Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether it has merit in any other jurisdiction, what does the GPL represent to a Chinese civil court? Does China have civil law as we know it? The image that has been planted in my mind of Chinese law, involves a court system that sits on a 3 meters high podium and makes brutal decisions. Would bringing a redress for a GPL violation subject the complainant to the risk of being dragged off to work in a labor camp for 50 years, if it suited the judge? Or has the impression of Chinese justice that is presented to Americans been grossly distorted?
Where are the responses to this memo, from IBM, SAP, Dell, HP, and RedHat?
After all, when Microsoft attacks Linux, these are the companies being attacked. IBM, especially, should respond. With full page ads in trade mags, or Monday Night Football spots or something.
Thank you for that post. The notion that codebreaking was the "only" factor was something that I wanted to object to very strongly. However, having just finished reading Cryptonomicon I understand now why that belief is making the rounds. Stephenson did a fine job of using factual matter to immerse a reader in a fictional plot. Bravo.
" It seems to me that Linux advocates should take this as a great compliment - MS Marketdroids sweating over a free OS that wasn't even a blip on the radar a year or two ago. "
There's another rather important point being missed:
It's too late for them to do what they would need to do in order to stop Linux from being the threat.
There are very few people (rhat shareholders aside) that will be harmed if Linux doesn't dominate the computing world. Linux has already won this fight. Linux was never fighting Microsoft, it's all their fight. No matter what Microsoft does or says, it won't stop Linux from being out here.
Sure, they could conceivably use PR and marketing tactics to stop anybody else from ever installing linux on another computer (ludicrous worst case), but that's already too little too late to make a difference. They would have had to somehow stop the release of the system back at 1.0.9. Now it's too late -- it already happened; linux is already out here. It is imminently useful as is, and the source code isn't going anywhere. Even if we all decide to drop it tonight as a result of this FUD, the source, design notes, applications, and as many implementations as there are computer types in widespread use, are all out there. And Linux' goal is neither "Destroy Microsoft" or even "Compete on Microsoft's Level". No, Linux' goal is "World Domination" -- There's nothing about that goal that requires domainating microsoft first. Microsoft may be huge compared to your business, but it's probably not even a neccessary stepping stone to world domination. What if Linux achieves the grand goal without even confronting Microsoft?
And how can that confrontation even take place? Linux is not an organization, it's a spirit. And if they try to grab for that spirit or attack it, it won't be where they thought it was when they grabbed. We here on/. might get all upset and hem and haw that our baby is being slandered, but, it just doesn't matter.
It matters to some of us who work in places where we know that systems could be deployed on linux or another unix, with great success, but there's a snowball's chance of that happening. It matters to anybody who is developing and/or selling an application for linux. It matters to people who really need and desire the open standards engendered by truly open computer systems, and it matters to people who understand what's at stake. It probably matters to application users whether they know it or not.
Consider how many computer users are out there who just consider the computer used in their jobs to be like pushing buttons on any other machine. These people could care less what machine it is, as long as they go home on time. These are people who (gasp) do not think about computers on their "own time." Or if they have PC's at home, their doin' the "internet thang" but don't make the connection between those systems and whatever finacial app or restaurant tabbing system they use at the job. There are quite a few of these non-geeks out there. And they neither know nor care whether the machine on which they push buttons is a 3270 plugged into a VAX, or a VT220 on a unix server, or a DOS box with a thermal printer and a credit card swiper, or NT Workstation with a touch screen. (I've seen all these lately, shopping, banking, etc.)
They just don't care about OS, and they don't read advocacy threads, get it? Our movement does not show up on the average Joe's radar either.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to deploy some vertical solution based on linux, without saying too much about it being linux. With no fanfare or politics, and no reason for the customer base for this new product to think of choosing one brand over another, why should there be? The application user just wants the buttons to push and to go home on time. Even the PHB's, in industries that aren't technology. I'm thinking "Hotel Desk" or "Restaurant Office" type PHB's. They don't give a stinking rat's ass about some of the things we have to struggle over. They sure as hell aren't going to hire a MCSE or a SysV admin to babysit their till or reservation desk.
