"The problem is that since windows came around, it's not uncommon for your average sysadmin to have no idea how to meaningfully scipt"
That was a very clever push from Microsoft's marketing: call mere operators sysadmins. Once you had the pay scale of sysadmins down to those of operators, make the claim of how cheap using Windows was, compared to Linux/commercial UNIX. Once that there basically were no sysadmins anymore (who would do it for almost help-desk wages?) no one would even tell the difference.
Now, these youngsters and their virtualized/containerized Linuxes come reinventing the wheel. Probably in just one decade will be back to knowledge levels of 1995.
"Bitter much? I'm also like you, a bit of everything. More positions are open to me (and presumably you) than the average narrowly-focused techie."
Truly. But since any open position is a the-winner-takes-all game you can offer yourself for a lot of positions... always to find it went to somebody who was a better fit.
Compound that with an HR system that absolutely lacks the knowledge to see a jack-of-all-trades even if that's the resume title and you'll in real troubles.
PS: DevOps is a new title for what used to be a senior sysadmin worth his salt -it's only neither the youngsters nor the HR dpt. know it.
"Did anyone ask the baboon's opinion on having a pig's heart pointlessly stuck in his stomach?"
Yes. The baboons answered they hated it. So they stopped pointlessly putting pigs' hearts into baboons stomachs.
Then they went back to the baboons and asked about putting pigs' hearts into their stomachs, not pointlessly but in order to study how they could eventually better the life expectancy for humans in need of a transplant. To that, the baboons agreed.
That's, little boy, how this situation came to be. Promise.
I thought it better and I think to be able to answer about the more serious part of my previous message.
But first, at your request:
"If you choose to reply, please, be sure to state unambiguously, whether you agree, that
taxation is confiscation;
such confiscations by the government against the will of the governed should therefor be minimized."
I have no problem to accept that "taxation is confiscation" once you got confiscation's definition to include taxation. Even without the "taxation/confiscation" issue you don't need the "therefore" part: in a democracy nothing should go against the will of the governed -that, of course, includes taxes. On the other hand, let's remember that democracy doesn't insure the best government, but only the most deserved.
But, of course, "I see what you did here!": you planted a word full of negative connotations -"confiscation", along another one, "taxation" in this case, to implicitly transfer the "bad karma" of the former to the latter. It's a good trick, let me try: "rape is sex too" or "using antibiotics is assassination". Sorry, that trick, albeit good, won't work on me.
Now, my turn.
First, repeat with me: While Soviet Russia was a form of statist regime, not all possible statist regimes need to look like USSR.
Regarding the line of thought "private companies answer to the money, government answers to nobody" (and variations thereof, like the one in your first paragraphs): the truth is that both answer more or less to the same degree: the "chain of command" is more or less the same in private and government organization (no wonder: people haven't invented that many qualitatively different ways to organize big number of peoples). Even in your example, there's no qualitative difference between a CEO and a major -except that the CEO election is much more opaque; on the other hand, while in one case shareholders are at the top, in the other they are the voters; while in the company the shareholders "vote" with their money, in the government, they vote with their ballots. You *may* have a point if you somehow defend some kind of correlation between money and ability, in order to bypass the biggest critique that can be done to democracy: "one person, one vote doesn't allow to those more capable to hold a heavier weight in decisions" (Ortega y Gasset wrote a whole book on the issue, The Revolt of the Masses).
"Market is more efficient than central planning." This, on itself, is already problematic: if that's the case, how is it that each and every corporation in the whole world, with all their MBAs, all the money thrown into business efficiency studies, end up self organizing into central planning, pure USSR way, and no one, not a single one in the whole world, choose to organize itself in a way resembling free market? The other problem is that while central planing was doomed in the past, that doesn't necessarily means that can't be done now or in the near future: market/sociological studies, big data, high performance computation... are not only reachable by private institutions but by governments too and so it seems that China-the government (I'm not talking about China-the people here) is doing quite a good job at planning their economy.
But even the "Market is more efficient than central planning" assertion is misleading from the beginning because it is begging for the *false* identity that "free market" goes tied to private property and "central planning the USSR way: we decide in advance how your toilet paper is gonna be and how many rolls is the country to need in the next five years" is the only option for a statist economy, which is false: what characterizes statism is *not* central planning but just public ownership of the production means, nothing more and nothing else.
