USA is hitting its own software companies with this regulations. This is good for everybody else, but it will cost the USA a LOT.
Very soon, US companies will start feeling the pressure from all over the place. For one thing, a german company (SuSe) can (and does) put things like PGP, ssh & co. in its distribution, which an US-based company (redhat, Caldera) can not and does not.
Now, adding ssh is just a matter of downloading the srpm package, compiling it and doing an RPM -i, but... Try adding ssh-agent imediately after login for all of your users in a consistent way and you will find out that this task is non-trivial. Then you have to make your PGP (or GPG) work with pine, or whatever you or any of your users use and so on. It is annoying and takes your precious time away.
It is just the same kind of shit as those I used to have with my (german) keyboard not getting properly configured, xdm coming with an completely open configuration file, and simmilar, with ONE major exception - RedHat cannot fix it in the "next version", because it is not even part of the distribution. SuSe can.
By the way, upgrading from RH-5.1 to RH-6.0 has killed my own solution to above mentioned problem of integrationg the ssh-agent in the login-process, so I had to do it again. And I hate repetitious jobs.-). Do I see a problem for RedHat here?
Although I am not exactly happy with the SUN-s new Star-Office licence, I do think we might have gained more than a "Free Beer". Although I do not believe that people will take the whole suite and start fixing everything, there are several areas where the work may be simple enough and gains big enough for someone to do it (or pay someone else to do it for him.). Some examples are:
Getting the SO compile on any Linux-powered computer, independent on the hardware platform. Oder UNIX-like systems will folow.
Anyone can make a "localised varsion" of SO, so "small languages" are likely to see the localised version.
Import/export filters. How about some LaTeX import/export? Or Lyx?
If StarOffice (i.e. SUN) team does their job properly, I am quite sure the above mentioned tasks will be relatively easy to do, especially writing the localised versions of the SO => someone will do it. I can even imagine a goverment of a small country actually PAYING someone to get the job done.
Surely, SUN will win a lot if this happens, but they will not be alone.
"True Cluster" is a High-avaliability clustering available with TrueUnix. In my opinion this and the Fortran-compiler are by far the best pieces of software Digital ever produced.
This is the first time I got interested in Sun-s licence, so I went there and read it. (Disclaimer: IANAL!)
AFAI understood, the SUN-s licence is very nice for SUN, but unpleasant for everybody else as it basically says: "We have published this programs source so You can work on it and make it better, but if we ever change our minds we may revoke the licence anytime. In particularly, you aren`t allowed to use the code or parts thereof for other projects."
I must say that I prefered the old Star-Office licence, since it was a straight commercial licence with "free for private use" attached to it, which was very easy to understand. SUNs "would-be-free" licence is much worse, since it camouflages itself as beeing much more than it really is.
As it is, SUN may hurt M$ (not so bad), kill Corel and Applix (bad- less choices left) and diminish the level of interest for various free-office projects in the next few years. It may also lead to various problems if someone starts writing the GPL-ed word-filters (for word) which are actually based on the filters from the Star-Office. I hope I am wrong.
My confidence in SUN would be much bigger if they would GPL the input and output filters - They may keep the rest of the program under any licence they like AFAI am concerned.
I feel that too many of you out there responded with "he is a stupid kid" type reactions.
The question is not "is this kid responsible?", it is also not a "what would he do with a military jet?", nor "could anyoune really believe that particular commercial?"
The real question is: SHOULD A COMPANY STAND BEHIND THEIR COMERCIALS, OR CAN THEY JUST CLAIM ANY SHIT AND WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT ???
If one lets the Pepsi go with this one, that may be a precedence for other cases where company sets a claim in their advertisements with absolutely no intention to stand behind it. So, now we have: "Do this and you will get a military jet" claim, finishing in "just a joke". What's next?