Oops, I ranted, and bad paragraph form at that. What was my point? Oh yeah, that we'd already made it. At least in the sense that in the post-holocaust future, planet-of-the-apes-style, when the apes figure out computers and start making them work, the system they have readily available will be the one that was open-source and widely distributed (on non-rapidly-decaying media). The one that had the incomplete code locked in a vault in what was once the Pac NW, but is now under 6km of glacial ice, won't matter:-)
Listen, I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep on the fasttrack of development, or that advocacy is unnecessary; just that, from the beginning the goal could have been something like "Get Microsoft's back up, make them perceive competition," a lofty goal still for any product, and we'd have done it several times this year. I can't WAIT for Halloween 99!
"2 GB file limit (isn't this gone under 64 bit CPUs?)" I think it's into the Exabytes for wide archs. -- Would we be having this conversation if Linux had been marketed on TV? "Not available in stores, call now! Operators are standing by!"
I ran one of those and it was a riot. Don't feel bad though, that thing took in a LOT of folks. The nice thing about it was that it had a certain context in which it operated -- the reason a sysop would run something like that was from being tired of the same exact questions 60 times a day -- so it was fairly easy to seed with keywords and tailor the responses a bit to add to the illusion.
Of course the limited context makes it a bit more like a magic trick (think "card force") than AI. I'm afraid in the Turing test, the person with the computer program is not the one choosing the questions.
I run a 6.0a install, that's been tweaked to a fare-the-well. I've upgraded lots of things by hand, including many runtime libs, and (more than one) custom kernel. Hopefully there's a decent way to upgrade a package at a time.
Is linuxconf improved? Will the base system install allow only updating things that are redhat specific? I really fear upgrading redhat. I've only ever wiped and reinstalled.
"I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy."
Well, nobody working on the linux project has really made it a priority to make that person happy, except you, and I don't think you're working on it, just grousing about it.
If it's a worthwhile task to make an installer, and after all we're talking about an XFree86 Installer, and maybe an OSS (sound) installer. NOT a linux installer, that automatically comes up on certain hardware combinations, then somebody do it. But nobody has claimed to be doing any such thing. RedHat expects you to read the manual, and to understand what the hell you're doing.
So where are people getting the impression that we promised them anything would be easy?
I need a journalist to come over and get SILO working on my ultrapenguin. furrfu.
"but can your mom tell me which of the fifty chips on a motherboard is the one that identifies it's video card?"
Was that part of the deal that terminates at "user friendly?" I must have missed that.
Nevertheless, "mom" can learn that nifty bit of tech know-how from the same places everybody else does. (I was born with such abilities, but I don't expect that from everybody.)
Re:Drunk Driving (off topic)
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 1
Careful with this strategy. In addition to losing your license, you will get all the benefits of Probation, where you get to go to jail if you ever test positive for marijuana, for instance. And Insurance? Probably won't be able to get it, or you'll need a special expensive kind. And the thing that floors me, in Texas anyway, is that it's a severe impediment to renting an apartment. No apartment on the Texas Apt Assn. will approve your lease if you've had a DWI or drug possession *arrest*. Not a *conviction*, mind you. An *arrest*. I think I'm more afraid of the corporate entity than I am the government.
Is it reaching completion? Features are not being added to IMAP and POP3 at anything resembling an alarming rate, and judging from the discussion on fetchmail-friends for the past year or so, most people are happy with it now, once they get it to work with their mailer. I do not fall into this category; I do bizarre things with fetchmail. And, ok, I can think of a few features that might be useful, but they are all better handled in them MTA.
As a project manager, Eric does quite well, no doubt. He had the presence of mind to gather this data. And the wherewithal to turn out the graph.
What I'd like to know is whether gnuplot turned out this graph as is, or if the gimp was involved. Getting a scatter chart is easy, but getting it to look like exactly what you want, for an ad-hoc chart, is not.
