This is the only non-GPLed app you list. It was originally under a proprietary license (pre-OSI days) & was relicensed under a BSD license. It was originally a teaching OS & I would argue that if there were no copyrights, professors would still have a need for teaching & so this program would still be written (of course neglecting prior art which may have truly needed copyrights).
Even under the current license, it "plays fewer games" with copyright law (it isn't copyleft, but still allows for Free/Open distribution). The difference between a BSD-style license and the public domain is basically a statement saying "don't sue me."
The $12 trade in deal is only valid if you purchased a PC with WinXP preinstalled. If you built your own system and installed a retail WinXP the offer doesn't apply.
I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.
First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.
I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.
You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.
You might be joking, but quite a bit is needed to lockdown win32.
Bastille does useful things such as stop unneeded services. The *nux distros I've used have been far better out of the box than win32 machines I've seen. File permissions on win32 are also a nightmare. Bastille also locks down common userland apps. Misconfigured apache on win32 can do as much damage as apache on linux.
I'm a bit surprised that it has been ported to a primarily desktop-OS (OS X), rather than Free/Open/Net-BSD. Anyone know of efforts to get this into ports? Are there already equivalent *BSD tools?
Wikipedia is great & the webapp that it runs on is fantastic. I would like to donate money to the developers (see my URL). I know that I can support Wikimedia Foundation, but was wondering if anyone knew how much of my donation would actually go to development.
Open Sources was a fantastic book, which is available for free from O'Reilly. I enjoyed it & bought a copy even after I read it on my PDA. I eagerly anticipate the second. Does anyone know when it will come out and if it will also be available for free?
While MediaWiki (and other projects) are a snap to setup, The Wiki Way offers an interesting perspective & some good advice.
This all depends what 'distribution' means, but if you distribute GPLed software in binary form, you are obligated to provide the source code to anyone who you distributed the binary to. This would presumably apply within an organization.
It is widely agreed that internal-use doesn't trigger the distribution requirements.
First of all, if you haven't changed the font itself, you have no obligation to provide it to anyone - Just like with GPL'd software.
While your analogy holds true for LGPL, it doesn't for the GPL. ANY redistribution of GPLed software is bound by the GPL & that says that any DERIVED WORKS of GPLed software must also be GPLed. Which is why coders who are writing software under a license more restrictive than the GPL avoid GPLed libraries.
The MS OS is now brain-dead to keep updated--it can be set to perform automatic updates. But updating commercial userland applications is quite a drag--MANY different vendors (some of which make you jump through hoops to prove you are entitled to updates) & almost as many packaging systems for updates & none of it is automated. There have been some apps to keep on top of the more popular packages for you & allow you to update all packages in their database.
But updates on open source desktops are GREAT. The *nix/*BSD distro has already gathered all the packages for you & with a simple 'apt-get update/upgrade' or an 'emerge -u' or a 'make update && portupgrade -ra' (all of which can be cronned & either set to automatically update or email you which packages have been updated) is a good thing!
Once a month or so, we update all apps on our Windows boxes. It requires FAR less interaction to do daily updates on our *nix machines.
E.g. "Have you ever configured a Group Policy before?"
Yes I have, though I would also say that I don't know everything about Windows security.
Security ignorance isn't platform specific. Most modern Linux and *BSD are more "secure by default" than the current versions of windows. I do acknowledge that Windows is getting much better in this department these days & that I actually do believe Redmond is capable of making something every-bit as secure as *nix offernings (though that doesn't mean it'll be something I enjoy using).
By looking at our own stats at my workplace, the largest security problem nowadays is NFS and mis-configured Linux computers. BTW did I also mention that most of the Windows boxes have a far better on-line time than Linux? I know they have to reboot quite often, but that's about it. The reboots are at night-time anyways.
Really? My experience is that ANY desktop sucks--email worms and trojans and spyware is the source of most cruft. A majority of this happens on Windows. My *nix boxes have MUCH better uptimes, but it costs more when they do go down.
This problem is that Linux is still largely a text interface
if you want to tap into any of its power.
The lack of easy GUIs to use power features is universal across OSs. POWER users need a different feature set that would only get in the way of average users.
Go a week without using a shell. Easier said than done.
Well, the "average" desktop user can get by perfectly well with an office suite, a browser, an email client, and little else. It is perfectly possible for Linux to do all of this. Furthermore, there are X-based text editors & configuration applications. I think it is perfectly possible to go a week without using a CLI. What I find more frustrating is when I am on Windows and WANT to tweak some setting or to use a powerful CLI & can't.
For example, when I started using Linux back with Mandrake 6.0, I remember how friggin hard it was to change the screen resoltion in my xwindows session. Mandrake 10 is only mildly better.