This car can stand a 100km/h hit with no scratches (just a joke - post mortem)
You can safely glue your dogs chain to the house with this glue (just a joke - tell it to the postmans testacles)
This rope is strong enough to hold a titanic (just a joke, and your $$$ yacht is gone)
When I think of it, quite a lot of the advertisments are obvious fakes - anti cellulyte "wonders" beeing advertised by 19-years old girls, detergents miraculously washing everything at -20 C, while your angora pully does not show any signs of wearing off after 10000 washing cycles, "head&shoulders" shampoos (hey, I should know!)... These guys should pay for it oneday - the sooner the better.
I feel that too many of you out there responded with "he is a stupid kid" type reactions.
The question is not "is this kid responsible?", it is also not a "what would he do with a military jet?", nor "could anyoune really believe that particular commercial?"
The real question is: SHOULD A COMPANY STAND BEHIND THEIR COMERCIALS, OR CAN THEY JUST CLAIM ANYTHING AND WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT ???
If one lets the Pepsi go with this one, that may be a precedence for other cases where company sets a claim in their advertisements with absolutely no intention to stand behind it. So, now we have: "Do this and you will get a military jet" claim, finishing in "just a joke". What's next?
This car can stand a 100km/h hit with no scratches (just a joke - post mortem)
You can safely glue your dogs chain to the house with this glue (just a joke - tell it to the postmans testacles)
This rope is strong enough to hold a tytanic (just a joke, and your $$$ jacht is gone)
When I think of it, quite a lot of the advertisments are obvious fakes - anti cellulyte "wonders" beeing advertised by 19-years old girls, detergents miraculously washing everything at -20 C, while your angora pully does not show any signs of wearing off after 10000 washing cycles, "head&shoulders" shampoos (hey, I should know!)... These guys should pay for it oneday - the sooner the better.
I dont think Intel would go into this much trouble just to kill the K7. The REAL problem is that K7 comes with "Slot 2" motherboards, 200MHz system frequency and co.
Now, as long as it is just a "Slot 1" against "Socket 7" game, it is a win-win situatin for Intel on a long term, but "Slot 2" motherboards could prove to be killers for the whole "Slot 1" buisness. Once these motherboards are established on the market, cards will be heavily mixed again.
In my opinion, it will be realy interesting to see intel-clones from other companies emerging which use the "slot 2" and cheap alpha-based machines, due to availability of cheap alfa-conformn hardware!
(I suppose it wont be possible to just take an alpha-procesor and stick it into K7-motherboard, but I'm quite sure that manufacturing a motherboard for Alpha-processor will all of the sudden become much cheaper.)
One can easily understand why You don't like the word "viral" (as: "it infects it's neibourhood with GPL"). Word "virus" is usualy mentioned in a negative conotation, and "viral" == "good" usually needs some explaining.
I suppose, "imune", as in "it is imune against beeing infected by non-free licences" would be a better word. Maybe we should start clasifying free licences according to their "immunity".
What strikes me as the bigest difference between NUMA-s and other multi-processor machines would be the idea of using different OS-s (well, actually only their Unix and M$ NT) on the multi-procesor system so that each OS gets one (or more?) processor to work with. At least that's what they claim here:
NUMACenter enables simultaneous use of both Unix and Windows NT on one system.
If I got the message right, a new great AmigaOS is basically a thin wrapper around Linux kernel now?
I wonder how much "Linux" will be left underneath? Just the kernel+modules, or all the non-graphical stuff, or even X?
What is it exactly the new "Amiga" will implement on top of Linux - new windowing system, or yet another desktop?
Actually it would be the best if they just make a new desktop and a set of libraries nessesary to port existing Amiga aplication to X11- This would allow the Amiga-users a smooth transition to Linux, withouth too much pain, and add another desktop to Linux. I actually like the idea.
Maybe they should try restricting the price of the system which is allowed for export? The regulative wouldn't be much better, but at least it would prevent some dictators from buying expensive computers...
On the other hand, a price-based system would certainly last longer than the one based on the "absolute crunching power" of the machine, especially if you add inflationary re-indexing. Ergo, the same law would live longer => it would be cheaper for tax payers!
I do hope, Prof Anderson will publicly appologise for his words. Basically, equivalent of his words in the "Real word" would be:
(Prof Anderson commes to classroom)
"I am sorry that I couldn't make it to a class yeterday. Someone has robbed me on the street, while I was walking alone, trough one of the worse slums in the whole USA at 2:30 in the morning, so I had to spend the whole morning at the Police station - first they were waiting me to get sober, then I had to describe the man...
