One thing I expect to come out of future Vista - OS X comparisons is a demonstration of the performance delta. I don't think many OS X users yet realize how slow it actually is. I'm no fan of Windows or Microsoft (or for that matter OS X or Apple), but I can't help but notice how slow OS X is every time I've used it.
I hope this turns into a thriving industry and captcha technology fails, because despite its usefulness I think it is one of the most obnoxious things to have ever happened to the Internet.
Note that I don't argue that he might be a difficult character. Comments on/. as well as his problems with other distros and the kernel suggest that he is. I simply don't know. But I also heard that Linux Torvalds can be a very harsh himself. Anybody want to fork the kernel because of that?
Linus doesn't actively impede the progress of the Linux kernel; nor does he insist that everybody adhere to archaic interfaces when virtually no one agrees with him; nor does he fork his own code and sell a "Linux Pro" and actively attempt to discredit the work of anyone who writes their own "Linux Pro" features into the regular, free Linux.
Re:Whoever modded parent 'flamebait' is full of it
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 1
Well, I can't ask Oracle, IBM, SGI, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Phillips, HP, Sun Microsystems, Intel and AMD why they choose to contribute code to Linux over BSD because I don't know who to ask. But as the example of Apple adopting BSD clearly shows, they are free at their whims to make it proprietary again. (The fact that Apple has apparently reversed that and is once again 'opening' XNU is irrelevant to the fact that they aptly demonstrated how bad BSD licensing really is).
Actually, Bob Young from Red Hat mentioned that one reason they chose to make Red Hat Linux instead of Red Hat BSD was because they knew the GPL would keep Microsoft from running them over.
The GPL enforces a cooperative environment while giving users complete freedom over how they personally use the software. The BSD license does not. Businesses abuse the 'freedom' of the BSD license. We've seen it time and time again.
Whoever modded parent 'flamebait' is full of it
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 1
He's absolutely right, and a mod of 'Flamebait' isn't appropriate just because you disagree. The GPL is one of the most important aspects of the success of the Linux revolution.
I have an Apple G4 laptop that ran OS X that I was using at work for a long while. I finally got tired of the clunky OS X interface and installed Gentoo Linux on there. It took four or five days to compile everything, including KDE, and I was thinking the whole time that I was going to have to put up with KDE being slower.
Not so! KDE/Linux smoked the hell out of Aqua/OS X!
Eric Raymond has had some interesting points in the past, but in more recent times the only things I can recall him making news for:
1. Saying that the GPL was unnecessary
2. Cursing at Microsoft for daring to try and recruit him
3. Telling Linux people to give in and accept proprietary nonsense into their lifestyle.
The reason this "free software" stuff is working out so great is because we ignored his cries to abandon the GPL and ignored the BSD zealots who think that licenses that allow the marriage of proprietary software to free (libre) software is a good thing. Right now, free software is the ONLY enterprise left (outside of purely political groups like the ACLU and EFF) that is fighting for user's rights. That's CRITICALLY IMPORTANT in this new era, where the whole content industry wants to marry the government and control every single electronic device their holy content is capable of passing through. We need free software to say NO to the proprietary -- to push open standards and software freedom.
Eben Moglen pointed out in his Wizards of OS3 keynote speech that there is no technical enterprise remaining that does not understand what trouble they face with FREEDOM as their most DIRE competitor. So what, we should stop competing just for the purpose of temporarily accelerating our adoption?
I HAVE A BETTER IDEA. Let's stick to our principals, let the DRM-loving content and proprietary software industry go do their thing for about 5 years. Our biggest concern will be keeping their practice out of the law books. Throughout those five years, we will enjoy a gradual drainage of people who are UPSET by the fact that their hardware and software doesn't obey their commands -- that they've lost rights they enjoyed growing up -- that their DVD player no longer plays DVDs because someone on the other end of the planet hacked it and its player key has now been revoked. We win by standing in SHARP contrast, where we will be incredibly easy to make out. Every additional right the controllers try to grab results in a greater number of defectors.
