Ah, another bogus attack on RMS and all his works. RMS has long said that free software needs free documentation, so that when new features are added to the program, these new features can be documented. This doesn't mean that every book telling how to use free software needs to be free, but it does mean that there needs to be at least one high-quality manual that is free. If others feel they can do a better job competing against the free manual, let them at it.
RMS wants a free manual, and he's putting his money where his mouth is. No author is obliged to accept his offer; furthermore, publishers like O'Reilly are free to fund other books. Free software and documentation are a part of the market. As a writer, you're simply going to have to deal with it.
Re:You guys are REALLY missing the point...
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Germany Frees Crypto
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No, you are missing the point. Classifying crypto as munitions is just stupid, it has no US constituional consequences (since the right to bear arms has not been treated by the US courts as the absolute right to have any kind of munition). And if anyone tried to make this argument it would be laughed out of court -- you'd have better luck with the 4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You seem to think that the US is constitutionally forbidden from preventing its citizens from using strong crypto. That's false, there has never been such a case.
But the biggest flaw is in your basic argument. If only constitutionally guaranteed rights are worth anything, then one would expect UK citizens to be absolute slaves (no written Constitution) and former USSR citizens to be the freeest in the world (extensive rights were "guaranteed" by their constitution).
Written constitutions don't prevent rights from being taken away. It just makes it a bit trickier. What matters is effective freedom, and in many ways there is more of that in Western Europe than the US.
No, Wassenaar has an exception for freeware
on
Germany Frees Crypto
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Wassenaar has an exception for what they call "public domain" software, and their appendix defines "public domain" in such a way that it includes free software/open source. So governments that have signed Wassenaar can still let their citizens export any free software they want to. They just have to restrict commercial products with strong encryption. The US forgot about this loophole because the Clinton administration is clueless about free software/ open source, and they can't close it unless they get all of the Wassenaar countries to agree.
No, it was the US NSA that got GSM crippled
on
Germany Frees Crypto
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It was the NSA, doing behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, that got GSM encryption crippled. They needed a European government as their front, and for all I know it might have been Helmut Kohl and his folks. But in case you didn't notice, that government was voted out of office.
As for trusting crypto, only code that is available in source form and independently audited should be trusted. However, you can expect FUD from proprietary software vendors attempting to assert the reverse with security-by-obscurity arguments.
No, France's laws are still as bad as the US's
on
Germany Frees Crypto
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France used to have the most anti-encryption policies in the developed world. Their new policy (which may not be the law yet, does anyone know?) is like that of the US: free domestic use, no export without a license for keys of more than 56 bits (which rules out source code distribution for algorithms that allow the key length to be modified easily).
This means that even after the new law is in effect, you still can't do open source crypto development in France.
If it's not GPL, it can't be used by directly linking into the kernel...
That's not quite correct. Any code that is under a license that is at least as permissive in every respect than the GPL can be linked directly into the kernel, because the GPL can then be applied to the combined work. This includes:
The LGPL
The Tcl/Tk or X Window system licenses
The newer BSD license that doesn't have the advertising clause
Public domain code
It does not include code under the older BSD license, since it imposes a requirement that the GPL does not (mention an organization or a list of organizations and people in all advertising).
It does not include the Artistic License, although most Artistic License software is dual-licensed, so if the other license says it's OK, you can go for it.
SGI could choose to use the GPL plus alternate licensing, and still get back improvements from others. This can be done either by getting assignments from contributors (if they are willing) or recoding the changes in a different way. Regardless of what licensing is chosen, getting assignments (as FSF and the egcs project do) is probably the safest thing to do, as I expect that within the next year, Microsoft or someone they put up to it will attempt to sue some high-profile open source project for theft of code (just find some contributor who didn't have the right to contribute, because of an employment contract or something), thus spreading a piracy taint over the whole movement.
It should be emphasized that at the least, SGI would be shooting themselves in the foot if they choose a GPL-incompatible license such as an NPL-like license. The reason is that this would force all Linux distributors to use their filesystem only as a module, which would be inconvenient. If SGI's work requires changes in the kernel itself, then it wouldn't even be valid to use it as a Linux kernel module if it's not under a GPL-compatible license.
SGI could use a BSD-like license (without the advertising clause), which would permit both BSD and Linux to use the code. They might not want to give that much away, though. You'll never beat Microsoft if you write code for them (yes, Microsoft networking has tons of Berkeley code in there, you can tell from the bug-compatibility).
