While that is a worthy goal, the insurance requirements are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve it, and put the government in a place that we as a society really do not want to put them - mandating our commercial relationships.
"It's only a fail if you think owning a car is necessary."
s/necessary/desirable.
"Its way too late to create endless roads like LA and since even after devoting around a third of land area to roads, LA is still the most congested region in the country"
Sure, LA is horrid, probably even worse than SF. Congestion is always going to be a problem when too many people insist on crowding together in too small a space.
"city planners throughout the country are starting to realize that accomodatng more re cars is not sustainable and are emphasizing other forms of transit."
Sure let's go from one failure to another.
"Transit in SF is far from perfect yet it's still one of the few cities in the country where its possible to live without a car"
SF has put absurd amounts of money into public transit and even you acknowledge it's only just possible to get along without a car there. Few people that live there even attempt it, and fewer still succeed. So despite all the money put into public transit people still want their cars. But people are crowded together so closely already there is barely room to walk, let alone drive.
With current technology it's a dead-end. Instead of building public transit the 'planners' should be figuring out how to reduce population density.
"SF has fewer parking spots than cars. That is a fail for the city planners and people are forced to pay illegally every day because there are simply no legal spots left."
Sounds like a good reason to move somewhere less crowded to me.
Havent watched TV in years, other than 5 minutes at someone elses place now and then. Long enough to remind me how unbearable it has become.
Seriously, the only reason they can get away with this crap is because most of the population are bloody idiots. If they refuse to provide the service the way you want it, then cut them off. Cancel the service. TV is something you can easily do without, it's not like you need it to eat or something. It's the worst possible way to get news or educational material, and at it's best it's just an amusing time waster. I cant believe not just the ridiculous amounts of money people spend on this, but even moreso the ridiculous terms they will stomach. If you really want to see a show and you are willing to pay for that show, I can respect that, but when they tell you no, you cant purchase a ticket for that show, the only way to get it is to purchase 100 other tickets you have no interest in, and you accept that?!?
It would not even take every subscriber simply refusing to enter into unconscionable contracts to stop this crap - just a significant fraction willing to put their foot down and say 'hell no' would be enough to force some sanity back into the market.
No, it does not. You would not be adding any power to the regulators to pick winners and losers - this would reduce their power actually. Just laying out a clear rule for the market that applies to everyone equally.
"You may shrug your shoulders and say "why should I care", but who exactly do you think ultimately pays for this? The answer is that _you_ pay if you're a Comcast customer who uses Netflix (or any other service they manage to extort this way)."
Unfortunately it's much worse than that. You pay for this if you use Netflix, or any other service that pays such extortion, whether you are a Comcast customer or not.
Also screw Netflix. I am on their side on this issue only under protest and lacking any other option. If we could just let Comcast take their money without setting a precedent then I would be fine with it. But unfortunately we cannot. If Comcast can shake them down by threat of disrupting their own customers service, then they can do this to anyone and everyone else that needs to contact one of their customers as well, and that would mean the death of the internet, in all seriousness.
I think you are basically correct but the problem is that you cannot actually undo the damage at this point by simply backing out the regulations that caused it.
The best way to solve it, without giving the state any new regulatory powers, would be to require ISPs to be only ISPs. Don't let one company own the pipes and also own a bunch of other businesses that compete as users of the pipes - that's just a recipe for corruption.
Comcast and others like them could pull a nice bump in revenues by divesting themselves of the ISP operations entirely, and then going forward the new ISP operation would no longer have a vested interest in disrupting network operations, while their main 'content ownership' scam would no longer have the power to disrupt the network in order to prevent competition.
"There's simply no way to explain to non-technical people why what is happening is bad."
You are wrong and TFA shows you how. Did you read?
You dont need to understand the technical side just the business side.
The way the internet works, I pay my ISP, you pay your ISP, and so far as we are concerned everyone is paid (the ISPs pay transit providers out of what they bill us but we can ignore that, it's not our responsibility.) You are Netflix, I paid Comcast, you paid your ISP, I am happily watching movies and you are happily cashing my checks, and so is Comcast. All is as it should be.
Then Comcast decides that since you are doing so well, they want a cut, and start interfering with *my* service to pressure you.
