If you read more carefully, you'd have noticed that I mentioned another reply to my initial post that mentions this already.
At any rate, it seems you are right that name and street address and phone number are not a creative expression usually (and you can indeed argue about name). However, company name and function title can very well be a creative expression and be protected by copyright, This still means that copyrighted information is distributed. Oh, and it really does not matter who owns the copyright, you still need explicit permission from the owner.
that is publicly available information, so how can it be copyrighted?
A published book is publicly available yet if it was written in somewhat recent times (what this means depends on copyright terms in your specific location) it is protected by copyright.
Even giving away a copy of copyrighted information does not remove the copyright on that information.
You can grant a license to everyone that receives the information allowing them to pass it on, you could specifically put it into the public domain, and in some cases )collection of facts as mentioned by another poster) the information is not protected by copyright to begin with, but you giving it away does not change anything here.
That is an interesting point but I believe that what you are refering to is a 'a collection of facts', which is indeed not protected by copyright.
This would concern jigsaw as a whole, but I somehow doubt that this covers the individual information as presented on a business card. At the very least, the company name and function title on it.
See there is another problem with the whole "free market" thing right here. A bar that allows smoking will do more buisness because both people who smoke, and people who know people who smoke will go there. Bars that don't allow smoking already have the important disadvantage (for a social institution) of being less popular for this reason, so they either have to cut prices and operate with a smaller margin, or raise prices and risk driving away their already sparse crowd.
Well, as I mentioned before, I am a smoker myself. My girlfriend however isn't, and while not objecting strongly, she doesn't like being in a too smokey environment. Result is that we often end up in a bar where I can smoke, but in restaurants that are smoke free. I really don't mind that, most food is better without the smell and taste of smoke to begin with
The proof is in the pudding - in the vast majority of cities/states where smoking in bars is legal there are no non-smoking bars, bowling allies, or pool halls.
(No I don't have any references, but I have lived in three cities as they made indoor smoking in public places illegal, and can't think of a single bar that was non-smoking before the ban. Also note that restaurants are a bit of a different catagory, I will admit that there are non-smoking restaurants that aren't legally mandated.)
Well, I have lived in the USA, but currently I live in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Maybe things are a bit different here, but we are seeing similar discussions here, and a strong push by anti smoking organisations to get smoking banned in bars and restaurants.
We are seeing more and more places here advertising that they are a non-smoking place. They are advertising that specifically because it gets them customers. 2 years ago this was really the exception still, nowadays it is a very common sight.
To me it seems that fear of losing customers is holding back many places from banning smoking, but once a few tried with success and is shown that it can work, more will follow.
Business cards are handed out by people to put their contact information out there for potential future business partners.
Talk for yourself, don#t talk for others.
Currently I run my own business, and I indeed give out business cards for the reason you mention. A couple of years ago however, I was a systems engineer for a huge IT company, and whenever I gave a business card to someone it was because of that specific individual having a need to contact me and me approving of him contacting me.
The morale of the story is that what you happen to do is first of all not representative, and second, might change over time.
A business card as such is copyrighted both in its design and its content. Taking that content and copying it is a violation of my copyright on my card, and you cannot do that without my permission.
First of all, whiule I am a smoker, I do agree that that is my own choice, and that I shouldn't bother others with it.
That said, why do we need laws for this? If there is a substantial group of non smokers (as there happens to be), then there should be bars and restaurants catering to those because there is a market for it.
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
Snooping on their private conversations and using pretexting to obtain information from the phone company are not moral or legal rights HP has, and as a matter of fact the later is definitely illegal.
"Snooping" on business activities and conversations is another matter.
What I find very interesting and disturbing at the same time, is how this can be a substantial news story, while something like the USA administration blatantly lying to its so called allies about a CIA secret prison program, and on the way breaking laws within allied countries, breaking agreements with those allies etc, barely makes the news at all.
So.. what do we have here? a company that broke the law in order to try to keep its information inside. Stupid, and even criminal maybe, but not really worth a major story.
