As an aside, these days, seems like there's no such thing as relevant, important news, either.
There are, they're just being drowned out. There was a nice show on BBC a few weeks ago, where one of the points the made was there there ain't such a thing as "news" anymore, nor are their "accidents", "scandals" or "debates". There are only "breaking news", "tragic accidents", "revealing scandals" or "controversial debates". Our daily life and communications are being taken over by marketing speech, and a principle of marketing speech is that everything you say is important. So you don't go to the toilet anymore, you "have an urgent requirement for a primary bodily function".
News suffer because everything is being hyped up in this constant attempt to draw attention. The real damage is that you can't avoid the tragedy. If everything else is hyped, you have no choice but to hype your product or news item as well, because otherwise it would never get any attention at all.
Witness the other side of the coin of free markets. While they create wealth and provide incentives for creativity and business sense, they also create some artifical and nonsensical rules. Time-to-market is one of those. We've seen it in the warez scene 15 years ago, when 0-day cracks were magically more valued even though the usual communication channels (disks copied on the school yard) were too slow to make an actual difference between a 0-day and a +3-day. And due to availability and timezones, it wasn't much of an indicator for skill, either (not to mention that a good portion of the 0-day cracks sucked and needed to be fixed with a later release).
Forward to 2005. Movie release dates have been crucial for a few years already, even though for all practical purposes it makes no difference. Now book release dates enter the picture. Again, no difference except for the marketing pressure that the free market has created, where immediacy is somehow a value, even where it has no actual usefulness.
So why does it matter? Because the market says it does. No other reason at all. If the king doesn't like red then you don't dress in red. If the market says (via marketing people, its inofficial spokespersons) that it's important, then you obey and the ridiculousness of it all will not become aparent until the king has fallen and our children all wonder why their ancestors didn't see that he wasn't really a god.
However, I have found that novices are quite easily able to feel comfortable quickly on Linux.
Bingo. I've put a couple novice users on Linux, and they all felt comfortable there. I could tell them with confidence that no matter what they do, they can't damage anything except their own data, so as long as they have a backup, they should feel free to simply try things out.
I know windos users who are afraid of pretty much everything, because they know that even a tiny mistake can lead to interesting failures, often with catastrophic results.
Apache all but bars a small-office manager from setting up their own LAN webserver. Windows IIS does not.
And that's why they don't just use it for LAN webservers, but also for public webservers. Which leads to the huge number of compromised IIS systems out there.
Sorry, there's some things that better be hard. I don't want people driving near me who built their car in their garage, unless they know what the heck they're doing, and I don't want a badly cobbled-together IIS server in my net segment for quite the same reasons.
While both a "collateral damage" death and an accident may be unintentional, there is a huge difference between specifically trying to kill someone and hitting the wrong guy, and having an accident during a perfectly non-violent activity.
When you bomb a city, you know that innocent people are going to die. No matter what the PR droids say, there is no such thing as a "clean" war. I don't see how you can compare that with civil aviation and face yourself in the mirror.
A good firewall does more than just port filtering. It cleans up the traffic, writes logs (on a different machine), it terminates VPN tunnels and enforces routing policies between networks.
Maybe your firewall is a glorified ACL - mine aren't so get your dirty hands off them.
But to imply that the occupying forces in Iraq are the moral equivalent of the terrorists is illogical and misguided.
Is it really? I dare to say that even if the occupation forces try to avoid civilian casualties, the total civilian bodycount in Iraq and Afghanistan that the US and UK forces are responsible for is still an order of magnitude or two higher than the casualties in NYC, Madrid and London.
Welcome to/., Mr. Bush. Allow me to be the first to introduce you to the novel fact that in complicated situations, there are sometimes more than two sides, and more than one solution.
Yes, however the terrorists do that as well, just a different kind of pretence. Yours is "it was an accident" (even when it is quite obvious that it wasn't, it was calculated collateral damage). The terrorists do the same, except that their argument is "it's for a greater good" and they make it clear that the collateral damage has been calculated and accepted.
These guys are deliberately hitting the civilians because any attempt on the military would just involve them being smeared across the front of a Challenger II.
Yes, and when the balance of power is so badly alligned against you, there's only two choices you have - give up or do the freedom fighter aka terrorist style. I don't think these people enjoy being terrorists, it's simply that in their situation that's the rational thing to do, if you've already decided that giving up is not an option.
But in the end, the BSD offers more benefits to enterprise customers.
Of course it does. Getting something for free with no strings attached is better than getting something for free with some responsibilities.
