A month or so ago Debian added support for almost-full disk encryption (need to leave/boot unencrypted so the kernel can load); it's fantastically easy to set up and the installer presents you with an option during the partitioning phase to set all of it up for you.
The Mozilla Corporation has said, "if you modify Firefox, you must let us approve the changes in order to call it Firefox."
Matthew Garrett, a Debian and Ubuntu developer, posted a well-thought reaction to this at http://mjg59.livejournal.com/68112.html. If the Linux kernel guys pursued the Mozilla Corporation's policy, you wouldn't have any GNU/Linux distributions - you'd have to call the Linux component something else, and where does that get the community?
'''Debian don't want to include certain icons related to Firefox because the licensing of those graphics isn't consistent with the aims of their project.
Mozilla say that's fine, as long as Debian don't call the package "Firefox".'''
What's unfortunate is that two years ago the Mozilla Foundation told Debian they'd be fine as long as they didn't call it "Mozilla Firefox"; they sanctioned the change to "Debian Firefox", as referenced in one of the links from the article. Now the Mozilla Corporation (the new trademark holder) says that calling it "Debian Firefox" isn't good enough and they need to do away with the Firefox entirely.
"It's funny because when the Apache Software Foundation has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, no one gave them grief, but SUN moves to one and suddenly they're evil..."
You're spreading FUD. Debian does have issues with the CDDL, but that wasn't the cause of this controversy. Joerg licensed parts of cdrecord under the CDDL and parts of under the GPL, and the result is not redistributable by anyone but Joerg - it's not free software.
Debian does not exclude free software with a license incompatible with the GPL, but it does exclude software that isn't free, like the newer versions of cdrecord.
The GPLv3 is incompatible with the GPLv2, in that you can't license parts of a work under each and still have the whole work be redistributable. It's not a problem, though; both the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 will be free software licenses, and Debian will include software licensed under both. Additionally, a lot of software is licensed under the GPLv2 "or later", so anyone distributing the software can "upgrade" to the newer version of the license.
"The real problem here is NOT the CDDL, Apache License, etc. The real problem is the GPL. There are many licenses classified as *free software* by the FSF that are incompatible. What makes SUN's any more evil than the other ones? If Richard's (RMS) criteria for what is free software isn't good enough to make all *free software* licenses compatible, then perhaps his criteria is wrong?"
The FSF does indeed classify the CDDL as a free license, and notes that it is incompatible with the GPL [1]. Debian takes issue with the choice of venue clause that forces legal disputes to be settled in a location specified by the original copyright holder.
The issue in cdrecord with the CDDL and the GPL is that parts are licensed under one and parts of the other; since the licenses are incompatible, no one can redistribute cdrecord. If it were all licensed under one of the two, there wouldn't be an issue (aside from the choice of venue clause).
"What Danese Cooper says is wrong. I and many other members of the OpenSolaris project know for certain that SUN did not create the CDDL to be purposefully incompatible with the GPL. SUN even releases other software under the GPL and LGPL."
Danese Cooper is the primary author of the CDDL; if there's anyone who knows the CDDL, it's her.
In the video linked in the article (from May of this year), she does indeed say that the CDDL is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, and the Sun employee also in the discussion (Sun's free software community relations guy) confirms this.
In the video it's explained that the Solaris development community didn't want to release the code under the GPL, and if Sun had done so prominent developers were ready to quit. Also in the video, she explains that Sun modelled the CDDL on the Mozilla Public License intentionally with the hopes that the Mozilla community would adopt it, and that the CDDL was left incompatible with the GPL partially to appeal to the Mozilla community.
"I've had no problems with the Ubuntu alternate install."
The Ubuntu alternate install is a modified and rebranded version of the Debian installer. If you didn't have problems with that, you won't have problems with Debian's.
Although Sarge (the current Debian stable) was not released with AMD64 support, it was added as an official, fully-supported architecture two months after the release -- way back in August of last year. TechWorld didn't read the recent news announcment correctly.
I disagree. Your position is no different than that of a slaveholder in the Americas during the 17th century who says "I have no leverage to end slavery, but I'll still hold slaves because if I expose them to Western culture and Christianity I've done them a service."
Google (and similar companies) should say to China, "no, we find the rules to which you will subject us to be morally unacceptable, and so we choose not to do business in your country." Economic pressure through divestiture was key in the downfall of South African aparthied, and there's no reason that similar boycotts can't work in China.
Soft updates are an alternative to journaling, but they still require a fsck on an unclean unmount. Although this fsck can be done in the background (with snapshots) after the filesystem has been mounted and is otherwise available for normal use, the fsck still takes significant time and system load - neither of which are an issue with an unclean unmount of a journalled filesystem. I believe one of the primary motivations behind adding journaling to UFS is to remove this drawback relative to journaled filesystems.
There was a message posted to ubuntu-devel this week that users ought to hold off upgrading due to the transition to gcc-4.0. Once that is done (and it seems to have finished today, judging from the number of packages that have been processed) and the autobuilders catch up, it ought to be more regular.