I also wonder what would be involved in adding color support for gnuplot to PNG.
"Or maybe someone wanted to test the waters in the Linux world with an advanced development environment... maybe there's some money to be made there..."
Uh, yeah. I'm ready to buy it. But it's vaporware until I get a CD. Maybe we can revisit this story in a year or so when there's a product...
Remus, I often tell people that, given the choice between something like a cablemodem on my end and a saturated network at the provider's, and a 28.8 dialup to a unix host which is on a fat pipe, I'll take dialup every time. Because I can move data from the network-at-large to my shell very, very fast by comparison to any low-cost broadband. Also, if you would compare the sheer throughput of say, Zmodem, to say, FTP, you will see that the old tech has some perks.
I should probably mention that I am a former Netcom, MindSpring, and I suppose soon-to-be Earthlink employee. And I've been a Netcom shell account user since 1994.
I mention the value of the shell accounts every chance I get. I cannot speak for the company but just between you and me and the 10E9 other/. readers, I would not worry about the shell accounts going away any time soon. MindSpring is not known for doing things that generate widespread customer dissatisfaction, and everybody who'd consider such a thing knows what kind of roasting it would get us.
However, it's not written in stone that it shall be SunOS4 forever.
How do you feel about Digital?
PS: I repeat, I don't speak for MindSpring or EarthLink or anybody else but me.
PPS: I'm just a little worker bee, so don't send me a bunch of questions! I don't know either.
"I think that, at some point, giving in to these people will legitimize malicious cracking in the eyes of many. "
Haha! Bank Robbery will undergo a renaissance, after a lull in popularity since the 1930's! A whole new generation of underworld gangsters to worship in the *next* gens media!
And don't underestimate the influence law enforcement has on policy, especially in the uniquely British system of banking. And London journalism is nothing if not sensational.
"The patent offices, lawyers, and judges really don't have a clue when it comes to high-tech. "
You only say that because you see the silliest cases which bubble out of the silly side of govt. But if you really think about it, you might be surprised just how clueful some of these people are. Many of them have engineering backgrounds, and huge amounts of experience.
I worked with a former patent attorney who was an EE before law school.
These guys have to know about so many disciplines. If there are any lawyers that are geeks, these are they.
And they are well aware that they are controlling industries and business, that their decisions are controversial and often unpopular. (But never wrong...:-)
Re:The Great Telephone Number Explosion...
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
>>IE you and your neighbor may have different area >>codes
In Dallas, there is a certain amount of prestige associated with the 214 area code. If you're out in 972, you might as well be living in a trailer park in the boondocks, in some people's opinion.
Believe it or not, there are people who can assert prestige based on their ZIP code or Area Code!!!
Don't underestimate the strength of this factor in setting policy...
"Why is it wrong for the govt, but not a company?"
I think you don't get out much.
Haven't you seen the big corporate world government? Much bigger and stronger than any civic government out there?
Want an example? Visit any airport. See how much free speach or freedom from search and seizure you have. Much less than under the supposed government of whereever you might be.
Re:Who has the .01 Version?
on
Linux Turns 8
·
· Score: 2
You guys are just throwing out numbers and percentages without any constraint on bias.
Admit that you pulled the "1% of americans will riot" idea out of your ass.
Now the "withdraw all your money from banks?" Well, these are Americans we're talking about. They have $485.17 in the bank. They withdraw it ALL every two weeks, a day or two before payday.
Way more than your bogus percentage have less than two weeks reserve of money in the bank.
If you were trying to come up with some useless made up statistic for those with more than a certain amount of money in the bank, you should have said so.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether it has merit in any other jurisdiction,
what does the GPL represent to a Chinese civil
court? Does China have civil law as we know it?
The image that has been planted in my mind of
Chinese law, involves a court system that sits
on a 3 meters high podium and makes brutal decisions. Would bringing a redress for a GPL violation subject the complainant to the risk of
being dragged off to work in a labor camp for 50 years, if it suited the judge? Or has the impression of Chinese justice that is presented to Americans been grossly distorted?
