Believe me I do appreciate that "anti-American != terrorist", but the US President has articulated an equality between those two things in his September 21, 2001 speech to congress (which you can find on the Whitehouse web site here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20 010920-8.html) in which he states:
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
Right, so he's such a big believer in this open source stuff that he runs a proprietary software company, Opsware. I mean what has this guy actually done that deserves a front page story connecting him with open source. He wasn't the one who decided (or even proposed) to open source Netscape Navigator; he's just a guy that got rich off of someone else's idea.
1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
Hello? Yes, Apache, Sendmail, BIND etc. are used extensively, but how about those Sun boxes and Cisco devices doing all the routing?
2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
I don't see how this means that OSS is going to succeed, it just seems like a fact. Anyhow RMS was doing Free Software using tapes and the USPS long before the Internet came along.
3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
True, but proprietary companies also use the Internet for development, so how is this important?
4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
Maybe.
5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Great. Thanks, so you manage to put Open Source and anti-American in a sentence. That's the last thing that OSS needs: "OSS developed by terrorists". Stop splitting the world into American and anti-American; it's not that simple, and surely the number of people who sit that and go "I'm going to develop this cool software because I hate America" must be tiny. Most of them are doing it for the glory.
6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
Yes, true.
7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
I don't even understand this.
8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
Hmm. Ever talk to IBM about running Linux on Big Iron? Not everything is Intel and if it were wouldn't that mean that Intel could charge whatever they like for a processor and make servers expensive again?
9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
Yes, they are.
10. "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
Oh man, this guy is out of touch. Go to any large organization (Shell Oil, JP Morgan, HBO,...) and you'll find software developers developing stuff for internal use. In fact I'll wager that more LOC are written outside the "software business" than in it.
11. "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
Wow, the insights never stop.
12. "It's free."
Very unimportant. A far more important issue is TCO; if you can make a good TCO argument then a CIO is going to buy into it.
How about one designed for men? The Epson I have seems to have been designed to be used by a robot.
I mean a real man's printer would weigh about 100 pounds, have a titanium shell, be able to hold 1,000 sheets of paper at a time. The cables that come with it would be an inch thick with massive connectors on each end that make satisfying "clunk" sounds when plugged in and lock into place. Every component would be made of steel: form feed would be achieved by pulling some burnished lever requiring manly strength that would mechanically push the paper through. And paper jams? There'd be no paper jams, if the paper wasn't in the right place the printer would crush it into oblivion.
Oh and the GIMP-Print people would already have a driver for it ready to go when I bring it home.
No, the key to making Linux a success is getting frikking copy and paste between applications to work, oh and maybe getting applications to understand the printers that I've got set up in CUPS, oh maybe when I click on a link in Thunderbird Firefox could open the page, oh and maybe the other n thousand things that Windows actually does right for the average user.
Disclaimer: I use GNOME/Linux is my primary desktop, day in day out, there are things I love about it, but the average user experience stinks. Creating a frikkin games distro isn't going to help.
John.
Now /. covers maintenance releases?
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can understand it being front page news if a significant project like KDE releases a significant release, but seriously why does a maintenance release make it to the front page?
I released POPFile v0.21.0, perhaps I should have submitted a story?
And while we're it at, could we stop with the posturing "the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux".
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Either than or it's X FREE 86 where 86 is some position that involves finding a woman with two heads.
/. please explain some of these difficult to understand terms: I mean I know what GIMP, DMCA, MP3, PARC, DSL, DRM, DVD and NSA mean, but who's this John Kerry and this Jane Fonda?
In case you hadn't noticed different countries have different standards of what's considered "acceptable" behavior:
In the US it's acceptable for the government to kill people who have be convicted of certain crimes if sentenced to death by a court.
In France it's acceptable for a TV ad for shower gel to show a naked woman soaping her breasts.
In Iran it's acceptable for women to be stoned to death for adultery.
So web sites should be no different. If in the UK it's considered unacceptable to have these types of sites then it's OK for the UK to not wanted them hosted there.
It might go against your "First Amendment" nirvana principles, but try this one out in the US to test "your rights online": start a free web site with pictures of child pornography; I think you'll find that that's considered unacceptable in the US.
TAYLOR: Just because you have more people looking at the code does not guarantee a level of quality, because those people might not be the most-qualified people to do code review. I'm not [making] a disparaging comment on the open-source community. I'm just simply saying that more in number does not mean it's more in quality.
