Who ever mod-ed the parent informative needs
to understand a lot of History
Microkernels, and messaging, were an academic
fad of 1988-1997 by which time Tanenbaum/CMU/Inria
were shown to be wrong, and classic Unix e.g. Solaris; Linux correct
There is a huge history on this and it dosnt need
repeating on 10% of Slashdot comments.
I normally try to be objective, even in the face of nonsense like this.
This guy is the architypal PHB, he is clue-less, and, yes if CA wants to have a profile, in the world today, they will have to hire a viable group
of good kernel hackers.
The days when you could coach, from the sidelines, are long gone.
Politicians, believing money can buy votes and IT technology Astroturfers _claim_ that IT generally, and Computers in Schools, are, per see, a good thing (TM); sorry I don't buy this on the basis of my own and my two children's education.
First, computers are good things, and the development of the Internet makes them much more useful, but, unless you are a software developer, they do not much help your education.
The reason for this is that computers have a fairly small application set, and most of that dosn't really help you to know, remember, understand and be able to exploit, effectively, what you do know, or can remember.
Second, you have to have the verdampt computer, with you and power it, network it, and you probably had to boot it first. They are boat anchors, even palm-tops.
For all basic Reading-Writing-Arithmetic they are no help at all, a toy is all. A few good books are (a) much, much better, and (b) cheaper and simpler, but for this to work you need to pick authors who the kids want to read e.g Ronald Dahl, Rowling, Tolkien... you do not, in general need Julius Ceasar (in latin/english), Chaucer, Shakespear or even Dickens. You also need to teach kids to do sums, mental arithmetic and to guess/approximate well, and to understand the difference between what they think and what they know.
Computers get in the way of that, they do not help.
If you are not in the middle of NORAM, you may need to learn more than one natural language, and some learn lots, German, French, Italian and English, this is best done (a) young (b) by thinking in the current language, so again, computers are useless.
Then when the kids are older, writing essays, papers and eventually theses and academic papers a real tradeoff begins, nicely printed and spell-checked material is much easier to read, and chores like maintaining citation lists are easily automated, _but_ beautiful, correctly spelled nonsense is still just that.
So, computers can be very, very useful in real education, but, except for 'learning how to use computers' does it have much of a role _at_the_beginning.
"The real mistake was to accept the 'free' BitKeeper licence with its poison pill"
Had the 'free-licence' been (a) irrevokable, and (b) had a sensible (BK) source escrow term, then and only then would the cost-benefit to Bitmover and the community made _balanced_ sense.
But that is water under the bridge, what is really interesting is the fallout, GIT.
GIT is the Linus' replacement patch-manager, and will, I predict revolutionise thinking about SCM tools. Linus has come up with an original and revolutionary approach, (less than 6 man-weeks work, under 150k code) which lays the foundations for a really effective OpenSource SCM, and, in the process run a pithy seminar class in what was the matter with traditional SCMs.
This may turn out to be one of the most useful things to have happened in a long time.
You can pick linux distros from the very stable to the bleeding edge; and for the corporate market, small, medium and large that, an office suite and a small number of apps, on a per corporate basis is all that is needed. They anyway spend more effort keeping systems clean and standard than adding esoteric apps.
For the tech savy, and students Linux, say Fedora or SuSE have huge advantages, and these people dont need DiDio to tell them about TCO
For grandma, and the un-sophisticated home user they already own Windows 98 or get a lowish cost OEM version with their hardware, and are thus a nil or small revenue stream for M$.
So what Linux has done is sink the upgrade
ratchet, which only ever worked in the developed west and in corporations anyway
Both in Asia, China, India and Sout America M$ have huge problems, and anyone who thins that Limited Edition is going to solve that is nuts.
In Europe, which is a bigger market than the US, M$ is equally un-popular mostly because of the closed formats and format incompatipilities in Office, which is particularly serious in the context of National Public Archives.
Even in corporate america, most CIOs are smart enough to do a Linux study while negotiating with M$.
Finally, as a Consultant, and Software developer I have enough, particularly on the tools side. I will never have to use M$ unstable, in-secure bug and bloat-ware ever again; and I often do that in the context of interworking with 100% M$ shops and have smiled benignly while I have been able to continue working as the latest mal-ware brought the rest of the organization to a halt.
