> > I think in the end he disowned Busybox and started a new project to do the same thing, under the BSD licence. > > No, that was Tim Bird of Sony, who wanted to create "toybox" as a means of replacing Busybox so that GPL > violations of the kernel harder to detect.
No, toybox is by me, Rob Landley, ex-maintainer of busybox, and the guy who hooked busybox up with the SFLC to start legal enforcement of the GPL in the first place. Tim has nothing to do with it (other than writing the first pass of the "id" command implementation, which has since been replaced).
But thanks for trying to FUD an open source project. We people who actually write code really appreciate the efforts of those like yourself who don't to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about our efforts.
Right now Warner Brothers can afford to ignore fanfic. If it's published for free on the web and they turn a blind eye, it doesn't erode their rights. They can afford to be nice.
This lexicon idiot is saying that publishing online for free is a precedent allowing him to publish in print for money, without any further barriers. If they convince a judge of that, it would force corporations to aggressively police the web to take fanfic down to prevent it from becoming a precedent. He's trying to force corporations to be evil.
I read the draft and found a section that would prevent busybox from using GPLv3. (It's the second coming of the BSD advertising clause: each busybox binary would have to contain GPL boilerplate text in the binary itself, and we're trying for small binary size on embedded systems. In GPL2, the advertising clause was optional. In GPL3 it isn't. That's a fatal flaw for us.)
I tried to comment through their web page, but it doesn't work with Konqueror. I sent a comment via their email system, but it was bounced by their robot. (The subject text, "Concerns about gpl3 and busybox", doesn't appear in the GPL draft document, this has not been seen by a human nor will it ever be. Try jumping through the hoop again.)
It was about this time I decided I really don't care enough about placating Stallman. Sticking with v2 is just fine with me, and his opinion about creative commons is irrelevant as well. At this point, I consider Stallman irrelevant, and GPLv3 just another incompatible license fragmenting the open source userbase.
Does this idiot begrudge his customers the cost of electric lights? Does he charge people if they want to read a book while they're there using the light he pays for? Does he make them register to use his light?
This is a fixed-price convenience like air conditioning. Restaurants do not have little vending machines for the napkins, straws, and condiment packets because A) it would make them look bad, B) the effort to regulate it would cost far more than the thing itself.
Trying to go with the "pay toilet" model for this will just convince the users that the guy's a money-grubbing bastard intent on nickel and diming them to death.
What does this say about LinuxWorld Expo? Is this organized by the same clueless idiot, or are they likely to change their name to something with less negative brand equity?
> I live in detroit and I agree.... why novi? > They could have done Troy or even downtown...
Because although I'd had the idea of doing this for years, Tracy Worcester had experience (con chair of ConFusion in 2000) and had con staff she could call on in the area. She lived in Ypsilanti.
There aren't any conference facilities in Ann Arbor (or Ypsilanti) big enough to hold more than about 500 people. Trust me, Tracy Worcester and I (the co-founders of Penguicon) looked a _lot_ back in 2002.
Downtown Detroit may be deeply frightening (I'm from Austin Texas, all I hear about Detroit is people making fun of it), but the suburbs aren't so bad. This year's hotel is on the northwest corner of the beltway around Detroit. You can avoid the actual city entirely.
Yes, but both times Wil cancelled on us it was because somebody was offering him an acting work. At least this time, he actually GOT the work...
I'm under the impression he's trying to set up some kind of videoconference from his living room into our theatre to make up for cancelling again. (Dunno if we can pull it off, but it'd be cool.)
Wil's been really nice to us ever since we got one of last year's guests of honor (Neil Gaiman) in touch with him to do the foreward of Just a Geek, even though Wil cancelled and thus couldn't make the pitch in person.
And yes, Neil mentioned Penguicon in the foreward. Same Penguicon. We're everywhere.
You mean like "What's up Tiger Lilly" predating MST3K by many years...
The Mr. Sinus guys do witty commentary about movies. Woo. Google for "Wizard People, Dear Readers" for somebody else doing the same thing to Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. (You can download the MP3 to play along with the movie.) A group called "The Yuppie Pricks" does it to the movie "Office Space" down at the drafthouse from time to time too.
The Sinus guys _don't_ have fake plastic robot hand puppets, they don't have a fake sattelite, their logo is a kite with eyes (not a ball of string planetoid), there's no banter with some mad scientist conducting experiments on them... None of that. They just make fun of movies that haven't aged well, and a few years ago there was no way to explain that to people in a small number of words except "like MST3K". When people started understanding who they were, they backed as far away from that as they could without losing the name they'd built for themselves.