I think most non-technical people can still understand very easily that this is or at least should be criminal behavior, based on the business logic alone and with no need to understand the technical details.
"you're insane. the rates were $100 in today's dollars for an average bill"
I believe you exaggerate, though the point that rates were higher is good.
"you paid extra for caller ID and lots of other services"
I actually miss that part. Because the corollary was that you could decline unwanted 'services.' Now any phone service you get has a dozen "services" that I do not want, must pay for anyway, and to add both insult and additional injury it's often impossible to even turn them off.
"you paid per minute for local calling. higher rates for regional calls and crazy rates for long distance calls"
It was possible to pay per minute for local calling, if you got the super-cheap phone service designed for those who would otherwise have no phone at all. With that lowest level of service you still got a number you could receive calls on all day every day, you only paid extra when you called out.
The normal mode was to pay slightly more per month and get unlimited local calls. Rates for long distance were certainly higher.
"there wasn't enough capacity for everyone and getting all circuits busy was normal, especially on long distance calls"
Not true, it happened but it was certainly not normal. Unless, say, you were trying to call Mexico City right after the news reported a natural disaster there - yeah, in that case, circuits would be busy.
So those are the down sides, and they are significant. What was the upside? If you were designing the system from scratch, why would you consider using a circuit switched network instead of a packet switched network?
In a word, reliability. Once you established a call, there was literally an unbroken strip of copper reaching from your handset right into the hand of the person you were talking to. There was NO packet loss, latency was very little above what the speed of light demands, bandwidth was constant and predictable.
With modern telephony being VOIP based, these things are no longer true, and telephone service is much less reliable.
With the old circuit switched network, when too many people tried to call Mexico City at the same time, a certain number actually got through. Each one of them got a good connection. All the other people whose request when through a moment too late got the message about all circuits being busy and try again later.
With the current packet switched network, when too many people try to call Mexico City at the same time, what will happen instead is that far more connections will be made, but they will not be reliable. If it's only a few too many, then maybe the audio quality goes down, a little delay creeps in, some audio artifacts... but you can all still keep talking. That's probably good. But when it's waaay too many, then no one will get a usable connection at all.
A packet-switched network is great for lots of applications but one can certainly argue that telephone service is not one of them.
Latest statistics I found with a quick LMGTFY says just under $12 BILLION last year in cc/dc fraud alone, so it sounds like you just supported my point rather than disagreeing with it.
"Customer retention may become a priority for them soon... I hope."
I think it is already a priority. The trouble is they go about it in the wrong way. Instead of fixing the network, they pay more people to apologize for it and/or spin it to their benefit (as with Netflix.) A customer retention initiative from Comcast might get you a free month of service or the like, but who cares when the service itself is still broken?
The problem is deeper than that. It goes back decades to the very idea of a scanner vs other methods of security. Scanners are good 'solutions' if you dont really want to solve the problem but rather want to profit from it. They are reactive, they require constant updates (which justifies continuing payments) and will absolutely never do more than partially ameliorate the problem. Scanners only find old threats and it's a very old game to just switch bytes around until the scanner says you are clean.
A system actually designed for security would instead focus on behavior and abilities, and look more like SELinux than a traditional virus scanner. It wouldnt care if a program was exceeding its authority because it's a virus or because it's damaged or just because it's poorly programmed - it would prevent it from doing damage regardless.
This is far from impossible, but as an industry we turned away from that road several decades ago, because it's slower, more expensive, and harder to develop for. First to market seems to trump well designed every time.:(
"Yes, but we can do that without restricting them from providing other services."
Eh, seriously, we can't. Look up regulatory capture for part of why. This rarely works at all and never works well for long.
The cleanest solution is simply to acknowledge that internet service is a natural monopoly and treat it as such. If the existing players do not want to be ISPs (which is clearly the case for several of them) then they should spin those assets off into an ISP and keep doing whatever business they prefer.
"Far too many shops delay the stuff they should have done until it becomes impossible to make forward progress, and then they commit "a cycle" to cleanup, which is laughable because it should have been "a nearly-entire lifetime of the product".