Use Linux I say to tech support who offer to help me re-build/disinfect my laptop.
I have, like most others, a huge respect for Linus,
he is both a superb developer and has a unique ability to "herd cats" in the development community.
He also has a proven track record of sound common sense.
This does _not_ however imbue him with infalibility.
We have two issues, and a side point, here:
(1) is reverse engineering wrong, HELL NO, it is the basis of most human scientific progress, in fact, you do the research, publish the paper and wait for collaborators to reverse engineer aka confirm your results.
(2) are Corporations unconditionally entitled to develop, or incompatibly extend, data formats or protocols and then claim them as patents, trade-secrets, or Intellectual Property, or semble to claim Copyright protection for them HELL NO.
The side issue is, was Andrew Trigel morally entitled to take the view he did.
So, if you try to extend an existing format or protocol, if you document it it is a _derived_work_ and your publication is infringing, unless it is fair use, so the M$ Kerberos extension fails.
To have a trade secret you must keep the secret.
Reverse Engineering is legal almost everywhere.
To protect against Reverse Engineering you need a patent.
If you are a monopoly, so M$ is, and Bitmover is not, different rules apply. Sherman & Mann, acts; see existing settlement(s) and the compliance process in the US and EU.
So, if the EU requires M$ to disclose its Office Formats, for example, then that will mean that they are in the public domain and can be used anywhere, whether Linus likes it or not.
All the above, simply restate the law.
Now, as a matter of opinion, I believe Andrew was: (a) fully within his rights, and (b) the resulting furore was a consequence of Linus lack of legal and commercial accumen in accepting Larry's licence with its in-built poison pill
He should have demanded that the 'free-licence' was irrevokable and that the BK source was in escrow before confering the benefits on Bitmover.
If you work in a large company, and made that sort of mistake, you would be be big trouble.
Oh NO he shouldn't, ClearCase is the most counter productive tool a developer could ever use, it encourages locked serial commits, is complicated, buggy, slow, poorly documented and poorly supported even for large enterprise customers.
All of the objections Linus has made to SVN also apply, and worse, to ClearCase.
Why, anyway, would it be better to buy a ClearCase licence than a BitKeeper licence.
What we need is something new here, and 'git' may be it.
Let me say that I use SVN, internally, used to use CVS, and both work well, and much better than the likes of ClearCase and PVCS; which both bought the configuration management lie.
SVN works very well with a small group of tightly co-ordinated developers, 1-10 people, but this is NOT linux, there are xx,000 out there.
Re:Mindshare and image bloodbath for BitKeeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 1
Now this is way over the top, and what I resent, more and more, on/.
McVoy is ethical, to a fault, and has both (a) a long and distinguished history as a developer and, (b) a temper, and reactivity which I am sure he usually regrets.
There are lessons to be learned, and mistakes not to re-made,... but OpenSorce learns these lessons and adapts, and inspite of many flames, goes forward.
(1) there is no OS solution, all the SCCS, CVS, svn, arch... and then PVCS, Clearcase were developed long ago and do not scale well to a large and weakly co-ordinated sets of developers.
Try maintaining a Clearcase repository on 5 continents and 7 time zones,
(2) Bitkeeper is a good, now closed source, solution to the problem
Larry has ranted, published white papers, huffed and puffed, and I suspect, finally, pissed Linus off --- Linus didn't whinge, he went and built a bridging tool
And, as often the case, only good will come of this.
I must be in a really bad mood today, _BUT_
when I hear stuff like this I really wonder
what people have been smoking.
The UNIX rwxrwxrwx permission is fine for keeping
applications out of the system files and to stop
users installing malware as root.
Whenever users _say_ they want complex permissions what they mean is they want the OS to implement business logic rules.
E.g. these people can issue orders, these sign cheques, but if it is over $100 000 two must sign, except if it over $10 000 000 the CFO must sign, and only the CFO can see/change the CEO's remuneration package, and by the way, if the company name is Enron or Woldcom the CFO can, singleton, do anything without creating audit records.
Put this crap in your application, easy in Oracle/SAP/Peoplesoft with a little bit of scripting.
Give the rest of us, who are concerned that some guy in Tuvalu, Latvia or China dosn't own the whole machine a break!
Bitkeeper is all about marketing, and mean vicious paranoia, and lm's inability to coerce ODSL. It clearly shows that RMS is basically right.