Fundamentally I don't think people should sign such things. Many often do because (1) everyone wants you to sign it (we're hungry for work!) or (2) they think that many scary parts of the larger agreement are basically unenforceable in their state.
1 and 2 may both be true, but are you still willing to knowingly sign your soul over for whatever meager salary or fee you are drawing? I was recently presented with an offer for a Senior engineering position at a startup. The offer letter included a pretty sizeable chunk of options as well. I denied their offer because their inventions agreement was something I'd never sign, on any planet, any time. It required that I acknowledge that they own any kind of creative work _at all_ that I do while I work for them, and _anything_ remotely connected to their business for a year following. I would be required to keep an accurate list and immediately tell my manager about all inventions even after leaving the company. It would state that I immediately yield all patent and copyright to them, and that they could sign any document on my behalf necessary to see those rights through.
What do they grant you in return? 1 page of small lines to document your entire inventive history. In an age where there are greedy f*ckers trying to own ANY small idea they can get their hands on, this kind of thing is TOTALLY unacceptable.
There are some ways to fight this. The first and most IMPORTANT one is to NOT SIGN. Every time someone signs one of these agreements, the entire industry of workers loses that much ground. People can't force these on you if no one will sign them; the only way they can do it is because it's "standard".
The second one is to find a trusted friend. Every time you have an idea of some sort, write it down and mail it to the friend. (That is, pen and paper / printed and snail mail). Your friend should lock the letters up in a fireproof safe. This should keep a timeline of your inventive history, which may be useful to prove that you didn't create something as a work for hire, if anyone should ever decide to try and pirate your creative works for the purpose of creating captive Intellectual (nonsense) Property.
Another thing I would advise if you do contracting or consulting is to have your own agreement. It may cost you something to get one written, but you don't want the terms of the agreement to be totally specified by your customers. I'm not a lawyer and so if I did this I may get different advice from a lawyer, but I would want my agreement to be straightforward, clean, short and reasonable. Agreements are often drafted to be the biggest bullet-proof "f*ck you" document you can possibly make. No doubt you've come across these.
Just remember - never sign something you are not willing to faithfully execute. Not only are you screwing yourself over, you're making life harder for the rest of us as well by legitimizing the practice.
I'd recommend for historical context that everyone who has not seen Cory Doctorow's Microsoft DRM talk watch it. In this video he aptly proposes to Microsoft that they build the record player that will play everyone's records (iTunes, etc.)
Clearly the message did not take. The failure of Microsoft's present strategy is clearly identified by Cory Doctorow's DRM talk.
It's just like Eben Moglen said in his Wizards of OS3 keynote speech in 2004. What these companies are competing with is FREEDOM - their most dire competitor - and they are going to lose.
Konqueror is not only more secure than Firefox, it's faster, uses less memory and is more _standards compliant_ than Firefox.
You mention all these things like MathML that Firefox supports or will support. Why are the developers focusing on parsing these things when they still can't pass ACID2? (I will remind that Safari and Konqueror, both based on KHTML, were the first browsers ever to pass ACID2)
IBM contributes heavily to Linux, whether it be financial contributions or intellectual ones. Linux isn't the whole of open source, but pegging IBM with "0%" is a big fat lie. IBM not only contributes to Linux, but they are even being sued for it(!) and fighting tooth and nail to their own benefit as well as the benefit of every Linux user out there.
I won't bother discussing Red Hat, Novell, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI or Oracle, since all of those companies are external to IBM's claim about Sun. I invoked the example of these companies to show how their collaboration on Linux (which is collaborating on the biggest, best-known, most financially important open source software project) provides them ROI.