And, I don't want to name names, but it's fair to say the blacks have caused all this trouble. It seems to be the neger mentality."
I don't want to name names," he said, "But it's fair to say the blacks are causing most of the headaches. It seems to be the neger mentality."
Now, I just wonder how long could he stay a professor with such an attitude?
Yust for the case he does not come with a public appologies, I think we should organise a strike. (A very public strike)
I havent read the original story, so this may be a bit off-topic, but there is a problem with Linux + ADSM.
Namely, ADSM clients running under RH-6.0 Linux simply crash the ADSM server. Part of the problem seams to be an buffer overflow in ADSM-server, which causes it to die in pain when presented a OS-version number longer than 7 characters. Well, the standard RH6.0 kernel is:
2.2.5-15 = 8 characters.
However, taking a kernel-version with a shorter name did not solve the problem completely - therefore I am not allowed to install RH 6.0 on a machine running ADSM client at the moment.
I hope this will be cleared soon, because it is an obvious flaw in the ADSM-server, not a problem with linux.
In my opinion, comercially available programs generally make Linux more valuable
=> GOOD FOR LINUX
It would be great to have the linux software in every store - Games, educational stuff, dictionaries, lexicons, cooking-books, whatever.
However, this is not true for the important libraries (Qt*), installers (Yast), standard daemond/services (httpd,ftpd,telnetd,sshd...) and other programs which cannot be easily replaced.
This is also the reason against Corel- IBM- or Microsoft- Linux distribution (to name a few): They will surely try to "infect" the linux-core by offering their own implementations of some standard programs under a semy-free licence.
If they ever succeed to do so, and this software becomes a part of the "standard" linux distribution the licence will all-of-the-sudden become non-free again, dragging the whole distribution with it.
At the moment, Microsoft is probably in the best position to do so: by developing a (good) comercial windows emulator they could cause a big damage to development of the native-linux applications, earn a lot of money and position their emulator/library as a de-facto standard part of the desktop linux distribution. They probably wouldnt even have to pretend their software were free.
* I know "Qt" has a "Open-source" licence today, but it wasnt so a year ago...
While a gaming support for Linux still stinks, there are at least SOME games available.
On the other hand, there is absolutely no life when it comes to "Edutainment" and "Infotainment", i.e. such software as Educational software, Encyclopedias, Lexicons...
If tere were some good Lexicons and Dictionaries available for Linux, I would be the first to buy. And in a few years when my kid starts using the computer, Im going to need a whole lot of this stuff...
What strikes me is the fact that this kind of software usually doesnt have to be extremely fast - I suppose one could implement it in Java and sell a version for all the platforms - yet nobody does it.
Uups, I forgot to format the text... Here it is again:
It would be nice to make a gray-box pointing to linux-counter. For instance with the picture of the "number of registred users versus time"-graph, or just with something like:
Linux counter, DATE
XXX registred users YY % yearly growth KK yr doubling time
It would be nice if this would be in a "default" section, so that new users see it.
Contact me if you want a perl script which prepares the box.
It would be nice to make a gray-box pointing to linux-counter. For instance with the picture of the "number of registred users versus time"-graph, or just with something like: Linux counter, DATE XXX registred users YY % yearly growth KK yr doubling time It would be nice if this would be in a "default" section, so that new users see it. Contact me if you want a perl script which prepares the box. Denis
Slashdot Mirror
USA is hitting its own software companies with this regulations. This is good for everybody else, but it will cost the USA a LOT.
Very soon, US companies will start feeling the pressure from all over the place. For one thing, a german company (SuSe) can (and does) put things like PGP, ssh & co. in its distribution, which an US-based company (redhat, Caldera) can not and does not.
Now, adding ssh is just a matter of downloading the srpm package, compiling it and doing an RPM -i, but... Try adding ssh-agent imediately after login for all of your users in a consistent way and you will find out that this task is non-trivial. Then you have to make your PGP (or GPG) work with pine, or whatever you or any of your users use and so on. It is annoying and takes your precious time away.