Note that much harware, including much that is, today, in the main line kernel needs soft firmware; also the Windoze driver interface is __VERY__ well
defined.
You better just hope the EU courts compel M$ to release the specifications; then one Windoze driver interface will support all non-native hardware, and M$ wont be able to change it each week.
Until the day of World Domination comes, and it is comming quickly in server farms, this will do to support esoteric hardware.
I continue to be impressed with the quality and real innovation comming from Google, it is now
very good and suddenly getting much better
If I were them I would negotiate with AFP, Reuters
so that the indexing Robot obeyed a delay time,
since even slightly stale news, say 15m for FOREX and Equity prices makes the information unusable for trading.
But, very good, keep it up Google, and show M$ what real innovation is about.
This is right up there with the famous Ken Olsen, erstwhile Digital President, dictum Unix is snake oil.
This outburst, from Swartz, is just as irrevant and clueless. It simply demonstrates that he is completely out of touch, and should make Wall Street even more concerned with the future of SUN.
I am very sad that a once great company, once one of the most innovative and generous in the computing industry, who figured out how to compete strongly with both DEC and IBM should be brought low by a bunch of MarketDroids and MonkeyBoys, with MBAs, who cannot figure out that their customers will remember FUD and betrayal.
It is just not true that all CIOs are PHBs, and even those who are, quickly get the message when their corporate e-mail system goes down or their web site is hacked.
The vital lesson here is simply that a complete software suite, including development tools is simply too expensive for a single company to develop, and support, the overhead is just too great!
Finally, when, not if, the desktop falls, and with the EU which will prevail the disclosure of the M$ secret formats is immanent, SUN is positioning itself to be irrelevant; they have been taking lessons from Balmer.
Rarely have I seen a post that misses so _MANY_ points at once; CPAN, CTAN & PEAR are truely useful
because they make a searchable archive readily accessible, and I generally have a clear Idea of which language code I want to find
Where well indexed searchable archives exist they
are a real boon
where they do not exist it says a lot about the vitality, community and opennes of the language set
Slashdot Mirror
A major problem is that all users are now programmed with click-through sequences, and the lie that this is, in any sense valuable.
Microkernels, and messaging, were an academic fad of 1988-1997 by which time Tanenbaum/CMU/Inria were shown to be wrong, and classic Unix e.g. Solaris; Linux correct
There is a huge history on this and it dosnt need repeating on 10% of Slashdot comments.
To summarise u-kernels suck!
This guy is the architypal PHB, he is clue-less, and, yes if CA wants to have a profile, in the world today, they will have to hire a viable group of good kernel hackers.
The days when you could coach, from the sidelines, are long gone.
You want your adgenda, pay for it.
(b) premium from Blue Chip often has insane mark up
If you are saying, "Buy from a Blue-Chip who will give you support" just reccomend that
Politicians, believing money can buy votes and IT technology Astroturfers _claim_ that IT generally, and Computers in Schools, are, per see, a good thing (TM); sorry I don't buy this on the basis of my own and my two children's education.
First, computers are good things, and the development of the Internet makes them much more useful, but, unless you are a software developer, they do not much help your education.
The reason for this is that computers have a fairly small application set, and most of that dosn't really help you to know, remember, understand and be able to exploit, effectively, what you do know, or can remember.
Second, you have to have the verdampt computer, with you and power it, network it, and you probably had to boot it first. They are boat anchors, even palm-tops.
For all basic Reading-Writing-Arithmetic they are no help at all, a toy is all. A few good books are (a) much, much better, and (b) cheaper and simpler, but for this to work you need to pick authors who the kids want to read e.g Ronald Dahl, Rowling, Tolkien ... you do not, in general need Julius Ceasar (in latin/english), Chaucer, Shakespear or even Dickens. You also need to teach kids to do sums, mental arithmetic and to guess/approximate well, and to understand the difference between what they think and what they know.
Computers get in the way of that, they do not help.
If you are not in the middle of NORAM, you may need to learn more than one natural language, and some learn lots, German, French, Italian and English, this is best done (a) young (b) by thinking in the current language, so again, computers are useless.
Then when the kids are older, writing essays, papers and eventually theses and academic papers a real tradeoff begins, nicely printed and spell-checked material is much easier to read, and chores like maintaining citation lists are easily automated, _but_ beautiful, correctly spelled nonsense is still just that.