Sun's a funny one. They seem to stick one foot in the water, up to their ankle, and announce boldly to the world that they're this great open source citizen. Let's look at the facts:
1. Sun is behind OpenOffice. Pretty cool. I suspect this had a lot more to do with lobbing grenades at Microsoft, though. 2. Sun has "Open"Solaris. As IBM says, it's not very open. There are major components of the operating system collection that either (A) aren't currently open but might be soon; (B) aren't currently open; or (C) will never be open[1]. And as IBM aptly points out, the very _process_ by which OpenSolaris is developed isn't very open either. 3. Sun bought millions of dollars worth of "licenses" from SCO when SCO decided to launch its Linux attack. According to someone who worked at Sun at the time (I'm paraphrasing something that was posted here a while ago), the first thing Sun employees knew is that Sun had given like 10 million to SCO. They couldn't say what it was for. Next, Sun's answer is "Oh, we had SCO helping us out with some x86 stuff! It was a consulting payoff." And after that, "We bought license from SCO." Personally, I think the right answer is "We don't want Linux to eat our Solaris business alive, as it has been doing for so long! We must stop Linux!" Cue the release of OpenSolaris under a license that seems engineered to be GPL-incompatible. 4. Arguably the thing Sun is best known for, the Java programming language, STILL IS NOT OPEN. They've recently announced that after years of the community screaming at them, they're finally going to open it -- but until they do, I reserve the right to assume it's going to be "half-open" much like OpenSolaris because that's exactly what they've done with major products in the past. 5. Sun forked OpenSSH to make their own proprietary version.
Sun's open source offerings either aren't really open, don't matter in the grand scheme of things, or they're a strategic lob at someone else. It may not be proper to say that Sun is an enemy of open source (though I explicitly note here that I don't trust them at all), but IBM's claim that OpenSolaris is "not-so-open" is very accurate, and they can say it without any danger of being a hypocrite because the biggest competition for OpenSolaris - that is, GNU/Linux, has seen significant and never-ending contributions from IBM. It's a $7 billion dollar business for them!
Personally, I would be happy if Sun ran out of money and went broke tomorrow. There are some cool things that the company does and continues to do, but on the whole, they've never managed to convince me that they're not evil, and I see evidence to the contrary all the time.
It is largely thanks to the collaboration of competing conglomerates such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, (even Sun), Oracle, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI and others on the Linux kernel that has made it so fantastically capable. We wouldn't have the world-class portability, the performance, support for all the hardware under the sun, CPU/PCI/memory hotplug, multiple journalling filesystems, etc. without the above named companies realizing that they can get _more_ ROI via controlled cooperation than with proprietary engineering. These companies compete with each-other in the market place and then pay their engineers to collaborate on making the OS better. It is a hugely successful strategy. The fact that Sun doesn't get it (and sometimes tries to/fight it/) makes Sun stupid and obsolete.
It wasn't Ars Technica that said it's the "World's Worst Internet Law" - that's the EFF. The only time Ars Technica uses that name is in quoting the EFF's opinion. If you RTFA, Ars Technica actually has a less worried view.
Perhaps they should make it an international Internet crime to post stories without checking even the most basic facts (ie, first two paragraphs of the document you link to).
You know, I used to think just like this -- though I didn't consider it 'whining', I worried about the practice, thinking it might just put the vendors off.
And then I watched the OpenBSD project flame the hell out of a Hifn representative for asserting that his company provided 'open documentation' (when in fact acquiring said documentation required registration that the OpenBSD developers felt violated their privacy). When I first read the systematically harsh response to the Hifn representative (including Theo's threat to drop the free driver from the OpenBSD tree), I was absolutely stunned that a group of free software developers would be so reckless.
But it got me thinking... we can't all bend over and ask for it from the vendors forever. Linux marketshare is growing in every segment, and we do have an increasing amount of support from giants like IBM. If it were possible for the projects to take a unified stance (across Linux and the three *BSDs) and persistently demand programming specifications from the vendors, what's going to happen -- they're going to say "fuck you for asking" and drop their binary drivers too?