The problem is often above the heads of the programmer/developer/code monkey anyway. No one can be expected to turn out good code when your specifications come from marketing and keep changing, for instance. Or when your business plan is first-to-market at any cost, clean it up later. In those conditions you can either load up on stimulants and hack something up quick and ugly, or start looking for other employment. Or both.
"All of those systems were commercially available at the time for the price indicated, so yes there was inexpensive PC Unix out there at the time."
Fine, I can see how you think you are technically correct here, but this was true in name only. Those systems all sucked very badly, they were 'unix' by some definition but they were not acceptable substitutes for big iron unix in the way that linux quickly became.
"As to "maximum return on minimum investment," why do you think people went after Linux?"
Everyone wants maximum return on minimum investment, of course, but not everyone takes it to unworkable extremes. The other x86 unix vendors did. They got to call it unix by virtue of paying for a license and being authorised forks of the AT&T code, but never invested the resources necessary to get the whole system ported and working properly. Honestly, even SCO was not a passable substitute for proper Unix, it was so rough and full of holes that every day was an adventure, and the other vendors were even worse.
"A/UX ran on hardware from what was the major competitor for X86 hardware"
No, just no. 68k was an entirely different architecture, in a higher price bracket, running entirely different code and competing at a very different tier to the x86 hardware.
"NextStep was also available for X86 at the time."
Spoken like someone that never used it.
I had the immense pleasure of working on a cube at about that time, side by side with HP/UX. Both ran on the big iron that us lowly mortals could not afford, and time-shares were precious. Yes, I know there was an x86 port before NeXT went caput, but how many people actually got a chance to see it run? And just how short was the supported hardware list, hmmm?
Any of these systems, with some time and resources dedicated to them, could have provided a real unix on x86 experience. But none of them did. Not until Linux.
It sounds like a great idea. HTTPS Everywhere is a must have extension, and this looks set to join it. Thanks EFF!
And in a related note, both of these fine extension works fine in Pale Moon, but refuse to install in Seamonkey, which is a deciding factor in which one I am going to use in the future. I dont know why it breaks in Seamonkey but if anyone does please chime in. Is it just a matter of a bad compatibility check or is there more to it?
You're showing SCO at $1295 for 'base' and that's in the right neighborhood, but you could not actually do anything useful with that. And the other x86 systems? Univel could offer their system for whatever price they wanted, it's an academic concern when your sales closely approximate 0. All of these systems were owned by companies that wanted maximum return on minimum investment and they were withering away from lack of development even before linux came along for the coup de grace.
A/UX sounded great but it does not belong on this list because it did NOT run on x86 hardware, it ran on a narrow subset of the 68k architecture which was more expensive and much less common, it was never really well supported and Apple abandoned it completely in '95. I've only seen it running on a computer once in my life.
"Many of the free and open tools, such as the GNU collection, could run on lots of the commercial releases as well."
Of course, before Linux that was the only way to run them. But these were not x86 systems that individuals could afford - we are talking about Apollo and Sun and SGI and DEC machines, specialized high performance hardware that was priced accordingly. With few exceptions, people did not own these things - institutions did, and individuals were lucky to get a shell account that would allow them to compile.
"There were actually quite a few real Unix and Unix-like operating systems available in the 80s to early 90s that ran on X86 hardware such as desktop PCs. The prices ranged from pretty cheap to expensive but still much more affordable than proprietary Unix workstations"
I was supporting SCO Unix in '93, and you are wrong. There was no *nix on PC that could possibly have been considered 'pretty cheap.' SCO was the best of the lot and you were still looking at a couple grand per seat, expect to pay for 'extra's in order to get a working system, and pay more for any support needed. And if you needed a bug fixed or a feature added you'd be paying a LOT more.
In '94 we switched a LOT of shops over. The machines that were running SCO went to Slackware. The machines that were running Windows instead because of cost went to Slackware as well. Installation, training, support, across the office, at less than half the cost of *just licensing* with SCO. And if you needed a bug stomped or a feature added you had the source code and there were multiple options offering similar or better quality of work at a much lower price.
Linux put GNU on the desktop and allowed us to turn relatively common and inexpensive toys into real computers. The impact of that is still being felt.
Git may be a damn fine version control system, but it's one of many, and the notion it is somehow more significant than linux is laughable.