That's so true: on my project the number of bogus comments I get from "programmers" out there is unbelievable. Give me one good, dedicated engineer, over a bazaar full of mediocre software engineers any day.
If you RTFA then you'll find that Apple didn't "sample" the song at all. Jeez. Can we get some standards here? The entire "story" here is that hip hop artists sample and then one is complaining about sampling, except that he isn't...
For all the people here talking smack about Microsoft, just consider the opposite situation: imagine some GPL code was found to be in Microsoft's code. You'd all be screaming for the GPL to be enforced (and the bedrock of the GPL is copyright law).
So STFU and listen to Microsoft for once, they are absolutely correct to be defending their copyrighted work as hard as they can. As much as anyone here who has copyrighted code (like me) and releases it under the GPL should be prepared to fight to defend that copyright from infringement.
And to those suggesting that we *need* Freenet to protect ourselves from Microsoft so that we can freely swap their copyrighted code: STFU. Stop inciting people to break the law. Without laws like copyright to protect us you get anarchy, and you do not want that.
> Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask > Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's > when I just checked.
Yes, and the last time I checked Sun had a market cap. of $19.2B and RedHat had a market cap of $3.2B. The actual share price is irrelevant in this discussion. Sun is 6 times the size of RedHat on market cap.
In addition look at their balance sheets. Sun has assets worth $12B, RedHat has $440M. So Sun has assets worth 27 times RedHat's.
So how does the fact that the Sun share price is lower than RedHat's figure into this?
I mean this is just another stop along the way which has brought us the original Yahoo! directory, Altavista, Inktomi, Hotbot, Metacrawler, MSN Search,..., Google, etc.
It's hardly worth thinking about. So Yahoo! dropped Google: good for them. The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation. After all, Google innovated like hell to be better than the other engines, now let's see what Yahoo! (or others) can do to be better than Google.
This doesn't have to be portrayed as some kind of war: that assumes that you take sides, and I'm not willing to be on Google's side. If something better comes along I'll switch.
> I'd rather tell my boss I didn't have time to completely test, than tell my boss the code doesn't exist yet.
At the company I work for the rule is that code isn't finished until there's a test suite for it. My general experience is that code without tests doesn't work.
> This is the old way of thinking. When you see the answer, I'm sure you'll jump on board.
I did a PhD at Oxford in the Programming Research Group and studied Z, CSP and all that stuff. My thesis even includes a program written in Occam proven via an algebra to meet a security specification.
Believe me, I'm aware of what the world could be like, but it is not practical to write real software this way yet. Hence we still need to test, and not enough people write tests today. Unit and system testing are best practices for the industry today, sure, there's a better theoretical way to do things, but I need to code in 2004 not 2054.
I'm with you on the formal methods, they'd be great if they were practical. I was a PhD student at Oxford's Programming Research Group and did study formal methods, but for real-world programming examples writing a good test suite as the pragmatic thing to do today.
I agree that it takes work and it takes work to keep the test suite up to date. It's a discipline to write new code and write the tests to go with it, but I truly believe it's worth it. The number of times I've changed something in POPFile and run the test suite only to find that my new code was wrong, or affected something else, makes me feel that it's worthwhile.
Yes, I agree with that statement, but given that it's impractical for real-world programmers to do a formal proof from a specification to code, I'd rather write tests.
It's true that there's lots of work going on with things like the Z notation and work on getting the specifications right, but real world examples of soup to nuts products of formally specified and proven code are few and far between.
I find it enlightening that this article does not include the word "test" once. Rather than spending a lot of time hoping that the purest use of OO technology or some other fancy boondoggle is going to make software better actually writing tests that describe the expected behaviour of the program is a damn fine way to make sure that it actually works.
Picking just one program from my experience, POPFile: intially we had no test suite, it quickly became apparent that the entire project was unmanageable without one and I stopped all development to write from scratch a test suite for 100% of the code (currently stands around 98% code coverage). It's particularly apparent when you don't have all day to spend fixing bugs because the project is "in your spare time" that it's vital to have fully automatic testing. You simply don't have time to waste fixing bugs (of course if you are being paid for it then you do:-)
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft could have filled the building with special bugging devices that would enable them to get their hands on the code that RMS is writing.
Oh wait.
John.
"To cite as an example or means of proof in an argument."
adduce
Right, so he's such a big believer in this open source stuff that he runs a proprietary software company, Opsware. I mean what has this guy actually done that deserves a front page story connecting him with open source. He wasn't the one who decided (or even proposed) to open source Netscape Navigator; he's just a guy that got rich off of someone else's idea.