Something tells me that giving your customers the finger, even if it's only an operating system or two only represent 6-10% of your desktop market, isn't the sort of thing you do to appease shareholders. So while they might not respond immediately, it's not like we're losing anything.
I'm thinking we should start a unified petition to AMD now that they're acquiring ATI - form an online petition to AMD that says "We are NVIDIA customers who will eBay our GPUs tomorrow and buy ATI if you release open drivers".
...aside from the mindshare of Linux, aside from the simple problem of customers jumping on the Linux bandwagon just because, is that they will never be able to match or even come close to the power of Linux development.
Think about it. They have two major operating system vendors (Red Hat and Novell) that are in direct competition with them. And since Red Hat and Novell both work on Linux, well - guess what! That's two companies behind Linux, versus one behind Sun.
And we haven't even begun to talk about hardware, where IBM, Intel, HP and Dell are gunning at them as well. More companies that work on Linux.
So it's Sun working on Solaris, trying to convince people that it's "open" (well, sort of) and somehow materialize a super open-source developer force many, MANY years too late versus Linux, which runs on twenty plus architectures (including all of Sun's), sports better performance, better mindshare and coders with religious fanaticism plus the backing of MANY heavyweight corporations.
And I haven't even begun to talk about real technical issues (hint: Linux does NUMA, CPU hotplug, massive scalability, etc quite nicely).
This post is probably going to sound like a big troll to some. Its biggest litmus test will be time, and barring any major changes in direction from Solaris or Linux, history and smart predictions say Solaris is on its way out. How soon Sun decides to phase it out is going to be the biggest factor in how badly it hurts them.
I don't have a problem with most of your post, and most of what you are saying with the exception of one thing.
To put my view into perspective, I'll start by saying I'm not at all a fan of Mac OS X, primarily because of XNU and how bad it really is. I just got through happily installing Gentoo Linux and KDE 3.5 on my work Powerbook G4.
That said, I didn't actually know until today that XNU was open enough you could build it yourself. I think it's fantastic that Apple has done that, even though I have basically zero interest in their operating system. You say that people have no reason to mess with the kernel, but I don't think that is accurate or fair.
Kernel source is educational and working on it can give you a unique perspective on programming as a whole. Don't overlook the value in that. People love to hack. The fact that the world's largest collaborative project in history is Linux, I think that's solid demonstration that there's something to be said for kernel hacking.
It's too bad that Apple's strategy is still fundamentally closed. A company like Apple could have built an open source operating system *and* the machine to run it on. I believe that if they offered a great enough package, people would buy their hardware on which the system ran.
I personally think Linus's style is much more effective at getting things done. Select people you trust to watch the things you cannot, then periodically tell people what they're doing wrong while you sit at the helm of the project.
And he's of course not the slightest bit afraid to speak his mind.
You mentioned you use FreeBSD. They're not going to actually give you the job -- they just want to know what disorder you have for choosing such an operating system.
OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).
Perhaps if they weren't so intent on wasting time, they could be exciting enough to get funding!
Seriously, I think the BSD community's devotion to its license is notable, but they're never going to make any progress at all if they're so fanatically opposed to the GPL. Since the GPL doesn't affect normal users at all (rather, just the people that want to take and not give back), it seems like a dramatic waste of time. They're not about to win anyone over that is going to do anything for their cause -- unless their cause is to be a free programmer for the proprietary software industry.
Sorry BSD guys -- the GPL is huge! You'll never escape it! David Wheeler surveyed license penetration in 2003 by looking at Freshmeat and SourceForge. GPL-licensed code came in around 70%, BSD licensed code around 4-7%. LGPL - the FSF's answer to BSD - came in at 5-10%!
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One thing I expect to come out of future Vista - OS X comparisons is a demonstration of the performance delta. I don't think many OS X users yet realize how slow it actually is. I'm no fan of Windows or Microsoft (or for that matter OS X or Apple), but I can't help but notice how slow OS X is every time I've used it.