So, computers can be very, very useful in real education, but, except for 'learning how to use computers' does it have much of a role _at_the_beginning.
"The real mistake was to accept the 'free' BitKeeper licence with its poison pill"
Had the 'free-licence' been (a) irrevokable, and (b) had a sensible (BK) source escrow term, then and only then would the cost-benefit to Bitmover and the community made _balanced_ sense.
But that is water under the bridge, what is really interesting is the fallout, GIT.
GIT is the Linus' replacement patch-manager, and will, I predict revolutionise thinking about SCM tools. Linus has come up with an original and revolutionary approach, (less than 6 man-weeks work, under 150k code) which lays the foundations for a really effective OpenSource SCM, and, in the process run a pithy seminar class in what was the matter with traditional SCMs.
This may turn out to be one of the most useful things to have happened in a long time.
No one said anyone was in breach of social contract, which is normally a weasle word for some anti-social behavior.
The only interesting thing here is the First Amendment, they have a right to publish their adds and that is _NOT_ being infringed.
Do I have an obligation to read it, __NO__
And we all know who paid IDC to say this!
You can pick linux distros from the very stable to the bleeding edge; and for the corporate market, small, medium and large that, an office suite and a small number of apps, on a per corporate basis is all that is needed. They anyway spend more effort keeping systems clean and standard than adding esoteric apps.
For the tech savy, and students Linux, say Fedora or SuSE have huge advantages, and these people dont need DiDio to tell them about TCO
For grandma, and the un-sophisticated home user they already own Windows 98 or get a lowish cost OEM version with their hardware, and are thus a nil or small revenue stream for M$.
So what Linux has done is sink the upgrade ratchet, which only ever worked in the developed west and in corporations anyway
Both in Asia, China, India and Sout America M$ have huge problems, and anyone who thins that Limited Edition is going to solve that is nuts.
In Europe, which is a bigger market than the US, M$ is equally un-popular mostly because of the closed formats and format incompatipilities in Office, which is particularly serious in the context of National Public Archives.
Even in corporate america, most CIOs are smart enough to do a Linux study while negotiating with M$.
Finally, as a Consultant, and Software developer I have enough, particularly on the tools side. I will never have to use M$ unstable, in-secure bug and bloat-ware ever again; and I often do that in the context of interworking with 100% M$ shops and have smiled benignly while I have been able to continue working as the latest mal-ware brought the rest of the organization to a halt.
Use Linux I say to tech support who offer to help me re-build/disinfect my laptop.
He also has a proven track record of sound common sense.
This does _not_ however imbue him with infalibility.
We have two issues, and a side point, here:
(1) is reverse engineering wrong, HELL NO, it is the basis of most human scientific progress, in fact, you do the research, publish the paper and wait for collaborators to reverse engineer aka confirm your results.
(2) are Corporations unconditionally entitled to develop, or incompatibly extend, data formats or protocols and then claim them as patents, trade-secrets, or Intellectual Property, or semble to claim Copyright protection for them HELL NO.
The side issue is, was Andrew Trigel morally entitled to take the view he did.
So, if you try to extend an existing format or protocol, if you document it it is a _derived_work_ and your publication is infringing, unless it is fair use, so the M$ Kerberos extension fails.
To have a trade secret you must keep the secret.
Reverse Engineering is legal almost everywhere.
To protect against Reverse Engineering you need a patent.
If you are a monopoly, so M$ is, and Bitmover is not, different rules apply. Sherman & Mann, acts; see existing settlement(s) and the compliance process in the US and EU.
So, if the EU requires M$ to disclose its Office Formats, for example, then that will mean that they are in the public domain and can be used anywhere, whether Linus likes it or not.
All the above, simply restate the law.
Now, as a matter of opinion, I believe Andrew was: (a) fully within his rights, and (b) the resulting furore was a consequence of Linus lack of legal and commercial accumen in accepting Larry's licence with its in-built poison pill
He should have demanded that the 'free-licence' was irrevokable and that the BK source was in escrow before confering the benefits on Bitmover.
If you work in a large company, and made that sort of mistake, you would be be big trouble.
Wrong, initially, for about 6 months, the BitKeeper code was released
Dipshit!
