timothy asked: "When's the last time you read a book that came as an HTML tarball?"
Sun has for a while had on their Java website a freely downloadable tutorial, html zipped or tarballed. Bruce Eckel at http://www.EckelObjects.com/ has freely downloadable books in html (or links to PDF) on Java and C++, Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++. He also makes drafts of his next editions available as he writes them. For that matter so does Sun with the Java tutorials.
Of course the Free Software Foundation makes available their manuals in all sorts of downloadable formats including html.
Did anyone actually read what Bill Joy is espousing? He isn't really questioning technology, he's questioning empowerment of the individual. Joy never mentions that the technology of the future might be misused by governments or corporations, hardly a surprise because he has been involved in such organizations all of his life.
Look at the reference to Theodore Kaczynski, obviously an attempt to give an example of the dangerous individual who misuses technology to inflict damage. Only this analogy collapses completely when we look at what Kaczynski actually did. First, Kaczynski was motivated by fear of advanced technology. Wouldn't it make more sense for Bill Joy to restrain himself and not provide further intellectual cover to a philosphy that encourages sociopaths? Second a Kaczynski of the future would be innately incapable of misusing nanotechnology to attack others because he'd never get to the point of proficiency. Didn't he hand-craft all of his bombs and retreat into the wilderness?
I find it more disturbing that an architect of the programming language Java, a technology whose stated purpose is to take away individual control of computers in order to centralize it in servers, is once again raising the nonexistent spector of individuals doing damage. There's absolutely no trend of individuals being given greater access to the means of production. Any rogues out there producing non-region encoded DVD players or gene-splicing chimeras? Of course not.
Does Bill Joy actually think that nanotechnology will ever be simplified to the point where anyone can buy at the local Walmart a nanotechnology toolkit? This technology will be researched by corporations, universities, or governments, patented, and exploited for profit or national defense.
Sometimes raising a question is as evil as providing a false answer. We only have to look at the real recent history where minorities have been persecuted because a "question" was raised.
What's interesting to me about Sun is how well they've done by keeping control of their key technology instead of relying on either Microsoft or Intel to supply pieces. Sun has control over their own operating system(s), they're successfully pushing their own language, Java, and they don't have to depend on Intel for their processors.
I think that in the long run Sun is going to do a lot better than say HP who has spread themselves really thin trying to be all things to all people. HP originally entered into the alliance with Intel because of fears it could not afford the next generations of chips, only to be caught in the nightmare situation of having to extend the product lifecycle while waiting for Intel to deliver a product that every other competitor will be able to use anyway. And Intel leveraged the alliance into getting HP to give away compiler and other technology for free. Nice for Intel, not so nice for HP.
DEC had the Alpha but got caught trying to rely on Microsoft for NT. Too bad NT on the Alpha was always an unwanted stepchild, but that's what happens when a company is dependent on another company. You're screwed if you're not a priority to them.
SGI same thing, total failure trying to sell their own NT workstations on Intel hardware.
I don't get it, it just seems common sense to me for companies to keep control of technology. That's why Sun is beating Microsoft like a drum in court today over Java, because they own it.
I am baffled by this assertion. I just downloaded srp-1.5.1. The LICENSE file in the docs subdirectory explicitly states that the license is akin to X11. The license also states that srp is "free for both commercial and non-commercial use."
In this case since the authors want srp to become a standard, its X11 type license is appropriate.
Start with Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. This book is superior to Learning Perl because it will teach you skills that will apply to all languages and utilities. This book starts from the very basics of using regular expressions.
Next try Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan. This will introduce the higher level concepts of Perl that will explain what about Perl makes it suitable for various tasks.
Before one can use Perl effectively one must wade through a substantial fraction of its excellent man pages. Actually, Perl's man pages are written in its own lightly marked up documentation format perldoc which can be translated into man pages, plain text, html, whatever. I read it "straight" by downloading the latest development Perl source.
Perl is basically a fusion of the C library functions and Unix system calls with excellent abilities to handle regular expressions. For this reason is is quite probable that one can learn more about actually using Perl by reading W. Richard Stevens book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment then any beginners Perl book.
For my money if one had only about 40 US dollars to spend on one Perl book, I'd get Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington's Perl Cookbook and try to make do learning from the Perl manpages.