I hope this turns into a thriving industry and captcha technology fails, because despite its usefulness I think it is one of the most obnoxious things to have ever happened to the Internet.
Note that I don't argue that he might be a difficult character. Comments on /. as well as his problems with other distros and the kernel suggest that he is. I simply don't know. But I also heard that Linux Torvalds can be a very harsh himself. Anybody want to fork the kernel because of that?
Linus doesn't actively impede the progress of the Linux kernel; nor does he insist that everybody adhere to archaic interfaces when virtually no one agrees with him; nor does he fork his own code and sell a "Linux Pro" and actively attempt to discredit the work of anyone who writes their own "Linux Pro" features into the regular, free Linux.
Well, I can't ask Oracle, IBM, SGI, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Phillips, HP, Sun Microsystems, Intel and AMD why they choose to contribute code to Linux over BSD because I don't know who to ask. But as the example of Apple adopting BSD clearly shows, they are free at their whims to make it proprietary again. (The fact that Apple has apparently reversed that and is once again 'opening' XNU is irrelevant to the fact that they aptly demonstrated how bad BSD licensing really is).
Actually, Bob Young from Red Hat mentioned that one reason they chose to make Red Hat Linux instead of Red Hat BSD was because they knew the GPL would keep Microsoft from running them over.
The GPL enforces a cooperative environment while giving users complete freedom over how they personally use the software. The BSD license does not. Businesses abuse the 'freedom' of the BSD license. We've seen it time and time again.
He's absolutely right, and a mod of 'Flamebait' isn't appropriate just because you disagree. The GPL is one of the most important aspects of the success of the Linux revolution.
I have an Apple G4 laptop that ran OS X that I was using at work for a long while. I finally got tired of the clunky OS X interface and installed Gentoo Linux on there. It took four or five days to compile everything, including KDE, and I was thinking the whole time that I was going to have to put up with KDE being slower.
Not so! KDE/Linux smoked the hell out of Aqua/OS X!
Eric Raymond has had some interesting points in the past, but in more recent times the only things I can recall him making news for:
1. Saying that the GPL was unnecessary
2. Cursing at Microsoft for daring to try and recruit him
3. Telling Linux people to give in and accept proprietary nonsense into their lifestyle.
The reason this "free software" stuff is working out so great is because we ignored his cries to abandon the GPL and ignored the BSD zealots who think that licenses that allow the marriage of proprietary software to free (libre) software is a good thing. Right now, free software is the ONLY enterprise left (outside of purely political groups like the ACLU and EFF) that is fighting for user's rights. That's CRITICALLY IMPORTANT in this new era, where the whole content industry wants to marry the government and control every single electronic device their holy content is capable of passing through. We need free software to say NO to the proprietary -- to push open standards and software freedom.
Eben Moglen pointed out in his Wizards of OS3 keynote speech that there is no technical enterprise remaining that does not understand what trouble they face with FREEDOM as their most DIRE competitor. So what, we should stop competing just for the purpose of temporarily accelerating our adoption?
I HAVE A BETTER IDEA. Let's stick to our principals, let the DRM-loving content and proprietary software industry go do their thing for about 5 years. Our biggest concern will be keeping their practice out of the law books. Throughout those five years, we will enjoy a gradual drainage of people who are UPSET by the fact that their hardware and software doesn't obey their commands -- that they've lost rights they enjoyed growing up -- that their DVD player no longer plays DVDs because someone on the other end of the planet hacked it and its player key has now been revoked. We win by standing in SHARP contrast, where we will be incredibly easy to make out. Every additional right the controllers try to grab results in a greater number of defectors.
In the end, the inevitable happens. Linux wins.
Fundamentally I don't think people should sign such things. Many often do because (1) everyone wants you to sign it (we're hungry for work!) or (2) they think that many scary parts of the larger agreement are basically unenforceable in their state.