On one hand, as I explained above, free market already makes heavy use of central planning so that, by itself, can't be a showstopper; on the other, there's nothing forbidding
While all my previous post was basically tongue-in-cheek (well, at least in this context), this I have problems to support:
"Corporate greed is normally best satisfied by delivering the goods and services consumers want"
This may have been true in the past and it is probably still true at the level of short corporations but it is true no more when talking about big corps. "delivering the goods and services consumers want" is just *one* of the tools they have to satisfy their greed and it seems to me that when compared to ability to bribe, power of marketing, etc. it is one that is fastly losing ground.
"Whether it is "corporate" is irrelevant here â" the defining characteristics is that the service was paid for by the government. The official approving the check did not spend his own funds."
That means that nothing but, maybe, little pop & mom business can work as basically no one in a bigger company (and nobody at all on a publicly traded one) is spending their own funds either.
And then, given that neither corps nor government can work, I still prefer government to be the one managing funds for all the basic things -at least there I have ballot power.
"The regulations are already insanely complicated"
Because, with time, they either have been demonstrated to be needed to cope with corporate greed or created by corporate greed by means of lobbying to better suit their desires. See? Another benefit to go with government managed basic services it's that you could severily cut regulations on these fields as they'd be unneeded once you take out corporations from the loop.
"If there is a bias towards producers, that's only logical because copyright law is there to protect them."
No, it is not.
I'll take that you are American because the USA Copyright Act owns a very clear wording, but it doesn't matter if not, since the principle stays.
Copyrights are there "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". See? It's not there to "protect producers". And then it adds "...by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." See? Securing this or that to authors and inventors is a means to an end, not an end by itself (and then, see it doesn't include distributors nor collections' managers? Just authors and inventors).
"it's about the freedom to create something on your own terms."
It is not. It is about granting excessive privileges to some class of citizens in order to obtain what is perceived to be a greater benefit for society at whole. The moment society changes its mind about what needs to be privileged or the means (the privileges) show not to be the best path of action for the end (the promotion of Science and useful Arts) it is the moment the privileges need to be reconsidered or even revoked.
"What accounted for the snowball effect was the increasing capability of the linux environment and and the increased knowledge of its existence as a PC based *nix environment. The GPL was there coincidentally"
Again, the "increased capability" of the Linux environment doesn't come from its raw popularity but from the people with the will and ability to code for it. Just as it is the case on the *BSD systems, by the way.
But then, when you have a plan for the "2. ???" point before the "3. profit!" and the ability to keep your secret sauce to yourself, what are you going to do? The question is, of course rethorical, since there are quite a lot of examples (i.e. embedded systems).
The point is that at the very beginning both BSD and GPL licenses work basically the same but, once a critical point is reached, the GPL system *because of its very nature* gets aggregating more and more functionality up to the point to allow for viable business *even* taking into account the perceived loss of having to surrender your developments to the common pool, while under the BSD, also *because of its very nature*, you are given a great incentive, "tragedy of the commons-like", to keep your hard worked edge to yourself at the expense of the common pool. Cf. i.e. Apple vs Red Hat.
It starts to become annoying how many "concidences" you need to bring to your side for an explanation.
"And that is the timeframe where AT&T was creating FUD related to *BSD*, casting a cloud over it all."
Maybe. But it's impossible to support that kind of FUD after BSD 4.4-lite was published, and that's back to JUN/1994, quite a long time ago. And BSD was still technically more advanced and with a better TCP stack -basically no one doubted that back then. And still you had all the strength of a myriad of commercial UNIX's, and not so much later came a time of quite a lot development on the embedded field (i.e. routers) but still Linux' acceptance kept growing, with both commercial (i.e. Red Hat) and not-for-profit (i.e. Debian) initiatives while the biggest impact on the BSD realm has been Apple perusing it (somehow) for their OS.
Surely it is a coincidence that the results are exactly the expected ones from the analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the BSD vs the GPL licenses (or, more to the point, "permissive copy" versus "copyleft" ones).
"Linux was not initially released under the GPL [...] From the v0.12 release notes: "I've had a couple of requests to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft"
Linux was delivered under the GPL since v0.99, december 1992. And what did I already say? "At the beginning this [BSD vs GPL] didn't mean any difference, but once Linux gained critical mass it was the GPL and its snowball effect all that counted."