...) and you'll find software developers developing stuff for internal use. In fact I'll wager that more LOC are written outside the "software business" than in it.
1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
Hello? Yes, Apache, Sendmail, BIND etc. are used extensively, but how about those Sun boxes and Cisco devices doing all the routing?
2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
I don't see how this means that OSS is going to succeed, it just seems like a fact. Anyhow RMS was doing Free Software using tapes and the USPS long before the Internet came along.
3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
True, but proprietary companies also use the Internet for development, so how is this important?
4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
Maybe.
5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Great. Thanks, so you manage to put Open Source and anti-American in a sentence. That's the last thing that OSS needs: "OSS developed by terrorists". Stop splitting the world into American and anti-American; it's not that simple, and surely the number of people who sit that and go "I'm going to develop this cool software because I hate America" must be tiny. Most of them are doing it for the glory.
6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
Yes, true.
7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
I don't even understand this.
8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
Hmm. Ever talk to IBM about running Linux on Big Iron? Not everything is Intel and if it were wouldn't that mean that Intel could charge whatever they like for a processor and make servers expensive again?
9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
Yes, they are.
10. "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
Oh man, this guy is out of touch. Go to any large organization (Shell Oil, JP Morgan, HBO,
11. "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
Wow, the insights never stop.
12. "It's free."
Very unimportant. A far more important issue is TCO; if you can make a good TCO argument then a CIO is going to buy into it.
John.
How about one designed for men? The Epson I have seems to have been designed to be used by a robot.
I mean a real man's printer would weigh about 100 pounds, have a titanium shell, be able to hold 1,000 sheets of paper at a time. The cables that come with it would be an inch thick with massive connectors on each end that make satisfying "clunk" sounds when plugged in and lock into place. Every component would be made of steel: form feed would be achieved by pulling some burnished lever requiring manly strength that would mechanically push the paper through. And paper jams? There'd be no paper jams, if the paper wasn't in the right place the printer would crush it into oblivion.
Oh and the GIMP-Print people would already have a driver for it ready to go when I bring it home.
John.
No, the key to making Linux a success is getting frikking copy and paste between applications to work, oh and maybe getting applications to understand the printers that I've got set up in CUPS, oh maybe when I click on a link in Thunderbird Firefox could open the page, oh and maybe the other n thousand things that Windows actually does right for the average user.
Disclaimer: I use GNOME/Linux is my primary desktop, day in day out, there are things I love about it, but the average user experience stinks. Creating a frikkin games distro isn't going to help.
John.
I released POPFile v0.21.0, perhaps I should have submitted a story?
And while we're it at, could we stop with the posturing "the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux".
John.
I don't have time to read a document hundreds of pages long, especially not one that's packed with information: I need a quick summary.
Could someone post a one line summary? For example,
Linux good; Microsoft bad; SCO evil; RMS god.
John.
Perhaps they can get it to run Windows, sell them on rolls and I'll be able to wipe my butt with Microsoft on a daily basis.
John.
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Either than or it's X FREE 86 where 86 is some position that involves finding a woman with two heads.
John.
...for average US penis size.
:-)
Luckily, I'm British and we're only number 9 on the list
John.
/. please explain some of these difficult to understand terms: I mean I know what GIMP, DMCA, MP3, PARC, DSL, DRM, DVD and NSA mean, but who's this John Kerry and this Jane Fonda?
John.
> What the hell is This Thing?
Dude, that's clearly an Orgasmotron.
John.
It doesn't exist, get over it.
In case you hadn't noticed different countries have different standards of what's considered "acceptable" behavior:
In the US it's acceptable for the government to kill people who have be convicted of certain crimes if sentenced to death by a court.
In France it's acceptable for a TV ad for shower gel to show a naked woman soaping her breasts.
In Iran it's acceptable for women to be stoned to death for adultery.
So web sites should be no different. If in the UK it's considered unacceptable to have these types of sites then it's OK for the UK to not wanted them hosted there.
It might go against your "First Amendment" nirvana principles, but try this one out in the US to test "your rights online": start a free web site with pictures of child pornography; I think you'll find that that's considered unacceptable in the US.
John.
TAYLOR: Just because you have more people looking at the code does not guarantee a level of quality, because those people might not be the most-qualified people to do code review. I'm not [making] a disparaging comment on the open-source community. I'm just simply saying that more in number does not mean it's more in quality.