1 and 2 may both be true, but are you still willing to knowingly sign your soul over for whatever meager salary or fee you are drawing? I was recently presented with an offer for a Senior engineering position at a startup. The offer letter included a pretty sizeable chunk of options as well. I denied their offer because their inventions agreement was something I'd never sign, on any planet, any time. It required that I acknowledge that they own any kind of creative work _at all_ that I do while I work for them, and _anything_ remotely connected to their business for a year following. I would be required to keep an accurate list and immediately tell my manager about all inventions even after leaving the company. It would state that I immediately yield all patent and copyright to them, and that they could sign any document on my behalf necessary to see those rights through.
What do they grant you in return? 1 page of small lines to document your entire inventive history. In an age where there are greedy f*ckers trying to own ANY small idea they can get their hands on, this kind of thing is TOTALLY unacceptable.
There are some ways to fight this. The first and most IMPORTANT one is to NOT SIGN. Every time someone signs one of these agreements, the entire industry of workers loses that much ground. People can't force these on you if no one will sign them; the only way they can do it is because it's "standard".
The second one is to find a trusted friend. Every time you have an idea of some sort, write it down and mail it to the friend. (That is, pen and paper / printed and snail mail). Your friend should lock the letters up in a fireproof safe. This should keep a timeline of your inventive history, which may be useful to prove that you didn't create something as a work for hire, if anyone should ever decide to try and pirate your creative works for the purpose of creating captive Intellectual (nonsense) Property.
Another thing I would advise if you do contracting or consulting is to have your own agreement. It may cost you something to get one written, but you don't want the terms of the agreement to be totally specified by your customers. I'm not a lawyer and so if I did this I may get different advice from a lawyer, but I would want my agreement to be straightforward, clean, short and reasonable. Agreements are often drafted to be the biggest bullet-proof "f*ck you" document you can possibly make. No doubt you've come across these.
Just remember - never sign something you are not willing to faithfully execute. Not only are you screwing yourself over, you're making life harder for the rest of us as well by legitimizing the practice.
I'd recommend for historical context that everyone who has not seen Cory Doctorow's Microsoft DRM talk watch it. In this video he aptly proposes to Microsoft that they build the record player that will play everyone's records (iTunes, etc.)
Clearly the message did not take. The failure of Microsoft's present strategy is clearly identified by Cory Doctorow's DRM talk.
It's just like Eben Moglen said in his Wizards of OS3 keynote speech in 2004. What these companies are competing with is FREEDOM - their most dire competitor - and they are going to lose.
Konqueror is not only more secure than Firefox, it's faster, uses less memory and is more _standards compliant_ than Firefox.
You mention all these things like MathML that Firefox supports or will support. Why are the developers focusing on parsing these things when they still can't pass ACID2? (I will remind that Safari and Konqueror, both based on KHTML, were the first browsers ever to pass ACID2)
Your choice of numbers is frankly full of shit.
IBM contributes heavily to Linux, whether it be financial contributions or intellectual ones. Linux isn't the whole of open source, but pegging IBM with "0%" is a big fat lie. IBM not only contributes to Linux, but they are even being sued for it(!) and fighting tooth and nail to their own benefit as well as the benefit of every Linux user out there.
I won't bother discussing Red Hat, Novell, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI or Oracle, since all of those companies are external to IBM's claim about Sun. I invoked the example of these companies to show how their collaboration on Linux (which is collaborating on the biggest, best-known, most financially important open source software project) provides them ROI.
Sun's a funny one. They seem to stick one foot in the water, up to their ankle, and announce boldly to the world that they're this great open source citizen. Let's look at the facts:
1. Sun is behind OpenOffice. Pretty cool. I suspect this had a lot more to do with lobbing grenades at Microsoft, though.
