Because English, and language, are not solely based on elegance or simplicity. I don't think any language is. They're based to a huge extent on history. A simple word like "close" would carry many of the implications involving intellectual property that "proprietize" does.
And once again, you've skewed your own words. You said, and I quote:
>> computer magazines are calling him "the co-author of the linux kernel"
And now you're saying:
> I said something about a silly tech journo making a mistake
You didn't say "a silly tech journo", you said "computer magazines". That implies that such statements are widespread. And given how you re-interpret your own words, how can we have confidence that you haven't misremembered or misquoted the magazine? Those little details really matter. This is especially the case when Richard himself does call Linux, the operating systems, "GNU/Linux", and you could apparently easily be misquoting or misremembering that.
Much like copyright law and comparisons between open source licenses, the devils are in the detailss, and you have to pay attention to them. One of Richard's great gifts is noticing the details before they create problems and making sure things are ready later on, for the edge cases: it's in his code, and it's in the GPL itself.
This is amazing, sir or madam!! You just skewed it again! You turned your own quote about "bad feeling about loss of control", which I cited carefully, into "bad feeling". It's misleading.
Do you have any other details for that Australian PC magazine? Did anyone write and explain the facts of life to the author.
You've a valid point about gcc: gcc is "merely" a vital part of the toolchain to build Linux kernels, especially for cross-compilation. That's why the kernels are so careful to state which gcc and glibc are needed in the requirements. I have seen it referred to as a component, probably the same way you've seen Mr. Stallman as a co-author of the Linux kernel: as a mistake.
You're referring to what became Xemacs? There was a lot more going on than a "bad feeling about loss of control", believe me. The Wikipedia article matches my recollections of the time, and is surprisingly good. (I wasn't directly involved, but I did meet some of the folks involved professionally.)
I'm concerned that your "co-author of the Linux kernel" memory is equally glossed over: do you have a reference for it? Because I've seen him his role in creating gcc, used to compile Linux, as a core component of the Linux kernel, but I've never seen him described as a co-author.
It's easy for little skewings of the events like that to mislead people who haven't invested the time to know better. The devil is in the details.
Look again at my list. It included the GPL itself, and he's been spending huge amounts of time on that.
He's had serious wrist issues, and hired students to help record dictation for him. (I actually blame Emacs for that somewhat, with its excessive use of Escape and Control keys in conjunction.) But so have a lot of programmers, and I understand his wrists are much better now.
He still pokes his head into gcc code and Emacs now and then, but it's true he's been politically too busy to keep deeply involved in it. And for a big open source project, that's what he wanted! Features and bigfixes are occurring that he would never have imagined, or pursued.
That's because it's not just text. It's Word formatting information, potentially including macros and other tools that may reach *outside* of the original document.
> E.g., if I created a little piece of software and dumped it into the public domain, and someone picked it up, made a slight improved version, and marketed it widely, it might eventually take over, to the point where people forgot about its origin. (Which the 'improved' version's author might not even need to disclose.) Or something could happen by random chance to knock that one source for the original version offline. From that point on, users would have lost the freedom to look at the original version.
We nearly saw this with Samba! When Novell and Microsoft made their patent deal, Jeremy Allison (one of the core Samba maintainers) worked for Novell. They could have proprietized Samba on a patent basis, after their years of competition with it. Fortunately, Jeremy immediately resigned, with a quite publicized note that the new patent deal violates the GPL on software from Novell. But it could have been extremely nasty if Samba wound up with uncontested and unpublicized Microsoft patents embedded in it.
Good analysis. One has to keep in mind that, when predators are blocked from prey, they try to find another way to get that prey. So we've seen Tivo-ization, the Microsoft/Novell patent deal, and companies like Linksys modifying glibc in secret and refusing to admit they use glibc, Theo de Raadt throwing a hissy fit when an OpenBSD author got caught lifting a GPL driver from the Linux kernel. It's about to get profoundly worse if the mis-named "Trusted Computing" tools become widespread, since they rely on hardware specific and software specific tools to access individual components, signed by a central authority (usually Microsoft). Richard is correctly deeply concerned about this: it could block open source tools from even being able to read filesystems, provide valid boot loaders, or even read CD's or DVD's.
