Considering that Alan Cox has already clearly indicated he will not accept relicensing of his code under something other than the GPL, legally the FXree86 people are already obliged to remove all Alan Cox's code from their relicensed XFree86 before distributing it...
I concur with the rest of your post but this part makes almost zero sense. When you distribute code under the X license (as presumably Mr. Cox did) it can be sublicensed; some would argue that's the whole freakin' point of X-style licensing.
That's why the Wine people could switch their codebase to LGPL and not have to pull the code of everybody who preferred to work on Rewind instead.
I *can* see Mr. Cox *requesting* that the XFree developers not relicense his contributed code bits.
I may have typed it wrong, but the loop is supposed to exit when the readlink fails because the file is not a link.
You're correct -- my bad..
I believe the relative path part is not required on Linux. It is there because this same code was used on Unix systems that don't have/proc, where it searches the path for the known name instead of starting at/proc/self/exe
Lest we forget: spam was a stellar hack. It exploited technical and cultural weaknesses within a system and its establishment to turn the system against itself.
Did you know the first spam was created by lawyers? There ya go.
The only reason why you would want to use the LGPL, is that you want to keep your code proprietary and to yourself.
That's overstating it. You might prefer a GPL-incompatible, but Free, license (check the FSF's site, there's plenty of them). This is somewhat mitigated with Qt since it is dual-licensed under the QPL.
Qt is superior to gtk because it is created by professional developers, not college students.
"Microsoft is superior to Linux because it is created by professional developers, not college students"
Perhaps if you did some research into Trolltech's licenses you would figure out that Trolltech has Edu licenses as well.
Very good point! Academic institutions should check this out.
LGPL is only about proprietary software
Then I guess BSD and XFree are even *more* about proprietary software. Come on...
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Apparently I misinterpreted its meaning. Wouldn't be the first time. Glad we're in violent agreement:-)
Simply put, developers, and not/. posters, get to pick if they think corporate "leeching" of code is an issue. Some developers couldn't care less, and some are happy to see their work used more widely.
More liberal licensing can also be a strategic plus when it's important to promote a standard rather than a piece of code. Consider Ogg Vorbis or the BSD TCP/IP stack.
I'm sure there are motives I've missed as well. Although I'd personally lean towards the LGPL for anything I'd write.
I believe you can set the permissions on the device files
This would be the way to do it, although it can be tricky. For instance, adding myself to the "uucp" group didn't suddenly make minicom on ttyS0 work for me. It was probably user error though.
Playing devil's advocate here. I'm sure you're already aware of most of these points.
Is insmod so difficult?
First, you'd really want modprobe. Second, for the few not using their distributions' modules, the point is that it is still more difficult than running an executable. Usually because the module in question needs to be compiled against your particular kernel, which is much less backward/forward compatible than glibc.
So, any other good reasons why you'd want userland drivers?
It should be more robust. You're not subject to kernel limitations (C language only, fixed 8k stack to play with, etc.) You can use more standard APIs, which are better documented and which also lead to better portability, if you can modularize your code well enough. There's a reason the XFree86 drivers aren't completely in-kernel.
Are those reasons good enough to offset the additional overhead that this would incur (additional context switching,etc)?
For low-throughput devices like serial ports, keyboards, and mice, it's quite possible. At least it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
The new layers of indirection that would have to be added?
Need to be more specific here. The amount of indirection depends on the driver to be "converted" and the way you approach it.
With the exception of win32 (assuming you don't count kde-cygwin), I could easily see KOffice eventually running everywhere... Including Mac OS X, given the recent efforts to get KDE in general up and running on that platform.
I agree that the OpenOffice developers seem to have cross-platform support much more in hand at this point. I'm assuming that's because there's more ooo developers to spare.
Can you tell me off the top of your head which libraries gdk-pixbuf, gtkglarea, ORBit, and libzvt depend on? I didn't think so.
I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what libraries the KDE libraries depend on either (and I'm a KDE fan). Besides, that's what ldd is for (please excuse the crappy formatting):
Morality and ethics aside - this is done everyday by both sides and is old news. It always surprises me how liberal the average Slashdot reader appears to be. Such a waste.