2. Sun has "Open"Solaris. As IBM says, it's not very open. There are major components of the operating system collection that either (A) aren't currently open but might be soon; (B) aren't currently open; or (C) will never be open[1]. And as IBM aptly points out, the very _process_ by which OpenSolaris is developed isn't very open either.
3. Sun bought millions of dollars worth of "licenses" from SCO when SCO decided to launch its Linux attack. According to someone who worked at Sun at the time (I'm paraphrasing something that was posted here a while ago), the first thing Sun employees knew is that Sun had given like 10 million to SCO. They couldn't say what it was for. Next, Sun's answer is "Oh, we had SCO helping us out with some x86 stuff! It was a consulting payoff." And after that, "We bought license from SCO." Personally, I think the right answer is "We don't want Linux to eat our Solaris business alive, as it has been doing for so long! We must stop Linux!" Cue the release of OpenSolaris under a license that seems engineered to be GPL-incompatible.
4. Arguably the thing Sun is best known for, the Java programming language, STILL IS NOT OPEN. They've recently announced that after years of the community screaming at them, they're finally going to open it -- but until they do, I reserve the right to assume it's going to be "half-open" much like OpenSolaris because that's exactly what they've done with major products in the past.
5. Sun forked OpenSSH to make their own proprietary version.
Sun's open source offerings either aren't really open, don't matter in the grand scheme of things, or they're a strategic lob at someone else. It may not be proper to say that Sun is an enemy of open source (though I explicitly note here that I don't trust them at all), but IBM's claim that OpenSolaris is "not-so-open" is very accurate, and they can say it without any danger of being a hypocrite because the biggest competition for OpenSolaris - that is, GNU/Linux, has seen significant and never-ending contributions from IBM. It's a $7 billion dollar business for them!
Personally, I would be happy if Sun ran out of money and went broke tomorrow. There are some cool things that the company does and continues to do, but on the whole, they've never managed to convince me that they're not evil, and I see evidence to the contrary all the time.
It is largely thanks to the collaboration of competing conglomerates such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, (even Sun), Oracle, Intel, AMD, HP, SGI and others on the Linux kernel that has made it so fantastically capable. We wouldn't have the world-class portability, the performance, support for all the hardware under the sun, CPU/PCI/memory hotplug, multiple journalling filesystems, etc. without the above named companies realizing that they can get _more_ ROI via controlled cooperation than with proprietary engineering. These companies compete with each-other in the market place and then pay their engineers to collaborate on making the OS better. It is a hugely successful strategy. The fact that Sun doesn't get it (and sometimes tries to /fight it/) makes Sun stupid and obsolete.
From the sound of it, they might have alternative pricing available to open source developers.
...so that's the only safe place to run Windows XP these days, what with all the viral code running about?
It wasn't Ars Technica that said it's the "World's Worst Internet Law" - that's the EFF. The only time Ars Technica uses that name is in quoting the EFF's opinion. If you RTFA, Ars Technica actually has a less worried view.
Perhaps they should make it an international Internet crime to post stories without checking even the most basic facts (ie, first two paragraphs of the document you link to).
You know, I used to think just like this -- though I didn't consider it 'whining', I worried about the practice, thinking it might just put the vendors off.
And then I watched the OpenBSD project flame the hell out of a Hifn representative for asserting that his company provided 'open documentation' (when in fact acquiring said documentation required registration that the OpenBSD developers felt violated their privacy). When I first read the systematically harsh response to the Hifn representative (including Theo's threat to drop the free driver from the OpenBSD tree), I was absolutely stunned that a group of free software developers would be so reckless.
But it got me thinking... we can't all bend over and ask for it from the vendors forever. Linux marketshare is growing in every segment, and we do have an increasing amount of support from giants like IBM. If it were possible for the projects to take a unified stance (across Linux and the three *BSDs) and persistently demand programming specifications from the vendors, what's going to happen -- they're going to say "fuck you for asking" and drop their binary drivers too?