And while your analysis is good, it would help if you'd run a spellchecker on it. It's spelled "precious", and "proprietize". "shouldn't" instead of "shouldnt", etc. It hurts your credibility to have so many spelling errors.
No, no, Comcast kept sending fake messages to the pirates to say their packets had never arrived, so the pirates would think their packets had never arrived and be afraid to take on the Ninjas without their cutlasses and cannons.
For more details, check out old Slashdot articles or some notes from the EFF at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-comcast-forging-packets-to-interfere.
Why would you possibly want to use 33, or 39 bits, when you can simply set it to "64-bit" that is easily supported by your compilers and 64-bit hardware on your servers? It's not like the numbers will take less computation or less storage because they're less than 64-bits: storing digital numbers doesn't work that way.
They should have thrown out 2 features from the start: WinFS, which they eventually did but wasted a huge amount of time, and the massive DRM bundle they mislabeled as "security enhancements".
At least when Apple is running late, you still get something you actually wanted when it comes out.
I've just had a conversation with the 3rd party support staff for a 5,000 person company who were trying to recruit me. That third party support company is unhappy about Vista, due to demonstrated software incompatibility, the larger CPU and RAM requirements, the poor driver support for non-Microsoft or legacy hardware, and other issues. It eats their time, and cuts their profit margins, and makes their customer unhappy.
They were intrigued about the possibilities of Mac's and Linux boxes using the compatible LDAP, Kerberos, and other infrastructures, and many of their sales staff have already been given Mac laptops for support reasons. One difficulty is the Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server compatibility: getting their Microsoft Exchange staff to talk with me and my interviewer long enough to explain that POP is not your friend, and that you need to turn on the Outlook Web Access URL to get things to work right was a bit of an adventure, and it became clear that the Microsoft support staf did not know how their own tools worked.
They didn't make an offer: I'd made clear that the commute was too far, and that I was content where I am right now. But the discussion was enlightening for both of us.
Oh, my, no. Give it to PJ over at groklaw.net. Now *that* would be fun, since PJ has consistently shown more understanding and nerve than any statements from EFF attorneys. This is partly because EFF attorneys work for people with enough money to be sued, but the resulting press releases and announcements would be far more entertaining.
Wait, I know. Let's make it carry audio, too with channels reserved for emergency communications and casual conversation. We'll put one in every car, and especially in trucks, and invent a specialed language for devoted users.
If only we could get Charlie Brown to invent it, we could call it a "CB".
Apparently, the BBC's Iplayer project just announced that they'll also be providing content in Real, because a stack of Linux, Mac, and other software users got extremely upset their content could only be viewed with Windows Media Player. So, it's true that Real is around and will be around for a while, namely to provide an alternative to Windows Media Player.
Now, if they'd just give up on calling files tagged as.rpm as Real files, and save them as software packages and save me having to use the "save as" option, I'd be thrilled.
Oh, please. The need to deal with documents, and programs, that are not signed is so prevalent that Palladium's usefulness against them is just about zero.
It may be useful against tools that corrupt virus checkers, but viruses and vulnerabilities come out so fast in basic software and protocols that this is only of limited usefulness. And that "chain of trust", as Palladium is designed, leads right back to Microsoft, who can be expected to have already handed over keys to the NSA or other federal authorities for them to manipulate that chain of trust at their whim.
SelfSigning something is fine for authentication: for RPM signatures, for example, it's a reasonable approach and could have some advantages over PGP key management.
However, the underlying purpose of Palladium, which was misleadingly renamed to "Trusted Computing", is DRM. It's designed very specifically to prevent access to data files without signed software, even signed software authenticated against the local hardware. This is aimed squarely at controlling video, audio, and registered software access such as games. It's even aimed at preventing DVD or CD players and recorders from operating without signed keys from the hardware vendors, in collaboration with the software vendors and media producers. It's also aimed squarely at hard drive access and BIOS management, to control boot loaders and BIOS's. While that's a good thing from a security point of view, it can and will be used to prevent "non-signed" boot loaders and "non-signed" kernels from booting your hardware. Are you prepared to have all desktop computers allow only kernels, and operating systems, that have invested in the signatures purchased from Microsoft or Intel to permit them to boot?