I can't believe you said such a thing (snip)
1) People say a lot of things here. Welcome to slashdot, #602408
2) He didn't say he wasn't concerned about morality and ethics. He was pointing out something else ("it's done everyday by both sides"). You've managed to spend an entire post venting on morality w/out actually confirming or denying his point. Classic red herring.
It's a satire on (U.S.) Fosters commercials that carry the tagline "Fosters: Australian for Beer".
Which is actually pretty funny all by itself.
Re:Spirit not that impressive...?
on
News from Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
The rovers themselves run VxWorks, a well-known real-time Unix variant
Pedantic: VxWorks is not a Unix variant; it has some Unix-like properties, since Wind River started tacking on POSIX API support. But every task lives in the same address space (although I think they added support for different address spaces recently?). Coding for it felt like linux kernel module coding, but with a better interface, but without accessible source code.
The only hard real-time Unix variant I know of is QNX.
I would have to say any number of former presidents of the USA, almost ALL politicians in my home state of AZ, professional criminals and of course, lawyers. (would you consider the last two redundant?)
Now, American culture also demands a dress code. What happens if a woman walks around topless? Golly, she's arrested.
Being topless is legal in Austin, TX (although.. the neighbors might scowl at you). We even have Hippy Hollow which is clothing-optional, if that floats your boat.
You are correct, but another interpretation is that this is a U.S. corporation, and it's a federal suit, and with our laws it may be a long time before the idiocy ends, so the joke is really at our expense.
Dubya gives us the same problem.. (Republicans: s/Dubya/Clinton/)
Your signature is rather coincidential. I would say
Automated Mathematician was the first *artificial* scientist. Doug Lenat, who programmed AM, now works on a AI program called Cyc.
Cygwin is built on top of the Win32 APIs on top of the NT kernel core. SFU is built straight on top of the core kernel; Win32 API variances (which have caused headaches for the Cygwin implementors of years) are no longer factored in.
There's a total flip side to that. In cygwin you can actually call (cygwin's) posix and win32 functions from the same program. Which would be useful if
1) You want to run any linux proggy with a GUI frontend on Windows (is an X server running on top of the new SFU posix subsystem even possible?)
2) You'd like to port your win32 program to posix (or vice-versa) in a piecemeal fashion.
IMHO NT's whole concept of different execution subsystems (win32 vs. OS/2 vs. posix) is painfully broken.
Well, it certainly looks very incriminating. But, those files under/bin aren't necessarily used. Some ftp servers (vsftpd) use their own internal version of 'ls'. I can't figure out how to force the server to invoke the other commands (most of them seem to want you to be uploading). Even if the commands did work, it would be remotely possible the UnixWare LKP was responsible, but I'd be convinced at that point.
In the meantime, I figure some admin could have (stupidly) copied over those linux binaries along with the rest of the ftp 'site' when they were switching to a SCO Unix ftp server.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest investigating the linux kernel traffic shaper, but I guess that would rate-limit *all* your traffic.
I concur with the rest of your post but this part makes almost zero sense. When you distribute code under the X license (as presumably Mr. Cox did) it can be sublicensed; some would argue that's the whole freakin' point of X-style licensing.
That's why the Wine people could switch their codebase to LGPL and not have to pull the code of everybody who preferred to work on Rewind instead.
I *can* see Mr. Cox *requesting* that the XFree developers not relicense his contributed code bits.
Other 8? It's just the sequel, they're counting in binary.
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing ol' Darl banned from the internet for life.
You're correct -- my bad..
I believe the relative path part is not required on Linux. It is there because this same code was used on Unix systems that don't have /proc, where it searches the path for the known name instead of starting at /proc/self/exe
Gotcha. Thanks again.
And from a visual grep, your function will usually loop forever :-)
(Thx for that example, btw; I'd been using /proc/getpid()/exe to do the same thing)
Did you know the first spam was created by lawyers? There ya go.