"There was not great clamor for the GPL."
Probably there was no clamor either for automobiles back when Ford started his mill, but there it was. I never claimed there were a clamor for a GPL'ed OS (outside of the GNU community, should I add) but still, I say that being GPL was key factor for its explosive growth -even when most of their users didn't give a damn about the license itself.
"I'm not referring to just Linus, I'm referring to the general developer community that wanted *nix on the PC."
That's fair, since that was the mood on the xenix newsgroups back then (and what could be done about minix without Tanenbaum's permission). Yes: it was the time and Linus filled a gap (which is true for basically anything, by the way: its success can be claimed to many sources but the main one it's usually that it was its moment).
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Of course yes. And out of context. Just like nobody tries to start a unix-like system right now because, well, Linux is already there. It doesn't tell anything about licenses but, again, about moment -and then, it is a bit misleading: there *existed* a 386 port back then; it's only Linus was more knowlegeable about minix, his own computer was probably not powerful enough to run 386BSD and he also partially suffered a NIH syndrome. At any rate, given the state of the art, his knowledge and his interests, no one can blame Linus from wanting to do it from scratch.
"It was also not released under the GPL license. He used his own license."
Never told otherwise. But, anyway, Linux has been released under the GPL since december 1992 (v 0.99 if wikipedia doesn't lie) so its inflationary grow has obviously been under the GPL.
"The community wanted *nix on their PCs so badly they would have supported any viable project, regardless of license."
Are you kidding? or forgetting that 386BSD was released in 1992 from a port starting back in 1989? With also FreeBSD and commercial offers like SCO and BSDi being there? There's the fact that *BSD on 386 was more mature and had stronger commercial support by 1993 that Linux -by a long stretch, and still was Linux the one that ate the cake so no, it can't be "any viable project" because there *were* viable projects stronger and older than Linux.
"Why contribute to a project that may well be successfully sued by one of the largest corporations in the world?"
Because, at any rate, Linus didn't want to contribute to anyone's code base but to tinker with his shinny new 80386 on the knowledge he gathered from Tanenbaum's MINIX.
And then again, he started tinkering with his new toy in 1991 while the USL v. BSDi lawsuit didn't started till 1992 and even then, Linus was 23 y.o. living in Finland and so, didn't give a damn about USA politics or laws. I challenge you to find *any* first hand reference from Torvalds saying he was worried by license/patent's problems from BSD -or that he even knew about them.
Do you think it was per chance that Linus announced his new project on comp.os.minix and said it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" and even went so far as to add "PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" but still didn't referenced BSD -at all?
"You were not alone back then."
I'd never doubt that, but it seems you weren't paying enough attention.
"What most people want is a decent *nix on their PC. Period."
Again, you can think all you want (of course). But what "most" people wanted was (and is) completely moot because it is not the "most" but the "minority" the ones that produce the code and make the difference. And while the minority pushing for Linux were adding code to a GPL base, the minority pushing for BSD (i.e. the two Bills, Joy and Jolitz -we are not talking here about people who Torvalds could cast any shadow over) were looking for their own cathedrals (which is *always* the risk about the BSD on a huge project like a whole OS plus userland is). At the beginning this didn't mean any difference, but once Linux gained critical mass it was the GPL and its snowball effect all that counted. You can bet that were it Linux under the BSD license, the commercial UNIX would be no better than they are, Debian or Red Hat would have follow by now the ways of Sun or BSDi -*BSD at best, and it is very uncertain that we would have had the "cloud revolution" we are living now.
"the GPL have always been a far secondary issue."
I, with all sincerity and after having been there all these years and expending not quite a short time studying the issue, have no choice but to claim bullshit on your claim.
"Linux did not benefit from the GPL, the GPL benefited from Linux."
I was there back then and that's not what I saw back in those days.
Yes, Linus started his pet project because of two things (not just one): 0. (yes, I know I said "two things", therefore the zero): a brand new 386 and the time and will to hack it. 1. Minix was not under a free license, so it couldn't be modified beyond Tanenbaum's desires (not that I think it was a wrong choice for him -I see why he did it). 2. BSD distributions were under license troubles.