There's no need to postulate a conspiracy. People in any field tend to produce what is rewarded, and avoid producing what is punished. The tendency is reinforced many times over when a field becomes so politicized.
To put it another way, you dont need a conspiracy among researchers to explain a bad paradigm. (I have seen no evidence of conspiracies to promote phlogiston chemistry, for instance.) A filtration process that promotes believers and weeds out skeptics (or simply overwhelms them with slander and harassment) *before* they become credentialed can produce unanimous agreement on whatever issue you filter for. No special conspiracy, just normal human politics.
"How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion."
The trouble is, it's possible to have a wealthy and advanced society while keeping pollution to a minimum. And that just wont do. It is necessary that the masses be returned to a dark ages standard of living ASAP, and so we have to demonize a normally occurring substance, like oh dihydrogen oxide, or carbon dioxide.
And as a side benefit, less pressure to clean up profitable but polluting activities. Win - Win right?
List of Free Software Licenses: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
All of these licenses are recognised as Free. Yet there are still differences between them, and reasons to prefer one over another.
Free software is the superset, copyleft is the subset. Which is to say all copyleft software is Free, but not all Free software is copyleft.
The Free Software foundation exists to promote Free Software. It also promotes copyleft specifically (in most but not all circumstances) because that type of Free Software not only means Freedom for users today, but helps to ensure that future users will still have Freedom tomorrow.
LLVM is Free, but it's not copyleft. And if you care about Freedom down the line, not just your Freedom here today but the future of it in 5 or 10 or 20 years, that could be very significant. That's why he's worried.
Slashdot Mirror
While that is a worthy goal, the insurance requirements are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve it, and put the government in a place that we as a society really do not want to put them - mandating our commercial relationships.
"It's only a fail if you think owning a car is necessary."
s/necessary/desirable.
"Its way too late to create endless roads like LA and since even after devoting around a third of land area to roads, LA is still the most congested region in the country"
Sure, LA is horrid, probably even worse than SF. Congestion is always going to be a problem when too many people insist on crowding together in too small a space.
"city planners throughout the country are starting to realize that accomodatng more re cars is not sustainable and are emphasizing other forms of transit."
Sure let's go from one failure to another.
"Transit in SF is far from perfect yet it's still one of the few cities in the country where its possible to live without a car"
SF has put absurd amounts of money into public transit and even you acknowledge it's only just possible to get along without a car there. Few people that live there even attempt it, and fewer still succeed. So despite all the money put into public transit people still want their cars. But people are crowded together so closely already there is barely room to walk, let alone drive.
With current technology it's a dead-end. Instead of building public transit the 'planners' should be figuring out how to reduce population density.
"SF has fewer parking spots than cars. That is a fail for the city planners and people are forced to pay illegally every day because there are simply no legal spots left."
Sounds like a good reason to move somewhere less crowded to me.
"fail for the city planners"
Department of redundancy department.
I'm not spending a penny on it.
Havent watched TV in years, other than 5 minutes at someone elses place now and then. Long enough to remind me how unbearable it has become.
Seriously, the only reason they can get away with this crap is because most of the population are bloody idiots. If they refuse to provide the service the way you want it, then cut them off. Cancel the service. TV is something you can easily do without, it's not like you need it to eat or something. It's the worst possible way to get news or educational material, and at it's best it's just an amusing time waster. I cant believe not just the ridiculous amounts of money people spend on this, but even moreso the ridiculous terms they will stomach. If you really want to see a show and you are willing to pay for that show, I can respect that, but when they tell you no, you cant purchase a ticket for that show, the only way to get it is to purchase 100 other tickets you have no interest in, and you accept that?!?
It would not even take every subscriber simply refusing to enter into unconscionable contracts to stop this crap - just a significant fraction willing to put their foot down and say 'hell no' would be enough to force some sanity back into the market.
"Your third clause contradicts your second."
No, it does not. You would not be adding any power to the regulators to pick winners and losers - this would reduce their power actually. Just laying out a clear rule for the market that applies to everyone equally.
"You may shrug your shoulders and say "why should I care", but who exactly do you think ultimately pays for this? The answer is that _you_ pay if you're a Comcast customer who uses Netflix (or any other service they manage to extort this way)."