This patent seems to me to be bad in just about every way conceivable.
1) Hasn't RT-Linux already been released under the GPL? How comforting to be reassured by Yodaiken that users of RT-Linux would not have to pay a royalty, uh, I thought that's part of what the GPL guaranteed. So is Yodaiken claiming that his patent trumps the GPL in the United States? Okay, so what exactly is RT-Linux's license? Sure there is the statement on http://www.rtlinux.org/~rtlinux/ that the software is GPLed. And whatever an author chooses as a license is fine, but can we at least have a firm statement of what this license is, because as far as I can tell there is nothing in the GPL that permits discrimination against other GPL(able|ed) operating systems such as the Hurd.
The letter from Yodaiken posted at http://lwn.net/2000/0210/a/vy-patent.html states "Other base OS's are not covered." That means the Hurd is out right?
2) Whatever happened to choice? Let's be real here, this patent is not going to inconvenience any of the major commercial players. This patent simply eliminates any other free operating system that is not Linux from even implementing the technology described by the patent. This strikes at what made Linux possible in the first place: The ability to freely implement as long as the source code was not derived from other works. I contend the ability to rewrite from scratch is an essential part of free software. That's why the movement is so strong, there is a continual stream of reinvention and destruction so that when one project falters another is able to spring up to take its place.
3) RT-Linux's patent is yet another strike against the idea of secondary contributors to free software projects being treated as peers. One of the good things about the GPL is that at least the code one contributes can be re-used in other GPLed projects later in one's life. It seems to me that one of the good features of the previous community is that people could go from one project to another with transportable skills. Now I see a danger that projects will advertise themselves as GPLed projects to gain critical mass only to have one lead proponent patent a critical technology.
Nothing wrong with GPLing software, after all, it's your code. However, I believe your aims and the GPL are not consistent. Your project wants to become massively distributed over the world, in effect, a standard. For this type of distribution, I believe that history has shown a more liberal license such as BSD for the TCP/IP stack or X works better. I don't think the stated aims of this project care whether the software is hosted on a commercial or noncommercial system. Wouldn't it be wonderful if commercial systems, even Windows (doubtful) were to do the work of distributing this software for you?
IANAL, but I question whether for most systems it is legal to link your GPLed code with anything but something such as the GPLed Kaffe. (Well for you since it's your code anything is legal, but I'm talking about others to whom it is distributed.) A Java VM is not a systems component for most systems so it doesn't fall under that exception to the GPL. This sort of technicality is what got KDE excluded from being distributed with Debian.
What I find troubling is the ease at which a special exception was granted for Corel. I am hoping this has nothing to do with the relationships Corel has been developing with Debian, because if so this is totally wrong. The library being GPLed restricts it from being linked to almost anything, presumably for a reason. Now a special exemption is granted for just this one product that wants to link to it? This makes no sense at all. What happens down the road when twenty other special exemptions have to be granted, do we see the license extended by another length of the GPL? And this exemption is being granted only to a commercial entity.
In my opinion what the free source movement needs is the equivalent of cross-licensing, and no, GPL is not cross-licensing when it cannot freely be used in BSD licensed or X licensed code.
So a corporation like Corel can just call up Debian on the phone and instantly get an exemption while an unknown student would not be able to freely study the library code to re-use in his projects throughout his latter career? I predict no one else on Slashdot will see how wrong this inequity is, and that is the problem.
As a example of how absurd the current situation is, there are maybe a half dozen incomplete attempts to reproduce Microsoft's Windows headers. No one seems to see the big picture that what is needed are one set of headers that are good enough so that serious projects would consider not having to shell out the licenses to buy Microsoft's development tools. No, entities such as Cygnus want to keep the code under whatever license is restrictive enough (GPL) so that if lightning strikes they can make a fortune by selective commercial licensing, so therefore we have perpetual beta products.
Perhaps you should look at the announcement: http://www.atguard.com/product_info/final.html This site says WRQ is licensing rights to sell AtGuard to Symantec as part of Norton Internet Security 2000. (And also licensed AtGuard to ASCII Network Technology.) According to the above URL at the site you posted, support and the web site will end from WRQ in under two months.