I can't speak to these distros. Others automagically make an xorg.conf & have a control panel-like applet to do this.
There are assumptions that Windows users make about where they should find widgets and configuration items. Unfortunately KDE (maybe gnome, but it is junk anyway:> ) just doesn't put them where they are used to seeing them.
Familiarity is important, but not essential. Look at the changes of each incarnation of Windows! Or look at the contrast of Windows and Mac.
They were blown away because they didn't realize it had a desktop and all the fancy programs that Windows has.
I use Linux on the desktop. I'm in the sciences, so many peers do the same. A long-time colleague in an adjacent office walked in, glanced at my desktop, and said "I thought you ran Linux."
All I had displayed was the fluxbox window manager with firefox, gvim, and a matplotlib window from a python session.
I had to switch vterms to convince him, as I was running Linux, as he also assumed Linux was all CLI.
He should've known better too: He wasn't some PHB, but someone who used X11 and fink under OS X! If those who are as technically literate as this don't get Linux, how will the "average consumer" ever get it?
Gimp doesn't have 16 bit support nor some other features which escape me right now.
While Gimp doesn't have every feature in the book, Film Gimp does support 16-bit. There is a push to get this in the mainline. Since we started a "bit-pissing" contest, CinePaint has 32 bit support!
Other people have made very good points about how browser lockin can lead to webapp lockin. Back in the bad old days this was a major issue: people were afreaid that IE would lead to mass adoption of WMV, IIS, and would allow MS to create proprietary web standards by majority. Certainly these fears haven't completely been abated, but I do think MS's ability to do this is worsening.
I also know first-hand from MS employees that some of the justification is much shorter-term. A majority of IE users don't change their home pages or search engines. These can generate significant revenue, as long as they get a lot of users. This is one reason why MS recently improved MSN search--they were embarrassed to discover that their old search engine was profitable, but that profits were shrinking as more and more turned to google.
They have also distributed it but refuse to make the source public. They claim that because of my IP agreement, they have full rights to this source code.
Talk to the legal counsel of the company. Show them the GPLed code you used, and no lawyer would try to lay IP claims over code that WASN'T made in-house.
Furthermore, show them the GPL. Explain that they have two options: (1)Not lay claims on any of your modifications to the GPLed code or (2)Obey the license & release code. If they don't realize that by trying to DISOBEY the license & still release binaries under the proprietary license opens the company up for lawsuits & is costly to shareholders, they don't deserve their job. Write a letter to the CEO to this effect.
In the course of all of this, continue to emphasize that agreements you signed cannot override the licenses written by the original copyright holders. Also tell them how you explained your past work on GPLed projects during your interview so that they won't fire you (to do so would be wrongful termination).
recommending they use tape when they have obviously thought of it and rejected the approach might not be fulfilling certain business requirements they didn't share with us.
He didn't recommend tape. He suggested AMANDA with optical media.
For your amanda suggestion to be complete, you need to offer a solution that also automatically labels the tape cartridges.
AMANDA supports barcode readers. It can also automatically print labels. If you have the hardware to automatically apply the labels to the media, you're more than set.
if I were not a poor college student, I would contribute.
Philanthropy does not require you to be personally wealthy. For one, a small donation from you of $5 will almost certainly help them & not overly burden you. But, as a student, you are in a good position to actually fundraise for them as well. Not only can you encourage your peers to also donate $5, but you can solicit faculty, alumni, and departments to donate much more than $5.
OpenBSD also accepts hardware donations. You can send any spare equipment you have, encourage others to do the same, and/or even dumpster dive for perfectly working components that could use a new home.
The current raid array is using 14 U160 drives in a dual raid5
configuration with a couple of hot spares. It is time to build up. See, the actual cvs machine is just a p3/gig machine. While there are lots of much faster build machines on the network, there has been no reason to crank the processor on cvs. It is not cpu bound but *strictly* IO bound. And the raid configuration has been working very well to keep that IO load under control, well it has been kind of working.
We support more architectures, which means more NFS load is being generated. There are more developers, and that does affect things because developers working fast do checkouts directly off cvs instead of via mirrors. As well, the array is full (it is half 18GB drives and half 36GB drives now due to failures after replacement). All of them are U160 drives.
Now there appears that the raid backplane is developing some issues, and at the same time, it is time for the "every three to four years" replace some parts plan. It's what most IT shops do as well. The drives are also getting a bit up there in age now. Perhaps that is why I am starting to lose them more often.