Beer opener too. I must have this.
Where are the responses to this memo, from IBM,
SAP, Dell, HP, and RedHat?
After all, when Microsoft attacks Linux, these
are the companies being attacked. IBM, especially, should respond. With full page ads
in trade mags, or Monday Night Football spots or
something.
Thank you for that post.
The notion that codebreaking was the "only"
factor was something that I wanted to object to
very strongly. However, having just finished reading Cryptonomicon I understand now why that belief is making the rounds. Stephenson did a fine job of using factual matter to immerse a reader in a fictional plot. Bravo.
There's another rather important point being missed:
It's too late for them to do what they would need to do in order to stop Linux from being the threat.
There are very few people (rhat shareholders aside) that will be harmed if Linux doesn't dominate the computing world. Linux has already won this fight. Linux was never fighting Microsoft, it's all their fight. No matter what Microsoft does or says, it won't stop Linux from being out here.
Sure, they could conceivably use PR and marketing tactics to stop anybody else from ever installing linux on another computer (ludicrous worst case), but that's already too little too late to make a difference. They would have had to somehow stop the release of the system back at 1.0.9. Now it's too late -- it already happened; linux is already out here. It is imminently useful as is, and the source code isn't going anywhere. Even if we all decide to drop it tonight as a result of this FUD, the source, design notes, applications, and as many implementations as there are computer types in widespread use, are all out there. And Linux' goal is neither "Destroy Microsoft" or even "Compete on Microsoft's Level". No, Linux' goal is "World Domination" -- There's nothing about that goal that requires domainating microsoft first. Microsoft may be huge compared to your business, but it's probably not even a neccessary stepping stone to world domination. What if Linux achieves the grand goal without even confronting Microsoft?
And how can that confrontation even take place? Linux is not an organization, it's a spirit. And if they try to grab for that spirit or attack it, it won't be where they thought it was when they grabbed. We here on /. might get all upset and hem and haw that our baby is being slandered, but, it just doesn't matter.
It matters to some of us who work in places where we know that systems could be deployed on linux or another unix, with great success, but there's a snowball's chance of that happening. It matters to anybody who is developing and/or selling an application for linux. It matters to people who really need and desire the open standards engendered by truly open computer systems, and it matters to people who understand what's at stake. It probably matters to application users whether they know it or not.
Consider how many computer users are out there who just consider the computer used in their jobs to be like pushing buttons on any other machine. These people could care less what machine it is, as long as they go home on time. These are people who (gasp) do not think about computers on their "own time." Or if they have PC's at home, their doin' the "internet thang" but don't make the connection between those systems and whatever finacial app or restaurant tabbing system they use at the job. There are quite a few of these non-geeks out there. And they neither know nor care whether the machine on which they push buttons is a 3270 plugged into a VAX, or a VT220 on a unix server, or a DOS box with a thermal printer and a credit card swiper, or NT Workstation with a touch screen. (I've seen all these lately, shopping, banking, etc.)
They just don't care about OS, and they don't read advocacy threads, get it?
Our movement does not show up on the average Joe's radar either.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to deploy some vertical solution based on linux, without saying too much about it being linux. With no fanfare or politics, and no reason for the customer base for this new product to think of choosing one brand over another, why should there be? The application user just wants the buttons to push and to go home on time. Even the PHB's, in industries that aren't technology. I'm thinking "Hotel Desk" or "Restaurant Office" type PHB's. They don't give a stinking rat's ass about some of the things we have to struggle over. They sure as hell aren't going to hire a MCSE or a SysV admin to babysit their till or reservation desk.