Something tells me that giving your customers the finger, even if it's only an operating system or two only represent 6-10% of your desktop market, isn't the sort of thing you do to appease shareholders. So while they might not respond immediately, it's not like we're losing anything.
I'm thinking we should start a unified petition to AMD now that they're acquiring ATI - form an online petition to AMD that says "We are NVIDIA customers who will eBay our GPUs tomorrow and buy ATI if you release open drivers".
Almost 1,000 pages of very interesting whitepapers from the event can be found in the first and second PDFs.
It's perfectly possible using simple hashing techniques to totally avoid XSS attacks.
...3D Realms has announced that Duke Nukem Forever will be shipping soon as a Firefox plugin.
...aside from the mindshare of Linux, aside from the simple problem of customers jumping on the Linux bandwagon just because, is that they will never be able to match or even come close to the power of Linux development.
Think about it. They have two major operating system vendors (Red Hat and Novell) that are in direct competition with them. And since Red Hat and Novell both work on Linux, well - guess what! That's two companies behind Linux, versus one behind Sun.
And we haven't even begun to talk about hardware, where IBM, Intel, HP and Dell are gunning at them as well. More companies that work on Linux.
So it's Sun working on Solaris, trying to convince people that it's "open" (well, sort of) and somehow materialize a super open-source developer force many, MANY years too late versus Linux, which runs on twenty plus architectures (including all of Sun's), sports better performance, better mindshare and coders with religious fanaticism plus the backing of MANY heavyweight corporations.
And I haven't even begun to talk about real technical issues (hint: Linux does NUMA, CPU hotplug, massive scalability, etc quite nicely).
This post is probably going to sound like a big troll to some. Its biggest litmus test will be time, and barring any major changes in direction from Solaris or Linux, history and smart predictions say Solaris is on its way out. How soon Sun decides to phase it out is going to be the biggest factor in how badly it hurts them.
I don't have a problem with most of your post, and most of what you are saying with the exception of one thing.
To put my view into perspective, I'll start by saying I'm not at all a fan of Mac OS X, primarily because of XNU and how bad it really is. I just got through happily installing Gentoo Linux and KDE 3.5 on my work Powerbook G4.
That said, I didn't actually know until today that XNU was open enough you could build it yourself. I think it's fantastic that Apple has done that, even though I have basically zero interest in their operating system. You say that people have no reason to mess with the kernel, but I don't think that is accurate or fair.
Kernel source is educational and working on it can give you a unique perspective on programming as a whole. Don't overlook the value in that. People love to hack. The fact that the world's largest collaborative project in history is Linux, I think that's solid demonstration that there's something to be said for kernel hacking.
It's too bad that Apple's strategy is still fundamentally closed. A company like Apple could have built an open source operating system *and* the machine to run it on. I believe that if they offered a great enough package, people would buy their hardware on which the system ran.
I personally think Linus's style is much more effective at getting things done. Select people you trust to watch the things you cannot, then periodically tell people what they're doing wrong while you sit at the helm of the project.
And he's of course not the slightest bit afraid to speak his mind.
You mentioned you use FreeBSD. They're not going to actually give you the job -- they just want to know what disorder you have for choosing such an operating system.
OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).
Perhaps if they weren't so intent on wasting time, they could be exciting enough to get funding!
Seriously, I think the BSD community's devotion to its license is notable, but they're never going to make any progress at all if they're so fanatically opposed to the GPL. Since the GPL doesn't affect normal users at all (rather, just the people that want to take and not give back), it seems like a dramatic waste of time. They're not about to win anyone over that is going to do anything for their cause -- unless their cause is to be a free programmer for the proprietary software industry.
Sorry BSD guys -- the GPL is huge! You'll never escape it! David Wheeler surveyed license penetration in 2003 by looking at Freshmeat and SourceForge. GPL-licensed code came in around 70%, BSD licensed code around 4-7%. LGPL - the FSF's answer to BSD - came in at 5-10%!