death tax." These are ordinary middle class people who owned buildings or land that happened to be appraised at a value that outweighs what they can realistically make off it.
I have the Game Cube version. I thought the game was pretty cool. Was it the "best" game I ever played? No. But it was fun, and the extra content was cool. I didn't experience any of the "bugs" people are talking about on the other platforms.
Graphics: They could be better but the animation is fairly realistic.
Sound: Gets a little repetative but it's well scripted
Gameplay: Controls were easy to grasp and very responsive
AI: Computer AI was pretty diverse (police do really stupid stuff and look dumbfounded when you run on the walls, agents casually dodge your hits and then beat the snot out of you).
Difficulty: I thought it was a little too easy
Overall 6/10
Were these pictures taken at different times or what? These don't even look like the same guy.
Among the changes was the export controls section.
It seems to me that Lucent is looking for someone in the Open Source community to take them up on this lisence and turn around and release it under a looser one, per the LPL. This would remove Lucent by an extra step from the Plan9 source and would probably make them less liable. I'll email them and ask if I read it correctly that this can be done.
yeh, I misread your post. couldn't fix it after I posted though.
It seems that this rewrite was an attempt to address Richard's concerns. That said I think some of these issues may still be valid, but IANAL.
Although the intent does not conflict with the GPL I think the requirment of commercial distributors to defend contributors against certain suits might be a show stopper beacause of how it's written. But IANAL; can someone comment on this?
This has noting to do with Linux running on 64 proc machines (execept that without the RCU it would me much slower).
I think you missunderstand. SCO is claiming IBM violated contracts reguarding derivative works of System V. See also: this and this.
IANAL and I havn't seen the contract but I'm thinking the claim is bull. Hopefully a judge will see this.
Thanks for filling me in. Are there any docs on your site that descibe in more detail the design of the system? I was unable to find any.
Linux internals are very messy. BSD is a lot cleaner, clean enough that researchers chop it up for use in experimental OSes. Why not start from something that works and has solid hardware support? Was it just more fun to do it from scratch or was there a design reson why reworking an existing system or just using large chunks of code wasn't an option?
I'm no UI expert but the code for X, KDE, and GNOME isn't pretty (and from a user's stand point, the UI isn't friendly). I'm sure that you guys can do a better job. Most people won't get to enjoy the results of your labor though, because your OS isn't compatible with the vast pool of Free and Open software out there. Asking people to take such a huge jump is hard (but not imposible). Why not make a UI to work on top of what's already there? What do current systems not support or do, that you felt compelled to rewrite? What advantages does your design offer over current systems? Can you still display remotely?
That said, the goal of the project seems to be to make a more useable system. Unless I misunderstand the plan of attack, I see no reason they couldn't make a UI (and other extenstions) that works with existing OSes instead of reinventing the wheel on everything else. A compleate OS is a huge undertaking, and I wish them the best of luck, but I don't understand why you need a new OS to have a better UI.
For Open Source and Free Software to succeed people need to stop making "yet another peice of software written from scratch". The strength of having the source is that you can modify it for your own use (like syllable is doing with the GNU tool chain) and not have to re-invent the wheel. The argument of "what's out there isn't good enough" doesn't fly either. You have the source to fix it and make it better!
While this seems like a cool project, it is taking away developers who could be adding the same great features and abilities to our current systems. Then again, maybe I don't understand what they are trying to do.
Asside from the morality, in any industry with high profit margins there will be a black market of some sort. Companies try to maximize profits by balancing the money they make with a higher margin against the money they don't make when people decide (in this case) to "steal." Recently companies have tried to skirt this choice by making it harder to make copies. Ideally, they would adjust their bussiness model to counter the threat of cheep information processing, but there is strong pressure from the market(an olygopoly) to not change. This causes companies to spend insane amounts of cash in the short term to avoid changing, even when it would benifit them in the long-run.
Note: I'm 100% legal.
I think you misunderstood his claim: The automotive industry does not design something only for luxury cars. Whenever something is designed there is a roadmap that has it get moved down to cheeper cars as kinks are worked out.
There are some very cool active safty systems in the pipes that go way beyond voice control and huds. Example: Automakers are doing research into safe cruise control systems that keep you from drifting in your lane and from hitting the person in front of you. Timeframe = ~10years
42V cars will save auto makers money. Since cars are built with the idea of "we need a car that costs x and can at least do y", you'll still pay the same but you'll get more.
I don't think that's why he's saying. I'll use an example:
In my office there is an SGI system we bought ~6 year ago for doing visualization work. After about 1 year of using it, we needed more power. Did we go with a new SGI? No we went with a Linux box and an NVidia graphics card. The system was over 8 times as fast. It also cost 1/4 as much.
I think what the grandparent was says was that Sun should use Linux and make cheep, powerful x86 based workstations much like they are doing with servers.
First off where are you going and what are you doing? For reference I go to Kettering University and I'm an Electrical Engineer.
Most schools have pretty good computer labs (including Unix ones). Unless you want to do your work in your room, you can rely on the schools pcs for getting school work done.
There really are only 2 things having your own computer is good for:
1. You can take it to class and use it there for doing circuits, solving diff eqs, notes, etc.
2. You can use it for entertainment (movies, games, music, p2p). If you are into this, go on and get a computer that can do what you want, and learn to excercise a little self control. Plus not having to go to the lab to do VHDL stuff is nice. I've known guys who couldn't get their act together and played games and failed out; but these guys would have failed out even without the games, they wern't serious or interested and would have found another way to not do work. Don't let the parrent convince you games are bad, not being able to manage your time that you should watch out for.
Laptop vs. Desktop: Laptops cost a lot more and don't have the power. I looked into it and decided to spend my money on a desktop instead. I spent a lot of cash and went from having a 400Mhz PII to having dual Xeons. Making CS levels and doing 3d modeling (my hobbies) was a lot easier. Now that I'm in higher engineering courses, not having to go to school (I live off campus) to do work is nice, and I wouldn't have much use for a laptop in class. I'd still go with the desktop (actually I'd get a shuttle system since they are small).
Remember, to have fun and try new things, the most important parts of college are in the social skills and experiences you have outside of the classroom.
But I don't WANT to sell it. I want to keep it. But I don't have that choice because we have to "tax the rich".
> Where I live it's two houses. You, by your own > voluntary choice, want a house in an area where > houses are expensive, whose fault is that? When my dad bought his house he paid less then $30,000 for it. Land values have gone up faster then income. If he leaves me the house, I won't be able to afford the $1,000,000 tax on it. I'll have to sell it. Somehow the land costing more is my fault?
There are loopholes in the tax law that let someone who can afford an army of lawyers get around it. This tax encourages large corporations and trust funds while punishing the little guy.
I have had friends who lost their family bussinesses or farms because of the "death tax." These are ordinary middle class people who owned buildings or land that happened to be appraised at a value that outweighs what they can realistically make off it.
I have the Game Cube version. I thought the game was pretty cool. Was it the "best" game I ever played? No. But it was fun, and the extra content was cool. I didn't experience any of the "bugs" people are talking about on the other platforms. Graphics: They could be better but the animation is fairly realistic. Sound: Gets a little repetative but it's well scripted Gameplay: Controls were easy to grasp and very responsive AI: Computer AI was pretty diverse (police do really stupid stuff and look dumbfounded when you run on the walls, agents casually dodge your hits and then beat the snot out of you). Difficulty: I thought it was a little too easy Overall 6/10