The US government acting in a way that gives other countries, esp. those who are called upon as allies at many times, rather good reason to distrust the USA and its foreign policies however gets ignored.
first of all, the rich getting better treatment than the poor is not an american phenomenon, it's a human phenomenon. it's true in every country, in every time period. why are you singling the usa out for accountability for what every country is guilty of?
I believe there are at least 3 reasons for this:
1. This particular incident took place in the USA, so GP is not singling out the USA so much as commenting on the incident and the circumstances that allowed for it.
2. Right or wrong of an action does not depend on what others do, it depends on your action. In other words, pointing at others and saying "they are wrong as well/worse then me" etc is simply no excuse.
3. The USA claims to provide justice for all those within its borders, it is not strange that others hold them to those claims.
There's no big economic reason for the phone companies to protect privacy effectively
Which is one of the reasons why many think the USA is seriously lacking laws to protect the privacy of individuals.The idea is really simple: An organisation that wants to collect and store information on you has to: - Inform you about it - Explain why they are doing this - Refrain from using the information in other ways - Let you review the information they keep on you - Honor requests for corrections and removal of said information
That mean that such an organisation is also legally responsible for ensuring that such information is not used in other ways. At least that gives them a strong legal incentive to take care.
As a nice side-effect it destroys te business model of parasites like doubleclick and friends.
, and the public service ethic they used to have died with Ma Bell.
Hmm. that is the same company that was inspiration for the statement "We don't care, we don't have to, we are the phone company" ?
Maybe you should learn to not assume things that you know shit about if you want some kind of serious discussion.
Why people live where they do? maybe they were born there and don't have the means to move somewhere else? It is just an example, I can think f a few others without efford, I m pretty sure that unless you really have shit for brains, you can think of some as well. The fact that SOME people have that choice in no way means everyone has, and that invalidates your argument.
Seeing how there are quite a few places with a few hundred thousand inhabitants and ONE SINGLE broadband ISP, it seems like you are either extremely badly informed, or you are suggesting overcrowding major cities to an even larger extent then is already the case, which sounds like a perfect solution indeed. Do you have more such briliant and well informed ideas?
Besides, nothing of what you say changes the fact that that One ISP should provide decent service, and in case of cable or local telco, has some privileges on your territory (they can run their cables there.. try running your own cables through someone elses gardens and see how long it lasts), and demanding proper service in return is quite reasonable.
Special privileges come with special obligations.
I think we should not expect you to understand such things however, seeing how you didn't grasp the basic concept of logging in or creating an account, not because it makes it more (or less) true what you say, but at least someone can know if they are still talking to the same person throughout the course of a discussion, and could look back at other things you said to provide some more context.
By 'moral argument' I was referring exactly to them doing something like artificially limiting a connection in order to get more money, which I think *I* would consider wrong and against society, all else equal. But you weren't talking about that.
The moral problem for me is first of all that whatever data goes over their network is none of their business, and they should keep their nose out of it. Second, if they want/need more money for their service, of better, if they want more money for a better service, they can come talk to me as their customer, not to some unrelated third party that doesn't do business and isn't directly connected to them to begin with.
As a matter of fact, ISPs should be paying content providers because it is those who make it interesting for people to have an internet connection, and as a result are directly responsible for providing ISPs with customers. It is really beyond me how some ISPs believe this is the other way around.
So according to you, the issue is really purely practical: You say that if you work out the costs, a neutral net is cheaper and easier. There is no moral aspect to it.
No, I was purely commenting on the argument that a tiered internet would be cheaper.
Wether or not there is a moral aspect to it is simply a different argument and I don't see how you arrive at your conclusion there.
The moral aspect comes in by reasoning as follows: given that a neutral net is cheaper, why would the telcos want a tiered net unless they wanted to do unsavoury things?
Rubbish. They want to make more money, and they can do that by charging more for a connection that is not artifically limited. No 'unsavoury' things or 'evil' has to happen there. It is undesirable for many reasons, but that doesn't make it evil perse.
But, what if you are wrong about the neutral net being cheaper? Then everything is ok, and the telcos are not doing bad things. So the whole issue depends on whether a tiered net is technically better.