It sounds like the Drafthouse's lawyers invited this by prodding the original guys into action worrying about a contingency that wasn't a problem before they made it one. John, Owen, and Jerm are cool and funny, and they parody their OWN movies. (Not the 1950's drek that MST3K parodied primarily because they didn't have to pay to license them.)
By the way, the Sinus guys can't do DVDs because they're parodying stuff that's still actively under copyright like "The Karate Kid" and "Mac and Me". They DO respect intellectual property, big time. They've never parodied even one movie that MST3K parodied, it's all original material.
You'd rather they used a less crowded formula like stand-up comedy, or new lyrics to popular songs? Sure, there are FAR fewer people doing those, that would be WAY more original...
Sun's nightmare scenario is Linux 2.6.10 or so (bugs squeezed out) on a 16 way Opteron system. This goes toe to toe with their core business, and it's only six to twelve months away.
Java is nice, but until they start pushing themselves as "Java experts" rather than "Java's owners", nobody's going to be too interested. (Calling their Linux distribution the "Java Desktop" actually hurts their case here.) And deep down, there's nothing that Java or.NET have that you can't get better from a scripting language. Portable bytecode allows you to run on multiple platforms, but so do Python, Perl, and PHP. (And a JIT is comceptually almost identical to just compiling the source when you try to run it, which is what modern scripting languages actually do. Python will even cache.pyc files for library imports, automatically). And you can debug a scripting language during or after deployment.
If a letter is moved two or three places away from where it normally is, the brain adjusts automatically. (It's sort of dyslexia in reverse; possibly this is the mechanism that goes WRONG in dyslexia.)
What the british columbia people did is used the longest words they could, and moved the letters as far away away from their original locations as possible (notice they simply inverted the inside contents of each word. planoissefors = professionals).
Once they'd bent it 720 degrees to the point it broke, they declared bending it had obviously never worked in the first place.
The book "Where did I go right?" by Bernie Brillstein is a marvelous introduction to how hollywood actually works. It's the memoirs of somebody who's been involved in everything from Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, the Muppet Show, Dangerous Liasons, etc. Along the way he founded his own agency (Brillstein/Grey) If you want to know the difference between a manager and an agent, or how movies and television shows are really put together, or what working with actors is like, read that book.
Linux won't get widespread third part software support (games, educational software, bundled device drivers, turbotax, etc) until it becomes #2. Why? Simple: There's Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and everybody else. Name the #3 cola. Anybody?
Most people look at the computer world the same way. You support the #1 platform, and maybe the #2 "to be diverse", and everybody else can go hang. It's _hard_ to make a business case to support anybody else, it's a case of diminishing returns with each new platform and the slope is STEEP.
The macintosh has been #2 since the mid 80's. Platforms like the amiga and OS/2 learned this. Pure java only got attention because it ran on Windows too. Even when the macintosh wasn't particularly significant (just before Steve Jobs came back), people were used to THINKING of it as #2, and targetting their retail software developent and hardware driver support that way. It will come as a surprise to a lot of people when it loses that spot. Confirming it will be news, and not just in the geek world but magazine covers and television evening news.
Now these days, the macintosh is a unix platform. If the mac loses its #2 position on the desktop, Jobs will just claim "we're unix, #2 is unix and that's us". Okay. Jobs does NOT want to give up the marketing advantage of being the "designated alternative", but WHEN the macintosh loses the #2 spot, he may be graceful about it since he does have a fallback marketing position. (You may have notice that on the tech side, he's trying to diversify into the server space.)
But right now, porting to linux without first porting to the macintosh is a really hard sell in a corporate environment, and after the mac port you have to sell linux AGAIN. (P.S. Try doing that sort of thing in the gaming environment, where windows as #2 to the playstation.)
Rob
(P.S. The "desktop" niche is dying, the laptop niche is what everybody should be worrying about. And apple's still doing REALLY nicely there...)
A possible advantage of the data reduction
characteristic to remove all sound portions
classified as "inaudible" could however even be
that one could clean with it supposingly
contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening.
Anybody think anything else this man has to say merits attention?
>We have not even been able to transition to >Win2K from 98SE for our field techs because >many of the 3rd party maintenance packages only >run under 98.
and a couple paragraphs later...
>What I (and I am sure many others also) need to >move to Linux is an inexspensive and 100% >compatible Windows API Layer for Linux, then I >could slowly move my clients to Linux.