And even worse, it's primary key management resides with Microsoft: the master keys for signing other keys reside in their vaults. If you use typical "signature" tools, the documents and access to your hardware and encrypted software resides with a company that does "security" updates in secret, and that has a proven history of deliberately breaking software to interfere with competitors. And there is no legal or procedural guarantee that the central keys will not be handed over at any whim to "law enforcement", especially the NSA for its documented programs of illegally monitoring domestic Internet traffic.
There is nothing currently in place, either legal or technological, to prevent such abuses. Trusted Computing as it stands is actually "DRM With a Vengeance". It's usability for personal encryption or authentication is incidental to its purpose: this is clear from its centralized key management, and its publicized ability to secure media players from playing or ripping the encrypted media.
Would you care to make a bet? As resently as 1995, a national chain in the US engaged in that sort of policy and was succesfully sued for it. (Denny's.) Visit Germany, and watch a Polish immigrant try to get a reservation, or get a job interview in . Then do it as an American, and watch the difference. Or try it as a black man in Salt Lake City. It's an adventure. Better yet, watch the difference as a passenger being driven home by a designated driver when the driver is young, female, and white, versus that when the driver is young, black, and male, and they get checked at a random roadside sobriety test.
It was both private industry, and governmental policy. Governmental policy allowed it, but it was certainly in practice in private businesses. Governmental policy, especially federal policy, eventually forbade it, primarily because it could be shown that the facilities were rarely if ever equal.
And you're missing some of *my* points. In a poor neighborhood, or for someone with limited mobility, an online store can be a godsend. But if you can't use the website, you're screwed. A small store may not be able to afford the website. The larger stores, by their puschasing and monopolistic or near-monopolistic power over a neighborhood, will displace other stores that might provide the service. It then becomes their responsibility.
This is why ADA restrictions apply much more heavily to large businesses than they do on small ones. An office of 3 people can't be expected to supply such facilities, they often lack the space or resources. A company of 500 people can, and should. And the business of 500 people set a standard that the smaller businesses often have to deal with.
The blind often have limited mobility. Available buses and shuttles rarely go to every shop in a neighborhood, and even if they do, a Target or other major store may be the only ones open in a neighborhood at late hours, or with certain products. They really do tend to dominate poor neighborhoods: the old jokes about an immigrant child's first words being "Attention, K-Mart shoppers!" have an unfortunate basis in reality. They often wield a monpolistic power over local markets. As such, they wind up with a responsibility to server all customers, not just the easiest or most "able" ones.
And no, "separate but equal" covered quite a lot more than government service. Go look up the Rosa Parks case. The bus company was a private company, not a government one. The same behavior applied to numerous facilities. And the "separate but equal" approach has been demonstrated by numerous well-done separate studies to leave a strong sense of privilege for the majority, and lesser status for the minority.
I suspect that you've not been around enough, or visited enough different cultures or economic classes, to see how these problems tend to be reproduced.
You don't. You build 4 or 8 sets of smaller RAID arrays, and use the others for snapshotted backup. This makes doing a straight rebuild/reformat/restore vastly faster and keeps the recovery times down to a quarter of the time of using a single array. It also lets you re-allocate the smaller arrays, or upgrade them, over time.
Even without piracy, this occurs. I've probably got 100 commercial DVD's in my house, scattered in various boxes and shelves of particular collectible sets. Add the open source CD and DVD's to that, and it's another 100DVD's worth of such media collected over the years. It would be nice to have the antique RedHat 6.2 installation media online for historical refernce, since I still work with tools that haven't evolved much since then, and it's become a real problem to find online.
So with 200 DVD's, at roughly 5 Gig each, that's easily a Terabyte. Add another set of drives for mirrored backup, and that's 2 Terabytes right there, without a single bit of piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Because English, and language, are not solely based on elegance or simplicity. I don't think any language is. They're based to a huge extent on history. A simple word like "close" would carry many of the implications involving intellectual property that "proprietize" does.
