Pfiffle! At university my first programming class was in Pascal on UCSD P-System. The very next class, Algorithms and Data Structures, required using C on BSD UNIX. The first assignment was handed out the first monday and due in one week. None of us had used C. None of us had used BSD UNIX. But we all managed to learn it and get our first assignment done.
Re:The finer points of gross misunderstanding
on
BusyBox Goes 1.0.0
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· Score: 1
Obviously, that page is talking about those who used busybox in the development of products, and failed to hold up their end of the license bargain.
So should there be a "Hall of Shame" for those who use/em? GCC in the development of products but don't release the source code?
You should stop spouting cliched homilies and engage your brain for a couple of seconds. The parent probably was monitoring their child. One minute she looks over and little Timmie is playing tic-tac-toe. The next minute she looks over and little Timmie is drawing to an inside straight...
While I think it is stupid for this mom to be complaining about the evils of gambling, it's going a bit beyond silly to suggest that she wasn't supervising her child properly. Do you want her to put a leash on the kid? Sit in his lap? Lock him in a closet until he's eighteen?
Re:The finer points of gross misunderstanding
on
BusyBox Goes 1.0.0
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The GPL community needs to get it through its thick skull that words have meanings. When the Busybox site has several prominent admonitions not to *use* the software, then it should surprise no one that people continue to think that the GPL restricts usage of the software.
It's irrelevant how much Bush has had to dodge this, since I'm not supporting Bush either. When I first saw these memos they looked suspicious to me. "Proportional font? Possible but not likely." So I said so. I was called a conspiratorial nutbag. About an hour later I had conducted the "MSWord Default Settings Test", and produced an exact duplicate of one of the memos. When I said this I was called a conspiratorial nutbag.
One shouldn't have to take sides on an issue of fact, and the fact was that the documents were frauds. But the Democrats never let facts get in the way calling people conspiratorial nutbags.
I realize you meant this to be funny, but maybe if the Democrats didn't take their own propaganda so seriously, they wouldn't have instinctively believed that memo to be genuine. To put it another way, no matter how many times UFOs have been debunked, some people continue to fall for the flimsiest manufactured UFO "evidence".
p.s. I'm still waiting for an apology from all those people who called me a conspiratorial nutbag for doubting the authenticity of those memos in the beginning. Of course I'll never get one, because it's against the Democrat code of honor to admit a mistake. "It's not our fault! Karl Rove did it!"
It's forensics. You can trace bullet to a specific gun using forensics. You can trace a typewritten page to a specific typewriter using forensics. This is just a way to do the same thing with printers.
My state is "safe" too. I have a friend who has spent the last eight years telling everyone how green he is. Everytime he utters a political opinion, it's prefaced with "I've been a registered Green since 1996, and I think...". He's got a Cobb bumpersticker. Yada, yada, yada.
Anyway, several weeks ago a Democrat challenged him, "but you're going to vote for Kerry, right?" My friend answered that he was still going to vote for Cobb because "California is a safe state."
WTF! If you only follow them when it's "safe" to do so, then they are not principles. And people who do so are not principled.
Casting a vote for Cobb only because you're assured Kerry is going to win your state, is the moral equivalent of voting for Kerry to begin with. Stop lying to yourself!
The GPL does not require disclosure of source code for *use* of the software. It also does not require one to *release* the source code, only provide it to customers. The Busybox hall of shame page seems to have gross misunderstanding of the GPL.
Companies that distribute busybox as a component of an embedded system do need to make the source code available to its customers. But this is a different thing than "use". The Busybox page employs the word "use", which is in error. In addition, "releasing" the source code is not necessary, you only have to available. According to some readings of the GPL, if you don't modify the sources, you could even get away with merely providing a link to the Busybox ftp site!
From 4.x to 5.3-RELEASE, you're going to have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff, so that an in-place upgrade isn't recommended. Heck, it's going to take you much longer than a minute to run mergemaster.
In the meantime, I would be putting 5.3-RC on a test system to work out the issues.
even plain old boring conscientious stewardship of the duties of the Presidency would place him miles above Bush in terms of qualifications & stature
So why the hell won't he campaign on that? Why aren't his supporters talking about that? To me that's a pretty damn big reason to consider Kerry, but NO! The Dems have to keep talking about Bush! They could have nominated a nudibranch and the campaign rhetoric would have been identical.
Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser
on
Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 1
XUL is not a standard. It may be open but you need more than that to be a standard. HTML is a standard, CSS is a standard, ECMAscript is a standard, and even Java is a standard. XUL is not.
I live in the SF bay area. "Letting out steam" at Bush is the regional pasttime. You would think I would be used to it by now, but I'm not. It's so fucking annoying I want to scream.
Once, just one, would you guys please stop "letting out steam" and put forth a cogent, rational and CALM argument for your side? You're like lemmings after the nuke button was pushed: quivering in rage until you pop. For the life of my I couldn't tell you what Kerry stands for, because his "supporters" are too busy slamming Bush to tell me anything at all about Kerry.
"Duh! He's not Bush, isn't that good enough for you!"
Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser
on
Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed
Except that it only works on Mozilla browsers. I don't care how open source Mozilla is, these kinds of applications only perpetuate the idea that one must standardize on a particular browser. This application-is-the-standard mindset must go.
Right now my work is deploying IE web apps as fast as they possibly can. It's not annoying that I have to switch over to IE to use these, it's annoying that I have to switch over from my currently open browser to begin with, regardless of brand or openness.
Your argument is so utterly powerful that I am stunned by the magnitude of its force. Your rhetoric is sublime and your mastery of the facts unassailable. I think you have single handedly managed to convince twenty thousand diehard Bush voters to swing the other way.
Those commercial unices were "based on" BSD. That's much different from a fork.
Other than BSD/OS, the other Unix that was closed to BSD was SunOS. But guess who started SunOS? Yet another BSD author by the name of Bill Joy! Funny though, this fork also happened before free and complete BSD sources were available. You may think this has no relevance, but it has every relevance because you cannot fork from an open source code base if the code base is not open source!
p.s. Oh, now that I think about it, NeXT probably counts as a true fork. So there's one that forked AFTER the BSD sources got unencumbered. One point for you. But funny thing is, the next time Steve Jobs went to fork off of BSD, he bent over backwards to keep it open source. Maybe he learned a lesson with NeXT.
The BSD projects are notorious for producing multiple incompatible forks, some of those forks being proprietary
The only proprietary BSD fork was BSD/OS, but that was a fork created by one of the orginal developers. And that fork actually predates any of the current free and open source BSD projects. Thus, your use of the word "notorious" borders on the disingenuous.
Except that we aren't seeing Slashdot stories on where to get flu shots. However we are getting plenty of stories that poor defenseless Democrats are being disenfranchised by unscrupulous Republicans. While I am a Libertarian and am disenfranchised by BOTH uscrupulous paties, it seems to me that the Democrats have made whining an art form. This story is just one more instance of this.
Because this old news. Stuff like this has been happening ever since you had to mark an affiliation on the voter registration form. Because it is so easy to detect, this kind of crime is not common. But if you think it's only supporters of Bush that are doing this, you are naive.
Putting this story on the front page would be like posting "mafia caught runnning prostitution ring". Yawn.
Your argument misses the point. I don't have to pay anyone to use the pythagorean theorem in my proprietary product. I don't need to follow a license. I don't need to get permission from his descendents. If someone asked for the original theorem I could tell them to take a hike. I could even take a copy of the theorem, encrypt it and encase it in a vault, and no one would care. IT IS TRULY FREE!
But do the same thing with GPL software and people go nuts. Fifty million copies of Linux, but put just one instance under a non-GPL license and people go apeshit. It's clear that Linux does not really belong to the same class of information as the pythagorean theorem.
In fact, now that I think about it, what people are "protecting" with the GPL is not the software itself, since the software is merely information and needs no protection. Instead what is being protected is a "taboo". Like a copy of the pythagorean theorem locked in a vault, one single proprietary instance of Linux out of millions of GPL licensed copies and thousands of repositories is *NOT* going to damage Linux. But one such proprietary instance will violate the TABOO. And that means the tribe will have to put on feathers and paint and go to war...
The 3-clause BSD licence is poisonous, because it allows someone effectively to turn an open-source product into a closed-source one, just by not distributing the source code.
Not "poisonous" at all. Keep your FUD out of this. While one can take BSD licensed source code and create a binary closed source product, this is not "poisonous". The orginal source code is still there. The orginal project is still there.
It would be like someone taking one apple from a free apple tree and locking it up. Are people going to be screaming "he poisoned the tree" when he locks up one apple? Of course not!