No, again, moral argument and technical argument are two seperate things. To debunk the cost argument from the telcos, you can present some data that shows their argument is very likely wrong. The moral argument is simply irrelevant for that beyond saying 'you shouldn't want that to begin with'.
I have to say I don't find this very convincing....
Maybe that is because first of all you seem to think in extremes, and second, you jump to conclusions.
Such a kernel can be distributed only pursuant to the GPL, absent an exception from the library's author.
That is also my understanding, since it is linked against that library.
To Eivind, this is why I see a legal issue, assuming of course that a BSD distribution would want to distibute the resulting kernel with a BSD style license. This of course is not a problem for GPLed userland tools and such, there you are entirely correct for what I can tell.
In places where bandwidth is readily available due to intense real competition between telcos (ie, substantial parts of Europe) it seems that a high bandwidth, low latency connection is simply cheaper then having to implement the filtering needed for a tiered internet.
This somehow suggests that there really is another motive for the telcos to want this tiered internet.
This in turn suggests the problem with your reasoning. It is not logically wrong what you say, but it is ignoring the actual cost of low latency bandwidth and the required filtering to implement a tiered internet.
It is hard to say if OpenSSH were GPL instead of BSD, they would still be in financial trouble. There would certainly, however, be less duplicated effort in keeping OpenSSH up to date with the commercial versions
That commercial version was there first actually, so GPLinng it would not have mattered. If the original codebase had been GPLed however, we might not even have had openssh as it is.
Apple may have "donated plenty" but you can't download the code, remove trademarks, and release your own OS/JOE now can you? Take a good look at CentOS and what this represents in terms of real freedom and compare it to the BSD world.
The BSD folk are so used to getting almost nothing, that "almost nothing" looks like "plenty."
You are confusing Apple's open-sourcing of parts of its own OS with Apple contributing code to FreeBSD. Both happen.
I can definitely take FreeBSD and roll my own OS based on it, including the code that Apple donated.
You are also mistaken about how often this happens, being somewhat blinded obviously by the fact that there are also quite a few cases where it doesn't happen. No it is not a requirement indeed.
FreeBSD includes a slightly obscure thing called Netgraph. Take a look at it when you have time, and also look at where it comes from.
FreeBSD also includes some nice feature called jail, take a look at where it comes from.
Why would companies do this even when they do not have a legal requirement to do so? Very simple, it is cheaper for them that way.
but it's my understanding the "user" (which I believe was a junior contributor) was being a jerk. He would have had to be to get a response like that, right?
Hmm, for all I can tell, getting a somewhat impolite response takes no more then asking a question. Getting an actually rude response does require a bit more, but not much.
Don't get me wrong btw, he does a good job and I respect him for it, but being nice just doesn't seem to be on his program usually.
Kernel stuff isn't that difficult to port... It takes some effort though.
There are technical and legal issues making this difficult.
Porting *BSD kernel stuff to Linux is usually not a problem for legal reasons, but the other way around might well be if it is to be integrated into a *BSD kernel.
Technically, it depends a lot on what you want to port, but the underlying differences between a Linux and a BSD kernel can be substantial, and you may well be running into features that one has and the other does not have at all.
I'm not going to agree that kernels don't matter but I do agree that the differences are smaller and smaller, device support seems to be the biggest and most outstanding issue of difference between various UNIX and UNIX like kernels (FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, XNU, and Solaris)
Differences between the virtual memory management of those kernels makes them work better or worse, or at times not at all depending on your situation. For example, where Solaris and Linux can handle resizing physical memory, BSD kernels can not. This makes hardware where you can add memory on-the-fly a no-go on a BSD system, but you do gain a bit of performance due to this.
Differences in schedulers look very acedemic when being discussed, but the difference for the end-user is quite real, and becomes larger the more common it becomes to have hundreds of small programs running.
The differences in threading implementations matter little to the end-user directly, but matter a lot to how well certain applications run, and since that happens to include things like video playback, it does matter to the end-user at times.
So while device support is the most glaringy obvious difference, it is not the only relevant one, and definitely not the most difficult one to change.
