SPITE is really funny, especially in the context of all of our talk about flameage in the community. Check out the "bitter guy" comics. A flamer's mascot, at last!
Now I have Spinal Tap going through my head. Every time I hear that construct I hear Bobbi Fleckman's voice, and imagine that look of confusion on Ian's face.
That goes hand-in-hand with Gleef's observation that Eric brought the debate into the public forum with his endorsement. Apple probably requested it of Eric; I hope he agonized over the decision. If not, then I hope he at least understands how that event set the stage for public rebuttal.
ESR was the one that forced that into the public arena...
You're probably very close to the truth here. I'd add that Apple may have insisted on a media-splash accompanied by ESR's simultaneous endorsement. I'd rather that this not be the model for how corporations get in bed with the community, but it may have been at the heart of the matter: Apple loves to be secret and then blow everybody's pants off with fireworks. That's fundamentally at odds with getting first-order-approximations in front of a multitude of peer-eyeballs.
That was well-phrased, but I think that you're shirking your own responsibility by waiting for him to ask you what you think. His email address is easy to find. He's not hiding from you.
Ok, it's 6am here. I've gotten up early to meet a deadline, and I find this pile-o-quickies, nearly pass up the entire lot, but something makes me click on the essay link...and I can't stop reading. That bastard. I think I'll have to punish him by buying his books. I've had so many people tell me "you've gotta read snowcrash". Now I understand why. It's going to take a lot of effort to put it aside for later.
...because that was a day that was a bit less, shall we say, turbulent than this one.
From my perspective, that day was no less turbulent. Flamewars raged in usenet, and on mailing lists from the first day of the open source initiative. The only difference is that journalists were not eavesdropping.
It's when they try to impose [their points of view] on other people, such as Stallman's continued "correction" of people who don't use the term "GNU/Linux," that leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Stallman is a preacher. His job is to propagate his memes. It's no different from what any of us are doing. If his missives are an imposition, then so are yours and mine. The truth is, though, that we're always free to tune each other out. From where I sit, the turbulence is caused by people worrying too much about the things other people express, rather than using their own voice to express good.
I take exception to your war metaphor. If turbulence is what you do not want, you could begin by refusing to think of the situation in military terms. Just a suggestion.
Open Source and free software are still the same thing. I created the original...
That is true. Unfortunately, neither you nor I can control the intended semantics when those terms are uttered by other people. Appealing to the original can only do so much to slow the rate of mutation. Such is life.
Open Source and free software are still the same thing. I created the original...
That is true. Unfortunately, neither you nor I can control the intended semantics when those terms are uttered by other people. Appealing to the original can only do so much to stop the mutation. Such is life.
Whatever happened to the days when "Free" and "Open Source" were used interchangeably to mean the same thing?
I don't think those days ever existed. People were debating the subtle semantic differences between those terms since day one. Even if I grant your view of the past, it's pointless to mourn semantic flux, for no two people on the planet have identical sets of semantic bindings. If you ever think you've found two such people, just have them get into a discussion about the fundamentals of their spirituality. You'll soon find that they're not speaking identical languages. This always has been, and ever shall be. It is the way of things.
...but what I think we should fret about more is the Linux community fragmenting into different little sects. The sad thing is that it's already happened, and I can't see any way to reverse it.
Thou shalt not fear diversity, neither shalt thou long for homogeneity. That is the path towards evil. Rather, grant each other status as individuals, and respect the effort required to bridge the linguistic distances, however small, for fragmentation need not imply non-interoperability. That's what protocols are for.
And who will protect our {free|open source} software interests from Big Business then?
No protection is needed, for the world will be a place where the lowest levels of the software infrastructure are free and open, and specifications for protocols are available to all. Proprietary software will live atop of this substrate symbiotically, powerless to upset the common planetary foundations. That which has been given cannot be ungiven. It is destiny.
Either way, to me they are both trying to constrain my choice and tell me what to do.