The "enterprise customer", however, is where the argument falls apart and shows that Mark really doesn't know what he's talking about, because in Free Software development there are no customers. The GPL isn't about a customer relationship, it doesn't put any restrictions on customers, i.e. users. It is a contract between developers only and it puts them on equal footing, i.e. mine is yours if yours is mine - we share and both sides get the same deal.
attacking Afghanistan was a reasonable thing to do.
Last I checked, you don't find and arrest people by bombing a 3rd world country into oblivion. You do it by search, not by bomb.
The Afghanistan war was very much not an attempt to capture someone, and it's no surprise it failed on that account.
The fact alone that the Pakistani border was respected during combat activities, even though it has been an open secret that the border region is a free travel zone for the jihad fighters and their supporters, should make it quite obvious that a country was attacked, not a bunch of outcasts.
Now, you see that's exactly the political digression I was hoping to avoid.
Then you shouldn't have provoked it with such a statement. To a random Afghan, the attack on his country and the destruction of his farm was no more or less justified than today's events to a random Londoner.
Still, on the bright side, both armies were generally going for military targets.
"Getting rid of primitive, murderous fuckwits" is always a Good Thing (tm); it's just too bad nobody had the balls to do it in places like Rwanda and Liberia.
as we can tell the difference between individuals and states, unlike Al "smash the Infidel by blowing up a bunch of random people" Qaeda).
And unlike Tony "let's invade Afghanistan because someone we think hurt us might be hiding there" Blair and George "let's destroy Iraq because that Saddam guy is an asshole" Bush ?
Iraq NOW has pissed off citizenry that will eventually bring the war to the US and Britain. But we MADE them.
Here's a quote from Blair today: "Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism upon the world," (source: wikipedia)
Someone in Iraq could say pretty much the same thing to justify the continued resistance against US forces.
Funny how everyone in this world thinks he's with the good guys and the others are the bad boys.
When something bad happens, and you put in countermeasures, and then it happens again, there are two possible replies:
a) "Apparently what we did didn't work, so we need to try something else."
b) "Obviously, we didn't do enough of what we did, we must do more of it, much more."
It's clear what Blair and Bush will be saying. I wonder if there's someone on some other government with both the smarts and the courage to choose the other option.
Why not, 'here is the code, use it if you like for whatever, who cares?'
For software I have written 100% myself, I usually dual-license it along the lines of "GPL for everyone who wants it, if you want a commercial, proprietary license, talk to me about money".
The point is that it's my work, so I choose if and how you can use it. So if I like the BSD license, you get that. If I like GPL better, you get that. And if I'm Bill Gates, you can buy it for $199 but you get no support and updates only when I feel like it. And all of that is ok, because if you don't like it, you can go and write your own.
What are your acheivements that you can go around telling people to shut up?
How about actually writing some Free Software (and also some proprietary)? I'm one of the people affected by the GPL, and I've made licensing decisions. There were good reasons why I choose the GPL for the programs I put out under GPL, and good reasons for choosing something else for others.
As to why I tell him to shut up - polemics. He doesn't seem to have anything useful to say recently, so for all I care, he can shut up.
The fact that without the GPL, there is still considerable incentive to take a GPL software, make a few trivial modifications and sell it closed-source.
Do you think all the companies that gpl-violations.org is hitting are stupid and don't know what they're doing? Or that they simply haven't seen the light yet? Probably true for some, but I am certain quite a few have taken a good look and decided that the advantages of having a proprietary product outweigh those of an open development.
And you know what? They're right. If I repackage iptables and call it "Tom's Tables", I doubt I'd sell more than a dozen if I prominently said that it's the same as iptables, except for the banner text. But if I add a few marketing pages saying how much effort I put into developing a revolutionary and excellent software...
Moreoever, a lot of companies have http://www.gpl-violations.org/">settled out of court, a good indication that their lawyers told them they had a considerable chance of losing.
Looks like ESR has gone over the edge, finally. I've always been more a fan of Free Software than of Open Source, but in the end I always thought OS is just the marketing name for FS.
The GPL is the one well-thought out licence, and AFAIK it's the only Free/Open-Source Software license ever to actually stand up in court.
ESR, shut the fuck up, you've done your good deeds, now don't start destroying it all just because you're not in the spotlight anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, these days, seems like there's no such thing as relevant, important news, either.
There are, they're just being drowned out. There was a nice show on BBC a few weeks ago, where one of the points the made was there there ain't such a thing as "news" anymore, nor are their "accidents", "scandals" or "debates". There are only "breaking news", "tragic accidents", "revealing scandals" or "controversial debates". Our daily life and communications are being taken over by marketing speech, and a principle of marketing speech is that everything you say is important. So you don't go to the toilet anymore, you "have an urgent requirement for a primary bodily function".