It is just the same kind of shit as those I used to have with my (german) keyboard not getting properly configured, xdm coming with an completely open configuration file, and simmilar, with ONE major exception - RedHat cannot fix it in the "next version", because it is not even part of the distribution. SuSe can.
By the way, upgrading from RH-5.1 to RH-6.0 has killed my own solution to above mentioned problem of integrationg the ssh-agent in the login-process, so I had to do it again. And I hate repetitious jobs .-).
Do I see a problem for RedHat here?
Although I am not exactly happy with the SUN-s new Star-Office licence, I do think we might have gained more than a "Free Beer". Although I do not believe that people will take the whole suite and start fixing everything, there are several areas where the work may be simple enough and gains big enough for someone to do it (or pay someone else to do it for him.). Some examples are:
If StarOffice (i.e. SUN) team does their job properly, I am quite sure the above mentioned tasks will be relatively easy to do, especially writing the localised versions of the SO => someone will do it. I can even imagine a goverment of a small country actually PAYING someone to get the job done.
Surely, SUN will win a lot if this happens, but they will not be alone.
Yup, it is from "boot"n us_torvalds_interview.htm
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~st7003/trap/linux/li
"True Cluster" is a High-avaliability clustering available with TrueUnix. In my opinion this and the Fortran-compiler are by far the best pieces of software Digital ever produced.
AFAI understood, the SUN-s licence is very nice for SUN, but unpleasant for everybody else as it basically says:
"We have published this programs source so You can work on it and make it better, but if we ever change our minds we may revoke the licence anytime. In particularly, you aren`t allowed to use the code or parts thereof for other projects."
I must say that I prefered the old Star-Office licence, since it was a straight commercial licence with "free for private use" attached to it, which was very easy to understand. SUNs "would-be-free" licence is much worse, since it camouflages itself as beeing much more than it really is.
As it is, SUN may hurt M$ (not so bad), kill Corel and Applix (bad- less choices left) and diminish the level of interest for various free-office projects in the next few years. It may also lead to various problems if someone starts writing the GPL-ed word-filters (for word) which are actually based on the filters from the Star-Office. I hope I am wrong.
My confidence in SUN would be much bigger if they would GPL the input and output filters - They may keep the rest of the program under any licence they like AFAI am concerned.
I have yust put the treshold to -1, which is the lowest possible, yet I get "2 replies below your current treshold" message.
I feel that too many of you out there responded with "he is a stupid kid" type reactions.
The question is not "is this kid responsible?", it is also not a "what would he do with a military jet?", nor "could anyoune really believe that particular commercial?"
The real question is: SHOULD A COMPANY STAND BEHIND THEIR COMERCIALS, OR CAN THEY JUST CLAIM ANY SHIT AND WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT ???
If one lets the Pepsi go with this one, that may be a precedence for other cases where company sets a claim in their advertisements with absolutely no intention to stand behind it. So, now we have: "Do this and you will get a military jet" claim, finishing in "just a joke". What's next?
This car can stand a 100km/h hit with no scratches (just a joke - post mortem)
You can safely glue your dogs chain to the house with this glue (just a joke - tell it to the postmans testacles)
This rope is strong enough to hold a titanic (just a joke, and your $$$ yacht is gone)
When I think of it, quite a lot of the advertisments are obvious fakes - anti cellulyte "wonders" beeing advertised by 19-years old girls, detergents miraculously washing everything at -20 C, while your angora pully does not show any signs of wearing off after 10000 washing cycles, "head&shoulders" shampoos (hey, I should know!)... These guys should pay for it oneday - the sooner the better.
As for the joke - I don't think it is funny.
I feel that too many of you out there responded with "he is a stupid kid" type reactions.
The question is not "is this kid responsible?", it is also not a "what would he do with a military jet?", nor "could anyoune really believe that particular commercial?"
The real question is: SHOULD A COMPANY STAND BEHIND THEIR COMERCIALS, OR CAN THEY JUST CLAIM ANYTHING AND WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT ???
