There are many good resources on the web explaining the hidden agenda of the FSF and the GPL.
The agenda that's different than the clearly stated, totally open agenda stated at fsf.org? Please, enlighten us.
These days it is not so hidden.
When did the FSF become more open about their "hidden" agenda? Most of the documents on fsf.org are pretty old.
BSD solves all of the problems of the GPL.
A commercial, for fee, license also solves all of the "problems" of the GPL, too. GPL solves all the problems with a license that allows someone to profit from others work without providing anything in return.
Different licenses for different requirements, I guess.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Let's have more integration between *BSD and Li
on
Intel using FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2
Am I the only one that doesn't see inherent evil in this?
I never said anything about evil, never.
What I did say was that it was odd that someone who favors a license that allows forks to become closed off is complaining that developers who clearly had a GPL bent (the GNOME developers) were not going out of their way to support a non-GPL'd operating system.
I then went on to point out the differences between GPL and other licenses and why people of a GPL bent may not be interested in "floating all boats". My argument is not with mr, it's with the guy who said that Linux and *BSD should make sure to have better integration.
Now, maybe I'm picking a fight here. The way this thread has gone is someone suggested that we "should make sure that we *BSD and Linux compatibility" and mr said "hey, I'm willing, it's these Linux guys". I pointed out that there are people who develop under the GPL with a purpose, and that purpose does not include floating other boats.
I do personally believe that the GPL will, as intended, eventually develop such a large code base that it will be more economical in most cases to use (and extend) GPL'd code than it will be to use other licenses.
Software reuse has always been something of a chimera. The GPL breaks down one of the great barriers to software reuse.
So, I guess you can count me as someone who thinks the GPL does very positive things, in general. That's not to say that I think closing software is "inherently evil". I write closed software when under the employ of various entities and I don't find it "evil".
The problem is that people view engineering as a phase. Engineering should permeate every phase of engineering projects. "Engineering" is not design, but it is an important part of design.
You know, you never hear anyone complaining about IBM supporting too many operating systems. Yet, they support:
AIX
OS/400
VM & OS/390
Linux
Windows (95/NT)
Again, nobody points this out about HP, but they support:
MPE
HP/UX
Linux
Windows (95/NT)
I'm not sure of what your point is. Surely, it's a good idea to offer different OS's for different needs. Only Microsoft and Sun would have you believe that only one Operating system fits all needs.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Let's have more integration between *BSD and Li
on
Intel using FreeBSD
·
· Score: 1
> The GPL recognizes the reality that left on it's own, software tends to become closed and militates agains this trend.
Right, just look at what happened to BSD, Apache, and X11. Can't get the source for any of those any more. Thank god for that GPL, eh?
I didn't mean to say that once open code somehow becomes closed over time.
But, the best forks tend to be closed off. There's just too much temptation to make something off of your changes. If a for-profit corporation owns the changes, they owe it to their stockholders to try to get something for the value they are creating. The GPL enforces a discipline on Open Source developers to ensure that they not only benefit from Open Source, but that their works benefit those who created the works they used as a starting point.
Closed forks happen and continue to happen with *BSD. If BSD/OS didn't offer considerable value over FreeBSD, it wouldn't sell. Any improvements made to the Open Source versions of *BSD can easily be folded in to BSD/OS, but the real added value of BSDI's offering remains closed.
There's not much call for a closed Apache as there're a number of free alternatives in that space. The commercial market for Web Servers is pretty much dominated by NetScape. I believe there are actually a few closed forks of Apache out there.
As to X11, X/Open tried to start charging for the latest once, but they weren't offering enough added value to make a go of it. There are a number of closed off X-Servers, but XFree86 dominates here. Had the X Consortium not been supporting it for years, there may have been more commercialized X Servers available. But the heavily supported (by corporate donation) X11 made a commercial branch uncompetitve. By the time the X Consortium was out of the way, too little new development was done on the base code to justify someone taking a closed fork commercial.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Let's have more integration between *BSD and Li
on
Intel using FreeBSD
·
· Score: 3
GNOME was singled out as an example of code that is written with Linux in mind, and not code portability.
I don't know about any difficulties in porting GNOME, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if GNOME was Linux specific.
The GNOME builders are pretty much GPL advocates. Note the similarity between the names GNU and GNOME?
It boils down to, do you want a rising tide to float ALL boats, or are you only giving a damn about your linux or BSD digny?
I find it interesting that someone who appears to support a software license that allows the closing off of modifications to "OpenSource" software seems to have an issue with others not writing their software in a form that is optimally available to them.
