DRM is entirely a case of security by obscurity. The DRM decrypters remain proprietary, so you can't run/open/play/view the file without those. If open source were to adopt DRM, people could simply add hacks to the code to output the file in a non-DRM format, and it would therefore be useless anyway.
Remember, though: officially supporting two (rather large) different desktop projects, which are created and designed with different fundamental idealogies, is *much* more costly to Novell, in terms of time, energy, paying hackers, etc.
Considering that Novell recently laid off a lot of people, perhaps reducing their overall cost by only officially supporting one desktop project will likely increase the quality of their distribution too.
Please don't use "commercial" as a synonym for "non-free." That confuses two entirely different issues.
A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity. A commercial program can be free or non-free, depending on its license. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual can be free or non-free, depending on its license. The two questions, what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its users have, are independent.
In the first decade of the Free Software Movement, free software packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or by nonprofit organizations such as the FSF and universities. Later, in the 90s, free commercial software started to appear.
Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so we should encourage it. But people who think that "commercial" means "non-free" will tend to think that the "free commercial" combination is self-contradictory, and dismiss the possibility. Let's be careful not to use the word "commercial" in that way.
1. They get no more free code, since people can't hack on it and improve it for themselves.
2. It's less secure (possibly), as less people have access to the source code to patch/fix it as bugs and holes occur.
1. MS bough DOS and simpy rebranded it. 2. Apple and some prior folk invented the GUI. 3. Tim Burners-Lee's was the first browser, if I recall correctly. 4. TeX was around with Unix since the 70s and 80s, long before graphical systems arose. 5. You do realize that MP3 was first set as a standard for lossy music encoding by the MPEG group about year before Windows 3.1, right? 6. Ok. You win one.;-)
Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long This is a bsdforums.org first! BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
[Read more]
======================
Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long
BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He also brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
1. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your first encounter with FreeBSD and what motivated you to use it ? How has FreeBSD evolved since the time you have been involved with it?
I'm 31 and live near Boulder, Colorado, with my wife, 2 kids, and 3 cats. Before I moved out here 6 years ago, I was in the US Navy for 6 years. My other day jobs have included a 4/5 year stint with Adaptec and my current job with SPARTA, Inc, doing work related to TrustedBSD and TrustedDarwin.
My first experience with BSD came when I discovered the Sun and HP labs at the University of Michigan in 1992. I decided that I absolutely had to replace my Windows 3.1 machine with Unix+X. That led to me discover 386BSD 0.1 and X386. So asking how it evolved in the time I've known it is like asking how a Model T evolved into a Mustang. Well, that's a bad analogy for those who don't like Ford. Anyways, it's come a long way =-) For a short while I toyed with the idea of using Linux, but the lack of a working network stack combined with the limitations of the minix filesystem made it pretty unattractive. I guess I was either oblivious to the legal battles with USL at the time, or I cared more about the technology and less about the politics.
In all, my involvement with FreeBSD has been very good for me in terms of exposing me to excellent engineering and extremely gifted people, as well as opening job opportunities for me.
2. Specifically what has been your role in Release Engineering relative to the entire release process, from a technical, authoritative and responsibility perspective?
I joined the release engineering team in Nov 2002. When I started, my only motivation was to increase the communication between the team and the rest of the developers. But, I quickly slipped in to doing the 5.0 release, and from there I took on the lead role in the team.
The job of the release engineering team is not only to do the mechanical work of producing a release, but also to ensure that the release is high quality. In order to do that, tools like code freezes, commit reviews and approvals, and bug status reports are used. So, a certain amount of authority and responsibility is implied there, but we also work very hard to make the process as open to others as possible, both inside and outside of the developer community.
And, this coordination and leadership of development is absolutely essential. Between having to coordinate the development and debugging activities of 220 developers and handle building and verifying releases for 5 hardware architectures, the old days of a single person freezing the tree for a few days and cuttin
Does this mean it will have PDF-import capabilities too? Or is this just export-only? It says on the article that it can publish to PDF. Just curious...
Putting the core and necessary aspects of Fedora on only 1-2 CDs is one big goal for the Core 5 release (tentatively scheduled for Februrary of next year). Check the FC5Future wiki page for more information: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.
The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats and other resources.
A FAQ addresses the changing differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.
Three plagued mice, Three plagued mice...
See how they die. See how they die.
They all ran way from the laboratory and died from the plague which they were injected with.
Three plagued mice..
Slashdot Mirror
DRM is entirely a case of security by obscurity. The DRM decrypters remain proprietary, so you can't run/open/play/view the file without those. If open source were to adopt DRM, people could simply add hacks to the code to output the file in a non-DRM format, and it would therefore be useless anyway.
Remember, though: officially supporting two (rather large) different desktop projects, which are created and designed with different fundamental idealogies, is *much* more costly to Novell, in terms of time, energy, paying hackers, etc.
Considering that Novell recently laid off a lot of people, perhaps reducing their overall cost by only officially supporting one desktop project will likely increase the quality of their distribution too.
...is some random dude's blog considered _news_?! GAAH!! SlashDot just keeps getting worse at this. *sigh*...