News suffer because everything is being hyped up in this constant attempt to draw attention. The real damage is that you can't avoid the tragedy. If everything else is hyped, you have no choice but to hype your product or news item as well, because otherwise it would never get any attention at all.
Witness the other side of the coin of free markets. While they create wealth and provide incentives for creativity and business sense, they also create some artifical and nonsensical rules. Time-to-market is one of those. We've seen it in the warez scene 15 years ago, when 0-day cracks were magically more valued even though the usual communication channels (disks copied on the school yard) were too slow to make an actual difference between a 0-day and a +3-day. And due to availability and timezones, it wasn't much of an indicator for skill, either (not to mention that a good portion of the 0-day cracks sucked and needed to be fixed with a later release).
Forward to 2005. Movie release dates have been crucial for a few years already, even though for all practical purposes it makes no difference. Now book release dates enter the picture. Again, no difference except for the marketing pressure that the free market has created, where immediacy is somehow a value, even where it has no actual usefulness.
So why does it matter? Because the market says it does. No other reason at all. If the king doesn't like red then you don't dress in red. If the market says (via marketing people, its inofficial spokespersons) that it's important, then you obey and the ridiculousness of it all will not become aparent until the king has fallen and our children all wonder why their ancestors didn't see that he wasn't really a god.
This is innovation?
/. would get it the 4th time around.
No, stupid. This is what they finally come up with after talking about innovation for a few years to keep their customers from going elsewhere.
I mean, really. You'd think at least people on
However, I have found that novices are quite easily able to feel comfortable quickly on Linux.
Bingo.
I've put a couple novice users on Linux, and they all felt comfortable there. I could tell them with confidence that no matter what they do, they can't damage anything except their own data, so as long as they have a backup, they should feel free to simply try things out.
I know windos users who are afraid of pretty much everything, because they know that even a tiny mistake can lead to interesting failures, often with catastrophic results.
Apache all but bars a small-office manager from setting up their own LAN webserver. Windows IIS does not.
And that's why they don't just use it for LAN webservers, but also for public webservers. Which leads to the huge number of compromised IIS systems out there.
Sorry, there's some things that better be hard. I don't want people driving near me who built their car in their garage, unless they know what the heck they're doing, and I don't want a badly cobbled-together IIS server in my net segment for quite the same reasons.
Easy != Good
Franking, in a 5 minute demo, I think windows would win.
Against what, precisely?
KDE is not Linux.
Gnome is not Linux.
Enlightenment, Windowmaker, XFCE, fvwm2 are not Linux either.
And that's before we even start talking applications.
While both a "collateral damage" death and an accident may be unintentional, there is a huge difference between specifically trying to kill someone and hitting the wrong guy, and having an accident during a perfectly non-violent activity.
When you bomb a city, you know that innocent people are going to die. No matter what the PR droids say, there is no such thing as a "clean" war. I don't see how you can compare that with civil aviation and face yourself in the mirror.
two words: "scrub all"
A good firewall does more than just port filtering. It cleans up the traffic, writes logs (on a different machine), it terminates VPN tunnels and enforces routing policies between networks.
Maybe your firewall is a glorified ACL - mine aren't so get your dirty hands off them.
But to imply that the occupying forces in Iraq are the moral equivalent of the terrorists is illogical and misguided.
Is it really? I dare to say that even if the occupation forces try to avoid civilian casualties, the total civilian bodycount in Iraq and Afghanistan that the US and UK forces are responsible for is still an order of magnitude or two higher than the casualties in NYC, Madrid and London.
Welcome to /., Mr. Bush. Allow me to be the first to introduce you to the novel fact that in complicated situations, there are sometimes more than two sides, and more than one solution.
We make at least a pretence,
Yes, however the terrorists do that as well, just a different kind of pretence. Yours is "it was an accident" (even when it is quite obvious that it wasn't, it was calculated collateral damage).
The terrorists do the same, except that their argument is "it's for a greater good" and they make it clear that the collateral damage has been calculated and accepted.
These guys are deliberately hitting the civilians because any attempt on the military would just involve them being smeared across the front of a Challenger II.
Yes, and when the balance of power is so badly alligned against you, there's only two choices you have - give up or do the freedom fighter aka terrorist style.
I don't think these people enjoy being terrorists, it's simply that in their situation that's the rational thing to do, if you've already decided that giving up is not an option.
But in the end, the BSD offers more benefits to enterprise customers.
Of course it does. Getting something for free with no strings attached is better than getting something for free with some responsibilities.
The "enterprise customer", however, is where the argument falls apart and shows that Mark really doesn't know what he's talking about, because in Free Software development there are no customers. The GPL isn't about a customer relationship, it doesn't put any restrictions on customers, i.e. users. It is a contract between developers only and it puts them on equal footing, i.e. mine is yours if yours is mine - we share and both sides get the same deal.
attacking Afghanistan was a reasonable thing to do.