I hope that they either go in the GPL or the BSD direction, and don't try to do one of those one-sided NPL-like licenses that is becoming popular with companies (e.g. we can take your changes proprietary, but you have to distribute source).
Who are the idiots who gave the above posting a 5?
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 3
At the time I posted my reply, the note I'm replying to was rated "5". Why?
NiceGuy has written a flame, saying nothing that hasn't been said before on Slashdot. Now, he has a right to his opinion, but moderation isn't supposed to be about "I agree/I disagree".
No new facts are presented; worse, the posting puts quotes around statements that are not being made (RMS has never claimed that Linux is good only as a stop-gap), an unethical technique in a debate (it's called a straw man argument).
The purpose of moderation is to try to move the gems to the front. This was not a gem; a similar posting that made the opposite point would also not be a gem.
If anything, it is Linux that is inside
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 1
An application developer writing for a Linux system is exposed to the API's and ABI's of the GNU C library and the X window system. He or she never talks to Linux directly at all (it is possible to tell the C library to do a direct system call, but even there the C library stands in between). Only the device driver writer ever interfaces directly to Linux.
(One could argue that the/proc filesystem is a semi-direct interface, but even there,/proc is an idea derived from other OSes).
Similarly, the user of KDE, Gnome or what have you cannot immediately tell if there is a Linux or a BSD kernel running underneath (yes, there are people running KDE and Gnome on BSD).
So, if anything, the user sees X and GNU, and it is Linux that is inside. If Linus's theories about microkernels are correct, when the Hurd is done it will be slower, but the user won't be able to immediately tell a Debian GNU/Linux system from a Debian GNU/Hurd system, just as a user won't be able to tell KDE running on FreeBSD from KDE on Linux.
A lot of this is because Linus has done such a great job building a very standard Posix-compliant kernel. It's such a good job that it is almost invisible... other than the fact that it's such a good story.
Re:RMS should read the GPL
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 4
RMS is not claiming that the GPL requires the name GNU/Linux to be used, so it is nonsense to claim that he is somehow making a mockery of the GPL.
RMS appears to want attention to be focused on GNU for two purposes, and credit is the less important of those two purposes (though I think it is more important to him than he admits). His more important purpose seems to be to get people to think of themselves as developing a GNU system in the sense that every program on that system would be free software -- that Linux not just be yet another platform like Windows or BeOS that software companies port all their software to and every significant program is proprietary software.
RMS seems to think that if he gets people to say GNU/Linux, people will then ask "What is GNU", and then when they find out, they will get excited about the free software message. Like any good activist, he doesn't care if he pisses people off... sometimes I think he thinks if he hasn't pissed anyone off lately, he isn't doing his job as an advocate.
As for me, I don't think that all software must be free, but I think that more free software is a good thing, and that without RMS making noise and annoying people and inspiring other like-minded people, the trend in the Linux community would quickly be to just try to be another platform for proprietary software developers. That's a losing goal, since Microsoft is much better at that.
Re:The absence of the GPL
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*BSD News
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This is at least the second time Daemon News has resorted to red-baiting. Just for fun, I'll do a bit of reversing here.
I fully respect and honor people who find the BSD license preferable to the GPL, or who object to the GPL because they think its retrictions are unnecessary. I have no use for jerks who argue against it on the basis that it is "communist", especially from proponents of the BSD license.
After all, the BSD license is more communist in the sense of Marx than the GPL. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." If you tell me I should use the BSD, you're saying that I should contribute work to you to do whatever you want to do with, because I have the ability and you have the need.
The GPL is more market-oriented. The author who uses the GPL gives software to other developers to make derivative works from only if the other developers are willing to give back their changes. Many developers who use the GPL also sell proprietary software; in some cases (e.g. Aladdin Software, makers of Ghostscript) they use dual licensing: folks who don't like the GPL restrictions can pay $$$ to get other terms.
As Russ Nelson has said, the reason he uses the GPL is "When I write commercial software I want to get paid." Those who claim that developers must use BSD-like terms when they write free software are saying that they must give up their work without any compensation at all, to whover needs it, in accordance with Marx's dictum.
There's no question that RMS has a political agenda, but then so does the Daemon News, which has repeatedly demonstrated that its political agenda is to try to get people to release software on BSD-like rather than GPL-like terms.