Slashdot Mirror
timothy asked: "When's the last time you read a book that came as an HTML tarball?"
Sun has for a while had on their Java website a freely downloadable tutorial, html zipped or tarballed. Bruce Eckel at
http://www.EckelObjects.com/
has freely downloadable books in html (or links to PDF) on Java and C++, Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++. He also makes drafts of his next editions available as he writes them. For that matter so does Sun with the Java tutorials.
Of course the Free Software Foundation makes available their manuals in all sorts of downloadable formats including html.
Did anyone actually read what Bill Joy is espousing? He isn't really questioning technology, he's questioning empowerment of the individual. Joy never mentions that the technology of the future might be misused by governments or corporations, hardly a surprise because he has been involved in such organizations all of his life.
Look at the reference to Theodore Kaczynski, obviously an attempt to give an example of the dangerous individual who misuses technology to inflict damage. Only this analogy collapses completely when we look at what Kaczynski actually did. First, Kaczynski was motivated by fear of advanced technology. Wouldn't it make more sense for Bill Joy to restrain himself and not provide further intellectual cover to a philosphy that encourages sociopaths? Second a Kaczynski of the future would be innately incapable of misusing nanotechnology to attack others because he'd never get to the point of proficiency. Didn't he hand-craft all of his bombs and retreat into the wilderness?
I find it more disturbing that an architect of the programming language Java, a technology whose stated purpose is to take away individual control of computers in order to centralize it in servers, is once again raising the nonexistent spector of individuals doing damage. There's absolutely no trend of individuals being given greater access to the means of production. Any rogues out there producing non-region encoded DVD players or gene-splicing chimeras? Of course not.
Does Bill Joy actually think that nanotechnology will ever be simplified to the point where anyone can buy at the local Walmart a nanotechnology toolkit? This technology will be researched by corporations, universities, or governments, patented, and exploited for profit or national defense.
Sometimes raising a question is as evil as providing a false answer. We only have to look at the real recent history where minorities have been persecuted because a "question" was raised.
What's interesting to me about Sun is how well they've done by keeping control of their key technology instead of relying on either Microsoft or Intel to supply pieces. Sun has control over their own operating system(s), they're successfully pushing their own language, Java, and they don't have to depend on Intel for their processors.
I think that in the long run Sun is going to do a lot better than say HP who has spread themselves really thin trying to be all things to all people. HP originally entered into the alliance with Intel because of fears it could not afford the next generations of chips, only to be caught in the nightmare situation of having to extend the product lifecycle while waiting for Intel to deliver a product that every other competitor will be able to use anyway. And Intel leveraged the alliance into getting HP to give away compiler and other technology for free. Nice for Intel, not so nice for HP.
DEC had the Alpha but got caught trying to rely on Microsoft for NT. Too bad NT on the Alpha was always an unwanted stepchild, but that's what happens when a company is dependent on another company. You're screwed if you're not a priority to them.
SGI same thing, total failure trying to sell their own NT workstations on Intel hardware.
I don't get it, it just seems common sense to me for companies to keep control of technology. That's why Sun is beating Microsoft like a drum in court today over Java, because they own it.
"SRP is under the GPL."
I am baffled by this assertion. I just downloaded srp-1.5.1. The LICENSE file in the docs subdirectory explicitly states that the license is akin to X11. The license also states that srp is "free for both commercial and non-commercial use."
In this case since the authors want srp to become a standard, its X11 type license is appropriate.
Start with Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. This book is superior to Learning Perl because it will teach you skills that will apply to all languages and utilities. This book starts from the very basics of using regular expressions.
Next try Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan. This will introduce the higher level concepts of Perl that will explain what about Perl makes it suitable for various tasks.
Before one can use Perl effectively one must wade through a substantial fraction of its excellent man pages. Actually, Perl's man pages are written in its own lightly marked up documentation format perldoc which can be translated into man pages, plain text, html, whatever. I read it "straight" by downloading the latest development Perl source.
Perl is basically a fusion of the C library functions and Unix system calls with excellent abilities to handle regular expressions. For this reason is is quite probable that one can learn more about actually using Perl by reading W. Richard Stevens book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment then any beginners Perl book.
For my money if one had only about 40 US dollars to spend on one Perl book, I'd get Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington's Perl Cookbook and try to make do learning from the Perl manpages.