That's so true: on my project the number of bogus comments I get from "programmers" out there is unbelievable. Give me one good, dedicated engineer, over a bazaar full of mediocre software engineers any day.
John.
If you RTFA then you'll find that Apple didn't "sample" the song at all. Jeez. Can we get some standards here? The entire "story" here is that hip hop artists sample and then one is complaining about sampling, except that he isn't...
John.
Why, oh why, do they keep coming up with these silly "destory or deflect the asteroid" schemes? Such "inside the box" thinking.
When is someone going to focus on the important alternative: how about moving Earth out of the way instead?
John.
For all the people here talking smack about Microsoft, just consider the opposite situation: imagine some GPL code was found to be in Microsoft's code. You'd all be screaming for the GPL to be enforced (and the bedrock of the GPL is copyright law).
So STFU and listen to Microsoft for once, they are absolutely correct to be defending their copyrighted work as hard as they can. As much as anyone here who has copyrighted code (like me) and releases it under the GPL should be prepared to fight to defend that copyright from infringement.
And to those suggesting that we *need* Freenet to protect ourselves from Microsoft so that we can freely swap their copyrighted code: STFU. Stop inciting people to break the law. Without laws like copyright to protect us you get anarchy, and you do not want that.
John.
> Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask
> Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's
> when I just checked.
Yes, and the last time I checked Sun had a market cap. of $19.2B and RedHat had a market cap of $3.2B. The actual share price is irrelevant in this discussion. Sun is 6 times the size of RedHat on market cap.
In addition look at their balance sheets. Sun has assets worth $12B, RedHat has $440M. So Sun has assets worth 27 times RedHat's.
So how does the fact that the Sun share price is lower than RedHat's figure into this?
John.
Or not.
..., Google, etc.
I mean this is just another stop along the way which has brought us the original Yahoo! directory, Altavista, Inktomi, Hotbot, Metacrawler, MSN Search,
It's hardly worth thinking about. So Yahoo! dropped Google: good for them. The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation. After all, Google innovated like hell to be better than the other engines, now let's see what Yahoo! (or others) can do to be better than Google.
This doesn't have to be portrayed as some kind of war: that assumes that you take sides, and I'm not willing to be on Google's side. If something better comes along I'll switch.
John.
> I'd rather tell my boss I didn't have time to completely test, than tell my boss the code doesn't exist yet.
At the company I work for the rule is that code isn't finished until there's a test suite for it. My general experience is that code without tests doesn't work.
John.
> This is the old way of thinking. When you see the answer, I'm sure you'll jump on board.
I did a PhD at Oxford in the Programming Research Group and studied Z, CSP and all that stuff. My thesis even includes a program written in Occam proven via an algebra to meet a security specification.
Believe me, I'm aware of what the world could be like, but it is not practical to write real software this way yet. Hence we still need to test, and not enough people write tests today. Unit and system testing are best practices for the industry today, sure, there's a better theoretical way to do things, but I need to code in 2004 not 2054.
John.
I'm with you on the formal methods, they'd be great if they were practical. I was a PhD student at Oxford's Programming Research Group and did study formal methods, but for real-world programming examples writing a good test suite as the pragmatic thing to do today.
I agree that it takes work and it takes work to keep the test suite up to date. It's a discipline to write new code and write the tests to go with it, but I truly believe it's worth it. The number of times I've changed something in POPFile and run the test suite only to find that my new code was wrong, or affected something else, makes me feel that it's worthwhile.
John.
Yes, I agree with that statement, but given that it's impractical for real-world programmers to do a formal proof from a specification to code, I'd rather write tests.
It's true that there's lots of work going on with things like the Z notation and work on getting the specifications right, but real world examples of soup to nuts products of formally specified and proven code are few and far between.
John.
I find it enlightening that this article does not include the word "test" once. Rather than spending a lot of time hoping that the purest use of OO technology or some other fancy boondoggle is going to make software better actually writing tests that describe the expected behaviour of the program is a damn fine way to make sure that it actually works.
:-)
Picking just one program from my experience, POPFile: intially we had no test suite, it quickly became apparent that the entire project was unmanageable without one and I stopped all development to write from scratch a test suite for 100% of the code (currently stands around 98% code coverage). It's particularly apparent when you don't have all day to spend fixing bugs because the project is "in your spare time" that it's vital to have fully automatic testing. You simply don't have time to waste fixing bugs (of course if you are being paid for it then you do
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
John.