I think that's kind of the point. More interestingly, Sun isn't going gangbusters on device support, they've increased their effort on the core. Apple does their own thing and device support doesn't even appear to be a concern to them, they are doing the hardware stack, they at least have an excuse and compelling hardware. The BSDs kind of do it in spurts but don't seem utterly concerned with it. Linux just has huge popularity going for it so it naturally acquires device support. Other than devices it seems like there is quite a bit of parity.
FreeBSD as well as Linux supports first of all the hardware that is relevant to those close to its development. For many configurations the differences in device support are hardly relevant, for some they are. If you want to have a use for your usb headset without having to patch the usb audio driver (and have the luck to have the 'right' type of usb controller), then Linux is your friend. If you need sata raid support without fuzz, FreeBSD is your friend, just to give some examples (neither of them being unique)
If device support is the big differentiator, then what at all does FreeBSD have going for it either? It's not difficult to come up with hardware it won't play with. The core team isn't that different that NetBSD's other than they execute more efficiently, they aren't making a big device support push... It seems like it's a critical situtation that device support isn't the number 1 effort for Free right now.
What is critical for FreeBSD in the area of 'device support' is getting usb support to work properly. That means getting rid of giant where possible, getting full duplex audio working, getting ugen to actually work for anything other then the most simple cases etc.
For the rest, cases where Linux supports some random device I end up with while FreeBSD doesn't are about as common as the other way around, and usually after a few months both support the thing.
As long as getting a simple usb webcam or digital camera or printer/scanner or usb headset working is a lot of work if it works at all FreeBSD will have a problem on the 'desktop', and more importantly, among the enthousiasts which
It's amazing how many people fail to grasp this very simple concept.
It is amazing how many people still don't get it into whatever they have for brains that this is not a realistic option for many people. No, dialup is not a realistic option in quite a few cases, no matter how much you want to believe it is, and many people simply have no other alternative.
And yes, having internet access is a requirement for my job, and is used for so many things nowadays that not having Internet access is not a realistic option for many people.
I happen to live somewhere where switching providers is quite an option, but I get out and talk to people enough to know this isn't true for many (without moving to another country or at least to quite far from where they live now and have their income)
Anyway, how about you comning back with your 'then switch to another isp, dumbass' kinda statements when YOU pay the extra cost of getting the place wired up to another ISP, even if that means getting another ISP to provide broadband access in that area?
Just someday try to get you a bsd tar and ftp, and compare them to gnu tar and the typical linux ftp client.. Anything the later 2 do are done by the first 2 as well but better, and they do a few things more.
This isn't true for all cases, but its not that exceptional either.
Personally, I think the best thing the Linux and BSD world has going for it is that Sun still thinks that it's all about the kernel. Nobody is ever going to switch to Solaris for dtrace, zones and zfs. 64bit filesystem vs. 128bit? Wake us up when it actually matters, if it ever does. I'm not saying kernels don't matter but the differences between various ones the features and lacking feature set is becoming small enough to not really care. The benchmark differences are so small and the stability differences aren't measurable.
Ah, someone else who believes the kernel doesn't matter..
I could run everything that is part of the typical Linux distribution on FreeBSD, and yet, I still would not have decent 5.1 audio and proper usb support for anything beyond a simple mass storage device or mouse.
I could run the FreeBSD userland on top of a Linux kernel however and still get working 5.1 audio and proper usb support
As a matter of fact, the differences between the userland on both are so small as to not matter for most practical purposes, and where there are differences in the userland, it is virtually always possible to port them. This is simply not true for the kernel.
I do agree with your opinion on Apple's changes however, getting rid of init is a very good idea, but then, unlike Linux and the *BSDs, Apple never tried to make a Unix like system, rather, they took the BSD derived system they already had and thought that it would be usefull as a component for building their next OS. This made it easy to get rid of traditional Unixisms like init
As a small sidenote, Apple uses a rather not unix like kernel..
What you are right about is that kernel features in themselves don't matter, what matters is the end-user functionality enabled by those kernel features.
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hmm, did you reply to the wrong post or am I missing something here..
I don't see me claiming anywhere that the USA is special in any way.
If you read more carefully, you'd have noticed that I mentioned another reply to my initial post that mentions this already.