So that was what made Linux take a start. And, yes, Stallman's voice had a lot to do with Torvalds releasing his code under the GPL instead of, say, the BSD (remember: it was the BSD codebase that was "tainted", not the license). But, then, why it succeeded? On one hand, the AT&T trial never fully stopped the BSD community and, on the other, the trial was settled out by 1993.
So, by the end of 1993 we had quite mature releases from FreeBSD and NetBSD and a flourishing variety of commercial UNIX's taking benefit from the shared code base, against early versions from Yggdrasil (the best known back then), Slackware or Debian -Red Hat still in the oven.
Now: you can think what you want but I know for sure the GPL was "a" and possibly "the" key factor for Linux not only taking pace against BSD's and, most notably, commercial UNIX, but passing them over at exponential acceleration.
"LOL, yup, that's freedom... adhere to this long list of restrictions, or don't use it."
Only, again, that's not the case. The case is that you can *either* "adhere to this so called by gstoddart long list of restrictions", *or* "just use and modify it at leisure to the full extent allowed by copyright laws".
"Take a piece of code under (modified 2 clause - assumed since 3-clause is incompatible) BSD. It gets incorporated under GPL (fine, that's why the authors picked BSD). Now, however, a patch is made to that code, which is GPL'd. That patch cannot be incorporated back into the upstream project because it's GPL'd which conflicts with the original project's BSD license."
Which is exactly why the patch creator chose the GPL instead of the BSD license -and that's also fine, that's why the authors picked BSD.
"It's not a hypothetical - it has happened before."
Why you seem surprised? That's exactly by design, not a side effect.
"That's probably the most insulting part of GPL - the claim BSD allows locking up "with proprietary licenses" when in reality, the GPL does the same"
Have you even read your own sentence? Are you aware it makes no sense? The GPL people claim that the BSD license allows locking up "with proprietary licenses". The GPL doesn't alllow locking up "with proprietary licenses" so in reality, no, the GPL does not do the same than proprietary licenses no matter how your distortion field paints it.
"People don't go looking for impartial information, they go looking for material that affirms their already held beliefs."
I remember Umberto Eco pointing it on his novel "Foucault's Pendulum" when making one of the characters saying (more or less) "conspiracists don't want new information, they want to be reasserted on their believings". Yes, tinfoil conpiracists are an extreme case, but I think you are right: to a shorter or larger extent everybody wants to be said that they are right and that they are special.
DHCP will hand you out whatever IP address it is configured to. Why do you think it would work any different?
"WTF why"
If you mean, technically, the right question would be WTF not? If you are asking why some institution would manage public IP addresses that way, that's because universities got into the Internet thingie quite soon and quite a lot of them got B classes and they assigned public IP addresses just to any single device that required and IP (there was no NAT and basically no need for that back then) and some of that management has percolated to present day.
"why not give printers fixed IP's"
Because back then, it worked basically in a self management way; once IT departments started to appear, they were usually less capable and less available than the self-management they were meant to substitute so in order to both avoid back-pressure and allow things being done, in many situations they ended up going for the less resistance path -any way, the one that gave them less work, and so you end up with a DHCP environment both giving public IP addresses and no assignations (and usually only minor segmentation).
"Anyone who actually believes the earth is younger than Hinduism"
Of course, Hinduism is a wrong faith that will throw its observants to Hell for the whole Eternity, so that doesn't say much.
"probably believes their God did that (condemned a billion souls to damnation), specifically to challenge our personal belief here in God's country"
Of course not. It's their own evil nature that makes them deaf to God Worship. Of course, God, being infinitely wise, has given us free will to choose. Bad luck they chose wrongly.
Of course, that there seems to be a strong correlation in having the "right" believings and Geography is just... well, I don't know, but it doesn't matter, as God knows better.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem is that since windows came around, it's not uncommon for your average sysadmin to have no idea how to meaningfully scipt"
That was a very clever push from Microsoft's marketing: call mere operators sysadmins. Once you had the pay scale of sysadmins down to those of operators, make the claim of how cheap using Windows was, compared to Linux/commercial UNIX. Once that there basically were no sysadmins anymore (who would do it for almost help-desk wages?) no one would even tell the difference.
Now, these youngsters and their virtualized/containerized Linuxes come reinventing the wheel. Probably in just one decade will be back to knowledge levels of 1995.