If one lets the Pepsi go with this one, that may be a precedence for other cases where company sets a claim in their advertisements with absolutely no intention to stand behind it. So, now we have: "Do this and you will get a military jet" claim, finishing in "just a joke". What's next?
This car can stand a 100km/h hit with no scratches (just a joke - post mortem)
You can safely glue your dogs chain to the house with this glue (just a joke - tell it to the postmans testacles)
This rope is strong enough to hold a tytanic (just a joke, and your $$$ jacht is gone)
When I think of it, quite a lot of the advertisments are obvious fakes - anti cellulyte "wonders" beeing advertised by 19-years old girls, detergents miraculously washing everything at -20 C, while your angora pully does not show any signs of wearing off after 10000 washing cycles, "head&shoulders" shampoos (hey, I should know!)... These guys should pay for it oneday - the sooner the better.
As for the joke - I don't think it is funny.
Lineo is actualy a good name for them. It resembles "Linea" which is Italian for a "Line". I suppose the Latin word must sound similar too.
And LINE is a damn good name for THIN clients...
I dont think Intel would go into this much trouble just to kill the K7. The REAL problem is that K7 comes with "Slot 2" motherboards, 200MHz system frequency and co.
Now, as long as it is just a "Slot 1" against "Socket 7" game, it is a win-win situatin for Intel on a long term, but "Slot 2" motherboards could prove to be killers for the whole "Slot 1" buisness. Once these motherboards are established on the market, cards will be heavily mixed again.
In my opinion, it will be realy interesting to see intel-clones from other companies emerging which use the "slot 2" and cheap alpha-based machines, due to availability of cheap alfa-conformn hardware!
(I suppose it wont be possible to just take an alpha-procesor and stick it into K7-motherboard, but I'm quite sure that manufacturing a motherboard for Alpha-processor will all of the sudden become much cheaper.)
One can easily understand why You don't like the word "viral" (as: "it infects it's neibourhood with GPL"). Word "virus" is usualy mentioned in a negative conotation, and "viral" == "good" usually needs some explaining.
I suppose, "imune", as in "it is imune against beeing infected by non-free licences" would be a better word. Maybe we should start clasifying free licences according to their "immunity".
What strikes me as the bigest difference between NUMA-s and other multi-processor machines would be the idea of using different OS-s (well, actually only their Unix and M$ NT) on the multi-procesor system so that each OS gets one (or more?) processor to work with. At least that's what they claim here:
NUMACenter enables simultaneous use of both Unix and Windows NT on one system.
If I got the message right, a new great AmigaOS is basically a thin wrapper around Linux kernel now?
I wonder how much "Linux" will be left underneath? Just the kernel+modules, or all the non-graphical stuff, or even X?
What is it exactly the new "Amiga" will implement on top of Linux - new windowing system, or yet another desktop?
Actually it would be the best if they just make a new desktop and a set of libraries nessesary to port existing Amiga aplication to X11- This would allow the Amiga-users a smooth transition to Linux, withouth too much pain, and add another desktop to Linux. I actually like the idea.
Maybe they should try restricting the price of the system which is allowed for export? The regulative wouldn't be much better, but at least it would prevent some dictators from buying expensive computers...
On the other hand, a price-based system would certainly last longer than the one based on the "absolute crunching power" of the machine, especially if you add inflationary re-indexing. Ergo, the same law would live longer => it would be cheaper for tax payers!
He really sounds much like last-years Jesse... (see http://lwn.net/1999/features/1998timeline/).
I wonder if he will follow the same path as Jesse did?
I do hope, Prof Anderson will publicly appologise
for his words. Basically, equivalent of his words
in the "Real word" would be:
(Prof Anderson commes to classroom)
"I am sorry that I couldn't make it to a class yeterday. Someone has robbed me on the street, while I was walking alone, trough one of the worse slums in the whole USA at 2:30 in the morning, so I had to spend the whole morning at the Police station - first they were waiting me to get sober, then I had to describe the man...
And, I don't want to name names, but
it's fair to say the blacks have caused all this trouble. It seems to be the neger mentality."