And once again, you've skewed your own words. You said, and I quote:
>> computer magazines are calling him "the co-author of the linux kernel"
And now you're saying:
> I said something about a silly tech journo making a mistake
You didn't say "a silly tech journo", you said "computer magazines". That implies that such statements are widespread. And given how you re-interpret your own words, how can we have confidence that you haven't misremembered or misquoted the magazine? Those little details really matter. This is especially the case when Richard himself does call Linux, the operating systems, "GNU/Linux", and you could apparently easily be misquoting or misremembering that.
Much like copyright law and comparisons between open source licenses, the devils are in the detailss, and you have to pay attention to them. One of Richard's great gifts is noticing the details before they create problems and making sure things are ready later on, for the edge cases: it's in his code, and it's in the GPL itself.
Because the political philosophy it's based on is "proprietism", not "proprietarism".
This is amazing, sir or madam!! You just skewed it again! You turned your own quote about "bad feeling about loss of control", which I cited carefully, into "bad feeling". It's misleading.
Do you have any other details for that Australian PC magazine? Did anyone write and explain the facts of life to the author.
You've a valid point about gcc: gcc is "merely" a vital part of the toolchain to build Linux kernels, especially for cross-compilation. That's why the kernels are so careful to state which gcc and glibc are needed in the requirements. I have seen it referred to as a component, probably the same way you've seen Mr. Stallman as a co-author of the Linux kernel: as a mistake.
You're referring to what became Xemacs? There was a lot more going on than a "bad feeling about loss of control", believe me. The Wikipedia article matches my recollections of the time, and is surprisingly good. (I wasn't directly involved, but I did meet some of the folks involved professionally.)
I'm concerned that your "co-author of the Linux kernel" memory is equally glossed over: do you have a reference for it? Because I've seen him his role in creating gcc, used to compile Linux, as a core component of the Linux kernel, but I've never seen him described as a co-author.
It's easy for little skewings of the events like that to mislead people who haven't invested the time to know better. The devil is in the details.
Look again at my list. It included the GPL itself, and he's been spending huge amounts of time on that.
He's had serious wrist issues, and hired students to help record dictation for him. (I actually blame Emacs for that somewhat, with its excessive use of Escape and Control keys in conjunction.) But so have a lot of programmers, and I understand his wrists are much better now.
He still pokes his head into gcc code and Emacs now and then, but it's true he's been politically too busy to keep deeply involved in it. And for a big open source project, that's what he wanted! Features and bigfixes are occurring that he would never have imagined, or pursued.
That's because it's not just text. It's Word formatting information, potentially including macros and other tools that may reach *outside* of the original document.
You wrote:
> E.g., if I created a little piece of software and dumped it into the public domain, and someone picked it up, made a slight improved version, and marketed it widely, it might eventually take over, to the point where people forgot about its origin. (Which the 'improved' version's author might not even need to disclose.) Or something could happen by random chance to knock that one source for the original version offline. From that point on, users would have lost the freedom to look at the original version.
We nearly saw this with Samba! When Novell and Microsoft made their patent deal, Jeremy Allison (one of the core Samba maintainers) worked for Novell. They could have proprietized Samba on a patent basis, after their years of competition with it. Fortunately, Jeremy immediately resigned, with a quite publicized note that the new patent deal violates the GPL on software from Novell. But it could have been extremely nasty if Samba wound up with uncontested and unpublicized Microsoft patents embedded in it.
Good analysis. One has to keep in mind that, when predators are blocked from prey, they try to find another way to get that prey. So we've seen Tivo-ization, the Microsoft/Novell patent deal, and companies like Linksys modifying glibc in secret and refusing to admit they use glibc, Theo de Raadt throwing a hissy fit when an OpenBSD author got caught lifting a GPL driver from the Linux kernel. It's about to get profoundly worse if the mis-named "Trusted Computing" tools become widespread, since they rely on hardware specific and software specific tools to access individual components, signed by a central authority (usually Microsoft). Richard is correctly deeply concerned about this: it could block open source tools from even being able to read filesystems, provide valid boot loaders, or even read CD's or DVD's.