How about moving to a Unix-like operating system that doesn't require you to compile everything? Having the computer recompiling this, that, and the other uses much more energy than letting it idle and downloading binary packages.
Did you buy the cheapest bulb? I bought some name-brand ones five years ago (only thing that was on the shelf) and they're still running fine and used daily.
As far as packages go, pkgsrc just doesn't cut it. The quarterly branches simply do not get updates in a timely manner if at all; there's no other way to put it. Upgrading packages was a pain - there are several utilities to help with the process, but none of them do a particularly good job, certainly not like portupgrade does. Getting the newest versions of sotware is also a mess - some people test things in pkgsrc-wip on sourceforge, others just put it in the tree.
FreeBSD-5.3 wasn't the most successful release they've had. Most of the complaints I've seen on the mailing lists were fixed in 5-STABLE shortly after release, and the fast-approaching 5.4 will incorporate those changes.
"This is opposed to your computer plugging itself in, tapping into the internet, downloading and running itself?"
Yes, it is. Ever tried to install Windows while on a network, especially while directly connected to the internet via a broadband line of some type? You'll get your computer owned before you can install patches from Windows Update.
Just for the record, xorg has been in pkgsrc for quite a while. It's easy to use - simply add 'X11_TYPE=xorg' to/etc/mk.conf and then pkg_add or 'make' new applications. You can remove/usr/X11 at your leisure.
"Their expert is the Vice President of Threat Research at Webroot. That much is from the article. The article doesn't take the next logical step, however, and point out that Webroot is in the business of developing and selling software to prevent, detect and eleminate spyware. So it's certainly in this guy's interest for people to think that spyware is still a problem."
At the same time, to be fair, his current position _is_ researching spyware - it is likely that he has a good understanding of it.
What kind of source would be an "independent third party" that would be reliable? Clearly, Firefox and anti-virus/anti-spyware are out - where does that leave us when looking for an authority on the subject of spyware in Firefox? That isn't a rhetoric question; I'm not sure where I'd go if I wanted to back up my own observations with an authoritative source.
Slashdot Mirror
A month or so ago Debian added support for almost-full disk encryption (need to leave /boot unencrypted so the kernel can load); it's fantastically easy to set up and the installer presents you with an option during the partitioning phase to set all of it up for you.
The Mozilla Corporation has said, "if you modify Firefox, you must let us approve the changes in order to call it Firefox."
Matthew Garrett, a Debian and Ubuntu developer, posted a well-thought reaction to this at http://mjg59.livejournal.com/68112.html. If the Linux kernel guys pursued the Mozilla Corporation's policy, you wouldn't have any GNU/Linux distributions - you'd have to call the Linux component something else, and where does that get the community?
'''Debian don't want to include certain icons related to Firefox because the licensing of those graphics isn't consistent with the aims of their project.
Mozilla say that's fine, as long as Debian don't call the package "Firefox".'''
What's unfortunate is that two years ago the Mozilla Foundation told Debian they'd be fine as long as they didn't call it "Mozilla Firefox"; they sanctioned the change to "Debian Firefox", as referenced in one of the links from the article. Now the Mozilla Corporation (the new trademark holder) says that calling it "Debian Firefox" isn't good enough and they need to do away with the Firefox entirely.
"It's funny because when the Apache Software Foundation has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, no one gave them grief, but SUN moves to one and suddenly they're evil..."
You're spreading FUD. Debian does have issues with the CDDL, but that wasn't the cause of this controversy. Joerg licensed parts of cdrecord under the CDDL and parts of under the GPL, and the result is not redistributable by anyone but Joerg - it's not free software.
Debian does not exclude free software with a license incompatible with the GPL, but it does exclude software that isn't free, like the newer versions of cdrecord.
The GPLv3 is incompatible with the GPLv2, in that you can't license parts of a work under each and still have the whole work be redistributable. It's not a problem, though; both the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 will be free software licenses, and Debian will include software licensed under both. Additionally, a lot of software is licensed under the GPLv2 "or later", so anyone distributing the software can "upgrade" to the newer version of the license.
"The real problem here is NOT the CDDL, Apache License, etc. The real problem is the GPL. There are many licenses classified as *free software* by the FSF that are incompatible. What makes SUN's any more evil than the other ones? If Richard's (RMS) criteria for what is free software isn't good enough to make all *free software* licenses compatible, then perhaps his criteria is wrong?"
G PLIncompatibleLicenses
The FSF does indeed classify the CDDL as a free license, and notes that it is incompatible with the GPL [1]. Debian takes issue with the choice of venue clause that forces legal disputes to be settled in a location specified by the original copyright holder.
The issue in cdrecord with the CDDL and the GPL is that parts are licensed under one and parts of the other; since the licenses are incompatible, no one can redistribute cdrecord. If it were all licensed under one of the two, there wouldn't be an issue (aside from the choice of venue clause).