If this is is how you feel, then you are opposed to the concept of free (as in freedom) software and open source. Furthermore, you are against Debian's Free Software Principles (since you say you want a cut of any money made).
Stallman's whole program is that people should be paid for services, not the software, and packaging and distributing software on CD-ROMs and supporting the customers is a service.
No final decision has been made as to whether the planned egcs 1.2 will come out as egcs 1.2 or gcc 3.0 or gcc some other number.
Also, June is not a promise: it will come out when it is ready.
yes, it's true; egcs is gcc. Some details
on
egcs to become gcc
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Three new languages: Fortran, Java, and Chill. There's also been some work to integrate GNU Pascal, though that's still not in the tree.
We talked about using "gcs" for the name, it's no longer a C compiler. But people know the name "gcc". Think of it as standing for GNU Compiler Collection.
No final decision has been made about the version number, but when we were talking about starting egcs, some folks wanted to call it gcc3 immediately (but this would have pissed off a number of folks so we didn't do it).
Ideally, the difference between pgcc and egcs/gcc will decrease over time, to the point where a separate pgcc branch is no longer needed. To a certain extent that's been happening.
RMS is the original author and designer of gcc. The egcs steering committee thinks he matters very much, which is why we worked to satisfy his concerns. Certainly he's stubborn and doctrinaire, and at times is not the easiest person to get along with.
But even if you don't think all software should be free, there's a lot more free software in the world because of RMS's advocacy (and don't forget the considerable amount of software he wrote himself).
yes, it's true; egcs is gcc. Some details
on
egcs to become gcc
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As a member of the egcs steering committee, which will become the gcc steering commitee, I can confirm that yes, the merger is official... sometime in the near future there will be a gcc 3.0 from the egcs code base. The steering committee has been talking to RMS about doing this for months now; at times it's been contentious but now that we understand each other better, things are going much better.
The important thing to understand is that when we started egcs, this is what we were planning all along (well, OK, what some of us were planning). We wanted to change the way gcc worked, not just create a variant. That's why assignments always went to the FSF, why GNU coding style is rigorously followed.
Technically, egcs/gcc will run the same way as before. Since we are now fully GNU, we'll be making some minor changes to reflect that, but we've been doing them gradually in the past few months anyway so nothing that significant will change. Jeff Law remains the release manager; a number of other people have CVS write access; the steering committee handles the "political" and other nontechnical stuff and "hires" the release manager.
egcs/gcc is at this point considerably more bazaar-like than the Linux kernel in that many more people have the ability to get something into the official code (for Linux, only Linus can do that). Jeff Law decides what goes in the release, but he delegates major areas to other maintainers.
The reason for the delay in the announcement is that we were waiting for RMS to announce it (he sent a message to the gnu.*.announce lists), but someone cracked an important FSF machine and did an rm -rf/ command. It was noticed and someone powered off the machine, but it appears that this machine hosted the GNU mailing lists, if I understand correctly, so there's nothing on gnu.announce. I don't know why there's still nothing on www.gnu.org (which was not cracked). Why do people do things like this?
Joseph Campbell would argue that the themes in the plot are thousands of years older than Freud and appear in most of the ancient myths: the hero's journey, the son overthrowing the father, etc.
What Lucas did with Star Wars is to read Joseph Campbell to find out what themes are in common to all the great myths, and then use that formula to design the plot, effectively creating a new mythology. Lucas has pretty much admitted this. Tolkein did essentially the same thing with Lord of the Rings (not by reading Campbell, but by doing the same kind of research as Campbell): he was a scholar who had studied all of the old Norse and Celtic stories and used them to construct his own mythology.
Folks who want to know more should read Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
I'm about to state the obvious, but evidently it isn't obvious to some people. It depends on who you are and what you use Linux for.
If it's a production machine, the answer should be "hardly ever". Here "production" means that you'll have a bunch of pissed-off users or lose money if the machine has problems. Upgrade only when some critical problem is found (like a security hole that's actively being exploited by the script kiddies). Don't switch to 2.2.x until things get a bit more stable (2.2.6 is a large change, indicating that 2.2.x probably still isn't ready for use by ISPs or to run your business from). 2.0.36 is a pretty solid kernel; we know that it works. Folks with earlier kernels without a firewall between them and the net probably should go to 2.0.36 for the added security fixes.