The whole point of the GPL is that all "boats" that ride on the tide created by it will rise evenly, or at least you can choose how much of the tide you wish to take advantage of. With BSD style licenses, some of the boats can suddenly become sea planes. These craft can benefit from the rising tide, if they chose, but can travel apart from the tide. GPL advocates feel that someone who benefits from their tide should contribute back innovations that allow new technological advances. Seems fair to me.
The GPL is about fairness, not freedom in the sense of "free beer". It's more like you can come enjoy the "free beer", but you're required to share any beer you brew.
The GPL recognizes the reality that left on it's own, software tends to become closed and militates agains this trend.
GPL advocates definitely are generally against having the rising tide floating ALL boats. For example, most GPL advocates are not in favor of floating Microsoft's boat.
Sheesh, to reestablish my reputation as a recovering Karma Junkie, I'll probably have to make several offtopic or "first posts" now. *SIGH*
Well, since Sparc's were originally sold with ONLY the option of BSD, this is not surprising.
SunOS 4 was a BSD derivative.
I think, more specifically, you mean that you are running NetBSD or some other "free" BSD.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Will SOMEONE please stand up?!
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 3
And, being a typical Slashdot Geek, the 74 second "test cycle" is probably well within operational parameters...
OK, you're in, so to speak.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Pregnancy in space
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 1
I would think the development period while in zero-G's would be the most dangerous part.
I wonder if gravity isn't helpful in getting the fetus in the proper position for birthing. Gravity may also provide tensions that may help to induce labor in some indirect way.
A breech presentation might be a problem. While a normal delivery might not be a problem in zero Gs, a ceasarian or unusual delivery could be serious.
I don't remember it, but I'm sure that I was once a sperm. Or was I an egg?
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Will SOMEONE please stand up?!
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 2
I, in an effort to further the human race, do volunteer to be one of the "testees" (har) for this noble experiment.
Very noble of you.
First, there's the matter of the training course using simulated conditions.
We fly you up to about 50,000 feet in a cargo plane and dive this "Vomit Comet" into a freefall trajectory. Uhmm, to make this realistic, we'll be asking you to make a complete, uhhm, runs in under 74 seconds, repeatedly.
Thank you for your service to science.
-Jordan Henderson
Re:Interesting story...
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 1
A $16 billion contraption built by highly qualified engineers meant to be used by consenting adult astronauts...
All the while they sat in court saying "poor innocent us, MS hurt us - Daddy make the bad man stop!" they were quietly screwing you all over.
An important fact that is often forgotten in discussion about Microsoft and the Anti-trust trial is that while other corporations may engage in similar behaviors, they aren't really dangerous as long as that corporation doesn't hold a monopoly.
This is why it was important for Judge Jackson to first find that Microsoft did, in fact, hold a monopoly.
That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).
Yeah, I don't get it. My wife uses it at home on a Pentium 100 with 48Mb of RAM for light work, letters, organizing tabular data in Excel, reading other's documents, etc. It's not swift, but I would not say it's "unusable".
The constant hyperbole about how bad MS products you see on/. really tends to discredit/. as a reliable source.
When is the addendum to the addendum to the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper detailing the effect of Slashdot on the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper addendum due?
Well we can't say when, but the addendum does address the question:
To conclude, this will be the last paper related to the Slashdot effect. If for some reason this addendum to the/. effect generates a new/. effect on the server, this will most likely not be presented as an Addendum to an Addendum.
I think you are operating under the mistaken impression that BSDI is based on FreeBSD's kernel -- it is not. It is based on its own kernel, which is based on the 4.4BSDLite2 kernel.
I realized that the various BSDs actually have somewhat different kernels. I don't believe it's an important distinction. Some of the different BSD kernels probably have more in common with each other than the various 2.x (x = 0,1,2,3) kernels, for example, but that's not important.
What I said was that BSDI was the only BSD commercial "distro" currently. I would compare it to RedHat, Suse, Caldera, Corel, Turbolinux, etc.
The other BSD "distros" are more similar to Debian. The group behind them all is not a commercial for-profit concern.
Would there be Redhat, Caldera, SuSE, et.al, if Linus had distributed his own full OS of Linux? I doubt it. People would have declared his whole distribution, not just his kernel, "good enough" and wouldn't have forked it, as it is the natural tendency not to fork code unless you MUST.
Since there was no official distro for Linux, the community HAD to fork to produce one.