"Bitter much? I'm also like you, a bit of everything. More positions are open to me (and presumably you) than the average narrowly-focused techie."
Truly. But since any open position is a the-winner-takes-all game you can offer yourself for a lot of positions... always to find it went to somebody who was a better fit.
Compound that with an HR system that absolutely lacks the knowledge to see a jack-of-all-trades even if that's the resume title and you'll in real troubles.
PS: DevOps is a new title for what used to be a senior sysadmin worth his salt -it's only neither the youngsters nor the HR dpt. know it.
"There is no such thing as zero risk."
On one hand, *if* there's no such thing as zero risk, don't advertise your service as being safe. Otherwise, there's awaiting a nice fine for you.
On the other hand, yes, there is such a thing as zero risk. I.e: once you are dead there is zero risk of you saying nonsenses anymore.
See what I did here?
"Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification"
As if calling him "Commander, USCYBERCOM" didn't sound stupid enough (isn't it something coming from Mattel?).
Those big boys and their expensive toys...
IoT, security and autonomous cars in the same phrase. How could anyone resist?
And they'll do it by leveraging the advantages of big data, right?
"Did anyone ask the baboon's opinion on having a pig's heart pointlessly stuck in his stomach?"
Yes. The baboons answered they hated it. So they stopped pointlessly putting pigs' hearts into baboons stomachs.
Then they went back to the baboons and asked about putting pigs' hearts into their stomachs, not pointlessly but in order to study how they could eventually better the life expectancy for humans in need of a transplant. To that, the baboons agreed.
That's, little boy, how this situation came to be. Promise.
I thought it better and I think to be able to answer about the more serious part of my previous message.
But first, at your request:
"If you choose to reply, please, be sure to state unambiguously, whether you agree, that
taxation is confiscation;
such confiscations by the government against the will of the governed should therefor be minimized."
I have no problem to accept that "taxation is confiscation" once you got confiscation's definition to include taxation. Even without the "taxation/confiscation" issue you don't need the "therefore" part: in a democracy nothing should go against the will of the governed -that, of course, includes taxes. On the other hand, let's remember that democracy doesn't insure the best government, but only the most deserved.
But, of course, "I see what you did here!": you planted a word full of negative connotations -"confiscation", along another one, "taxation" in this case, to implicitly transfer the "bad karma" of the former to the latter. It's a good trick, let me try: "rape is sex too" or "using antibiotics is assassination". Sorry, that trick, albeit good, won't work on me.
Now, my turn.
First, repeat with me: While Soviet Russia was a form of statist regime, not all possible statist regimes need to look like USSR.
Regarding the line of thought "private companies answer to the money, government answers to nobody" (and variations thereof, like the one in your first paragraphs): the truth is that both answer more or less to the same degree: the "chain of command" is more or less the same in private and government organization (no wonder: people haven't invented that many qualitatively different ways to organize big number of peoples). Even in your example, there's no qualitative difference between a CEO and a major -except that the CEO election is much more opaque; on the other hand, while in one case shareholders are at the top, in the other they are the voters; while in the company the shareholders "vote" with their money, in the government, they vote with their ballots. You *may* have a point if you somehow defend some kind of correlation between money and ability, in order to bypass the biggest critique that can be done to democracy: "one person, one vote doesn't allow to those more capable to hold a heavier weight in decisions" (Ortega y Gasset wrote a whole book on the issue, The Revolt of the Masses).
"Market is more efficient than central planning." This, on itself, is already problematic: if that's the case, how is it that each and every corporation in the whole world, with all their MBAs, all the money thrown into business efficiency studies, end up self organizing into central planning, pure USSR way, and no one, not a single one in the whole world, choose to organize itself in a way resembling free market? The other problem is that while central planing was doomed in the past, that doesn't necessarily means that can't be done now or in the near future: market/sociological studies, big data, high performance computation... are not only reachable by private institutions but by governments too and so it seems that China-the government (I'm not talking about China-the people here) is doing quite a good job at planning their economy.
But even the "Market is more efficient than central planning" assertion is misleading from the beginning because it is begging for the *false* identity that "free market" goes tied to private property and "central planning the USSR way: we decide in advance how your toilet paper is gonna be and how many rolls is the country to need in the next five years" is the only option for a statist economy, which is false: what characterizes statism is *not* central planning but just public ownership of the production means, nothing more and nothing else.