I don't think you have any ground to stand on there. RMS is not constraining your choice in any way. You are always free to choose any other method of licensing the software you produce, or choosing the software you use. This will never change, no matter what he says.
Maybe "Hydra" isn't the mythical beast I meant to invoke. Whatever it's called, the legend is that the beast has many heads, and it keeps growing new ones as you cut them off. It's true that there are flavors of linux that are dead today. However, unix itself is alive and well, and doesn't suffer that much with the death of any particular implementation, except in the short term.
...in the mass market, where people prefer to learn only one system.
There must be some other reason, because the unity of Windows is an illusion, not only for any given fixed point in time, but as time passes as well. Windows is no less fragmented than the unix market. The only thing about it that is more unified is the number of vendors who can sell it. (I think its success lies in Microsoft's persistent leveraging of any protocol, API, or file-format that they can own and strategic morphing of same with each release, but I'm no super-pundit.) The differences between different "flavors" of unix are no greater than the differences between DOS/Win98 and NT, so the dominance of the latter cannot be pinned entirely on the fragmentation of the former.
The "fragmentation" of unix is actually its greatest strength. Through diversity, unix has become the Hydra that microsoft cannot kill. I shudder to think of Windows gaining similar potency from such an auction.
Your point, that secret political battles within companies usually don't lead to division-of-effort, is also a good one. The flip-side is that the company will often end up doing the wrong thing. With open, public development a lone wolf who happens to be right doesn't need to be held back by management decisions.
Sooner or later the press is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the "leaders" of the community are fallible because they're just people and they don't get to hide behind the PR team. To put too fine a point on it: my reaction to the article is "No shit, Sherlock. That's humanity."
As already stated by the first respondent, hemp is illegal to grow because it is closely related to marijuana. This point needs to be expanded a little bit. The problem is that it would be very difficult for government regulators to walk into a hemp field and find out if the farmer were growing a little patch of marijuana, camouflaged in a sea of hemp plants.
And that, friends, would give the tobacco industry competition that they don't want: a better buzz that any random citizen can grow for themselves. I think the answer to your question is that tobacco lobbyists still have too much power and too much interest in keeping hemp illegal.
When Netscape announced their intent to release the mozilla source under an open-source license, there was extensive (and often hostile) debate in public fora. It eventually led to both clarification and modification of the first iteration of their license. Nobody in the press called it a "bitter political war." Maybe that's because back then the reporters didn't know where the discussion was taking place.
This kind of open debate, however bitter it may seem to outsiders, is how the collective operates. Somebody posts something to the net (be it draft code, or a draft license) and everybody who gives a shit starts to argue about the Right Way(tm) it should be done. Anything that a company offers to The Community is, implicitly, an RFC. If your request gets you no commentary, that's when there's a problem. Beware the day when any of the people involved want to stop the dialogue, not the day when the dialogue is passionate.
I tried to find docs on mozilla.org to read what milestone 3 is, and what it will take to reach milestone 4, but the information isn't on the development roadmap. Does anybody have a link to a current description?
this is starting to make sense.
on
Wired on Kipling
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· Score: 1
In the past, I would promote the jargon-file-approved meaning of the word "hacker", but I've grown to tolerate the mainstream useage. Thanks to Larry Lein, I finally understand why it's so difficult to get people to adopt "cracker" when referring to virtual-trespassers: it's also a racist term. I never would have thought of that one. I've thought of saltines, but never socio-economically-disadvantaged people of european descent: the meaning that is the means by which people can be mean. Death to the One True(tm) semantic-binding meme.
OK, so it appears that the advocates of the Open Source label would like it to be equivalent to the term Free Software, but I'm not convinced that the feeling is mutual. I get the distinct impression from reading Richard's opinions vis-a-vis the ASPL that he's taking the terms to not be identical. He first talks about the ASPL as an open-source license, then he moves on to the (seemingly separate) perspective of the ASPL as a free-software license. Why would he do this if the terms had identical semantics? I think I must be slow on the uptake here.
open source == free software?
on
RMS on APSL
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Open Source and free software means the exact same thing.