That's overstating it. You might prefer a GPL-incompatible, but Free, license (check the FSF's site, there's plenty of them). This is somewhat mitigated with Qt since it is dual-licensed under the QPL.
"Microsoft is superior to Linux because it is created by professional developers, not college students"
Very good point! Academic institutions should check this out.
Then I guess BSD and XFree are even *more* about proprietary software. Come on...
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Apparently I misinterpreted its meaning. Wouldn't be the first time. Glad we're in violent agreement :-)
I'm sure there are motives I've missed as well. Although I'd personally lean towards the LGPL for anything I'd write.
This would be the way to do it, although it can be tricky. For instance, adding myself to the "uucp" group didn't suddenly make minicom on ttyS0 work for me. It was probably user error though.
Is insmod so difficult?
First, you'd really want modprobe. Second, for the few not using their distributions' modules, the point is that it is still more difficult than running an executable. Usually because the module in question needs to be compiled against your particular kernel, which is much less backward/forward compatible than glibc.
So, any other good reasons why you'd want userland drivers?
It should be more robust. You're not subject to kernel limitations (C language only, fixed 8k stack to play with, etc.) You can use more standard APIs, which are better documented and which also lead to better portability, if you can modularize your code well enough. There's a reason the XFree86 drivers aren't completely in-kernel.
Are those reasons good enough to offset the additional overhead that this would incur (additional context switching,etc)?
For low-throughput devices like serial ports, keyboards, and mice, it's quite possible. At least it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
The new layers of indirection that would have to be added?
Need to be more specific here. The amount of indirection depends on the driver to be "converted" and the way you approach it.
I agree that the OpenOffice developers seem to have cross-platform support much more in hand at this point. I'm assuming that's because there's more ooo developers to spare.
I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what libraries the KDE libraries depend on either (and I'm a KDE fan). Besides, that's what ldd is for (please excuse the crappy formatting):
1) People say a lot of things here. Welcome to slashdot, #602408
2) He didn't say he wasn't concerned about morality and ethics. He was pointing out something else ("it's done everyday by both sides"). You've managed to spend an entire post venting on morality w/out actually confirming or denying his point. Classic red herring.
It's a satire on (U.S.) Fosters commercials that carry the tagline "Fosters: Australian for Beer".
Which is actually pretty funny all by itself.
Pedantic: VxWorks is not a Unix variant; it has some Unix-like properties, since Wind River started tacking on POSIX API support. But every task lives in the same address space (although I think they added support for different address spaces recently?). Coding for it felt like linux kernel module coding, but with a better interface, but without accessible source code.
The only hard real-time Unix variant I know of is QNX.
You can get a taste of the VxWorks API here.
Actually, most of those terms are redundant.
Being topless is legal in Austin, TX (although.. the neighbors might scowl at you). We even have Hippy Hollow which is clothing-optional, if that floats your boat.
As a U.S. citizen:
You are correct, but another interpretation is that this is a U.S. corporation, and it's a federal suit, and with our laws it may be a long time before the idiocy ends, so the joke is really at our expense.
Dubya gives us the same problem.. (Republicans: s/Dubya/Clinton/)
Your signature is rather coincidential. I would say Automated Mathematician was the first *artificial* scientist. Doug Lenat, who programmed AM, now works on a AI program called Cyc.
Hahaha, that's classic. What did you do?
There's a total flip side to that. In cygwin you can actually call (cygwin's) posix and win32 functions from the same program. Which would be useful if
1) You want to run any linux proggy with a GUI frontend on Windows (is an X server running on top of the new SFU posix subsystem even possible?)
2) You'd like to port your win32 program to posix (or vice-versa) in a piecemeal fashion.
IMHO NT's whole concept of different execution subsystems (win32 vs. OS/2 vs. posix) is painfully broken.
In the meantime, I figure some admin could have (stupidly) copied over those linux binaries along with the rest of the ftp 'site' when they were switching to a SCO Unix ftp server.
That's not proof. It's entirely possible that SCO is hosting linux binaries on a SCO Unix FTP server.
As an aside, why did you use an ASCII transfer for a binary file? I bet your downloaded copy of gzip didn't run for sh*t..