At any rate, it seems you are right that name and street address and phone number are not a creative expression usually (and you can indeed argue about name). However, company name and function title can very well be a creative expression and be protected by copyright, This still means that copyrighted information is distributed. Oh, and it really does not matter who owns the copyright, you still need explicit permission from the owner.
that is publicly available information, so how can it be copyrighted?
A published book is publicly available yet if it was written in somewhat recent times (what this means depends on copyright terms in your specific location) it is protected by copyright.
Even giving away a copy of copyrighted information does not remove the copyright on that information.
You can grant a license to everyone that receives the information allowing them to pass it on, you could specifically put it into the public domain, and in some cases )collection of facts as mentioned by another poster) the information is not protected by copyright to begin with, but you giving it away does not change anything here.
That is an interesting point but I believe that what you are refering to is a 'a collection of facts', which is indeed not protected by copyright.
This would concern jigsaw as a whole, but I somehow doubt that this covers the individual information as presented on a business card. At the very least, the company name and function title on it.
See there is another problem with the whole "free market" thing right here. A bar that allows smoking will do more buisness because both people who smoke, and people who know people who smoke will go there. Bars that don't allow smoking already have the important disadvantage (for a social institution) of being less popular for this reason, so they either have to cut prices and operate with a smaller margin, or raise prices and risk driving away their already sparse crowd.
Well, as I mentioned before, I am a smoker myself. My girlfriend however isn't, and while not objecting strongly, she doesn't like being in a too smokey environment. Result is that we often end up in a bar where I can smoke, but in restaurants that are smoke free. I really don't mind that, most food is better without the smell and taste of smoke to begin with
The proof is in the pudding - in the vast majority of cities/states where smoking in bars is legal there are no non-smoking bars, bowling allies, or pool halls.
(No I don't have any references, but I have lived in three cities as they made indoor smoking in public places illegal, and can't think of a single bar that was non-smoking before the ban. Also note that restaurants are a bit of a different catagory, I will admit that there are non-smoking restaurants that aren't legally mandated.)
Well, I have lived in the USA, but currently I live in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Maybe things are a bit different here, but we are seeing similar discussions here, and a strong push by anti smoking organisations to get smoking banned in bars and restaurants.
We are seeing more and more places here advertising that they are a non-smoking place. They are advertising that specifically because it gets them customers. 2 years ago this was really the exception still, nowadays it is a very common sight.
To me it seems that fear of losing customers is holding back many places from banning smoking, but once a few tried with success and is shown that it can work, more will follow.
Hot girls smoke? hmm.. would that work similar to how wet wood smokes when set ablaze?
:)
Thanks for bringing a bit of light into this discussion
Business cards are handed out by people to put their contact information out there for potential future business partners.
Talk for yourself, don#t talk for others.
Currently I run my own business, and I indeed give out business cards for the reason you mention. A couple of years ago however, I was a systems engineer for a huge IT company, and whenever I gave a business card to someone it was because of that specific individual having a need to contact me and me approving of him contacting me.
The morale of the story is that what you happen to do is first of all not representative, and second, might change over time.
A business card as such is copyrighted both in its design and its content. Taking that content and copying it is a violation of my copyright on my card, and you cannot do that without my permission.
First of all, whiule I am a smoker, I do agree that that is my own choice, and that I shouldn't bother others with it.
That said, why do we need laws for this? If there is a substantial group of non smokers (as there happens to be), then there should be bars and restaurants catering to those because there is a market for it.
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
Snooping on their private conversations and using pretexting to obtain information from the phone company are not moral or legal rights HP has, and as a matter of fact the later is definitely illegal.
"Snooping" on business activities and conversations is another matter.
What I find very interesting and disturbing at the same time, is how this can be a substantial news story, while something like the USA administration blatantly lying to its so called allies about a CIA secret prison program, and on the way breaking laws within allied countries, breaking agreements with those allies etc, barely makes the news at all.
So.. what do we have here? a company that broke the law in order to try to keep its information inside. Stupid, and even criminal maybe, but not really worth a major story.