It's my understanding that your claim is untrue, and that the fact that these are different concepts is one of the few things that both camps agree upon. Open Source licenses need not have the concept of copyleft, whereas free software must. Note here that "free software" is taken to be FSF jargon that implies copyleft, not merely a label that denotes that the software can be obtained sans cost.
proprietary 1. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a proprietor. 2. Owned, made, and sold by one holding a trademark or patent.
proprietor An owner, as of a building or business.
That should answer your question. 8^) At any rate, it's not the case that "GPL'd software must be within a specific group" anyway, unless that group is defined to encompass "anybody that abides by the license," which means "every user of the software", with no exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
FIRST BEOWULF COMMENT!
SPITE is really funny, especially in the context of all of our talk about flameage in the community. Check out the "bitter guy" comics. A flamer's mascot, at last!
Now I have Spinal Tap going through my head. Every time I hear that construct I hear Bobbi Fleckman's voice, and imagine that look of confusion on Ian's face.
That goes hand-in-hand with Gleef's observation that Eric brought the debate into the public forum with his endorsement. Apple probably requested it of Eric; I hope he agonized over the decision. If not, then I hope he at least understands how that event set the stage for public rebuttal.
You're probably very close to the truth here. I'd add that Apple may have insisted on a media-splash accompanied by ESR's simultaneous endorsement. I'd rather that this not be the model for how corporations get in bed with the community, but it may have been at the heart of the matter: Apple loves to be secret and then blow everybody's pants off with fireworks. That's fundamentally at odds with getting first-order-approximations in front of a multitude of peer-eyeballs.
That was well-phrased, but I think that you're shirking your own responsibility by waiting for him to ask you what you think. His email address is easy to find. He's not hiding from you.
Ok, it's 6am here. I've gotten up early to meet a deadline, and I find this pile-o-quickies, nearly pass up the entire lot, but something makes me click on the essay link...and I can't stop reading. That bastard. I think I'll have to punish him by buying his books. I've had so many people tell me "you've gotta read snowcrash". Now I understand why. It's going to take a lot of effort to put it aside for later.
From my perspective, that day was no less turbulent. Flamewars raged in usenet, and on mailing lists from the first day of the open source initiative. The only difference is that journalists were not eavesdropping.
It's when they try to impose [their points of view] on other people, such as Stallman's continued "correction" of people who don't use the term "GNU/Linux," that leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Stallman is a preacher. His job is to propagate his memes. It's no different from what any of us are doing. If his missives are an imposition, then so are yours and mine. The truth is, though, that we're always free to tune each other out. From where I sit, the turbulence is caused by people worrying too much about the things other people express, rather than using their own voice to express good.
I take exception to your war metaphor. If turbulence is what you do not want, you could begin by refusing to think of the situation in military terms. Just a suggestion.
That is true. Unfortunately, neither you nor I can control the intended semantics when those terms are uttered by other people. Appealing to the original can only do so much to slow the rate of mutation. Such is life.
That is true. Unfortunately, neither you nor I can control the intended semantics when those terms are uttered by other people. Appealing to the original can only do so much to stop the mutation. Such is life.
I don't think those days ever existed. People were debating the subtle semantic differences between those terms since day one. Even if I grant your view of the past, it's pointless to mourn semantic flux, for no two people on the planet have identical sets of semantic bindings. If you ever think you've found two such people, just have them get into a discussion about the fundamentals of their spirituality. You'll soon find that they're not speaking identical languages. This always has been, and ever shall be. It is the way of things.
...but what I think we should fret about more is the Linux community fragmenting into different little sects. The sad thing is that it's already happened, and I can't see any way to reverse it.
Thou shalt not fear diversity, neither shalt thou long for homogeneity. That is the path towards evil. Rather, grant each other status as individuals, and respect the effort required to bridge the linguistic distances, however small, for fragmentation need not imply non-interoperability. That's what protocols are for.
And who will protect our {free|open source} software interests from Big Business then?