Well, you'll have to explain how this theory accounts for the fact that "the community" has produced and continues to produce numerous commercial and non-commercial distros, have none of them been "good enough" for most users?
I think the existence of BSDi in the BSD space scares potential competitors out of the commercial BSD space. It would be difficult to pop-up and compete with them based on any of the BSDL source bases as BSDI can simply use most of the BSDL work in their own offering while the competitor would not benefit from the proprietary BSDi code.
Then, there's also the problem that anyone who started a new commercial BSD distro would have to resist the powerful temptation to close off important parts of their distro to give them a competitive advantage, especially when your major competition, BSDI, has done exactly this.
This is not the case with fully GPL'd OSs. A new competitor can pop up and add value to an old competitor (witness Mandrake and RedHat).
BSD advocates like to make all sorts of excuses for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD. I think the accretive nature of the GPL has something to do with the rapid growth and acceptance of Linux.
On the other hand, there really aren't any "distros" to speak of with the BSDs. I wonder why...
Sure, there's a BSD distro. It's well supported, solid, comes packaged for ISPs and Servers. The fine people at BSDI sell it.
I'm beginning to think the reason there's no inexpensive, mass-market distro for *BSD is because of the license. You just can't stop the suits from closing off important pieces, and jacking up the price to what the the market will bear because they can.
Look at Cygnus. They started out as a business to offer support for Open Source "products". Now, they sell closed source products as well. Why the change in business plans when, according to Cygnus, they've always enjoyed phenomenal growth and profitability? I think it's because the suits just can't stand the thought of giving everything away.
This is what's really new about running a business distributing GPL'd code. The suits have to start rethinking where they can make the money.
I'm not sure there is a lot of money to be made, long term, in being a distro vendor. A lot of people will just buy the same thing from Cheap Bytes. Ultimately, I would think that the distro vendors would get more involved in support, custom projects and training. I think RedHat knows this and this is why the Cygnus purchase makes sense.
What is the effect of a government, tax financed patent?
An interesting question, for certain.
I was given to understand that, in the US, Governments can't hold copyrights. Why can they hold patents but not copyrights? Are such patents defensive in nature?
I don't know of any company I could apply for a job where I could be doing free source development.
Well, I can't comment about your qualifications, but there are a number of companies offering employment for free source developers.
To name a few; Cygnus, Red Hat, Corel, Caldera, SGI, IBM, Sun and Compaq all are employing people who primarily do free source development.
There are any number of smaller groups that are trying to adopt an Open Source model commercially, giving away the source in hopes of making money on support. We'll see if they are successful.
And in addition (aand I've said this here before), lawyer's and plaintiffs should NOT be allowed to profit from punitive damages (they are PUNISHMENTS, not rewards). The punitive fees should be distributed to the community (somehow).
The plaintiff benefits from punitive damages in order to encourage the pursuit of punitive damages.
These punishments are determined by a court and are, in theory, justly applied against a defenendent. What does it matter who receives the benefit from the award?
There is a conflict of interest in giving these awards to the community in that it is the people, through their courts and juries, who would determine the damage AND benefit.
If you feel that the punitive damages are excessive, then consider support for tort reform. Fix the right problem.
Microsoft makes this big show of only hiring the best people, but really, it must be a mind-numbing stultifying experience that all those people working so hard (as we hear) can't turn up anything more innovative than a dancing paper clip.
Slashdot Mirror
The agenda that's different than the clearly stated, totally open agenda stated at fsf.org? Please, enlighten us.
When did the FSF become more open about their "hidden" agenda? Most of the documents on fsf.org are pretty old.
A commercial, for fee, license also solves all of the "problems" of the GPL, too. GPL solves all the problems with a license that allows someone to profit from others work without providing anything in return.
Different licenses for different requirements, I guess.
-Jordan Henderson
I never said anything about evil, never.
What I did say was that it was odd that someone who favors a license that allows forks to become closed off is complaining that developers who clearly had a GPL bent (the GNOME developers) were not going out of their way to support a non-GPL'd operating system.
I then went on to point out the differences between GPL and other licenses and why people of a GPL bent may not be interested in "floating all boats". My argument is not with mr, it's with the guy who said that Linux and *BSD should make sure to have better integration.
Now, maybe I'm picking a fight here. The way this thread has gone is someone suggested that we "should make sure that we *BSD and Linux compatibility" and mr said "hey, I'm willing, it's these Linux guys". I pointed out that there are people who develop under the GPL with a purpose, and that purpose does not include floating other boats.