And while your analysis is good, it would help if you'd run a spellchecker on it. It's spelled "precious", and "proprietize". "shouldn't" instead of "shouldnt", etc. It hurts your credibility to have so many spelling errors.
No, no, Comcast kept sending fake messages to the pirates to say their packets had never arrived, so the pirates would think their packets had never arrived and be afraid to take on the Ninjas without their cutlasses and cannons. For more details, check out old Slashdot articles or some notes from the EFF at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-comcast-forging-packets-to-interfere.
And gcc. And Emacs. And the GPL.
Have you ever read his code? It's fascinating stuff, and quite brilliant.
Why would you possibly want to use 33, or 39 bits, when you can simply set it to "64-bit" that is easily supported by your compilers and 64-bit hardware on your servers? It's not like the numbers will take less computation or less storage because they're less than 64-bits: storing digital numbers doesn't work that way.
They should have thrown out 2 features from the start: WinFS, which they eventually did but wasted a huge amount of time, and the massive DRM bundle they mislabeled as "security enhancements".
At least when Apple is running late, you still get something you actually wanted when it comes out.
I've just had a conversation with the 3rd party support staff for a 5,000 person company who were trying to recruit me. That third party support company is unhappy about Vista, due to demonstrated software incompatibility, the larger CPU and RAM requirements, the poor driver support for non-Microsoft or legacy hardware, and other issues. It eats their time, and cuts their profit margins, and makes their customer unhappy.
They were intrigued about the possibilities of Mac's and Linux boxes using the compatible LDAP, Kerberos, and other infrastructures, and many of their sales staff have already been given Mac laptops for support reasons. One difficulty is the Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server compatibility: getting their Microsoft Exchange staff to talk with me and my interviewer long enough to explain that POP is not your friend, and that you need to turn on the Outlook Web Access URL to get things to work right was a bit of an adventure, and it became clear that the Microsoft support staf did not know how their own tools worked.
They didn't make an offer: I'd made clear that the commute was too far, and that I was content where I am right now. But the discussion was enlightening for both of us.
Oh, my, no. Give it to PJ over at groklaw.net. Now *that* would be fun, since PJ has consistently shown more understanding and nerve than any statements from EFF attorneys. This is partly because EFF attorneys work for people with enough money to be sued, but the resulting press releases and announcements would be far more entertaining.
Wait, I know. Let's make it carry audio, too with channels reserved for emergency communications and casual conversation. We'll put one in every car, and especially in trucks, and invent a specialed language for devoted users.
If only we could get Charlie Brown to invent it, we could call it a "CB".
Apparently, the BBC's Iplayer project just announced that they'll also be providing content in Real, because a stack of Linux, Mac, and other software users got extremely upset their content could only be viewed with Windows Media Player. So, it's true that Real is around and will be around for a while, namely to provide an alternative to Windows Media Player.
.rpm as Real files, and save them as software packages and save me having to use the "save as" option, I'd be thrilled.
Now, if they'd just give up on calling files tagged as
No, he failed at being British. In the US, it's spelled "program".
Oh, please. The need to deal with documents, and programs, that are not signed is so prevalent that Palladium's usefulness against them is just about zero.
It may be useful against tools that corrupt virus checkers, but viruses and vulnerabilities come out so fast in basic software and protocols that this is only of limited usefulness. And that "chain of trust", as Palladium is designed, leads right back to Microsoft, who can be expected to have already handed over keys to the NSA or other federal authorities for them to manipulate that chain of trust at their whim.
SelfSigning something is fine for authentication: for RPM signatures, for example, it's a reasonable approach and could have some advantages over PGP key management.
However, the underlying purpose of Palladium, which was misleadingly renamed to "Trusted Computing", is DRM. It's designed very specifically to prevent access to data files without signed software, even signed software authenticated against the local hardware. This is aimed squarely at controlling video, audio, and registered software access such as games. It's even aimed at preventing DVD or CD players and recorders from operating without signed keys from the hardware vendors, in collaboration with the software vendors and media producers. It's also aimed squarely at hard drive access and BIOS management, to control boot loaders and BIOS's. While that's a good thing from a security point of view, it can and will be used to prevent "non-signed" boot loaders and "non-signed" kernels from booting your hardware. Are you prepared to have all desktop computers allow only kernels, and operating systems, that have invested in the signatures purchased from Microsoft or Intel to permit them to boot?