Slashdot Mirror
Pfiffle! At university my first programming class was in Pascal on UCSD P-System. The very next class, Algorithms and Data Structures, required using C on BSD UNIX. The first assignment was handed out the first monday and due in one week. None of us had used C. None of us had used BSD UNIX. But we all managed to learn it and get our first assignment done.
Obviously, that page is talking about those who used busybox in the development of products, and failed to hold up their end of the license bargain.
So should there be a "Hall of Shame" for those who use/em? GCC in the development of products but don't release the source code?
You should stop spouting cliched homilies and engage your brain for a couple of seconds. The parent probably was monitoring their child. One minute she looks over and little Timmie is playing tic-tac-toe. The next minute she looks over and little Timmie is drawing to an inside straight...
While I think it is stupid for this mom to be complaining about the evils of gambling, it's going a bit beyond silly to suggest that she wasn't supervising her child properly. Do you want her to put a leash on the kid? Sit in his lap? Lock him in a closet until he's eighteen?
The GPL community needs to get it through its thick skull that words have meanings. When the Busybox site has several prominent admonitions not to *use* the software, then it should surprise no one that people continue to think that the GPL restricts usage of the software.
Oh I see. Because one side has not apologized to me, it's okay for the other side not to apologize either. I understand now.
Wonderful threat about shitheads and borderline criminals. But I'm still waiting for my apology...
It's irrelevant how much Bush has had to dodge this, since I'm not supporting Bush either. When I first saw these memos they looked suspicious to me. "Proportional font? Possible but not likely." So I said so. I was called a conspiratorial nutbag. About an hour later I had conducted the "MSWord Default Settings Test", and produced an exact duplicate of one of the memos. When I said this I was called a conspiratorial nutbag.
One shouldn't have to take sides on an issue of fact, and the fact was that the documents were frauds. But the Democrats never let facts get in the way calling people conspiratorial nutbags.
I'm still waiting for the apology.
Actually, third parties have won in the past. Does the name "Abraham Lincoln" mean anything to you?
Frankly I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
I realize you meant this to be funny, but maybe if the Democrats didn't take their own propaganda so seriously, they wouldn't have instinctively believed that memo to be genuine. To put it another way, no matter how many times UFOs have been debunked, some people continue to fall for the flimsiest manufactured UFO "evidence".
p.s. I'm still waiting for an apology from all those people who called me a conspiratorial nutbag for doubting the authenticity of those memos in the beginning. Of course I'll never get one, because it's against the Democrat code of honor to admit a mistake. "It's not our fault! Karl Rove did it!"
It's forensics. You can trace bullet to a specific gun using forensics. You can trace a typewritten page to a specific typewriter using forensics. This is just a way to do the same thing with printers.
My state is "safe" too. I have a friend who has spent the last eight years telling everyone how green he is. Everytime he utters a political opinion, it's prefaced with "I've been a registered Green since 1996, and I think...". He's got a Cobb bumpersticker. Yada, yada, yada.
Anyway, several weeks ago a Democrat challenged him, "but you're going to vote for Kerry, right?" My friend answered that he was still going to vote for Cobb because "California is a safe state."
WTF! If you only follow them when it's "safe" to do so, then they are not principles. And people who do so are not principled.
Casting a vote for Cobb only because you're assured Kerry is going to win your state, is the moral equivalent of voting for Kerry to begin with. Stop lying to yourself!
The GPL does not require disclosure of source code for *use* of the software. It also does not require one to *release* the source code, only provide it to customers. The Busybox hall of shame page seems to have gross misunderstanding of the GPL.
Companies that distribute busybox as a component of an embedded system do need to make the source code available to its customers. But this is a different thing than "use". The Busybox page employs the word "use", which is in error. In addition, "releasing" the source code is not necessary, you only have to available. According to some readings of the GPL, if you don't modify the sources, you could even get away with merely providing a link to the Busybox ftp site!
From 4.x to 5.3-RELEASE, you're going to have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff, so that an in-place upgrade isn't recommended. Heck, it's going to take you much longer than a minute to run mergemaster.
In the meantime, I would be putting 5.3-RC on a test system to work out the issues.
even plain old boring conscientious stewardship of the duties of the Presidency would place him miles above Bush in terms of qualifications & stature
So why the hell won't he campaign on that? Why aren't his supporters talking about that? To me that's a pretty damn big reason to consider Kerry, but NO! The Dems have to keep talking about Bush! They could have nominated a nudibranch and the campaign rhetoric would have been identical.