This patent seems to me to be bad in just about every way conceivable.
1) Hasn't RT-Linux already been released under the GPL? How comforting to be reassured by Yodaiken that users of RT-Linux would not have to pay a royalty, uh, I thought that's part of what the GPL guaranteed. So is Yodaiken claiming that his patent trumps the GPL in the United States? Okay, so what exactly is RT-Linux's license? Sure there is the statement on
http://www.rtlinux.org/~rtlinux/
that the software is GPLed. And whatever an author chooses as a license is fine, but can we at least have a firm statement of what this license is, because as far as I can tell there is nothing in the GPL that permits discrimination against other GPL(able|ed) operating systems such as the Hurd.
The letter from Yodaiken posted at
http://lwn.net/2000/0210/a/vy-patent.html
states "Other base OS's are not covered." That means the Hurd is out right?
2) Whatever happened to choice? Let's be real here, this patent is not going to inconvenience any of the major commercial players. This patent simply eliminates any other free operating system that is not Linux from even implementing the technology described by the patent. This strikes at what made Linux possible in the first place: The ability to freely implement as long as the source code was not derived from other works. I contend the ability to rewrite from scratch is an essential part of free software. That's why the movement is so strong, there is a continual stream of reinvention and destruction so that when one project falters another is able to spring up to take its place.
3) RT-Linux's patent is yet another strike against the idea of secondary contributors to free software projects being treated as peers. One of the good things about the GPL is that at least the code one contributes can be re-used in other GPLed projects later in one's life. It seems to me that one of the good features of the previous community is that people could go from one project to another with transportable skills. Now I see a danger that projects will advertise themselves as GPLed projects to gain critical mass only to have one lead proponent patent a critical technology.
Nothing wrong with GPLing software, after all, it's your code. However, I believe your aims and the GPL are not consistent. Your project wants to become massively distributed over the world, in effect, a standard. For this type of distribution, I believe that history has shown a more liberal license such as BSD for the TCP/IP stack or X works better. I don't think the stated aims of this project care whether the software is hosted on a commercial or noncommercial system. Wouldn't it be wonderful if commercial systems, even Windows (doubtful) were to do the work of distributing this software for you?
IANAL, but I question whether for most systems it is legal to link your GPLed code with anything but something such as the GPLed Kaffe. (Well for you since it's your code anything is legal, but I'm talking about others to whom it is distributed.) A Java VM is not a systems component for most systems so it doesn't fall under that exception to the GPL. This sort of technicality is what got KDE excluded from being distributed with Debian.
What I find troubling is the ease at which a special exception was granted for Corel. I am hoping this has nothing to do with the relationships Corel has been developing with Debian, because if so this is totally wrong. The library being GPLed restricts it from being linked to almost anything, presumably for a reason. Now a special exemption is granted for just this one product that wants to link to it? This makes no sense at all. What happens down the road when twenty other special exemptions have to be granted, do we see the license extended by another length of the GPL? And this exemption is being granted only to a commercial entity.
In my opinion what the free source movement needs is the equivalent of cross-licensing, and no, GPL is not cross-licensing when it cannot freely be used in BSD licensed or X licensed code.
So a corporation like Corel can just call up Debian on the phone and instantly get an exemption while an unknown student would not be able to freely study the library code to re-use in his
projects throughout his latter career? I predict no one else on Slashdot will see how wrong this inequity is, and that is the problem.
As a example of how absurd the current situation is, there are maybe a half dozen incomplete attempts to reproduce Microsoft's Windows headers. No one seems to see the big picture that what is needed are one set of headers that are good enough so that serious projects would consider not having to shell out the licenses to buy Microsoft's development tools. No, entities such as Cygnus want to keep the code under whatever license is restrictive enough (GPL) so that if lightning strikes they can make a fortune by selective commercial licensing, so therefore we have perpetual beta products.
Perhaps you should look at the announcement: http://www.atguard.com/product_info/final.html This site says WRQ is licensing rights to sell AtGuard to Symantec as part of Norton Internet Security 2000. (And also licensed AtGuard to ASCII Network Technology.) According to the above URL at the site you posted, support and the web site will end from WRQ in under two months.