I think a lot of us really need to step back and take a look at what was said...
A bit back I posted an article that, while not outright flaming, questioned RMS's ability to lead due to this and other incidents.
Now, I'm not about to withdraw several other statements - I still don't think that he's definitely the ideal leader. But now it seems that he's actually going out of his way to make sure that what he meant to say is made certain. That is a Good Thing for someone in a leader's position to do, and it gives me a heck of a lot more confidence in him:).
A bit of analysis as to why the misinterpretation may have happened:
He tried to recap what had happened before. This is a mistake considering that his only audience in this area is going to be folks who are already very familiar with the history. Reaquainting folks with past blows at a time when people have just made a great leap and expecting to see the war over for it ends up not looking like an objective review and more like an attempt to twist the knife One More Time.
He brought up details for final recovery WITHOUT specifically mentioning them as such in a clear manner. Looking back over the article, I can see how he would view his talking about "forgiveness" as a request to others to also bury the hatchet. But by phrasing it the way he did - by not making it totally clear that he considered it to be Over, Kaput, End Of Story (he did say this, but it was slighty obusfucated), it looked like he was jabbing one more time.
The rest is really just compounded on those two points. In that light, "Go GNOMEs!" would easily be seen as a derisive jab instead of what it seems now to be intended as - a sort of good-natured "Okay, you folks are all right, we like ya, but we're 'still gonna getcha', heh heh, nudge nudge."
Final verdict? The first article needed a few rewrites. But who knows; maybe RMS was too excited about the thought that KDE was finally going to be Totally Without Problems to review his material.
And btw, no, I don't think that this is what the above poster seems to think it is - a "he's too good to mess up, so it's OUR fault" article. RMS does have a few issues with arrogance and tunnel vision - hell, anyone can - but that kind of arrogance is just a little beyond even him.:)
Bell Labs *was* owned by AT&T. Regardless of what *they* were (I have a hell of a lot of respect for them), ultimately AT&T did call all the shots for them, and so AT&T could easily do Bad Things in their name, which they did.
As for the FCC, I'll admit, I didn't remember anything 'bout that. Like I said in a correction (which you might not have seen), forgive me for historical innaccuracies. I think I'll go bap myself with a rolled-up newspaper for that one.
Bell Labs was cool and independently would have been harmless. But they weren't independent.
I don't accuse RMS of trying to resort to the same kind of corporate "Oh, it's mine now, you can't have it, nyah nyah" tactics that happened earlier.
I'm worried that folks are going to start ignoring his message in full - including all the good, worthy stuff about how Freedom Is Good - and that he may inadvertently destroy the movement for something he wants to promote.
If you seriously think that I seriously think that RMS would throw something like FSF donations in the GPL......I can't come up with any way to describe how ridiculous that contention is, because you apparently know it to be stupid as well as I seeing as tho you replied about it:)
My complaint about RMS *is* that unyieldingness - while it is an excellent quality for a defender of freedom, it is Not an excellent quality for a leader and promoter.
People aren't all that enthused to join the other side while that other side is still poking at them over and over.
Oh, and by the way, check that 'carpetbagger' comment, then my.sig. I'm a she, not a he.:)
Once upon a time, there was an operating system named Unix. A fine operating system by the standards of several there - not merely in technical value, but in fun value. For across the nation and indeed the world, many hackers were given leave to play with this Operating System, and have great fun with it. There was a bit of foreshadowed warning in that it was owned ultimately by AT&T's Bell Labs, but this was not noticed as they were docile.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Richard M. Stallman. He was not a famous man (not to the world at large, at least), nor was he a man of any combination of unique qualities. He was another hacker, another UNIX lover, another programmer enjoying the relative freedom in early Unix.
And then AT&T Bell Labs returned, took over Unix and claimed it all for their own, destroying the freedom that grew from this system and making many hackers unhappy.
So RMS went forth and formed the Free Software Foundation and started, with several friends, the GNU Operating System project. And much progress was made on it, and it was Good.
Now...