Unfortunately it's much worse than that. You pay for this if you use Netflix, or any other service that pays such extortion, whether you are a Comcast customer or not.
Also screw Netflix. I am on their side on this issue only under protest and lacking any other option. If we could just let Comcast take their money without setting a precedent then I would be fine with it. But unfortunately we cannot. If Comcast can shake them down by threat of disrupting their own customers service, then they can do this to anyone and everyone else that needs to contact one of their customers as well, and that would mean the death of the internet, in all seriousness.
Are you a human being or an algorithm?
I think you are basically correct but the problem is that you cannot actually undo the damage at this point by simply backing out the regulations that caused it.
The best way to solve it, without giving the state any new regulatory powers, would be to require ISPs to be only ISPs. Don't let one company own the pipes and also own a bunch of other businesses that compete as users of the pipes - that's just a recipe for corruption.
Comcast and others like them could pull a nice bump in revenues by divesting themselves of the ISP operations entirely, and then going forward the new ISP operation would no longer have a vested interest in disrupting network operations, while their main 'content ownership' scam would no longer have the power to disrupt the network in order to prevent competition.
"Even if you frame it as you have, I'll bet 8% of normal people you explain it to would just go "eh"."
92% response rate is fine, I'll take it in a heartbeat.
"There's simply no way to explain to non-technical people why what is happening is bad."
You are wrong and TFA shows you how. Did you read?
You dont need to understand the technical side just the business side.
The way the internet works, I pay my ISP, you pay your ISP, and so far as we are concerned everyone is paid (the ISPs pay transit providers out of what they bill us but we can ignore that, it's not our responsibility.) You are Netflix, I paid Comcast, you paid your ISP, I am happily watching movies and you are happily cashing my checks, and so is Comcast. All is as it should be.
Then Comcast decides that since you are doing so well, they want a cut, and start interfering with *my* service to pressure you.
I think most non-technical people can still understand very easily that this is or at least should be criminal behavior, based on the business logic alone and with no need to understand the technical details.
"you're insane. the rates were $100 in today's dollars for an average bill"
I believe you exaggerate, though the point that rates were higher is good.
"you paid extra for caller ID and lots of other services"
I actually miss that part. Because the corollary was that you could decline unwanted 'services.' Now any phone service you get has a dozen "services" that I do not want, must pay for anyway, and to add both insult and additional injury it's often impossible to even turn them off.
"you paid per minute for local calling. higher rates for regional calls and crazy rates for long distance calls"
It was possible to pay per minute for local calling, if you got the super-cheap phone service designed for those who would otherwise have no phone at all. With that lowest level of service you still got a number you could receive calls on all day every day, you only paid extra when you called out.
The normal mode was to pay slightly more per month and get unlimited local calls. Rates for long distance were certainly higher.
"there wasn't enough capacity for everyone and getting all circuits busy was normal, especially on long distance calls"
Not true, it happened but it was certainly not normal. Unless, say, you were trying to call Mexico City right after the news reported a natural disaster there - yeah, in that case, circuits would be busy.
So those are the down sides, and they are significant. What was the upside? If you were designing the system from scratch, why would you consider using a circuit switched network instead of a packet switched network?
In a word, reliability. Once you established a call, there was literally an unbroken strip of copper reaching from your handset right into the hand of the person you were talking to. There was NO packet loss, latency was very little above what the speed of light demands, bandwidth was constant and predictable.
With modern telephony being VOIP based, these things are no longer true, and telephone service is much less reliable.
With the old circuit switched network, when too many people tried to call Mexico City at the same time, a certain number actually got through. Each one of them got a good connection. All the other people whose request when through a moment too late got the message about all circuits being busy and try again later.
With the current packet switched network, when too many people try to call Mexico City at the same time, what will happen instead is that far more connections will be made, but they will not be reliable. If it's only a few too many, then maybe the audio quality goes down, a little delay creeps in, some audio artifacts... but you can all still keep talking. That's probably good. But when it's waaay too many, then no one will get a usable connection at all.
A packet-switched network is great for lots of applications but one can certainly argue that telephone service is not one of them.