Please don't use "commercial" as a synonym for "non-free." That confuses two entirely different issues.
# Commercial
A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity. A commercial program can be free or non-free, depending on its license. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual can be free or non-free, depending on its license. The two questions, what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its users have, are independent.
In the first decade of the Free Software Movement, free software packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or by nonprofit organizations such as the FSF and universities. Later, in the 90s, free commercial software started to appear.
Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so we should encourage it. But people who think that "commercial" means "non-free" will tend to think that the "free commercial" combination is self-contradictory, and dismiss the possibility. Let's be careful not to use the word "commercial" in that way.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
1. They get no more free code, since people can't hack on it and improve it for themselves. 2. It's less secure (possibly), as less people have access to the source code to patch/fix it as bugs and holes occur.
1. MS bough DOS and simpy rebranded it. ;-)
2. Apple and some prior folk invented the GUI.
3. Tim Burners-Lee's was the first browser, if I recall correctly.
4. TeX was around with Unix since the 70s and 80s, long before graphical systems arose.
5. You do realize that MP3 was first set as a standard for lossy music encoding by the MPEG group about year before Windows 3.1, right?
6. Ok. You win one.
Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long
This is a bsdforums.org first! BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
[Read more]
======================
Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long
BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He also brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
1. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your first encounter with FreeBSD and what motivated you to use it ? How has FreeBSD evolved since the time you have been involved with it?
I'm 31 and live near Boulder, Colorado, with my wife, 2 kids, and 3 cats. Before I moved out here 6 years ago, I was in the US Navy for 6 years. My other day jobs have included a 4/5 year stint with Adaptec and my current job with SPARTA, Inc, doing work related to TrustedBSD and TrustedDarwin.
My first experience with BSD came when I discovered the Sun and HP labs at the University of Michigan in 1992. I decided that I absolutely had to replace my Windows 3.1 machine with Unix+X. That led to me discover 386BSD 0.1 and X386. So asking how it evolved in the time I've known it is like asking how a Model T evolved into a Mustang. Well, that's a bad analogy for those who don't like Ford. Anyways, it's come a long way =-) For a short while I toyed with the idea of using Linux, but the lack of a working network stack combined with the limitations of the minix filesystem made it pretty unattractive. I guess I was either oblivious to the legal battles with USL at the time, or I cared more about the technology and less about the politics.
In all, my involvement with FreeBSD has been very good for me in terms of exposing me to excellent engineering and extremely gifted people, as well as opening job opportunities for me.
2. Specifically what has been your role in Release Engineering relative to the entire release process, from a technical, authoritative and responsibility perspective?
I joined the release engineering team in Nov 2002. When I started, my only motivation was to increase the communication between the team and the rest of the developers. But, I quickly slipped in to doing the 5.0 release, and from there I took on the lead role in the team.
The job of the release engineering team is not only to do the mechanical work of producing a release, but also to ensure that the release is high quality. In order to do that, tools like code freezes, commit reviews and approvals, and bug status reports are used. So, a certain amount of authority and responsibility is implied there, but we also work very hard to make the process as open to others as possible, both inside and outside of the developer community.
And, this coordination and leadership of development is absolutely essential. Between having to coordinate the development and debugging activities of 220 developers and handle building and verifying releases for 5 hardware architectures, the old days of a single person freezing the tree for a few days and cuttin
Coral cache: http://blogs.msdn.com.nyud.net:8090/brian_jones/ar chive/2005/10/01/476067.aspx
MirrorDot: http://mirrordot.org/stories/8cd3958d23ab9ac3dfb87 d8f52b8722a/index.html
Does this mean it will have PDF-import capabilities too? Or is this just export-only? It says on the article that it can publish to PDF. Just curious...
Putting the core and necessary aspects of Fedora on only 1-2 CDs is one big goal for the Core 5 release (tentatively scheduled for Februrary of next year). Check the FC5Future wiki page for more information: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future
I think the big question on a lot of our minds is: Why did you start doing game design and programming in the first place?
http://www.prweb.com.nyud.net:8090/releases/2005/9 /prweb288725.htm
Oh well. At least it doesn't hit Hexus' servers again.
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.
The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats and other resources.
A FAQ addresses the changing differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.
1. Have story posted to slashdot
2. Have story posted to slashdot
3. Watch the webserver melt from being slashdotted.
4. ???
5. PROFIT!
...and it's arguably just as popular as Ubuntu among us nerds/geeks/techies.
funny++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_Planet
Don't forget to reverse the polarity of your fluid dilation coils. ;-)
Slashdotting an article on Wikipedia about the slashdot effect from an article on slashdot about wikipedia
Oh gawd the irony rocks...
Three plagued mice, Three plagued mice...
See how they die. See how they die.
They all ran way from the laboratory and died from
the plague which they were injected with.
Three plagued mice..
If they're "infected wqith a deadly plague," perhaps they simply died?
That should be "are my personal favorite". ;-)
...but need humor skills, you do. ;)
Remind me again how having stupid people be in charge of weapons that could potentially destroy us all is something to laugh at?! GAAH...