But if we want more oomph, then it is time to go to U320. It is also time to move towards another raid controller (already have it) which we hope will have supported raid management soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Even under the current license, it "plays fewer games" with copyright law (it isn't copyleft, but still allows for Free/Open distribution). The difference between a BSD-style license and the public domain is basically a statement saying "don't sue me."
See MS link to it here.
I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.
First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.
Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.
I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.
You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.
You might be joking, but quite a bit is needed to lockdown win32.
Bastille does useful things such as stop unneeded services. The *nux distros I've used have been far better out of the box than win32 machines I've seen. File permissions on win32 are also a nightmare. Bastille also locks down common userland apps. Misconfigured apache on win32 can do as much damage as apache on linux.
I'm a bit surprised that it has been ported to a primarily desktop-OS (OS X), rather than Free/Open/Net-BSD. Anyone know of efforts to get this into ports? Are there already equivalent *BSD tools?
I don't use OS X, but if anyone is looking to have a good impact with little effort email jay at bastille-linux.org
Wikipedia is great & the webapp that it runs on is fantastic. I would like to donate money to the developers (see my URL). I know that I can support Wikimedia Foundation, but was wondering if anyone knew how much of my donation would actually go to development.
Open Sources was a fantastic book, which is available for free from O'Reilly. I enjoyed it & bought a copy even after I read it on my PDA. I eagerly anticipate the second. Does anyone know when it will come out and if it will also be available for free?
While MediaWiki (and other projects) are a snap to setup, The Wiki Way offers an interesting perspective & some good advice.
In this case? The fact that the organization which wrote the GPL says so
The MS OS is now brain-dead to keep updated--it can be set to perform automatic updates. But updating commercial userland applications is quite a drag--MANY different vendors (some of which make you jump through hoops to prove you are entitled to updates) & almost as many packaging systems for updates & none of it is automated. There have been some apps to keep on top of the more popular packages for you & allow you to update all packages in their database.
But updates on open source desktops are GREAT. The *nix/*BSD distro has already gathered all the packages for you & with a simple 'apt-get update/upgrade' or an 'emerge -u' or a 'make update && portupgrade -ra' (all of which can be cronned & either set to automatically update or email you which packages have been updated) is a good thing!
Once a month or so, we update all apps on our Windows boxes. It requires FAR less interaction to do daily updates on our *nix machines.
Security ignorance isn't platform specific. Most modern Linux and *BSD are more "secure by default" than the current versions of windows. I do acknowledge that Windows is getting much better in this department these days & that I actually do believe Redmond is capable of making something every-bit as secure as *nix offernings (though that doesn't mean it'll be something I enjoy using).Really? My experience is that ANY desktop sucks--email worms and trojans and spyware is the source of most cruft. A majority of this happens on Windows. My *nix boxes have MUCH better uptimes, but it costs more when they do go down.
All I had displayed was the fluxbox window manager with firefox, gvim, and a matplotlib window from a python session.
I had to switch vterms to convince him, as I was running Linux, as he also assumed Linux was all CLI.
He should've known better too: He wasn't some PHB, but someone who used X11 and fink under OS X! If those who are as technically literate as this don't get Linux, how will the "average consumer" ever get it?
Maximum burn is worth a listen. A good pdf is there too. CD-Rs don't last. But a few tips can make them last a bit longer.
Other people have made very good points about how browser lockin can lead to webapp lockin. Back in the bad old days this was a major issue: people were afreaid that IE would lead to mass adoption of WMV, IIS, and would allow MS to create proprietary web standards by majority. Certainly these fears haven't completely been abated, but I do think MS's ability to do this is worsening.
I also know first-hand from MS employees that some of the justification is much shorter-term. A majority of IE users don't change their home pages or search engines. These can generate significant revenue, as long as they get a lot of users. This is one reason why MS recently improved MSN search--they were embarrassed to discover that their old search engine was profitable, but that profits were shrinking as more and more turned to google.
This isn't TeX!
Furthermore, show them the GPL. Explain that they have two options: (1)Not lay claims on any of your modifications to the GPLed code or (2)Obey the license & release code. If they don't realize that by trying to DISOBEY the license & still release binaries under the proprietary license opens the company up for lawsuits & is costly to shareholders, they don't deserve their job. Write a letter to the CEO to this effect.
In the course of all of this, continue to emphasize that agreements you signed cannot override the licenses written by the original copyright holders. Also tell them how you explained your past work on GPLed projects during your interview so that they won't fire you (to do so would be wrongful termination).
Knuth also made metafont, a programming language to produce rasterized fonts. The version number is converging to e.
OpenBSD also accepts hardware donations. You can send any spare equipment you have, encourage others to do the same, and/or even dumpster dive for perfectly working components that could use a new home.