Once upon a time, there was an operating system named Linux. Started by a Helsinki hacker with a school project to finish, it became embraced by several hackers toying with what was slowly becoming the complete GNU OS. With the combination of the GNU OS tools (free for use by all except those who would try to take them permanently), the Linux Operating System began to take the world by fire. There was a bit of foreshadowed warning in that those GNU tools, and indeed the whole of Linux, were under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public Liscence, and thus subject to his whim and the whim of the Free Software Foundation, but this was ignored as RMS was a freedom fighter, and it was well known he would never take Linux away.
Or was it?
When Bell Labs was looked at, many disadvanatages were evident. Bell Labs is corporate-owned; it survives by putting profit first, and AT&T had a reputation for doing Bad Things with the consumer.
When we look at RMS, many disadvantages are evident. RMS is only human; he has backstabbed, grown arrogant (see Emacs vs. Xemacs), and the cynical would say that he has become convinced that the only way Freedom can be defended is if he alone does it.
Library GPL to "Lesser" GPL. "Don't use the BSD Liscence". Emacs vs. XEmacs. "GNU/Linux". "The X Consortium has betrayed us". "xxx is not compatible with the GPL, so it is bad". "Boycott Amazon".
Opera and IE both pay very close attention to more recent standards - HTML 4.0 and CSS come to mind.
Netscape very definitely *does not*.
Netscape had minor issues back in the days of HTML 3.2, but they were nothing compared to IE's problems. But nowadays on the web, when more and more people are trying to get closer and closer to standards, Netscape 4.x is getting more and more revealed as the hack piece of crap it's become.
If a site doesn't work in Netscape, then 99 times out of 100 it's because of Netscape being broken, not the site.
This prob'ly seems rather much an insignificant detail, but I'm curious - what rendering engine/component/thingamabob/whatchamacallit/thing i is being used in Red Carpet for webpages like the Debian home page?
The Debian package system can behave close enough to the latter of those conditions, but it depends on the package maintainers being savvy about those dependencies. As to the dependency-checking thought you have there, tho, I think.deb uses a database kind of like RPM. (Tho I could easily be mistaken as I'm not a Debian packager)
The "Official" Debian-packaged debs are very well done, AFAIK, but they don't cover everything (they're only human) and not all of them may address small issues like this for any variety of reasons.
Ultimately, however you do this - even with RPMs - you'll be at the mercy of the package maintainer.
Am I supposed to vote for them because I like their NAME?
Actually, yes. It's called "Name Recognition", and it's why George Bush Jr. is prob'ly going to win by a landslide.
Sad, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a governmental system based on citizen legislation and ditch the permanent ruling class? Gosh, if only.
It seems that many content distributors (MPAA, RIAA) would like nothing better than to have everyone turn into mindless money-spending drones. They already see us like that anyway.
Virtually *every* kind of corporation with any kind of business that isn't people itself reacts in this manner - it's more cost-effective. Really.
Even at a fast-food restaurant (name removed because I don't have the guts to say it:) ) that I worked at encouraged being polite and nice to customers and deciding in their favor because it was more profitable to have repeat customers than it was to get the most out of that one sale. That's the most humanity I've ever seen in overall corportate policy.
(Granted, individual Members of a corporation can easily have more humanity than that (I was nice to the customer 'cause I figured they liked it:) ) but the corporation is not the individual members thereof, it's the corporation.)
I worry that if corporations continue to go the way they do, demonstrating every last virtue of Capitalism, then we're going to run into the same "too much of a good thing" that Communist economies ran into and falldowngoboom.
(IANA 'Commie', btw, so don't use that accusation:) ).
"Your comment is a common misconception about the power of the X windows environmnent"
Actually, no, it isn't. But I can see how it would seem that way.
What I was referring to is hard disk space - I'd rather not install an entirely new desktop environment just so I can use one component of it in an entirely different desktop environment.:)
"I'm sure Opera is great for some people - those who value speed over standards compliance..."
Last I checked, Opera held the number one position in standards compliance - including over every version of IE released so far - for quite some time, until Gecko matured, and even now the Win32 version is very impressive.
I will refrain from further judgement until both Mozilla and Opera are completed. I suggest that you try the same.
You don't want Konqueror if you don't want KDE.