If you have a machine inside a firewall that's carrying on some useful function (a server for filesystems, www or printers), just let it sit and brag about its uptime. Don't upgrade it ever until you want the machine to do something new. If it's still running 1.2.13, cool.
If it's your personal machine and you like being on the edge, build every kernel. Have a blast.
If you're somewhere in between (it'll be a pain in the butt if you hose your machine, but not a disaster), wait at least a week before installing a new kernel.
Cybernet Systems Corporation has applied for a trademark on "Where do you want to go tomorrow?". But then, you're searching the wrong database (a US database) for a dispute that is taking place in Germany.
This is just a special case of spread spectrum/CDMA (CDMA is code division multiple access). Qualcomm is the chief proponent of CDMA, and it is currently used in wireless quite a bit. In CDMA you are effectively sending pulses (though they have a much more complex structure than a simple pulse), and because of the wideband nature of the pulse you can extract accurate timing information. This lets multipath effects (your signal reaches you by multiple paths with different time delays, because it bounces off hills, buildings, etc) work in your favor: time-shift the echos and add them into the signal.
The claims that this guy's system will lead to a revolution are nonsense. He hasn't succeeded in repealing information theory. And we'll soon have low-power radios the size of salt grains, just by evolving existing technology.
I'm sure the Livermore labs didn't steal this guy's ideas in the sense of reading and copying his work. It naturally follows as a special case of spread spectrum, which the military labs have been pushing for twenty years or more (let the bandwidth go to infinity, so you can send extremely narrow pulses).
Has Java Progressed wrt Generic Programming?
on
Java for EGCS
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Thanks to some changes that were made in Java 1.1, you can now do generic programming in Java reasonably well. Interested folks should check out the Java Generic Library, a "port" of the C++ Standard Template Library to Java.
One thing the author of the above article writes is that there is almost no performance penalty in using the C++ STL, but there is a considerable penalty in using the Java equivalent (all those downcasts from Object to whatever class you're using cost).
Red Hat has attracted lots of outside investment now. Unfortunately, outside investment can lead to outside control if things aren't managed very carefully. SAP is going to be more comfortable with traditional, proprietary software company management than with Red Hat's approach of putting the software they develop under the GPL.
Much the same thing happened to Cygnus. At one time, everything Cygnus did was freeware (GPL, LGPL, etc). As they grew and hired more folks from the traditional software industry, and started thinking about going public, "value added" thinking started to take hold. Now they've got proprietary products and one of their founders, Mike Tiemann, now says that infrastructure should be free but applications should be proprietary.
Red Hat may come under increasing pressure to create proprietary "value-added" pieces (or, as RMS likes to say, "freedom subtracted") to improve their competitive position.
One could argue that this is OK as long as the GPL version of Red Hat is a complete system. But the old-time Red Hat folks might have to fight their new investors to keep this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just like open source software: anyone can print the book, no one gets proceeds unless the publisher makes donations.
Why not just write a good program, and publish it yourself as shareware, or perhaps make a deal with Microsoft? You'd make more money that way.
Ah, another bogus attack on RMS and all his works. RMS has long said that free software needs free documentation, so that when new features are added to the program, these new features can be documented. This doesn't mean that every book telling how to use free software needs to be free, but it does mean that there needs to be at least one high-quality manual that is free. If others feel they can do a better job competing against the free manual, let them at it.
RMS wants a free manual, and he's putting his money where his mouth is. No author is obliged to accept his offer; furthermore, publishers like O'Reilly are free to fund other books. Free software and documentation are a part of the market. As a writer, you're simply going to have to deal with it.
You seem to think that the US is constitutionally forbidden from preventing its citizens from using strong crypto. That's false, there has never been such a case.
But the biggest flaw is in your basic argument. If only constitutionally guaranteed rights are worth anything, then one would expect UK citizens to be absolute slaves (no written Constitution) and former USSR citizens to be the freeest in the world (extensive rights were "guaranteed" by their constitution).
Written constitutions don't prevent rights from being taken away. It just makes it a bit trickier. What matters is effective freedom, and in many ways there is more of that in Western Europe than the US.