The US government acting in a way that gives other countries, esp. those who are called upon as allies at many times, rather good reason to distrust the USA and its foreign policies however gets ignored.
first of all, the rich getting better treatment than the poor is not an american phenomenon, it's a human phenomenon. it's true in every country, in every time period. why are you singling the usa out for accountability for what every country is guilty of?
I believe there are at least 3 reasons for this:
1. This particular incident took place in the USA, so GP is not singling out the USA so much as commenting on the incident and the circumstances that allowed for it.
2. Right or wrong of an action does not depend on what others do, it depends on your action. In other words, pointing at others and saying "they are wrong as well/worse then me" etc is simply no excuse.
3. The USA claims to provide justice for all those within its borders, it is not strange that others hold them to those claims.
The remainder of your post I fully agree with.
There's no big economic reason for the phone companies to protect privacy effectively
Which is one of the reasons why many think the USA is seriously lacking laws to protect the privacy of individuals.The idea is really simple: An organisation that wants to collect and store information on you has to:
- Inform you about it
- Explain why they are doing this
- Refrain from using the information in other ways
- Let you review the information they keep on you
- Honor requests for corrections and removal of said information
That mean that such an organisation is also legally responsible for ensuring that such information is not used in other ways. At least that gives them a strong legal incentive to take care.
As a nice side-effect it destroys te business model of parasites like doubleclick and friends.
, and the public service ethic they used to have died with Ma Bell.
Hmm. that is the same company that was inspiration for the statement "We don't care, we don't have to, we are the phone company" ?
It is similar in a way, but that doesn't make it related.
Maybe you should learn to not assume things that you know shit about if you want some kind of serious discussion.
Why people live where they do? maybe they were born there and don't have the means to move somewhere else? It is just an example, I can think f a few others without efford, I m pretty sure that unless you really have shit for brains, you can think of some as well. The fact that SOME people have that choice in no way means everyone has, and that invalidates your argument.
Seeing how there are quite a few places with a few hundred thousand inhabitants and ONE SINGLE broadband ISP, it seems like you are either extremely badly informed, or you are suggesting overcrowding major cities to an even larger extent then is already the case, which sounds like a perfect solution indeed. Do you have more such briliant and well informed ideas?
Besides, nothing of what you say changes the fact that that One ISP should provide decent service, and in case of cable or local telco, has some privileges on your territory (they can run their cables there.. try running your own cables through someone elses gardens and see how long it lasts), and demanding proper service in return is quite reasonable.
Special privileges come with special obligations.
I think we should not expect you to understand such things however, seeing how you didn't grasp the basic concept of logging in or creating an account, not because it makes it more (or less) true what you say, but at least someone can know if they are still talking to the same person throughout the course of a discussion, and could look back at other things you said to provide some more context.
By 'moral argument' I was referring exactly to them doing something like artificially limiting a connection in order to get more money, which I think *I* would consider wrong and against society, all else equal. But you weren't talking about that.
The moral problem for me is first of all that whatever data goes over their network is none of their business, and they should keep their nose out of it. Second, if they want/need more money for their service, of better, if they want more money for a better service, they can come talk to me as their customer, not to some unrelated third party that doesn't do business and isn't directly connected to them to begin with.
As a matter of fact, ISPs should be paying content providers because it is those who make it interesting for people to have an internet connection, and as a result are directly responsible for providing ISPs with customers. It is really beyond me how some ISPs believe this is the other way around.
So according to you, the issue is really purely practical: You say that if you work out the costs, a neutral net is cheaper and easier.
...
There is no moral aspect to it.
No, I was purely commenting on the argument that a tiered internet would be cheaper.
Wether or not there is a moral aspect to it is simply a different argument and I don't see how you arrive at your conclusion there.
The moral aspect comes in by reasoning as follows: given that a neutral net is cheaper, why would the telcos want a tiered net unless they wanted to do unsavoury things?
Rubbish. They want to make more money, and they can do that by charging more for a connection that is not artifically limited. No 'unsavoury' things or 'evil' has to happen there. It is undesirable for many reasons, but that doesn't make it evil perse.
But, what if you are wrong about the neutral net being cheaper? Then everything is ok, and the telcos are not doing bad things. So the whole issue depends on whether a tiered net is technically better.
