Linux really has very few problems with userspace backward compatibility. What did you have in mind?
Merely my brief experience with Gentoo, when they first upgraded glibc (from 2.2 to 2.3 iirc) and broke half the packages, then downgraded it again and broke everything else. This is really a pet peeve: aren't minor versions supposed to be compatible? And a zillion similar but smaller-scale annoyances, well expressed by Bill Paul many years ago and the years haven't eased the pain all that much.
And BSDs are more likely to introduce binary incompatibilities
Clearly you haven't used the BSDs. You may have library incompatibilities between major versions, but just install the earlier "compat libraries" and you're set. I upgraded from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 -- a huge upgrade, over 2 years in the making -- and all my software just worked, even complex stuff like KDE and Mozilla that had been compiled under 4.x.
because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music
All of them.
Dave Brubeck can't.
Django Reinhardt couldn't.
Paco de Lucia can't (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India).
From that interview, it sounds like DragonFly is going to have a different package management system in the future. Which means either the base is going to change,
The BSD base isn't packaged. BSD types like having a source tree for their entire base system and being able to do "make buildworld" and "make installworld" to upgrade it. The package management system is entirely for third party applications. This is not Debian or Gentoo who have no code maintained by themselves other than installation and package management stuff. The BSDs maintain the kernel, the libc, other key libraries, and all the base utilities like ls, cp, mount, etc. And there's also a lot of "contrib" software in the base system -- some of it necessary to build the system (gcc and binutils), some of it just there out of tradition or regarded as "too useful to be moved to ports" (bind, sendmail).
They do have ISOs, click the "download" link on their main page. The ISO is a liveCD, so you can boot your computer with it, like knoppix (no X or GUI stuff though). What they don't have is a friendly installer. But the/README file has detailed instructions on installing it to the hard disk, which should be easy if you have BSD experience, or if you're a brave newbie you can try it anyway.
Which is unfortunate in many ways. For example, Matt has introduced variant symlinks into DragonFly, and has major plans involving vfs namespaces etc which will really solve a lot of problems in package management, like allowing two different conflicting versions of a package to exist at the same time. He can do all this because he's looking at the whole picture, and so are the others: the entire source tree for the base system is there on my machine, in one nicely-arranged subdirectory. I don't foresee major changes happening in the linux kernel driven by distributors. To this day, breakages with binary-incompatible glibc etc are constant annoyances with linux unless you choose a stable distributed version from a branded linux distro and stick to it.
the linux kernel is what "linux is supposed to look like" to linus.
What is "the linux kernel"? There's a Red Hat kernel, a Mandrake kernel, a SuSE kernel, and you can't really drop a generic Linus kernel into any of the commercial distros and expect it to work properly. (Debian and Gentoo are better.)
I'm not dissing linux, it's better than the mainstream alternatives and has far better hardware support and graphical system administration tools than the BSDs. In fact after 2 years with FreeBSD I myself had switched to Linux on my new machine because of hardware issues (I've now mostly switched to DragonFly and the hardware issues are mostly gone). And I use Linux at work and have no desire to change that. But there are reasons why a lot of technically aware people find the BSDs nicer systems to play with.
I suppose NetBSD has some sort of port system as well.
Weird that you ask that, since you answer it a few lines later. It's pkgsrc, thus called because "port" is NetBSD's term for a separate architecture on which it runs. Pkgsrc originally came from FreeBSD's ports system.
I don't think so. BSDi acquired Walnut Creek, who maintained both Slackware and FreeBSD. BSDi wasn't interested in Slackware and got rid of it. Later, Wind River acquired BSDi.
Indeed, Wind River had bought BSDi, which had earlier bought Walnut Creek and acquired close ties with FreeBSD; thus quite a few FreeBSD developers ended up working with Wind River. But the honeymoon didn't last long... I have no idea what went wrong. But even now they claim ownership of the BSD, BSD/OS and FreeBSD trademarks... There has been a long-term plan for the FreeBSD Foundation to get control of the trademark, but I don't know where that's at.
With me it's the opposite: I use emacs for complex work, and vi for quick and dirty stuff (mainly because I'm used to vi, switched to emacs relatively late...)