I don't want to name names," he said, "But
it's fair to say the blacks
are causing most of the headaches. It
seems to be the neger mentality."
Now, I just wonder how long could he stay a professor with such an attitude?
Yust for the case he does not come with a public appologies, I think we should organise a strike.
(A very public strike)
Yours
Denis
Read the license of Yast. It is far from beeing the GPL, or at least it was 6 months ago when I last saw it.
Ups. I should have read the story first... :-(( It is OFF-toppic. But the network connection was SOOO slow .-) Well, i hope noone will notice it. Denis
Hi there
I havent read the original story, so this may be a bit off-topic, but there is a problem with Linux + ADSM.
Namely, ADSM clients running under RH-6.0 Linux simply crash the ADSM server. Part of the problem seams to be an buffer overflow in ADSM-server, which causes it to die in pain when presented a OS-version number longer than 7 characters. Well, the standard RH6.0 kernel is:
2.2.5-15 = 8 characters.
However, taking a kernel-version with a shorter name did not solve the problem completely - therefore I am not allowed to install RH 6.0 on a machine running ADSM client at the moment.
I hope this will be cleared soon, because it is an obvious flaw in the ADSM-server, not a problem with linux.
Yours
Denis
GNU/Linux is awkward. Too long, difficult to pronounce and after all not even right:
It would be logical to call it:
GNU-BSD-etc..etc../Linux, or even
85%GNU-10%BSD-..../Linux
(i just invented the numbers - they don't mean anything)
I know it sounds stupid - It is.
On the other hand, "GNU inside" sticker sounds like a good idea:
Short, easy to pronounce, nice little sticker and above all truth - There really is a lot of GNU stuff inside any Linux distribution.
In my opinion, comercially available programs generally make Linux more valuable
=> GOOD FOR LINUX
It would be great to have the linux software in every store - Games, educational stuff, dictionaries, lexicons, cooking-books, whatever.
However, this is not true for the important libraries (Qt*), installers (Yast), standard daemond/services (httpd,ftpd,telnetd,sshd...)
and other programs which cannot be easily replaced.
This is also the reason against Corel- IBM- or Microsoft- Linux distribution (to name a few): They will surely try to "infect" the linux-core by offering their own implementations of some standard programs under a semy-free licence.
If they ever succeed to do so, and this software becomes a part of the "standard" linux distribution the licence will all-of-the-sudden become non-free again, dragging the whole distribution with it.
At the moment, Microsoft is probably in the best position to do so: by developing a (good) comercial windows emulator they could cause a big damage to development of the native-linux applications, earn a lot of money and position their emulator/library as a de-facto standard part of the desktop linux distribution. They probably wouldnt even have to pretend their software were free.
* I know "Qt" has a "Open-source" licence today, but it wasnt so a year ago...
While a gaming support for Linux still stinks, there are at least SOME games available.
On the other hand, there is absolutely no life when it comes to "Edutainment" and "Infotainment", i.e. such software as Educational software, Encyclopedias, Lexicons...
If tere were some good Lexicons and Dictionaries available for Linux, I would be the first to buy. And in a few years when my kid starts using the computer, Im going to need a whole lot of this stuff...
What strikes me is the fact that this kind of software usually doesnt have to be extremely fast - I suppose one could implement it in Java and sell a version for all the platforms - yet nobody does it.
Uups, I forgot to format the text... Here it is again:
It would be nice to make a gray-box pointing to linux-counter. For instance with the picture of the "number of registred users versus time"-graph,
or just with something like:
Linux counter, DATE
XXX registred users
YY % yearly growth
KK yr doubling time
It would be nice if this would be in a "default" section, so that new users see it.
Contact me if you want a perl script which prepares the box.
Denis
It would be nice to make a gray-box pointing to linux-counter. For instance with the picture of the "number of registred users versus time"-graph, or just with something like: Linux counter, DATE XXX registred users YY % yearly growth KK yr doubling time It would be nice if this would be in a "default" section, so that new users see it. Contact me if you want a perl script which prepares the box. Denis
Please just stop posting his crap. What makes him important anyway?