On one hand, as I explained above, free market already makes heavy use of central planning so that, by itself, can't be a showstopper; on the other, there's nothing forbidding
While all my previous post was basically tongue-in-cheek (well, at least in this context), this I have problems to support:
"Corporate greed is normally best satisfied by delivering the goods and services consumers want"
This may have been true in the past and it is probably still true at the level of short corporations but it is true no more when talking about big corps. "delivering the goods and services consumers want" is just *one* of the tools they have to satisfy their greed and it seems to me that when compared to ability to bribe, power of marketing, etc. it is one that is fastly losing ground.
"Whether it is "corporate" is irrelevant here â" the defining characteristics is that the service was paid for by the government. The official approving the check did not spend his own funds."
That means that nothing but, maybe, little pop & mom business can work as basically no one in a bigger company (and nobody at all on a publicly traded one) is spending their own funds either.
And then, given that neither corps nor government can work, I still prefer government to be the one managing funds for all the basic things -at least there I have ballot power.
"The regulations are already insanely complicated"
Because, with time, they either have been demonstrated to be needed to cope with corporate greed or created by corporate greed by means of lobbying to better suit their desires. See? Another benefit to go with government managed basic services it's that you could severily cut regulations on these fields as they'd be unneeded once you take out corporations from the loop.
"If there is a bias towards producers, that's only logical because copyright law is there to protect them."
No, it is not.
I'll take that you are American because the USA Copyright Act owns a very clear wording, but it doesn't matter if not, since the principle stays.
Copyrights are there "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". See? It's not there to "protect producers". And then it adds "...by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." See? Securing this or that to authors and inventors is a means to an end, not an end by itself (and then, see it doesn't include distributors nor collections' managers? Just authors and inventors).
"it's about the freedom to create something on your own terms."
It is not. It is about granting excessive privileges to some class of citizens in order to obtain what is perceived to be a greater benefit for society at whole. The moment society changes its mind about what needs to be privileged or the means (the privileges) show not to be the best path of action for the end (the promotion of Science and useful Arts) it is the moment the privileges need to be reconsidered or even revoked.
"What accounted for the snowball effect was the increasing capability of the linux environment and and the increased knowledge of its existence as a PC based *nix environment. The GPL was there coincidentally"
Again, the "increased capability" of the Linux environment doesn't come from its raw popularity but from the people with the will and ability to code for it. Just as it is the case on the *BSD systems, by the way.
But then, when you have a plan for the "2. ???" point before the "3. profit!" and the ability to keep your secret sauce to yourself, what are you going to do? The question is, of course rethorical, since there are quite a lot of examples (i.e. embedded systems).
The point is that at the very beginning both BSD and GPL licenses work basically the same but, once a critical point is reached, the GPL system *because of its very nature* gets aggregating more and more functionality up to the point to allow for viable business *even* taking into account the perceived loss of having to surrender your developments to the common pool, while under the BSD, also *because of its very nature*, you are given a great incentive, "tragedy of the commons-like", to keep your hard worked edge to yourself at the expense of the common pool. Cf. i.e. Apple vs Red Hat.
"Coincidence"
It starts to become annoying how many "concidences" you need to bring to your side for an explanation.
"And that is the timeframe where AT&T was creating FUD related to *BSD*, casting a cloud over it all."
Maybe. But it's impossible to support that kind of FUD after BSD 4.4-lite was published, and that's back to JUN/1994, quite a long time ago. And BSD was still technically more advanced and with a better TCP stack -basically no one doubted that back then. And still you had all the strength of a myriad of commercial UNIX's, and not so much later came a time of quite a lot development on the embedded field (i.e. routers) but still Linux' acceptance kept growing, with both commercial (i.e. Red Hat) and not-for-profit (i.e. Debian) initiatives while the biggest impact on the BSD realm has been Apple perusing it (somehow) for their OS.
Surely it is a coincidence that the results are exactly the expected ones from the analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the BSD vs the GPL licenses (or, more to the point, "permissive copy" versus "copyleft" ones).