Maybe the article only describes what US call centres are like. I've had pretty good experience with support staff from India (I could make out from their accents, and even smalltalked with them a bit sometimes). So that's another reason apart from cost to migrate the support jobs...
Stallman himself knows better. I noted zlib in another post; more recently, he supported the licence switch of the Ogg Vorbis libraries to the BSD licence. Even now, it's hard enough to push vorbis to commercial companies; LGPL wouldn't have had a prayer.
Name a single counterexample of a GPL'd library shipped as part of a commercial OS.
Let's take two examples here: first, zlib. It was released under the BSD licence, not GPL, because it was important to wean people off the LZW-patent-encumbred compress. And it made it to commercial systems. But take, on the other hand, the readline library. This could have been immensely useful to a lot of commercial vendors, and Stallman knew it, so he used the GPL (not even LGPL) to try and "force" third party code to be GPL'd. As a result, nobody outside the free software world uses it.
One could say that to the contrary a copylefted X Window System would have had less forking (widgets, servers, extensions, drivers)
Are you saying GPL projects don't fork? For an early counterexample, see emacs/xemacs. Even with the linux kernel, every distribution now maintains its own version, and it's rather hard to drop a vanilla Linus kernel into Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake and expect it to run the same. But forking wasn't the point. The point with the GPL is that commercial vendors would not have picked a windowing system based on it, because shipping it as part of their system would have meant GPL'ing every graphical program they wrote, thanks to the virality clause. Name a single counterexample of a GPL'd library shipped as part of a commercial OS.
Some time ago Doug Rabson posted a wishlist
of features that would be needed to move FreeBSD to subversion (from CVS). Any idea on progress on these features? The site seems to be slashdotted.
Subversion overall looks very nice. However, I do have some issues with it. Namely, it's released under the Apache/BSD license, which I'm not completely comfortable with.
What a strange statement. Do you use XFree86? OpenSSH? There's any amount of such software out there under similar licences, and if the original BSD TCP/IP stack hadn't been under such a licence, it's doubtful the internet would be as interoperable as it is today, and if X hadn't been under the MIT licence, we'd be stuck with a bunch of incompatible proprietary windowing systems.
you seriously think the government can "provide" a standard of living to a billion people
It's a communist government. That's their job:)
That's exactly what's wrong with communism. The government's only source of income is taxes. If 80% of the population is rich, you can tax them and provide welfare to the remaining 20% (like in Europe), but if 80% are poor, you cannot possibly give them handouts by taxing the remaining 20% to any rational degree. And if you impose ridiculous tax rates like 80% on the rich, you kill their incentive to earn and destroy the economy.
BTW, the Chinese govt has realised this for a couple of decades now; today China is communist only politically, not economically.
We went to war during the great depression. A war that wasn't directly against us (until Pearl Harbor).
I'm not sure what they teach in history classes these days. The US went to war only after Pearl Harbour. Until then, which means when France and most of Western Europe had been occupied and the Nazis had been at Britain's doorstep for several months, the US was neutral---precisely because the war "wasn't directly against us".
the USA did it and more (and its population paid the price in taxes, but it could afford it, being a truly rich country)
Yeah, tell that to the chap sleeping on the streets outside my doorstep, the people begging on the subway, the wretched homes in the Bronx and New Jersey, people living in shantytowns all over the midwest, south, etc.
Oh yes, "welfare" is only a dirty word if the US Government says about it, no?
Really -- assuming you're an american and have been brought up in the American way of thinking -- do you seriously think the government can "provide" a standard of living to a billion people? No government has that kind of money. You improve the standard of living by stimulating the economy and creating jobs. You do that, in part, by spurring science and technological research. The post-war defence and space programmes are a big reason for the US's economic superpower status today. (You also need a market economy, which the USSR didn't have, but China's developing one.)
Lighten up. This is nothing compared to the Bush jokes you'll see here. And for all Bush's defects, his government is still a shade less totalitarian than the Chinese one, most people would agree.
Looks like they're pointing out the JFS, EVMA and RCU stuff which everyone knows IBM contributed and probably did modify from IBM's/Dynix's own code. The dispute is about whether SCO has any rights to that code in the first place.