Oops, I ranted, and bad paragraph form at that. What was my point? Oh yeah, that we'd already made it. At least in the sense that in the post-holocaust future, planet-of-the-apes-style, when the apes figure out computers and start making them work, the system they have readily available will be the one that was open-source and widely distributed (on non-rapidly-decaying media). The one that had the incomplete code locked in a vault in what was once the Pac NW, but is now under 6km of glacial ice, won't matter :-)
Listen, I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep on the fasttrack of development, or that advocacy is unnecessary; just that, from the beginning the goal could have been something like "Get Microsoft's back up, make them perceive competition," a lofty goal still for any product, and we'd have done it several times this year. I can't WAIT for Halloween 99!
"2 GB file limit (isn't this gone under 64 bit CPUs?)" I think it's into the Exabytes for wide archs.
--
Would we be having this conversation if Linux had been marketed on TV? "Not available in stores, call now! Operators are standing by!"
I ran one of those and it was a riot. Don't feel bad though, that thing took in a LOT of folks.
The nice thing about it was that it had a certain
context in which it operated -- the reason a sysop
would run something like that was from being tired
of the same exact questions 60 times a day -- so it was fairly easy to seed with keywords and tailor the responses a bit to add to the illusion.
Of course the limited context makes it a bit more
like a magic trick (think "card force") than AI.
I'm afraid in the Turing test, the person with
the computer program is not the one choosing the questions.
M=(current_state, current_symbol, new_state, new_symbol, left/right)
I run a 6.0a install, that's been tweaked to a fare-the-well. I've upgraded lots of things by hand, including many runtime libs, and (more than
one) custom kernel. Hopefully there's a decent
way to upgrade a package at a time.
Is linuxconf improved? Will the base system install allow only updating things that are redhat specific? I really fear upgrading redhat. I've
only ever wiped and reinstalled.
"The only reason the Allies beat the Nazis in WWII
was because they had cracked their codes and knew most of what Germany was doing. "
You can't imagine that brute force, high morale, and air superiority might have played any part in the allied victory?
"I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a
penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said
something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar
video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy."
Well, nobody working on the linux project has really made it a priority to make that person happy, except you, and I don't think you're working on it, just grousing about it.
If it's a worthwhile task to make an installer,
and after all we're talking about an XFree86 Installer, and maybe an OSS (sound) installer.
NOT a linux installer, that automatically comes
up on certain hardware combinations, then somebody do it. But nobody has claimed to be doing any such thing. RedHat expects you to read the manual, and to understand what the hell you're doing.
So where are people getting the impression that we promised them anything would be easy?
I need a journalist to come over and get SILO working on my ultrapenguin. furrfu.
"but can your mom tell me which of the fifty chips on a motherboard is the one that identifies it's video
card?"
Was that part of the deal that terminates at "user friendly?"
I must have missed that.
Nevertheless, "mom" can learn that nifty bit of tech know-how from the same places everybody else does. (I was born with such abilities, but I don't expect that from everybody.)
Careful with this strategy. In addition to losing your license, you will get all the benefits of Probation, where you get to go to jail if you ever
test positive for marijuana, for instance. And Insurance? Probably won't be able to get it, or
you'll need a special expensive kind. And the thing that floors me, in Texas anyway, is that it's a severe impediment to renting an apartment.
No apartment on the Texas Apt Assn. will approve your lease if you've had a DWI or drug possession
*arrest*. Not a *conviction*, mind you. An *arrest*. I think I'm more afraid of the corporate entity than I am the government.
Is it reaching completion?
Features are not being added to IMAP and POP3
at anything resembling an alarming rate, and
judging from the discussion on fetchmail-friends
for the past year or so, most people are happy
with it now, once they get it to work with their
mailer. I do not fall into this category; I do
bizarre things with fetchmail. And, ok, I can
think of a few features that might be useful, but
they are all better handled in them MTA.
As a project manager, Eric does quite well, no doubt. He had the presence of mind to gather this
data. And the wherewithal to turn out the graph.
What I'd like to know is whether gnuplot turned out this graph as is, or if the gimp was involved.
Getting a scatter chart is easy, but getting it to look like exactly what you want, for an ad-hoc chart, is not.