Wassenaar has an exception for what they call "public domain" software, and their appendix defines "public domain" in such a way that it includes free software/open source. So governments that have signed Wassenaar can still let their citizens export any free software they want to. They just have to restrict commercial products with strong encryption. The US forgot about this loophole because the Clinton administration is clueless about free software/ open source, and they can't close it unless they get all of the Wassenaar countries to agree.
It was the NSA, doing behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, that got GSM encryption crippled. They needed a European government as their front, and for all I know it might have been Helmut Kohl and his folks. But in case you didn't notice, that government was voted out of office.
As for trusting crypto, only code that is available in source form and independently audited should be trusted. However, you can expect FUD from proprietary software vendors attempting to assert the reverse with security-by-obscurity arguments.
France used to have the most anti-encryption policies in the developed world. Their new policy (which may not be the law yet, does anyone know?) is like that of the US: free domestic use, no export without a license for keys of more than 56 bits (which rules out source code distribution for algorithms that allow the key length to be modified easily).
This means that even after the new law is in effect, you still can't do open source crypto development in France.
That's not quite correct. Any code that is under a license that is at least as permissive in every respect than the GPL can be linked directly into the kernel, because the GPL can then be applied to the combined work. This includes:
It does not include code under the older BSD license, since it imposes a requirement that the GPL does not (mention an organization or a list of organizations and people in all advertising).
It does not include the Artistic License, although most Artistic License software is dual-licensed, so if the other license says it's OK, you can go for it.
SGI could choose to use the GPL plus alternate licensing, and still get back improvements from others. This can be done either by getting assignments from contributors (if they are willing) or recoding the changes in a different way. Regardless of what licensing is chosen, getting assignments (as FSF and the egcs project do) is probably the safest thing to do, as I expect that within the next year, Microsoft or someone they put up to it will attempt to sue some high-profile open source project for theft of code (just find some contributor who didn't have the right to contribute, because of an employment contract or something), thus spreading a piracy taint over the whole movement.
It should be emphasized that at the least, SGI would be shooting themselves in the foot if they choose a GPL-incompatible license such as an NPL-like license. The reason is that this would force all Linux distributors to use their filesystem only as a module, which would be inconvenient. If SGI's work requires changes in the kernel itself, then it wouldn't even be valid to use it as a Linux kernel module if it's not under a GPL-compatible license.
SGI could use a BSD-like license (without the advertising clause), which would permit both BSD and Linux to use the code. They might not want to give that much away, though. You'll never beat Microsoft if you write code for them (yes, Microsoft networking has tons of Berkeley code in there, you can tell from the bug-compatibility).
I hope that they either go in the GPL or the BSD direction, and don't try to do one of those one-sided NPL-like licenses that is becoming popular with companies (e.g. we can take your changes proprietary, but you have to distribute source).
At the time I posted my reply, the note I'm replying to was rated "5". Why?
NiceGuy has written a flame, saying nothing that hasn't been said before on Slashdot. Now, he has a right to his opinion, but moderation isn't supposed to be about "I agree/I disagree".
No new facts are presented; worse, the posting puts quotes around statements that are not being made (RMS has never claimed that Linux is good only as a stop-gap), an unethical technique in a debate (it's called a straw man argument).
The purpose of moderation is to try to move the gems to the front. This was not a gem; a similar posting that made the opposite point would also not be a gem.
An application developer writing for a Linux system is exposed to the API's and ABI's of the GNU C library and the X window system. He or she never talks to Linux directly at all (it is possible to tell the C library to do a direct system call, but even there the C library stands in between). Only the device driver writer ever interfaces directly to Linux.
(One could argue that the /proc filesystem is a semi-direct interface, but even there, /proc is an idea derived from other OSes).
Similarly, the user of KDE, Gnome or what have you cannot immediately tell if there is a Linux or a BSD kernel running underneath (yes, there are people running KDE and Gnome on BSD).
So, if anything, the user sees X and GNU, and it is Linux that is inside. If Linus's theories about microkernels are correct, when the Hurd is done it will be slower, but the user won't be able to immediately tell a Debian GNU/Linux system from a Debian GNU/Hurd system, just as a user won't be able to tell KDE running on FreeBSD from KDE on Linux.
A lot of this is because Linus has done such a great job building a very standard Posix-compliant kernel. It's such a good job that it is almost invisible ... other than the fact that it's such a good story.
RMS is not claiming that the GPL requires the name GNU/Linux to be used, so it is nonsense to claim that he is somehow making a mockery of the GPL.