Same dif.:)
-Jo Hunter
Re:I actually have good things to say about Mozill
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 3
I didn't really stress-test M17 or anything (was too late at night for that:) ), but frankly I thought it worth the download just because it came with a skin already installed that WASN'T their puke 'modern' one. I wonder how familiar-sounding is the story of going all over the Web for various alternative skins for Mozilla M16, searching for something that might be appropriate, finding, downloading, and finding out that it DOESN'T WORK ANYWAYS.:)
I've also been using Galeon, and yes, admittedly it's rather impressive. I've never used Netscape 4.anything on my linbox/laptop/current computer/whatever - morals dictate against it:) - but Galeon is defintely able to get the job done faster than Moz, mostly because it doesn't have the rendering engine running four or five different times over just to get the UI working.
I've also been trying out the Opera tech preview, and, Qt notwithstanding, it's even more impressive in terms of speed. From one alpha to another, it can fairly easily beat Galeon on my comp, and Mozilla... it makes Mozilla look like frozen molasses. Of course, it's also based on Qt (good for some, bad for some), closed, proprietary, shareware, crashprone as any alpha app, and still uses an MDI interface at the moment. But at least for the last two it'll get better...:)
Oh, and what's happened to Konqueror? I must have tried at least four times to get that damn thing working on my laptop (and trying to avoid having to install the whole of KDE2 beta for the first two tries), and each time it just doesn't want to start up. Might there be a plan of some kind to take the various sundry libraries that Konqueror uses out of KDE and repackage it into a seperate application? Something like that would be very nice...
When you can remove a program that came in a tarball without searching through three or four directories on the executable path (and in some cases all the library directories) and applying rm when you get lucky, I'll use tarballs. 'Till then, I like "apt-get remove":)
Slightly different. All the noncoding geeks (like myself) want the small, fast, compliant browser. The vast majority of the actual developers have the browser envy.
If you don't like it, go *buy* a better browser in the meantime.
The instant Opera is released for GNU/Linux I intend to do exactly that, Qt use be damned. There comes a point when you just get tired of being unable to do anything with your freedom.
Yep, we've got Galeon (it's what I'm using). But the fact that it's based off of Gecko means it has Gecko's limitations.
Those being:
it's slow (the Opera/X11 alpha is much faster),
it still pukes on java[script],
it's still unstable, and
it's still got portability problems.
Galeon IS a good idea. But they're still limited by all the folks on the Mozilla project who are doing God knows what over there... (How late is M17 now? Approaching five, six weeks IIRC?)
(Oh, and for all of you folks who talk about it beating Netscape: THAT AIN'T ALL THAT HARD TO DO.)
Hon, HTML is a markup language, not a display language.
Yet most uses of HTML in email is to play with those various display tags added during the NS vs. IE wars a while back (which, if you haven't noticed, the W3C is *desperately* trying to get rid of)
HTML for email is just a further abuse of this weakness with HTML at present. It "sorta works".
(And besides, what the hell do you want to *do* with this stuff? Does it really *matter* what font you use to show off your m@d sk1|z?)
"That one" actually does have a redeeming quality that I can think of - it helps keep overtesttosteroned moviegoers off the streets, making it much safer for people like myself to ride a bicycle down to the local grocery store.
see? if you're creative enough *everything* has a use.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I dunno if you followed a link to /. recently, but the war's over! :D
seriously, they went dual-liscencing (QPL or GPL, take your pick) 'bout a week or two back.
-Jo Hunter
A bit back I posted an article that, while not outright flaming, questioned RMS's ability to lead due to this and other incidents.
Now, I'm not about to withdraw several other statements - I still don't think that he's definitely the ideal leader. But now it seems that he's actually going out of his way to make sure that what he meant to say is made certain. That is a Good Thing for someone in a leader's position to do, and it gives me a heck of a lot more confidence in him :).
A bit of analysis as to why the misinterpretation may have happened:
The rest is really just compounded on those two points. In that light, "Go GNOMEs!" would easily be seen as a derisive jab instead of what it seems now to be intended as - a sort of good-natured "Okay, you folks are all right, we like ya, but we're 'still gonna getcha', heh heh, nudge nudge."