I also wonder what would be involved in adding color support for gnuplot to PNG.
"Or maybe someone wanted to test the waters in the Linux world with an advanced development environment...
maybe there's some money to be made there..."
Uh, yeah. I'm ready to buy it. But it's vaporware until I get a CD.
Maybe we can revisit this story in a year or so
when there's a product...
When the windows versions will build a linux
binary, you'll be right.
Remus, I often tell people that, given the choice between something like a cablemodem on my end and
/. readers, I would not worry about the shell accounts going away any time soon. MindSpring is not known for doing things that
a saturated network at the provider's, and a
28.8 dialup to a unix host which is on a fat pipe,
I'll take dialup every time. Because I can move data from the network-at-large to my shell very,
very fast by comparison to any low-cost broadband.
Also, if you would compare the sheer throughput of
say, Zmodem, to say, FTP, you will see that the old tech has some perks.
I should probably mention that I am a former Netcom, MindSpring, and I suppose soon-to-be Earthlink employee. And I've been a Netcom shell account user since 1994.
I mention the value of the shell accounts every chance I get. I cannot speak for the company but just between you and me and the 10E9
other
generate widespread customer dissatisfaction, and
everybody who'd consider such a thing knows what
kind of roasting it would get us.
However, it's not written in stone that it shall be SunOS4 forever.
How do you feel about Digital?
PS: I repeat, I don't speak for MindSpring or EarthLink or anybody else but me.
PPS: I'm just a little worker bee, so don't
send me a bunch of questions! I don't know either.
"I think that, at some point, giving in to these people will legitimize malicious cracking in the eyes of many. "
Haha! Bank Robbery will undergo a renaissance,
after a lull in popularity since the 1930's!
A whole new generation of underworld gangsters
to worship in the *next* gens media!
And don't underestimate the influence law enforcement has on policy, especially in the
uniquely British system of banking. And London
journalism is nothing if not sensational.
"The patent offices, lawyers, and judges really don't have a clue when it comes to high-tech. "
:-)
You only say that because you see the silliest cases which bubble out of the silly side of govt.
But if you really think about it, you might be surprised just how clueful some of these people are. Many of them have engineering backgrounds,
and huge amounts of experience.
I worked with a former patent attorney who was an EE before law school.
These guys have to know about so many disciplines.
If there are any lawyers that are geeks, these are they.
And they are well aware that they are controlling industries and business, that their decisions are controversial and often unpopular. (But never wrong...
>>IE you and your neighbor may have different area >>codes
In Dallas, there is a certain amount of prestige
associated with the 214 area code. If you're out
in 972, you might as well be living in a trailer
park in the boondocks, in some people's opinion.
Believe it or not, there are people who can assert
prestige based on their ZIP code or Area Code!!!
Don't underestimate the strength of this factor in
setting policy...
Mother nature has prior art for human genes
She has waited far too long to get an attorney.
Doesn't she know how to survive in today's business world?
The people who signed that treaty thought we were as likely to live on the moon as it were made of green cheese.
"Why is it wrong for the govt, but not a company?"
I think you don't get out much.
Haven't you seen the big corporate world government? Much bigger and stronger than
any civic government out there?
Want an example? Visit any airport.
See how much free speach or freedom from
search and seizure you have. Much less than
under the supposed government of whereever you
might be.
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/lin ux-0.01.tar.gz
You have tragically confused civil laws
with criminal laws. You are using criminal
law examples to illustrate a civil matter.
You guys are just throwing out numbers and percentages without any constraint on bias.
Admit that you pulled the "1% of americans will
riot" idea out of your ass.
Now the "withdraw all your money from banks?"
Well, these are Americans we're talking about.
They have $485.17 in the bank. They withdraw
it ALL every two weeks, a day or two before payday.
Way more than your bogus percentage
have less than two weeks reserve of money
in the bank.
If you were trying to come up with some useless
made up statistic for those with more than a certain amount of money in the bank, you should
have said so.