IHT (the other paper named in the article) is a Paris-based English-language newspaper owned by the New York Times.
Really, did you need to go to whois to discover something that's plainly written at the bottom of the page? More proofs that moderators don't actually read articles any more than posters do.
Slashdot Mirror
Merely my brief experience with Gentoo, when they first upgraded glibc (from 2.2 to 2.3 iirc) and broke half the packages, then downgraded it again and broke everything else. This is really a pet peeve: aren't minor versions supposed to be compatible? And a zillion similar but smaller-scale annoyances, well expressed by Bill Paul many years ago and the years haven't eased the pain all that much.
And BSDs are more likely to introduce binary incompatibilities
Clearly you haven't used the BSDs. You may have library incompatibilities between major versions, but just install the earlier "compat libraries" and you're set. I upgraded from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 -- a huge upgrade, over 2 years in the making -- and all my software just worked, even complex stuff like KDE and Mozilla that had been compiled under 4.x.
All of them.
Dave Brubeck can't. Django Reinhardt couldn't. Paco de Lucia can't (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India).
The BSD base isn't packaged. BSD types like having a source tree for their entire base system and being able to do "make buildworld" and "make installworld" to upgrade it. The package management system is entirely for third party applications. This is not Debian or Gentoo who have no code maintained by themselves other than installation and package management stuff. The BSDs maintain the kernel, the libc, other key libraries, and all the base utilities like ls, cp, mount, etc. And there's also a lot of "contrib" software in the base system -- some of it necessary to build the system (gcc and binutils), some of it just there out of tradition or regarded as "too useful to be moved to ports" (bind, sendmail).
They do have ISOs, click the "download" link on their main page. The ISO is a liveCD, so you can boot your computer with it, like knoppix (no X or GUI stuff though). What they don't have is a friendly installer. But the /README file has detailed instructions on installing it to the hard disk, which should be easy if you have BSD experience, or if you're a brave newbie you can try it anyway.
Which is unfortunate in many ways. For example, Matt has introduced variant symlinks into DragonFly, and has major plans involving vfs namespaces etc which will really solve a lot of problems in package management, like allowing two different conflicting versions of a package to exist at the same time. He can do all this because he's looking at the whole picture, and so are the others: the entire source tree for the base system is there on my machine, in one nicely-arranged subdirectory. I don't foresee major changes happening in the linux kernel driven by distributors. To this day, breakages with binary-incompatible glibc etc are constant annoyances with linux unless you choose a stable distributed version from a branded linux distro and stick to it. the linux kernel is what "linux is supposed to look like" to linus.
What is "the linux kernel"? There's a Red Hat kernel, a Mandrake kernel, a SuSE kernel, and you can't really drop a generic Linus kernel into any of the commercial distros and expect it to work properly. (Debian and Gentoo are better.)
I'm not dissing linux, it's better than the mainstream alternatives and has far better hardware support and graphical system administration tools than the BSDs. In fact after 2 years with FreeBSD I myself had switched to Linux on my new machine because of hardware issues (I've now mostly switched to DragonFly and the hardware issues are mostly gone). And I use Linux at work and have no desire to change that. But there are reasons why a lot of technically aware people find the BSDs nicer systems to play with.
Weird that you ask that, since you answer it a few lines later. It's pkgsrc, thus called because "port" is NetBSD's term for a separate architecture on which it runs. Pkgsrc originally came from FreeBSD's ports system.
I don't think so. BSDi acquired Walnut Creek, who maintained both Slackware and FreeBSD. BSDi wasn't interested in Slackware and got rid of it. Later, Wind River acquired BSDi.
Indeed, Wind River had bought BSDi, which had earlier bought Walnut Creek and acquired close ties with FreeBSD; thus quite a few FreeBSD developers ended up working with Wind River. But the honeymoon didn't last long... I have no idea what went wrong. But even now they claim ownership of the BSD, BSD/OS and FreeBSD trademarks... There has been a long-term plan for the FreeBSD Foundation to get control of the trademark, but I don't know where that's at.