The more this goes on the more sad/lame it gets!
All of the objections Linus has made to SVN also apply, and worse, to ClearCase.
Why, anyway, would it be better to buy a ClearCase licence than a BitKeeper licence.
What we need is something new here, and 'git' may be it.
Let me say that I use SVN, internally, used to use CVS, and both work well, and much better than the likes of ClearCase and PVCS; which both bought the configuration management lie.
SVN works very well with a small group of tightly co-ordinated developers, 1-10 people, but this is NOT linux, there are xx,000 out there.
McVoy is ethical, to a fault, and has both (a) a long and distinguished history as a developer and, (b) a temper, and reactivity which I am sure he usually regrets.
There are lessons to be learned, and mistakes not to re-made, ... but OpenSorce learns these lessons and adapts, and inspite of many flames, goes forward.
(1) there is no OS solution, all the SCCS, CVS, svn, arch ... and then PVCS, Clearcase were developed long ago and do not scale well to a large and weakly co-ordinated sets of developers.
Try maintaining a Clearcase repository on 5 continents and 7 time zones,
(2) Bitkeeper is a good, now closed source, solution to the problem
Larry has ranted, published white papers, huffed and puffed, and I suspect, finally, pissed Linus off --- Linus didn't whinge, he went and built a bridging tool
And, as often the case, only good will come of this.
2. Bitkeeper is a vary, very good product.
3. Because of lm, it is unusable in the Kernel context.
4. The good reason is lm's attitude, and he owns the product. Sadly, he has just completely destroyed all _TRUST_ in his product
If you read about 'git', think and stop making silly posts, you will understand what is going down.
The UNIX rwxrwxrwx permission is fine for keeping applications out of the system files and to stop users installing malware as root.
Whenever users _say_ they want complex permissions what they mean is they want the OS to implement business logic rules.
E.g. these people can issue orders, these sign cheques, but if it is over $100 000 two must sign, except if it over $10 000 000 the CFO must sign, and only the CFO can see/change the CEO's remuneration package, and by the way, if the company name is Enron or Woldcom the CFO can, singleton, do anything without creating audit records.
Put this crap in your application, easy in Oracle/SAP/Peoplesoft with a little bit of scripting.
Give the rest of us, who are concerned that some guy in Tuvalu, Latvia or China dosn't own the whole machine a break!
Oh really, just how do you know that?
Welcome to the TCO debate!
Shill!
Un-informed nonsense!
Bitkeeper is all about marketing, and mean vicious paranoia, and lm's inability to coerce ODSL. It clearly shows that RMS is basically right.
Note that much harware, including much that is, today, in the main line kernel needs soft firmware; also the Windoze driver interface is __VERY__ well defined.
You better just hope the EU courts compel M$ to release the specifications; then one Windoze driver interface will support all non-native hardware, and M$ wont be able to change it each week.
Until the day of World Domination comes, and it is comming quickly in server farms, this will do to support esoteric hardware.
If I were them I would negotiate with AFP, Reuters so that the indexing Robot obeyed a delay time, since even slightly stale news, say 15m for FOREX and Equity prices makes the information unusable for trading.
But, very good, keep it up Google, and show M$ what real innovation is about.
And note, this was exactly the problem with DEC!
This outburst, from Swartz, is just as irrevant and clueless. It simply demonstrates that he is completely out of touch, and should make Wall Street even more concerned with the future of SUN.
I am very sad that a once great company, once one of the most innovative and generous in the computing industry, who figured out how to compete strongly with both DEC and IBM should be brought low by a bunch of MarketDroids and MonkeyBoys, with MBAs, who cannot figure out that their customers will remember FUD and betrayal.
It is just not true that all CIOs are PHBs, and even those who are, quickly get the message when their corporate e-mail system goes down or their web site is hacked.
The vital lesson here is simply that a complete software suite, including development tools is simply too expensive for a single company to develop, and support, the overhead is just too great!
Finally, when, not if, the desktop falls, and with the EU which will prevail the disclosure of the M$ secret formats is immanent, SUN is positioning itself to be irrelevant; they have been taking lessons from Balmer.
SUN is, however, nowhere as wealthy.
Where well indexed searchable archives exist they are a real boon
where they do not exist it says a lot about the vitality, community and opennes of the language set