Final verdict? The first article needed a few rewrites. But who knows; maybe RMS was too excited about the thought that KDE was finally going to be Totally Without Problems to review his material.
And btw, no, I don't think that this is what the above poster seems to think it is - a "he's too good to mess up, so it's OUR fault" article. RMS does have a few issues with arrogance and tunnel vision - hell, anyone can - but that kind of arrogance is just a little beyond even him. :)
-Jo Hunter
As for the FCC, I'll admit, I didn't remember anything 'bout that. Like I said in a correction (which you might not have seen), forgive me for historical innaccuracies. I think I'll go bap myself with a rolled-up newspaper for that one.
Bell Labs was cool and independently would have been harmless. But they weren't independent.
-Jo Hunter
I'm worried that folks are going to start ignoring his message in full - including all the good, worthy stuff about how Freedom Is Good - and that he may inadvertently destroy the movement for something he wants to promote.
If you seriously think that I seriously think that RMS would throw something like FSF donations in the GPL... ...I can't come up with any way to describe how ridiculous that contention is, because you apparently know it to be stupid as well as I seeing as tho you replied about it :)
-Jo Hunter
People aren't all that enthused to join the other side while that other side is still poking at them over and over.
Oh, and by the way, check that 'carpetbagger' comment, then my .sig. I'm a she, not a he. :)
-Jo Hunter
Disclaimer for above: I am not a hacker, I am not a historian. If I screwed anything up in the rant above, oopsie, sowwy, badvixie.
-Jo Hunter
Once upon a time, there was an operating system named Unix. A fine operating system by the standards of several there - not merely in technical value, but in fun value. For across the nation and indeed the world, many hackers were given leave to play with this Operating System, and have great fun with it. There was a bit of foreshadowed warning in that it was owned ultimately by AT&T's Bell Labs, but this was not noticed as they were docile.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Richard M. Stallman. He was not a famous man (not to the world at large, at least), nor was he a man of any combination of unique qualities. He was another hacker, another UNIX lover, another programmer enjoying the relative freedom in early Unix.
And then AT&T Bell Labs returned, took over Unix and claimed it all for their own, destroying the freedom that grew from this system and making many hackers unhappy.
So RMS went forth and formed the Free Software Foundation and started, with several friends, the GNU Operating System project. And much progress was made on it, and it was Good.
Now...
Once upon a time, there was an operating system named Linux. Started by a Helsinki hacker with a school project to finish, it became embraced by several hackers toying with what was slowly becoming the complete GNU OS. With the combination of the GNU OS tools (free for use by all except those who would try to take them permanently), the Linux Operating System began to take the world by fire. There was a bit of foreshadowed warning in that those GNU tools, and indeed the whole of Linux, were under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public Liscence, and thus subject to his whim and the whim of the Free Software Foundation, but this was ignored as RMS was a freedom fighter, and it was well known he would never take Linux away.
Or was it?
When Bell Labs was looked at, many disadvanatages were evident. Bell Labs is corporate-owned; it survives by putting profit first, and AT&T had a reputation for doing Bad Things with the consumer.
When we look at RMS, many disadvantages are evident. RMS is only human; he has backstabbed, grown arrogant (see Emacs vs. Xemacs), and the cynical would say that he has become convinced that the only way Freedom can be defended is if he alone does it.
Library GPL to "Lesser" GPL. "Don't use the BSD Liscence". Emacs vs. XEmacs. "GNU/Linux". "The X Consortium has betrayed us". "xxx is not compatible with the GPL, so it is bad". "Boycott Amazon".
"KDE is still in violation".
Are we, possibly, at all going to take the hint?
-Jo Hunter
Netscape very definitely *does not*.
Netscape had minor issues back in the days of HTML 3.2, but they were nothing compared to IE's problems. But nowadays on the web, when more and more people are trying to get closer and closer to standards, Netscape 4.x is getting more and more revealed as the hack piece of crap it's become.
If a site doesn't work in Netscape, then 99 times out of 100 it's because of Netscape being broken, not the site.
(Take a look at http://www.alistapart.com/storie s/died/article.txt for a brief little anecdote by one of the founders of the WaSP about Netscape's troubles...)