No, again, moral argument and technical argument are two seperate things. To debunk the cost argument from the telcos, you can present some data that shows their argument is very likely wrong. The moral argument is simply irrelevant for that beyond saying 'you shouldn't want that to begin with'.
I have to say I don't find this very convincing.
Maybe that is because first of all you seem to think in extremes, and second, you jump to conclusions.
tepples said:
Such a kernel can be distributed only pursuant to the GPL, absent an exception from the library's author.
That is also my understanding, since it is linked against that library.
To Eivind, this is why I see a legal issue, assuming of course that a BSD distribution would want to distibute the resulting kernel with a BSD style license. This of course is not a problem for GPLed userland tools and such, there you are entirely correct for what I can tell.
In places where bandwidth is readily available due to intense real competition between telcos (ie, substantial parts of Europe) it seems that a high bandwidth, low latency connection is simply cheaper then having to implement the filtering needed for a tiered internet.
This somehow suggests that there really is another motive for the telcos to want this tiered internet.
This in turn suggests the problem with your reasoning. It is not logically wrong what you say, but it is ignoring the actual cost of low latency bandwidth and the required filtering to implement a tiered internet.
I think it depends on the nature of the GPLed project and how you use it.
What would the result be of using a GPLed library in the kernel with regards to the licence of the kernel?
It is hard to say if OpenSSH were GPL instead of BSD, they would still be in financial trouble. There would certainly, however, be less duplicated effort in keeping OpenSSH up to date with the commercial versions
That commercial version was there first actually, so GPLinng it would not have mattered. If the original codebase had been GPLed however, we might not even have had openssh as it is.
Apple may have "donated plenty" but you can't download the code, remove trademarks, and release your own OS/JOE now can you? Take a good look at CentOS and what this represents in terms of real freedom and compare it to the BSD world.
The BSD folk are so used to getting almost nothing, that "almost nothing" looks like "plenty."
You are confusing Apple's open-sourcing of parts of its own OS with Apple contributing code to FreeBSD. Both happen.
I can definitely take FreeBSD and roll my own OS based on it, including the code that Apple donated.
You are also mistaken about how often this happens, being somewhat blinded obviously by the fact that there are also quite a few cases where it doesn't happen. No it is not a requirement indeed.
FreeBSD includes a slightly obscure thing called Netgraph. Take a look at it when you have time, and also look at where it comes from.
FreeBSD also includes some nice feature called jail, take a look at where it comes from.
Why would companies do this even when they do not have a legal requirement to do so? Very simple, it is cheaper for them that way.
but it's my understanding the "user" (which I believe was a junior contributor) was being a jerk. He would have had to be to get a response like that, right?
Hmm, for all I can tell, getting a somewhat impolite response takes no more then asking a question. Getting an actually rude response does require a bit more, but not much.
Don't get me wrong btw, he does a good job and I respect him for it, but being nice just doesn't seem to be on his program usually.
Kernel stuff isn't that difficult to port... It takes some effort though.
There are technical and legal issues making this difficult.
Porting *BSD kernel stuff to Linux is usually not a problem for legal reasons, but the other way around might well be if it is to be integrated into a *BSD kernel.
Technically, it depends a lot on what you want to port, but the underlying differences between a Linux and a BSD kernel can be substantial, and you may well be running into features that one has and the other does not have at all.
I'm not going to agree that kernels don't matter but I do agree that the differences are smaller and smaller, device support seems to be the biggest and most outstanding issue of difference between various UNIX and UNIX like kernels (FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, XNU, and Solaris)
Differences between the virtual memory management of those kernels makes them work better or worse, or at times not at all depending on your situation. For example, where Solaris and Linux can handle resizing physical memory, BSD kernels can not. This makes hardware where you can add memory on-the-fly a no-go on a BSD system, but you do gain a bit of performance due to this.
Differences in schedulers look very acedemic when being discussed, but the difference for the end-user is quite real, and becomes larger the more common it becomes to have hundreds of small programs running.
The differences in threading implementations matter little to the end-user directly, but matter a lot to how well certain applications run, and since that happens to include things like video playback, it does matter to the end-user at times.