With me it's the opposite: I use emacs for complex work, and vi for quick and dirty stuff (mainly because I'm used to vi, switched to emacs relatively late...)
That's a new one to me. I must find some pico users to have flamewars with over that one...
Maybe the article only describes what US call centres are like. I've had pretty good experience with support staff from India (I could make out from their accents, and even smalltalked with them a bit sometimes). So that's another reason apart from cost to migrate the support jobs...
Stallman himself knows better. I noted zlib in another post; more recently, he supported the licence switch of the Ogg Vorbis libraries to the BSD licence. Even now, it's hard enough to push vorbis to commercial companies; LGPL wouldn't have had a prayer.
Must be something to do with the BSD-like licence. FreeBSD has been a victim many times.
Time for a new acronym: BSD=Beware of SlashDot?
Name a single counterexample of a GPL'd library shipped as part of a commercial OS.
Let's take two examples here: first, zlib. It was released under the BSD licence, not GPL, because it was important to wean people off the LZW-patent-encumbred compress. And it made it to commercial systems. But take, on the other hand, the readline library. This could have been immensely useful to a lot of commercial vendors, and Stallman knew it, so he used the GPL (not even LGPL) to try and "force" third party code to be GPL'd. As a result, nobody outside the free software world uses it.
Are you saying GPL projects don't fork? For an early counterexample, see emacs/xemacs. Even with the linux kernel, every distribution now maintains its own version, and it's rather hard to drop a vanilla Linus kernel into Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake and expect it to run the same. But forking wasn't the point. The point with the GPL is that commercial vendors would not have picked a windowing system based on it, because shipping it as part of their system would have meant GPL'ing every graphical program they wrote, thanks to the virality clause. Name a single counterexample of a GPL'd library shipped as part of a commercial OS.
Some time ago Doug Rabson posted a wishlist of features that would be needed to move FreeBSD to subversion (from CVS). Any idea on progress on these features? The site seems to be slashdotted.
What a strange statement. Do you use XFree86? OpenSSH? There's any amount of such software out there under similar licences, and if the original BSD TCP/IP stack hadn't been under such a licence, it's doubtful the internet would be as interoperable as it is today, and if X hadn't been under the MIT licence, we'd be stuck with a bunch of incompatible proprietary windowing systems.
That's exactly what's wrong with communism. The government's only source of income is taxes. If 80% of the population is rich, you can tax them and provide welfare to the remaining 20% (like in Europe), but if 80% are poor, you cannot possibly give them handouts by taxing the remaining 20% to any rational degree. And if you impose ridiculous tax rates like 80% on the rich, you kill their incentive to earn and destroy the economy.
BTW, the Chinese govt has realised this for a couple of decades now; today China is communist only politically, not economically.
I'm not sure what they teach in history classes these days. The US went to war only after Pearl Harbour. Until then, which means when France and most of Western Europe had been occupied and the Nazis had been at Britain's doorstep for several months, the US was neutral---precisely because the war "wasn't directly against us".
Yeah, tell that to the chap sleeping on the streets outside my doorstep, the people begging on the subway, the wretched homes in the Bronx and New Jersey, people living in shantytowns all over the midwest, south, etc.
Oh yes, "welfare" is only a dirty word if the US Government says about it, no?
Really -- assuming you're an american and have been brought up in the American way of thinking -- do you seriously think the government can "provide" a standard of living to a billion people? No government has that kind of money. You improve the standard of living by stimulating the economy and creating jobs. You do that, in part, by spurring science and technological research. The post-war defence and space programmes are a big reason for the US's economic superpower status today. (You also need a market economy, which the USSR didn't have, but China's developing one.)
Lighten up. This is nothing compared to the Bush jokes you'll see here. And for all Bush's defects, his government is still a shade less totalitarian than the Chinese one, most people would agree.
That should have been: /.
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Looks like they're pointing out the JFS, EVMA and RCU stuff which everyone knows IBM contributed and probably did modify from IBM's/Dynix's own code. The dispute is about whether SCO has any rights to that code in the first place.
Really, did you need to go to whois to discover something that's plainly written at the bottom of the page? More proofs that moderators don't actually read articles any more than posters do.