[1] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#
"What Danese Cooper says is wrong. I and many other members of the OpenSolaris project know for certain that SUN did not create the CDDL to be purposefully incompatible with the GPL. SUN even releases other software under the GPL and LGPL."
Danese Cooper is the primary author of the CDDL; if there's anyone who knows the CDDL, it's her.
In the video linked in the article (from May of this year), she does indeed say that the CDDL is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, and the Sun employee also in the discussion (Sun's free software community relations guy) confirms this.
In the video it's explained that the Solaris development community didn't want to release the code under the GPL, and if Sun had done so prominent developers were ready to quit. Also in the video, she explains that Sun modelled the CDDL on the Mozilla Public License intentionally with the hopes that the Mozilla community would adopt it, and that the CDDL was left incompatible with the GPL partially to appeal to the Mozilla community.
That was awesome, thanks for the laugh.
"I've had no problems with the Ubuntu alternate install."
The Ubuntu alternate install is a modified and rebranded version of the Debian installer. If you didn't have problems with that, you won't have problems with Debian's.
http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050811
Although Sarge (the current Debian stable) was not released with AMD64 support, it was added as an official, fully-supported architecture two months after the release -- way back in August of last year. TechWorld didn't read the recent news announcment correctly.
I disagree. Your position is no different than that of a slaveholder in the Americas during the 17th century who says "I have no leverage to end slavery, but I'll still hold slaves because if I expose them to Western culture and Christianity I've done them a service."
Google (and similar companies) should say to China, "no, we find the rules to which you will subject us to be morally unacceptable, and so we choose not to do business in your country." Economic pressure through divestiture was key in the downfall of South African aparthied, and there's no reason that similar boycotts can't work in China.
http://rzip.samba.org/ is a phenomenal compressor. It does much better than bzip2 or rar on large files and is open source.
Soft updates are an alternative to journaling, but they still require a fsck on an unclean unmount. Although this fsck can be done in the background (with snapshots) after the filesystem has been mounted and is otherwise available for normal use, the fsck still takes significant time and system load - neither of which are an issue with an unclean unmount of a journalled filesystem. I believe one of the primary motivations behind adding journaling to UFS is to remove this drawback relative to journaled filesystems.
The percentages are of music listeners, not of music downloaders. Not all music listeners download music.
There was a message posted to ubuntu-devel this week that users ought to hold off upgrading due to the transition to gcc-4.0. Once that is done (and it seems to have finished today, judging from the number of packages that have been processed) and the autobuilders catch up, it ought to be more regular.
How about moving to a Unix-like operating system that doesn't require you to compile everything? Having the computer recompiling this, that, and the other uses much more energy than letting it idle and downloading binary packages.
But is Evince as fast as xpdf and does it support reloading with a keypress? While doing LaTeX, that's a killer feature.
http://technocrat.net/
gnupod, a set of perl scripts for managing the iPod, has this feature - it will down-convert FLAC and OGG to MP3 or AAC. It works wonderfully.
Did you buy the cheapest bulb? I bought some name-brand ones five years ago (only thing that was on the shelf) and they're still running fine and used daily.
Isn't the Mac Mini just a Shuttle knock-off? The article makes it sound like "another Mac innovation ripped off by the competition."
As far as packages go, pkgsrc just doesn't cut it. The quarterly branches simply do not get updates in a timely manner if at all; there's no other way to put it. Upgrading packages was a pain - there are several utilities to help with the process, but none of them do a particularly good job, certainly not like portupgrade does. Getting the newest versions of sotware is also a mess - some people test things in pkgsrc-wip on sourceforge, others just put it in the tree.
FreeBSD-5.3 wasn't the most successful release they've had. Most of the complaints I've seen on the mailing lists were fixed in 5-STABLE shortly after release, and the fast-approaching 5.4 will incorporate those changes.
"This is opposed to your computer plugging itself in, tapping into the internet, downloading and running itself?"
Yes, it is. Ever tried to install Windows while on a network, especially while directly connected to the internet via a broadband line of some type? You'll get your computer owned before you can install patches from Windows Update.
Just for the record, xorg has been in pkgsrc for quite a while. It's easy to use - simply add 'X11_TYPE=xorg' to /etc/mk.conf and then pkg_add or 'make' new applications. You can remove /usr/X11 at your leisure.
"Their expert is the Vice President of Threat Research at Webroot. That much is from the article. The article doesn't take the next logical step, however, and point out that Webroot is in the business of developing and selling software to prevent, detect and eleminate spyware. So it's certainly in this guy's interest for people to think that spyware is still a problem."
At the same time, to be fair, his current position _is_ researching spyware - it is likely that he has a good understanding of it.
What kind of source would be an "independent third party" that would be reliable? Clearly, Firefox and anti-virus/anti-spyware are out - where does that leave us when looking for an authority on the subject of spyware in Firefox? That isn't a rhetoric question; I'm not sure where I'd go if I wanted to back up my own observations with an authoritative source.