-Jo Hunter
Yeah, I thought it was stupid too :)
-Jo Hunter
-Jo Hunter
The "Official" Debian-packaged debs are very well done, AFAIK, but they don't cover everything (they're only human) and not all of them may address small issues like this for any variety of reasons.
Ultimately, however you do this - even with RPMs - you'll be at the mercy of the package maintainer.
-Jo Hunter
If only I had moderator access this time around...
-Jo Hunter
-Jo Hunter
Actually, yes. It's called "Name Recognition", and it's why George Bush Jr. is prob'ly going to win by a landslide.
Sad, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a governmental system based on citizen legislation and ditch the permanent ruling class? Gosh, if only.
-Jo Hunter
Virtually *every* kind of corporation with any kind of business that isn't people itself reacts in this manner - it's more cost-effective. Really.
Even at a fast-food restaurant (name removed because I don't have the guts to say it :) ) that I worked at encouraged being polite and nice to customers and deciding in their favor because it was more profitable to have repeat customers than it was to get the most out of that one sale. That's the most humanity I've ever seen in overall corportate policy.
(Granted, individual Members of a corporation can easily have more humanity than that (I was nice to the customer 'cause I figured they liked it :) ) but the corporation is not the individual members thereof, it's the corporation.)
I worry that if corporations continue to go the way they do, demonstrating every last virtue of Capitalism, then we're going to run into the same "too much of a good thing" that Communist economies ran into and falldowngoboom. :) ).
(IANA 'Commie', btw, so don't use that accusation
-Jo Hunter
Actually, no, it isn't. But I can see how it would seem that way.
What I was referring to is hard disk space - I'd rather not install an entirely new desktop environment just so I can use one component of it in an entirely different desktop environment. :)
-Jo Hunter
Last I checked, Opera held the number one position in standards compliance - including over every version of IE released so far - for quite some time, until Gecko matured, and even now the Win32 version is very impressive.
I will refrain from further judgement until both Mozilla and Opera are completed. I suggest that you try the same.
-Jo Hunter
Same dif.
-Jo Hunter
I've also been using Galeon, and yes, admittedly it's rather impressive. I've never used Netscape 4.anything on my linbox/laptop/current computer/whatever - morals dictate against it :) - but Galeon is defintely able to get the job done faster than Moz, mostly because it doesn't have the rendering engine running four or five different times over just to get the UI working.
I've also been trying out the Opera tech preview, and, Qt notwithstanding, it's even more impressive in terms of speed. From one alpha to another, it can fairly easily beat Galeon on my comp, and Mozilla... it makes Mozilla look like frozen molasses. Of course, it's also based on Qt (good for some, bad for some), closed, proprietary, shareware, crashprone as any alpha app, and still uses an MDI interface at the moment. But at least for the last two it'll get better... :)
Oh, and what's happened to Konqueror? I must have tried at least four times to get that damn thing working on my laptop (and trying to avoid having to install the whole of KDE2 beta for the first two tries), and each time it just doesn't want to start up. Might there be a plan of some kind to take the various sundry libraries that Konqueror uses out of KDE and repackage it into a seperate application? Something like that would be very nice...
-Jo Hunter
-Jo Hunter
-Jo Hunter
The instant Opera is released for GNU/Linux I intend to do exactly that, Qt use be damned. There comes a point when you just get tired of being unable to do anything with your freedom.
-Jo Hunter
Those being:
Galeon IS a good idea. But they're still limited by all the folks on the Mozilla project who are doing God knows what over there... (How late is M17 now? Approaching five, six weeks IIRC?)
(Oh, and for all of you folks who talk about it beating Netscape: THAT AIN'T ALL THAT HARD TO DO.)
-Jo Hunter
Hon, HTML is a markup language, not a display language.
Yet most uses of HTML in email is to play with those various display tags added during the NS vs. IE wars a while back (which, if you haven't noticed, the W3C is *desperately* trying to get rid of)
HTML for email is just a further abuse of this weakness with HTML at present. It "sorta works".
(And besides, what the hell do you want to *do* with this stuff? Does it really *matter* what font you use to show off your m@d sk1|z?)
-Jo Hunter
see? if you're creative enough *everything* has a use. :)
-Jo Hunter