RMS appears to want attention to be focused on GNU for two purposes, and credit is the less important of those two purposes (though I think it is more important to him than he admits). His more important purpose seems to be to get people to think of themselves as developing a GNU system in the sense that every program on that system would be free software -- that Linux not just be yet another platform like Windows or BeOS that software companies port all their software to and every significant program is proprietary software.
RMS seems to think that if he gets people to say GNU/Linux, people will then ask "What is GNU", and then when they find out, they will get excited about the free software message. Like any good activist, he doesn't care if he pisses people off ... sometimes I think he thinks if he hasn't pissed anyone off lately, he isn't doing his job as an advocate.
As for me, I don't think that all software must be free, but I think that more free software is a good thing, and that without RMS making noise and annoying people and inspiring other like-minded people, the trend in the Linux community would quickly be to just try to be another platform for proprietary software developers. That's a losing goal, since Microsoft is much better at that.
I fully respect and honor people who find the BSD license preferable to the GPL, or who object to the GPL because they think its retrictions are unnecessary. I have no use for jerks who argue against it on the basis that it is "communist", especially from proponents of the BSD license.
After all, the BSD license is more communist in the sense of Marx than the GPL. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." If you tell me I should use the BSD, you're saying that I should contribute work to you to do whatever you want to do with, because I have the ability and you have the need.
The GPL is more market-oriented. The author who uses the GPL gives software to other developers to make derivative works from only if the other developers are willing to give back their changes. Many developers who use the GPL also sell proprietary software; in some cases (e.g. Aladdin Software, makers of Ghostscript) they use dual licensing: folks who don't like the GPL restrictions can pay $$$ to get other terms.
As Russ Nelson has said, the reason he uses the GPL is "When I write commercial software I want to get paid." Those who claim that developers must use BSD-like terms when they write free software are saying that they must give up their work without any compensation at all, to whover needs it, in accordance with Marx's dictum.
There's no question that RMS has a political agenda, but then so does the Daemon News, which has repeatedly demonstrated that its political agenda is to try to get people to release software on BSD-like rather than GPL-like terms.
If this is is how you feel, then you are opposed to the concept of free (as in freedom) software and open source. Furthermore, you are against Debian's Free Software Principles (since you say you want a cut of any money made).
Stallman's whole program is that people should be paid for services, not the software, and packaging and distributing software on CD-ROMs and supporting the customers is a service.
No final decision has been made as to whether the planned egcs 1.2 will come out as egcs 1.2 or gcc 3.0 or gcc some other number.
Also, June is not a promise: it will come out when it is ready.
Three new languages: Fortran, Java, and Chill. There's also been some work to integrate GNU Pascal, though that's still not in the tree.
We talked about using "gcs" for the name, it's no longer a C compiler. But people know the name "gcc". Think of it as standing for GNU Compiler Collection.
No final decision has been made about the version number, but when we were talking about starting egcs, some folks wanted to call it gcc3 immediately (but this would have pissed off a number of folks so we didn't do it).
Ideally, the difference between pgcc and egcs/gcc will decrease over time, to the point where a separate pgcc branch is no longer needed. To a certain extent that's been happening.
RMS is the original author and designer of gcc. The egcs steering committee thinks he matters very much, which is why we worked to satisfy his concerns. Certainly he's stubborn and doctrinaire, and at times is not the easiest person to get along with.
But even if you don't think all software should be free, there's a lot more free software in the world because of RMS's advocacy (and don't forget the considerable amount of software he wrote himself).
As a member of the egcs steering committee, which will become the gcc steering commitee, I can confirm that yes, the merger is official ... sometime in the near future there will be a gcc 3.0 from the egcs code base. The steering committee has been talking to RMS about doing this for months now; at times it's been contentious but now that we understand each other better, things are going much better.
The important thing to understand is that when we started egcs, this is what we were planning all along (well, OK, what some of us were planning). We wanted to change the way gcc worked, not just create a variant. That's why assignments always went to the FSF, why GNU coding style is rigorously followed.