"Linux was not initially released under the GPL [...] From the v0.12 release notes: "I've had a couple of requests to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft"
Linux was delivered under the GPL since v0.99, december 1992. And what did I already say? "At the beginning this [BSD vs GPL] didn't mean any difference, but once Linux gained critical mass it was the GPL and its snowball effect all that counted."
"There was not great clamor for the GPL."
Probably there was no clamor either for automobiles back when Ford started his mill, but there it was. I never claimed there were a clamor for a GPL'ed OS (outside of the GNU community, should I add) but still, I say that being GPL was key factor for its explosive growth -even when most of their users didn't give a damn about the license itself.
"I'm not referring to just Linus, I'm referring to the general developer community that wanted *nix on the PC."
That's fair, since that was the mood on the xenix newsgroups back then (and what could be done about minix without Tanenbaum's permission). Yes: it was the time and Linus filled a gap (which is true for basically anything, by the way: its success can be claimed to many sources but the main one it's usually that it was its moment).
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Of course yes. And out of context. Just like nobody tries to start a unix-like system right now because, well, Linux is already there. It doesn't tell anything about licenses but, again, about moment -and then, it is a bit misleading: there *existed* a 386 port back then; it's only Linus was more knowlegeable about minix, his own computer was probably not powerful enough to run 386BSD and he also partially suffered a NIH syndrome. At any rate, given the state of the art, his knowledge and his interests, no one can blame Linus from wanting to do it from scratch.
"It was also not released under the GPL license. He used his own license."
Never told otherwise. But, anyway, Linux has been released under the GPL since december 1992 (v 0.99 if wikipedia doesn't lie) so its inflationary grow has obviously been under the GPL.
"The community wanted *nix on their PCs so badly they would have supported any viable project, regardless of license."
Are you kidding? or forgetting that 386BSD was released in 1992 from a port starting back in 1989? With also FreeBSD and commercial offers like SCO and BSDi being there? There's the fact that *BSD on 386 was more mature and had stronger commercial support by 1993 that Linux -by a long stretch, and still was Linux the one that ate the cake so no, it can't be "any viable project" because there *were* viable projects stronger and older than Linux.
"There was not great clamor for the GPL."
Neither I claimed anything like this. What I did say is that GPL was critical to its success. Quite different.
"Why contribute to a project that may well be successfully sued by one of the largest corporations in the world?"
Because, at any rate, Linus didn't want to contribute to anyone's code base but to tinker with his shinny new 80386 on the knowledge he gathered from Tanenbaum's MINIX.
And then again, he started tinkering with his new toy in 1991 while the USL v. BSDi lawsuit didn't started till 1992 and even then, Linus was 23 y.o. living in Finland and so, didn't give a damn about USA politics or laws. I challenge you to find *any* first hand reference from Torvalds saying he was worried by license/patent's problems from BSD -or that he even knew about them.
Do you think it was per chance that Linus announced his new project on comp.os.minix and said it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" and even went so far as to add "PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" but still didn't referenced BSD -at all?
"You were not alone back then."
I'd never doubt that, but it seems you weren't paying enough attention.
"What most people want is a decent *nix on their PC. Period."
Again, you can think all you want (of course). But what "most" people wanted was (and is) completely moot because it is not the "most" but the "minority" the ones that produce the code and make the difference. And while the minority pushing for Linux were adding code to a GPL base, the minority pushing for BSD (i.e. the two Bills, Joy and Jolitz -we are not talking here about people who Torvalds could cast any shadow over) were looking for their own cathedrals (which is *always* the risk about the BSD on a huge project like a whole OS plus userland is). At the beginning this didn't mean any difference, but once Linux gained critical mass it was the GPL and its snowball effect all that counted. You can bet that were it Linux under the BSD license, the commercial UNIX would be no better than they are, Debian or Red Hat would have follow by now the ways of Sun or BSDi -*BSD at best, and it is very uncertain that we would have had the "cloud revolution" we are living now.
"the GPL have always been a far secondary issue."
I, with all sincerity and after having been there all these years and expending not quite a short time studying the issue, have no choice but to claim bullshit on your claim.
"Linux did not benefit from the GPL, the GPL benefited from Linux."
I was there back then and that's not what I saw back in those days.
Yes, Linus started his pet project because of two things (not just one):
0. (yes, I know I said "two things", therefore the zero): a brand new 386 and the time and will to hack it.