No protection is needed, for the world will be a place where the lowest levels of the software infrastructure are free and open, and specifications for protocols are available to all. Proprietary software will live atop of this substrate symbiotically, powerless to upset the common planetary foundations. That which has been given cannot be ungiven. It is destiny.
Rejoice! 8^)
I don't think you have any ground to stand on there. RMS is not constraining your choice in any way. You are always free to choose any other method of licensing the software you produce, or choosing the software you use. This will never change, no matter what he says.
Maybe "Hydra" isn't the mythical beast I meant to invoke. Whatever it's called, the legend is that the beast has many heads, and it keeps growing new ones as you cut them off. It's true that there are flavors of linux that are dead today. However, unix itself is alive and well, and doesn't suffer that much with the death of any particular implementation, except in the short term.
There must be some other reason, because the unity of Windows is an illusion, not only for any given fixed point in time, but as time passes as well. Windows is no less fragmented than the unix market. The only thing about it that is more unified is the number of vendors who can sell it. (I think its success lies in Microsoft's persistent leveraging of any protocol, API, or file-format that they can own and strategic morphing of same with each release, but I'm no super-pundit.) The differences between different "flavors" of unix are no greater than the differences between DOS/Win98 and NT, so the dominance of the latter cannot be pinned entirely on the fragmentation of the former.
The "fragmentation" of unix is actually its greatest strength. Through diversity, unix has become the Hydra that microsoft cannot kill. I shudder to think of Windows gaining similar potency from such an auction.
Sooner or later the press is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the "leaders" of the community are fallible because they're just people and they don't get to hide behind the PR team. To put too fine a point on it: my reaction to the article is "No shit, Sherlock. That's humanity."
Is there any reason why one couldn't choose an appropriate scheduler at config time, based upon the target machine?
And that, friends, would give the tobacco industry competition that they don't want: a better buzz that any random citizen can grow for themselves. I think the answer to your question is that tobacco lobbyists still have too much power and too much interest in keeping hemp illegal.
That description fits both the federation and the borg.
This kind of open debate, however bitter it may seem to outsiders, is how the collective operates. Somebody posts something to the net (be it draft code, or a draft license) and everybody who gives a shit starts to argue about the Right Way(tm) it should be done. Anything that a company offers to The Community is, implicitly, an RFC. If your request gets you no commentary, that's when there's a problem. Beware the day when any of the people involved want to stop the dialogue, not the day when the dialogue is passionate.
I tried to find docs on mozilla.org to read what milestone 3 is, and what it will take to reach milestone 4, but the information isn't on the development roadmap. Does anybody have a link to a current description?
In the past, I would promote the jargon-file-approved meaning of the word "hacker", but I've grown to tolerate the mainstream useage. Thanks to Larry Lein, I finally understand why it's so difficult to get people to adopt "cracker" when referring to virtual-trespassers: it's also a racist term. I never would have thought of that one. I've thought of saltines, but never socio-economically-disadvantaged people of european descent: the meaning that is the means by which people can be mean. Death to the One True(tm) semantic-binding meme.
OK, so it appears that the advocates of the Open Source label would like it to be equivalent to the term Free Software, but I'm not convinced that the feeling is mutual. I get the distinct impression from reading Richard's opinions vis-a-vis the ASPL that he's taking the terms to not be identical. He first talks about the ASPL as an open-source license, then he moves on to the (seemingly separate) perspective of the ASPL as a free-software license. Why would he do this if the terms had identical semantics? I think I must be slow on the uptake here.
It's my understanding that your claim is untrue, and that the fact that these are different concepts is one of the few things that both camps agree upon. Open Source licenses need not have the concept of copyleft, whereas free software must. Note here that "free software" is taken to be FSF jargon that implies copyleft, not merely a label that denotes that the software can be obtained sans cost.
proprietor An owner, as of a building or business.
That should answer your question. 8^) At any rate, it's not the case that "GPL'd software must be within a specific group" anyway, unless that group is defined to encompass "anybody that abides by the license," which means "every user of the software", with no exceptions.