Technically, egcs/gcc will run the same way as before. Since we are now fully GNU, we'll be making some minor changes to reflect that, but we've been doing them gradually in the past few months anyway so nothing that significant will change. Jeff Law remains the release manager; a number of other people have CVS write access; the steering committee handles the "political" and other nontechnical stuff and "hires" the release manager.
egcs/gcc is at this point considerably more bazaar-like than the Linux kernel in that many more people have the ability to get something into the official code (for Linux, only Linus can do that). Jeff Law decides what goes in the release, but he delegates major areas to other maintainers.
The reason for the delay in the announcement is that we were waiting for RMS to announce it (he sent a message to the gnu.*.announce lists), but someone cracked an important FSF machine and did an rm -rf / command. It was noticed and someone powered off the machine, but it appears that this machine hosted the GNU mailing lists, if I understand correctly, so there's nothing on gnu.announce. I don't know why there's still nothing on www.gnu.org (which was not cracked). Why do people do things like this?
Joseph Campbell would argue that the themes in the plot are thousands of years older than Freud and appear in most of the ancient myths: the hero's journey, the son overthrowing the father, etc.
What Lucas did with Star Wars is to read Joseph Campbell to find out what themes are in common to all the great myths, and then use that formula to design the plot, effectively creating a new mythology. Lucas has pretty much admitted this. Tolkein did essentially the same thing with Lord of the Rings (not by reading Campbell, but by doing the same kind of research as Campbell): he was a scholar who had studied all of the old Norse and Celtic stories and used them to construct his own mythology.
Folks who want to know more should read Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
I'm about to state the obvious, but evidently it isn't obvious to some people. It depends on who you are and what you use Linux for.
If it's a production machine, the answer should be "hardly ever". Here "production" means that you'll have a bunch of pissed-off users or lose money if the machine has problems. Upgrade only when some critical problem is found (like a security hole that's actively being exploited by the script kiddies). Don't switch to 2.2.x until things get a bit more stable (2.2.6 is a large change, indicating that 2.2.x probably still isn't ready for use by ISPs or to run your business from). 2.0.36 is a pretty solid kernel; we know that it works. Folks with earlier kernels without a firewall between them and the net probably should go to 2.0.36 for the added security fixes.
If you have a machine inside a firewall that's carrying on some useful function (a server for filesystems, www or printers), just let it sit and brag about its uptime. Don't upgrade it ever until you want the machine to do something new. If it's still running 1.2.13, cool.
If it's your personal machine and you like being on the edge, build every kernel. Have a blast.
If you're somewhere in between (it'll be a pain in the butt if you hose your machine, but not a disaster), wait at least a week before installing a new kernel.
Please point out any "veiled public insults and a lot more" in Bruce Perens' press releases. I can't find any.
Cybernet Systems Corporation has applied for a trademark on "Where do you want to go tomorrow?". But then, you're searching the wrong database (a US database) for a dispute that is taking place in Germany.
The claims that this guy's system will lead to a revolution are nonsense. He hasn't succeeded in repealing information theory. And we'll soon have low-power radios the size of salt grains, just by evolving existing technology.
I'm sure the Livermore labs didn't steal this guy's ideas in the sense of reading and copying his work. It naturally follows as a special case of spread spectrum, which the military labs have been pushing for twenty years or more (let the bandwidth go to infinity, so you can send extremely narrow pulses).
Thanks to some changes that were made in Java 1.1, you can now do generic programming in Java reasonably well. Interested folks should check out the Java Generic Library, a "port" of the C++ Standard Template Library to Java.
One thing the author of the above article writes is that there is almost no performance penalty in using the C++ STL, but there is a considerable penalty in using the Java equivalent (all those downcasts from Object to whatever class you're using cost).
Red Hat has attracted lots of outside investment now. Unfortunately, outside investment can lead to outside control if things aren't managed very carefully. SAP is going to be more comfortable with traditional, proprietary software company management than with Red Hat's approach of putting the software they develop under the GPL.
Much the same thing happened to Cygnus. At one time, everything Cygnus did was freeware (GPL, LGPL, etc). As they grew and hired more folks from the traditional software industry, and started thinking about going public, "value added" thinking started to take hold. Now they've got proprietary products and one of their founders, Mike Tiemann, now says that infrastructure should be free but applications should be proprietary.
Red Hat may come under increasing pressure to create proprietary "value-added" pieces (or, as RMS likes to say, "freedom subtracted") to improve their competitive position.
One could argue that this is OK as long as the GPL version of Red Hat is a complete system. But the old-time Red Hat folks might have to fight their new investors to keep this.