I do personally believe that the GPL will, as intended, eventually develop such a large code base that it will be more economical in most cases to use (and extend) GPL'd code than it will be to use other licenses.
Software reuse has always been something of a chimera. The GPL breaks down one of the great barriers to software reuse.
So, I guess you can count me as someone who thinks the GPL does very positive things, in general. That's not to say that I think closing software is "inherently evil". I write closed software when under the employ of various entities and I don't find it "evil".
-Jordan Henderson
The problem is that people view engineering as a phase. Engineering should permeate every phase of engineering projects. "Engineering" is not design, but it is an important part of design.
-Jordan Henderson
Check out Tom Christiansen's fine posts, for example.
I think the people here are pretty "Open" minded. :-)
-Jordan Henderson
Again, nobody points this out about HP, but they support:
I'm not sure of what your point is. Surely, it's a good idea to offer different OS's for different needs. Only Microsoft and Sun would have you believe that only one Operating system fits all needs.
-Jordan Henderson
Right, just look at what happened to BSD, Apache, and X11. Can't get the source for any of those any more. Thank god for that GPL, eh?
I didn't mean to say that once open code somehow becomes closed over time.
But, the best forks tend to be closed off. There's just too much temptation to make something off of your changes. If a for-profit corporation owns the changes, they owe it to their stockholders to try to get something for the value they are creating. The GPL enforces a discipline on Open Source developers to ensure that they not only benefit from Open Source, but that their works benefit those who created the works they used as a starting point.
Closed forks happen and continue to happen with *BSD. If BSD/OS didn't offer considerable value over FreeBSD, it wouldn't sell. Any improvements made to the Open Source versions of *BSD can easily be folded in to BSD/OS, but the real added value of BSDI's offering remains closed.
There's not much call for a closed Apache as there're a number of free alternatives in that space. The commercial market for Web Servers is pretty much dominated by NetScape. I believe there are actually a few closed forks of Apache out there.
As to X11, X/Open tried to start charging for the latest once, but they weren't offering enough added value to make a go of it. There are a number of closed off X-Servers, but XFree86 dominates here. Had the X Consortium not been supporting it for years, there may have been more commercialized X Servers available. But the heavily supported (by corporate donation) X11 made a commercial branch uncompetitve. By the time the X Consortium was out of the way, too little new development was done on the base code to justify someone taking a closed fork commercial.
-Jordan Henderson
I don't know about any difficulties in porting GNOME, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if GNOME was Linux specific.
The GNOME builders are pretty much GPL advocates. Note the similarity between the names GNU and GNOME?
I find it interesting that someone who appears to support a software license that allows the closing off of modifications to "OpenSource" software seems to have an issue with others not writing their software in a form that is optimally available to them.
The whole point of the GPL is that all "boats" that ride on the tide created by it will rise evenly, or at least you can choose how much of the tide you wish to take advantage of. With BSD style licenses, some of the boats can suddenly become sea planes. These craft can benefit from the rising tide, if they chose, but can travel apart from the tide. GPL advocates feel that someone who benefits from their tide should contribute back innovations that allow new technological advances. Seems fair to me.
The GPL is about fairness, not freedom in the sense of "free beer". It's more like you can come enjoy the "free beer", but you're required to share any beer you brew.
The GPL recognizes the reality that left on it's own, software tends to become closed and militates agains this trend.
GPL advocates definitely are generally against having the rising tide floating ALL boats. For example, most GPL advocates are not in favor of floating Microsoft's boat.
Sheesh, to reestablish my reputation as a recovering Karma Junkie, I'll probably have to make several offtopic or "first posts" now. *SIGH*
-Jordan Henderson
SunOS 4 was a BSD derivative.
I think, more specifically, you mean that you are running NetBSD or some other "free" BSD.
-Jordan Henderson
OK, you're in, so to speak.
-Jordan Henderson
I wonder if gravity isn't helpful in getting the fetus in the proper position for birthing. Gravity may also provide tensions that may help to induce labor in some indirect way.
A breech presentation might be a problem. While a normal delivery might not be a problem in zero Gs, a ceasarian or unusual delivery could be serious.
Of course, IANAD ;-)
-Jordan Henderson
I don't remember it, but I'm sure that I was once a sperm. Or was I an egg?
-Jordan Henderson
Very noble of you.
First, there's the matter of the training course using simulated conditions.
We fly you up to about 50,000 feet in a cargo plane and dive this "Vomit Comet" into a freefall trajectory. Uhmm, to make this realistic, we'll be asking you to make a complete, uhhm, runs in under 74 seconds, repeatedly.