Latest statistics I found with a quick LMGTFY says just under $12 BILLION last year in cc/dc fraud alone, so it sounds like you just supported my point rather than disagreeing with it.
"Customer retention may become a priority for them soon... I hope."
I think it is already a priority. The trouble is they go about it in the wrong way. Instead of fixing the network, they pay more people to apologize for it and/or spin it to their benefit (as with Netflix.) A customer retention initiative from Comcast might get you a free month of service or the like, but who cares when the service itself is still broken?
The problem is deeper than that. It goes back decades to the very idea of a scanner vs other methods of security. Scanners are good 'solutions' if you dont really want to solve the problem but rather want to profit from it. They are reactive, they require constant updates (which justifies continuing payments) and will absolutely never do more than partially ameliorate the problem. Scanners only find old threats and it's a very old game to just switch bytes around until the scanner says you are clean.
:(
A system actually designed for security would instead focus on behavior and abilities, and look more like SELinux than a traditional virus scanner. It wouldnt care if a program was exceeding its authority because it's a virus or because it's damaged or just because it's poorly programmed - it would prevent it from doing damage regardless.
This is far from impossible, but as an industry we turned away from that road several decades ago, because it's slower, more expensive, and harder to develop for. First to market seems to trump well designed every time.
"Yes, but we can do that without restricting them from providing other services."
Eh, seriously, we can't. Look up regulatory capture for part of why. This rarely works at all and never works well for long.
The cleanest solution is simply to acknowledge that internet service is a natural monopoly and treat it as such. If the existing players do not want to be ISPs (which is clearly the case for several of them) then they should spin those assets off into an ISP and keep doing whatever business they prefer.
1) You mean you dont already have https everywhere?
2) It distinguishes cookie types and also has a greylist for things that we really dont want but are currently required to use major websites as well.
"Far too many shops delay the stuff they should have done until it becomes impossible to make forward progress, and then they commit "a cycle" to cleanup, which is laughable because it should have been "a nearly-entire lifetime of the product".
The problem is often above the heads of the programmer/developer/code monkey anyway. No one can be expected to turn out good code when your specifications come from marketing and keep changing, for instance. Or when your business plan is first-to-market at any cost, clean it up later. In those conditions you can either load up on stimulants and hack something up quick and ugly, or start looking for other employment. Or both.
"All of those systems were commercially available at the time for the price indicated, so yes there was inexpensive PC Unix out there at the time."
Fine, I can see how you think you are technically correct here, but this was true in name only. Those systems all sucked very badly, they were 'unix' by some definition but they were not acceptable substitutes for big iron unix in the way that linux quickly became.
"As to "maximum return on minimum investment," why do you think people went after Linux?"
Everyone wants maximum return on minimum investment, of course, but not everyone takes it to unworkable extremes. The other x86 unix vendors did. They got to call it unix by virtue of paying for a license and being authorised forks of the AT&T code, but never invested the resources necessary to get the whole system ported and working properly. Honestly, even SCO was not a passable substitute for proper Unix, it was so rough and full of holes that every day was an adventure, and the other vendors were even worse.
"A/UX ran on hardware from what was the major competitor for X86 hardware"
No, just no. 68k was an entirely different architecture, in a higher price bracket, running entirely different code and competing at a very different tier to the x86 hardware.
"NextStep was also available for X86 at the time."
Spoken like someone that never used it.
I had the immense pleasure of working on a cube at about that time, side by side with HP/UX. Both ran on the big iron that us lowly mortals could not afford, and time-shares were precious. Yes, I know there was an x86 port before NeXT went caput, but how many people actually got a chance to see it run? And just how short was the supported hardware list, hmmm?
Any of these systems, with some time and resources dedicated to them, could have provided a real unix on x86 experience. But none of them did. Not until Linux.
It sounds like a great idea. HTTPS Everywhere is a must have extension, and this looks set to join it. Thanks EFF!
And in a related note, both of these fine extension works fine in Pale Moon, but refuse to install in Seamonkey, which is a deciding factor in which one I am going to use in the future. I dont know why it breaks in Seamonkey but if anyone does please chime in. Is it just a matter of a bad compatibility check or is there more to it?