XUL is not a standard. It may be open but you need more than that to be a standard. HTML is a standard, CSS is a standard, ECMAscript is a standard, and even Java is a standard. XUL is not.
I live in the SF bay area. "Letting out steam" at Bush is the regional pasttime. You would think I would be used to it by now, but I'm not. It's so fucking annoying I want to scream.
Once, just one, would you guys please stop "letting out steam" and put forth a cogent, rational and CALM argument for your side? You're like lemmings after the nuke button was pushed: quivering in rage until you pop. For the life of my I couldn't tell you what Kerry stands for, because his "supporters" are too busy slamming Bush to tell me anything at all about Kerry.
"Duh! He's not Bush, isn't that good enough for you!"
Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed
Except that it only works on Mozilla browsers. I don't care how open source Mozilla is, these kinds of applications only perpetuate the idea that one must standardize on a particular browser. This application-is-the-standard mindset must go.
Right now my work is deploying IE web apps as fast as they possibly can. It's not annoying that I have to switch over to IE to use these, it's annoying that I have to switch over from my currently open browser to begin with, regardless of brand or openness.
Your argument is so utterly powerful that I am stunned by the magnitude of its force. Your rhetoric is sublime and your mastery of the facts unassailable. I think you have single handedly managed to convince twenty thousand diehard Bush voters to swing the other way.
Those commercial unices were "based on" BSD. That's much different from a fork.
Other than BSD/OS, the other Unix that was closed to BSD was SunOS. But guess who started SunOS? Yet another BSD author by the name of Bill Joy! Funny though, this fork also happened before free and complete BSD sources were available. You may think this has no relevance, but it has every relevance because you cannot fork from an open source code base if the code base is not open source!
p.s. Oh, now that I think about it, NeXT probably counts as a true fork. So there's one that forked AFTER the BSD sources got unencumbered. One point for you. But funny thing is, the next time Steve Jobs went to fork off of BSD, he bent over backwards to keep it open source. Maybe he learned a lesson with NeXT.
The BSD projects are notorious for producing multiple incompatible forks, some of those forks being proprietary
The only proprietary BSD fork was BSD/OS, but that was a fork created by one of the orginal developers. And that fork actually predates any of the current free and open source BSD projects. Thus, your use of the word "notorious" borders on the disingenuous.
Except that we aren't seeing Slashdot stories on where to get flu shots. However we are getting plenty of stories that poor defenseless Democrats are being disenfranchised by unscrupulous Republicans. While I am a Libertarian and am disenfranchised by BOTH uscrupulous paties, it seems to me that the Democrats have made whining an art form. This story is just one more instance of this.
Because this old news. Stuff like this has been happening ever since you had to mark an affiliation on the voter registration form. Because it is so easy to detect, this kind of crime is not common. But if you think it's only supporters of Bush that are doing this, you are naive.
Putting this story on the front page would be like posting "mafia caught runnning prostitution ring". Yawn.
Your argument misses the point. I don't have to pay anyone to use the pythagorean theorem in my proprietary product. I don't need to follow a license. I don't need to get permission from his descendents. If someone asked for the original theorem I could tell them to take a hike. I could even take a copy of the theorem, encrypt it and encase it in a vault, and no one would care. IT IS TRULY FREE!
But do the same thing with GPL software and people go nuts. Fifty million copies of Linux, but put just one instance under a non-GPL license and people go apeshit. It's clear that Linux does not really belong to the same class of information as the pythagorean theorem.
In fact, now that I think about it, what people are "protecting" with the GPL is not the software itself, since the software is merely information and needs no protection. Instead what is being protected is a "taboo". Like a copy of the pythagorean theorem locked in a vault, one single proprietary instance of Linux out of millions of GPL licensed copies and thousands of repositories is *NOT* going to damage Linux. But one such proprietary instance will violate the TABOO. And that means the tribe will have to put on feathers and paint and go to war...
The 3-clause BSD licence is poisonous, because it allows someone effectively to turn an open-source product into a closed-source one, just by not distributing the source code.
Not "poisonous" at all. Keep your FUD out of this. While one can take BSD licensed source code and create a binary closed source product, this is not "poisonous". The orginal source code is still there. The orginal project is still there.
It would be like someone taking one apple from a free apple tree and locking it up. Are people going to be screaming "he poisoned the tree" when he locks up one apple? Of course not!