And even worse, it's primary key management resides with Microsoft: the master keys for signing other keys reside in their vaults. If you use typical "signature" tools, the documents and access to your hardware and encrypted software resides with a company that does "security" updates in secret, and that has a proven history of deliberately breaking software to interfere with competitors. And there is no legal or procedural guarantee that the central keys will not be handed over at any whim to "law enforcement", especially the NSA for its documented programs of illegally monitoring domestic Internet traffic.
There is nothing currently in place, either legal or technological, to prevent such abuses. Trusted Computing as it stands is actually "DRM With a Vengeance". It's usability for personal encryption or authentication is incidental to its purpose: this is clear from its centralized key management, and its publicized ability to secure media players from playing or ripping the encrypted media.
Would you care to make a bet? As resently as 1995, a national chain in the US engaged in that sort of policy and was succesfully sued for it. (Denny's.) Visit Germany, and watch a Polish immigrant try to get a reservation, or get a job interview in . Then do it as an American, and watch the difference. Or try it as a black man in Salt Lake City. It's an adventure. Better yet, watch the difference as a passenger being driven home by a designated driver when the driver is young, female, and white, versus that when the driver is young, black, and male, and they get checked at a random roadside sobriety test.
It was both private industry, and governmental policy. Governmental policy allowed it, but it was certainly in practice in private businesses. Governmental policy, especially federal policy, eventually forbade it, primarily because it could be shown that the facilities were rarely if ever equal.
And you're missing some of *my* points. In a poor neighborhood, or for someone with limited mobility, an online store can be a godsend. But if you can't use the website, you're screwed. A small store may not be able to afford the website. The larger stores, by their puschasing and monopolistic or near-monopolistic power over a neighborhood, will displace other stores that might provide the service. It then becomes their responsibility.
This is why ADA restrictions apply much more heavily to large businesses than they do on small ones. An office of 3 people can't be expected to supply such facilities, they often lack the space or resources. A company of 500 people can, and should. And the business of 500 people set a standard that the smaller businesses often have to deal with.
The blind often have limited mobility. Available buses and shuttles rarely go to every shop in a neighborhood, and even if they do, a Target or other major store may be the only ones open in a neighborhood at late hours, or with certain products. They really do tend to dominate poor neighborhoods: the old jokes about an immigrant child's first words being "Attention, K-Mart shoppers!" have an unfortunate basis in reality. They often wield a monpolistic power over local markets. As such, they wind up with a responsibility to server all customers, not just the easiest or most "able" ones.
And no, "separate but equal" covered quite a lot more than government service. Go look up the Rosa Parks case. The bus company was a private company, not a government one. The same behavior applied to numerous facilities. And the "separate but equal" approach has been demonstrated by numerous well-done separate studies to leave a strong sense of privilege for the majority, and lesser status for the minority.
I suspect that you've not been around enough, or visited enough different cultures or economic classes, to see how these problems tend to be reproduced.
You don't. You build 4 or 8 sets of smaller RAID arrays, and use the others for snapshotted backup. This makes doing a straight rebuild/reformat/restore vastly faster and keeps the recovery times down to a quarter of the time of using a single array. It also lets you re-allocate the smaller arrays, or upgrade them, over time.
Even without piracy, this occurs. I've probably got 100 commercial DVD's in my house, scattered in various boxes and shelves of particular collectible sets. Add the open source CD and DVD's to that, and it's another 100DVD's worth of such media collected over the years. It would be nice to have the antique RedHat 6.2 installation media online for historical refernce, since I still work with tools that haven't evolved much since then, and it's become a real problem to find online.
So with 200 DVD's, at roughly 5 Gig each, that's easily a Terabyte. Add another set of drives for mirrored backup, and that's 2 Terabytes right there, without a single bit of piracy.