Last I checked, you don't find and arrest people by bombing a 3rd world country into oblivion. You do it by search, not by bomb.
The Afghanistan war was very much not an attempt to capture someone, and it's no surprise it failed on that account.
The fact alone that the Pakistani border was respected during combat activities, even though it has been an open secret that the border region is a free travel zone for the jihad fighters and their supporters, should make it quite obvious that a country was attacked, not a bunch of outcasts.
Now, you see that's exactly the political digression I was hoping to avoid.
Then you shouldn't have provoked it with such a statement.
To a random Afghan, the attack on his country and the destruction of his farm was no more or less justified than today's events to a random Londoner.
Still, on the bright side, both armies were generally going for military targets.
True, mostly.
"Getting rid of primitive, murderous fuckwits" is always a Good Thing (tm); it's just too bad nobody had the balls to do it in places like Rwanda and Liberia.
Or Washington, DC.
as we can tell the difference between individuals and states, unlike Al "smash the Infidel by blowing up a bunch of random people" Qaeda).
And unlike Tony "let's invade Afghanistan because someone we think hurt us might be hiding there" Blair and George "let's destroy Iraq because that Saddam guy is an asshole" Bush ?
Iraq NOW has pissed off citizenry that will eventually bring the war to the US and Britain. But we MADE them.
Here's a quote from Blair today:
"Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism upon the world,"
(source: wikipedia)
Someone in Iraq could say pretty much the same thing to justify the continued resistance against US forces.
Funny how everyone in this world thinks he's with the good guys and the others are the bad boys.
Absolutely.
When something bad happens, and you put in countermeasures, and then it happens again, there are two possible replies:
a) "Apparently what we did didn't work, so we need to try something else."
b) "Obviously, we didn't do enough of what we did, we must do more of it, much more."
It's clear what Blair and Bush will be saying. I wonder if there's someone on some other government with both the smarts and the courage to choose the other option.
Bush actually said, "Bring it on!"
Great point. From that statement onwards, he should lose all rights to complain if they comply.
Why not, 'here is the code, use it if you like for whatever, who cares?'
For software I have written 100% myself, I usually dual-license it along the lines of "GPL for everyone who wants it, if you want a commercial, proprietary license, talk to me about money".
The point is that it's my work, so I choose if and how you can use it. So if I like the BSD license, you get that. If I like GPL better, you get that. And if I'm Bill Gates, you can buy it for $199 but you get no support and updates only when I feel like it.
And all of that is ok, because if you don't like it, you can go and write your own.
What are your acheivements that you can go around telling people to shut up?
How about actually writing some Free Software (and also some proprietary)? I'm one of the people affected by the GPL, and I've made licensing decisions. There were good reasons why I choose the GPL for the programs I put out under GPL, and good reasons for choosing something else for others.
As to why I tell him to shut up - polemics. He doesn't seem to have anything useful to say recently, so for all I care, he can shut up.
It boils down to:
The fact that without the GPL, there is still considerable incentive to take a GPL software, make a few trivial modifications and sell it closed-source.
Do you think all the companies that gpl-violations.org is hitting are stupid and don't know what they're doing? Or that they simply haven't seen the light yet? Probably true for some, but I am certain quite a few have taken a good look and decided that the advantages of having a proprietary product outweigh those of an open development.
And you know what? They're right. If I repackage iptables and call it "Tom's Tables", I doubt I'd sell more than a dozen if I prominently said that it's the same as iptables, except for the banner text. But if I add a few marketing pages saying how much effort I put into developing a revolutionary and excellent software...
he claims that the "Bazaar" model has proven itself to be successful, and has grown powerful enough to not need the protection of the GPL.
History books are full with things that had "proven itself to be successful", and we can easily add Netscape and other M$ victims to that list.
Just because you're successful doesn't mean you don't need to protect yourself anymore. I would even say far to the contrary.
The BSD license is the only one to ever stand up in court.
Reference?
The GPL is in court right now, but lawsuit is still ongoing.
No, it's not. The GPL has been tested in court:
Frtinet Injunction
Moreoever, a lot of companies have http://www.gpl-violations.org/">settled out of court, a good indication that their lawyers told them they had a considerable chance of losing.
Looks like ESR has gone over the edge, finally. I've always been more a fan of Free Software than of Open Source, but in the end I always thought OS is just the marketing name for FS.
The GPL is the one well-thought out licence, and AFAIK it's the only Free/Open-Source Software license ever to actually stand up in court.
ESR, shut the fuck up, you've done your good deeds, now don't start destroying it all just because you're not in the spotlight anymore.