1. Minix was not under a free license, so it couldn't be modified beyond Tanenbaum's desires (not that I think it was a wrong choice for him -I see why he did it).
2. BSD distributions were under license troubles.
So that was what made Linux take a start. And, yes, Stallman's voice had a lot to do with Torvalds releasing his code under the GPL instead of, say, the BSD (remember: it was the BSD codebase that was "tainted", not the license). But, then, why it succeeded? On one hand, the AT&T trial never fully stopped the BSD community and, on the other, the trial was settled out by 1993.
So, by the end of 1993 we had quite mature releases from FreeBSD and NetBSD and a flourishing variety of commercial UNIX's taking benefit from the shared code base, against early versions from Yggdrasil (the best known back then), Slackware or Debian -Red Hat still in the oven.
Now: you can think what you want but I know for sure the GPL was "a" and possibly "the" key factor for Linux not only taking pace against BSD's and, most notably, commercial UNIX, but passing them over at exponential acceleration.
"LOL, yup, that's freedom ... adhere to this long list of restrictions, or don't use it."
Only, again, that's not the case. The case is that you can *either* "adhere to this so called by gstoddart long list of restrictions", *or* "just use and modify it at leisure to the full extent allowed by copyright laws".
At your entire choice.
"Take a piece of code under (modified 2 clause - assumed since 3-clause is incompatible) BSD. It gets incorporated under GPL (fine, that's why the authors picked BSD). Now, however, a patch is made to that code, which is GPL'd. That patch cannot be incorporated back into the upstream project because it's GPL'd which conflicts with the original project's BSD license."
Which is exactly why the patch creator chose the GPL instead of the BSD license -and that's also fine, that's why the authors picked BSD.
"It's not a hypothetical - it has happened before."
Why you seem surprised? That's exactly by design, not a side effect.
"That's probably the most insulting part of GPL - the claim BSD allows locking up "with proprietary licenses" when in reality, the GPL does the same"
Have you even read your own sentence? Are you aware it makes no sense? The GPL people claim that the BSD license allows locking up "with proprietary licenses". The GPL doesn't alllow locking up "with proprietary licenses" so in reality, no, the GPL does not do the same than proprietary licenses no matter how your distortion field paints it.
"People don't go looking for impartial information, they go looking for material that affirms their already held beliefs."
I remember Umberto Eco pointing it on his novel "Foucault's Pendulum" when making one of the characters saying (more or less) "conspiracists don't want new information, they want to be reasserted on their believings". Yes, tinfoil conpiracists are an extreme case, but I think you are right: to a shorter or larger extent everybody wants to be said that they are right and that they are special.
"It could also be a Chinese-ism"
It could also be a Spanish false-friend. And given Spanish roots, I bet that's the case for any other Romance language.
CVS!!!???
That's a fad from new boys. RCS rulez!
"DHCP hands out internet ip's?"
DHCP will hand you out whatever IP address it is configured to. Why do you think it would work any different?
"WTF why"
If you mean, technically, the right question would be WTF not? If you are asking why some institution would manage public IP addresses that way, that's because universities got into the Internet thingie quite soon and quite a lot of them got B classes and they assigned public IP addresses just to any single device that required and IP (there was no NAT and basically no need for that back then) and some of that management has percolated to present day.
"why not give printers fixed IP's"
Because back then, it worked basically in a self management way; once IT departments started to appear, they were usually less capable and less available than the self-management they were meant to substitute so in order to both avoid back-pressure and allow things being done, in many situations they ended up going for the less resistance path -any way, the one that gave them less work, and so you end up with a DHCP environment both giving public IP addresses and no assignations (and usually only minor segmentation).
Now, go off my lawn.
"Anyone who actually believes the earth is younger than Hinduism"
Of course, Hinduism is a wrong faith that will throw its observants to Hell for the whole Eternity, so that doesn't say much.
"probably believes their God did that (condemned a billion souls to damnation), specifically to challenge our personal belief here in God's country"
Of course not. It's their own evil nature that makes them deaf to God Worship. Of course, God, being infinitely wise, has given us free will to choose. Bad luck they chose wrongly.
Of course, that there seems to be a strong correlation in having the "right" believings and Geography is just... well, I don't know, but it doesn't matter, as God knows better.