You're showing SCO at $1295 for 'base' and that's in the right neighborhood, but you could not actually do anything useful with that. And the other x86 systems? Univel could offer their system for whatever price they wanted, it's an academic concern when your sales closely approximate 0. All of these systems were owned by companies that wanted maximum return on minimum investment and they were withering away from lack of development even before linux came along for the coup de grace.
A/UX sounded great but it does not belong on this list because it did NOT run on x86 hardware, it ran on a narrow subset of the 68k architecture which was more expensive and much less common, it was never really well supported and Apple abandoned it completely in '95. I've only seen it running on a computer once in my life.
"Many of the free and open tools, such as the GNU collection, could run on lots of the commercial releases as well."
Of course, before Linux that was the only way to run them. But these were not x86 systems that individuals could afford - we are talking about Apollo and Sun and SGI and DEC machines, specialized high performance hardware that was priced accordingly. With few exceptions, people did not own these things - institutions did, and individuals were lucky to get a shell account that would allow them to compile.
"There were actually quite a few real Unix and Unix-like operating systems available in the 80s to early 90s that ran on X86 hardware such as desktop PCs. The prices ranged from pretty cheap to expensive but still much more affordable than proprietary Unix workstations"
I was supporting SCO Unix in '93, and you are wrong. There was no *nix on PC that could possibly have been considered 'pretty cheap.' SCO was the best of the lot and you were still looking at a couple grand per seat, expect to pay for 'extra's in order to get a working system, and pay more for any support needed. And if you needed a bug fixed or a feature added you'd be paying a LOT more.
In '94 we switched a LOT of shops over. The machines that were running SCO went to Slackware. The machines that were running Windows instead because of cost went to Slackware as well. Installation, training, support, across the office, at less than half the cost of *just licensing* with SCO. And if you needed a bug stomped or a feature added you had the source code and there were multiple options offering similar or better quality of work at a much lower price.
Linux put GNU on the desktop and allowed us to turn relatively common and inexpensive toys into real computers. The impact of that is still being felt.
Git may be a damn fine version control system, but it's one of many, and the notion it is somehow more significant than linux is laughable.
There's no need to postulate a conspiracy. People in any field tend to produce what is rewarded, and avoid producing what is punished. The tendency is reinforced many times over when a field becomes so politicized.
To put it another way, you dont need a conspiracy among researchers to explain a bad paradigm. (I have seen no evidence of conspiracies to promote phlogiston chemistry, for instance.) A filtration process that promotes believers and weeds out skeptics (or simply overwhelms them with slander and harassment) *before* they become credentialed can produce unanimous agreement on whatever issue you filter for. No special conspiracy, just normal human politics.
"How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion."
The trouble is, it's possible to have a wealthy and advanced society while keeping pollution to a minimum. And that just wont do. It is necessary that the masses be returned to a dark ages standard of living ASAP, and so we have to demonize a normally occurring substance, like oh dihydrogen oxide, or carbon dioxide.
And as a side benefit, less pressure to clean up profitable but polluting activities. Win - Win right?
"It's not unusual for software developers to be expected to work 16 hour days or odd hours in the weeks before release"
It's also not unusual for released code to be so full of critical errors people are still discovering them years later.
Coincidence? I think not.
Q. Where in that does he say the BSD license is not Free?
A. Nowhere.
"What is the correct interpretation of his comment that BSD devs basically avoid talking about freedom if it doesn't mean it isn't truly free?"
That despite being Free they do not share the values and goals of copyleft, do not recognise or care about the need for copyleft.
Free Software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
List of Free Software Licenses: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
All of these licenses are recognised as Free. Yet there are still differences between them, and reasons to prefer one over another.
Free software is the superset, copyleft is the subset. Which is to say all copyleft software is Free, but not all Free software is copyleft.
The Free Software foundation exists to promote Free Software. It also promotes copyleft specifically (in most but not all circumstances) because that type of Free Software not only means Freedom for users today, but helps to ensure that future users will still have Freedom tomorrow.
LLVM is Free, but it's not copyleft. And if you care about Freedom down the line, not just your Freedom here today but the future of it in 5 or 10 or 20 years, that could be very significant. That's why he's worried.