Thank you for your service to science.
-Jordan Henderson
Hmmmm.... What do we call it?
The term "O Ring" is already taken...
-Jordan Henderson
An important fact that is often forgotten in discussion about Microsoft and the Anti-trust trial is that while other corporations may engage in similar behaviors, they aren't really dangerous as long as that corporation doesn't hold a monopoly.
This is why it was important for Judge Jackson to first find that Microsoft did, in fact, hold a monopoly.
-Jordan Henderson
Yeah, I don't get it. My wife uses it at home on a Pentium 100 with 48Mb of RAM for light work, letters, organizing tabular data in Excel, reading other's documents, etc. It's not swift, but I would not say it's "unusable".
The constant hyperbole about how bad MS products you see on /. really tends to discredit /. as a reliable source.
I'm beginning to see a career path for this 3 yr. old. A position in a newly formed software powerhouse might be possible after the breakup of MS.
If Gates' handlers brigade is broken up too, then there will be people experienced in this kind of thing who will need work.
Well we can't say when, but the addendum does address the question:
I realized that the various BSDs actually have somewhat different kernels. I don't believe it's an important distinction. Some of the different BSD kernels probably have more in common with each other than the various 2.x (x = 0,1,2,3) kernels, for example, but that's not important.
What I said was that BSDI was the only BSD commercial "distro" currently. I would compare it to RedHat, Suse, Caldera, Corel, Turbolinux, etc.
The other BSD "distros" are more similar to Debian. The group behind them all is not a commercial for-profit concern.
Since there was no official distro for Linux, the community HAD to fork to produce one.
Well, you'll have to explain how this theory accounts for the fact that "the community" has produced and continues to produce numerous commercial and non-commercial distros, have none of them been "good enough" for most users?
I think the existence of BSDi in the BSD space scares potential competitors out of the commercial BSD space. It would be difficult to pop-up and compete with them based on any of the BSDL source bases as BSDI can simply use most of the BSDL work in their own offering while the competitor would not benefit from the proprietary BSDi code.
Then, there's also the problem that anyone who started a new commercial BSD distro would have to resist the powerful temptation to close off important parts of their distro to give them a competitive advantage, especially when your major competition, BSDI, has done exactly this.
This is not the case with fully GPL'd OSs. A new competitor can pop up and add value to an old competitor (witness Mandrake and RedHat).
BSD advocates like to make all sorts of excuses for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD. I think the accretive nature of the GPL has something to do with the rapid growth and acceptance of Linux.
Sure, there's a BSD distro. It's well supported, solid, comes packaged for ISPs and Servers. The fine people at BSDI sell it.
I'm beginning to think the reason there's no inexpensive, mass-market distro for *BSD is because of the license. You just can't stop the suits from closing off important pieces, and jacking up the price to what the the market will bear because they can .
Look at Cygnus. They started out as a business to offer support for Open Source "products". Now, they sell closed source products as well. Why the change in business plans when, according to Cygnus, they've always enjoyed phenomenal growth and profitability? I think it's because the suits just can't stand the thought of giving everything away.
This is what's really new about running a business distributing GPL'd code. The suits have to start rethinking where they can make the money.
I'm not sure there is a lot of money to be made, long term, in being a distro vendor. A lot of people will just buy the same thing from Cheap Bytes. Ultimately, I would think that the distro vendors would get more involved in support, custom projects and training. I think RedHat knows this and this is why the Cygnus purchase makes sense.
An interesting question, for certain.
I was given to understand that, in the US, Governments can't hold copyrights. Why can they hold patents but not copyrights? Are such patents defensive in nature?
Well, I can't comment about your qualifications, but there are a number of companies offering employment for free source developers.
To name a few; Cygnus, Red Hat, Corel, Caldera, SGI, IBM, Sun and Compaq all are employing people who primarily do free source development.
There are any number of smaller groups that are trying to adopt an Open Source model commercially, giving away the source in hopes of making money on support. We'll see if they are successful.
The plaintiff benefits from punitive damages in order to encourage the pursuit of punitive damages.
These punishments are determined by a court and are, in theory, justly applied against a defenendent. What does it matter who receives the benefit from the award?
There is a conflict of interest in giving these awards to the community in that it is the people, through their courts and juries, who would determine the damage AND benefit.
If you feel that the punitive damages are excessive, then consider support for tort reform. Fix the right problem.
Let's hear the rest of the list.
Why would anyone want to work there very long?
Probably some dll problem...