So while device support is the most glaringy obvious difference, it is not the only relevant one, and definitely not the most difficult one to change.
I think that's kind of the point. More interestingly, Sun isn't going gangbusters on device support, they've increased their effort on the core. Apple does their own thing and device support doesn't even appear to be a concern to them, they are doing the hardware stack, they at least have an excuse and compelling hardware. The BSDs kind of do it in spurts but don't seem utterly concerned with it. Linux just has huge popularity going for it so it naturally acquires device support. Other than devices it seems like there is quite a bit of parity.
FreeBSD as well as Linux supports first of all the hardware that is relevant to those close to its development. For many configurations the differences in device support are hardly relevant, for some they are. If you want to have a use for your usb headset without having to patch the usb audio driver (and have the luck to have the 'right' type of usb controller), then Linux is your friend. If you need sata raid support without fuzz, FreeBSD is your friend, just to give some examples (neither of them being unique)
If device support is the big differentiator, then what at all does FreeBSD have going for it either? It's not difficult to come up with hardware it won't play with. The core team isn't that different that NetBSD's other than they execute more efficiently, they aren't making a big device support push... It seems like it's a critical situtation that device support isn't the number 1 effort for Free right now.
What is critical for FreeBSD in the area of 'device support' is getting usb support to work properly. That means getting rid of giant where possible, getting full duplex audio working, getting ugen to actually work for anything other then the most simple cases etc.
For the rest, cases where Linux supports some random device I end up with while FreeBSD doesn't are about as common as the other way around, and usually after a few months both support the thing.
As long as getting a simple usb webcam or digital camera or printer/scanner or usb headset working is a lot of work if it works at all FreeBSD will have a problem on the 'desktop', and more importantly, among the enthousiasts which
It's amazing how many people fail to grasp this very simple concept.
It is amazing how many people still don't get it into whatever they have for brains that this is not a realistic option for many people. No, dialup is not a realistic option in quite a few cases, no matter how much you want to believe it is, and many people simply have no other alternative.
And yes, having internet access is a requirement for my job, and is used for so many things nowadays that not having Internet access is not a realistic option for many people.
I happen to live somewhere where switching providers is quite an option, but I get out and talk to people enough to know this isn't true for many (without moving to another country or at least to quite far from where they live now and have their income)
Anyway, how about you comning back with your 'then switch to another isp, dumbass' kinda statements when YOU pay the extra cost of getting the place wired up to another ISP, even if that means getting another ISP to provide broadband access in that area?
Just someday try to get you a bsd tar and ftp, and compare them to gnu tar and the typical linux ftp client.. Anything the later 2 do are done by the first 2 as well but better, and they do a few things more.
This isn't true for all cases, but its not that exceptional either.
Personally, I think the best thing the Linux and BSD world has going for it is that Sun still thinks that it's all about the kernel. Nobody is ever going to switch to Solaris for dtrace, zones and zfs. 64bit filesystem vs. 128bit? Wake us up when it actually matters, if it ever does. I'm not saying kernels don't matter but the differences between various ones the features and lacking feature set is becoming small enough to not really care. The benchmark differences are so small and the stability differences aren't measurable.
Ah, someone else who believes the kernel doesn't matter..
I could run everything that is part of the typical Linux distribution on FreeBSD, and yet, I still would not have decent 5.1 audio and proper usb support for anything beyond a simple mass storage device or mouse.
I could run the FreeBSD userland on top of a Linux kernel however and still get working 5.1 audio and proper usb support
As a matter of fact, the differences between the userland on both are so small as to not matter for most practical purposes, and where there are differences in the userland, it is virtually always possible to port them. This is simply not true for the kernel.
I do agree with your opinion on Apple's changes however, getting rid of init is a very good idea, but then, unlike Linux and the *BSDs, Apple never tried to make a Unix like system, rather, they took the BSD derived system they already had and thought that it would be usefull as a component for building their next OS. This made it easy to get rid of traditional Unixisms like init
As a small sidenote, Apple uses a rather not unix like kernel..
What you are right about is that kernel features in themselves don't matter, what matters is the end-user functionality enabled by those kernel features.