You just pointed out that windows isn't 100% compatable with ITSELF (95, 98, 98SE, NT4, 2K, XP, and even what service pack you're running)... So please shut up about 100.00% compatability. The only way you have it now is by keeping your existing custom installs and config tweaks preserved in formaldehyde and hoping you don't get a virus.
Now if you want approximately the same level of compatability you'd get migrating from 98 to 2K, of from 2K to XP, then give Wine a try. Yes, you'll have to re-test everything. Yes, you will have to fix some stuff. But if you've dropped $300k annually on your accounting system wouldn't a single $60k salary to hire a full time "make this work" person make sense? You'll spend more than that on licenses, hardware, and general support time however it goes.
You have the source code to wine. You have the source code to your app. Between the two of them, most stuff can be made to work. No, it's not going to just drop in and run. But it already doesn't do that between MS upgrades.
Yes, wine sucks. But 98 is a pretty old target by this point, they're getting pretty good with the old stuff by now.
The appeals court basically said that if you modify your patent at all during the approval process, you can't ever apply it to inventions similar to but not identical to what your patent describes. (It prevented the patent holder from making the argument at all: you modify the patent during approval and it WILL be very narrowly viewed.)
The supreme court said we're not going to prevent you from making the argument that something similar to your patent is covered by the patent, but it moved the burden of proof to the patent holder rather than the challenger.
I.E If a patenter modifies the patent application during the approval process, the burden of proof falls on the patent holder, not on the infringer, to prove the modification didn't screw up the patent's enforceability (expanding an in-progress patent application to cover newly published prior art, etc).
Putting the burden of proof on the patent holder to prove their patent is valid is definitely a good thing.:)
From the article:
>The burden now falls upon the inventor to prove >that the equivalent in question was not waived >during prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
> > I think in the end he disowned Busybox and started a new project to do the same thing, under the BSD licence.
>
> No, that was Tim Bird of Sony, who wanted to create "toybox" as a means of replacing Busybox so that GPL
> violations of the kernel harder to detect.
No, toybox is by me, Rob Landley, ex-maintainer of busybox, and the guy who hooked busybox up with the SFLC to start legal enforcement of the GPL in the first place. Tim has nothing to do with it (other than writing the first pass of the "id" command implementation, which has since been replaced).
But thanks for trying to FUD an open source project. We people who actually write code really appreciate the efforts of those like yourself who don't to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about our efforts.
Rob
I think everybody with a 4 digit or lower UID is obligated to dig up our logins and escort him out of the building.
Rob
Right now Warner Brothers can afford to ignore fanfic. If it's published for free on the web and they turn a blind eye, it doesn't erode their rights. They can afford to be nice.
This lexicon idiot is saying that publishing online for free is a precedent allowing him to publish in print for money, without any further barriers. If they convince a judge of that, it would force corporations to aggressively police the web to take fanfic down to prevent it from becoming a precedent. He's trying to force corporations to be evil.
I read the draft and found a section that would prevent busybox from using GPLv3. (It's the second coming of the BSD advertising clause: each busybox binary would have to contain GPL boilerplate text in the binary itself, and we're trying for small binary size on embedded systems. In GPL2, the advertising clause was optional. In GPL3 it isn't. That's a fatal flaw for us.)
I tried to comment through their web page, but it doesn't work with Konqueror. I sent a comment via their email system, but it was bounced by their robot. (The subject text, "Concerns about gpl3 and busybox", doesn't appear in the GPL draft document, this has not been seen by a human nor will it ever be. Try jumping through the hoop again.)
It was about this time I decided I really don't care enough about placating Stallman. Sticking with v2 is just fine with me, and his opinion about creative commons is irrelevant as well. At this point, I consider Stallman irrelevant, and GPLv3 just another incompatible license fragmenting the open source userbase.
A pity, really...
Does this idiot begrudge his customers the cost of electric lights? Does he charge people if they want to read a book while they're there using the light he pays for? Does he make them register to use his light?
This is a fixed-price convenience like air conditioning. Restaurants do not have little vending machines for the napkins, straws, and condiment packets because A) it would make them look bad, B) the effort to regulate it would cost far more than the thing itself.
Trying to go with the "pay toilet" model for this will just convince the users that the guy's a money-grubbing bastard intent on nickel and diming them to death.
This one's OBVIOUS.
What does this say about LinuxWorld Expo? Is this organized by the same clueless idiot, or are they likely to change their name to something with less negative brand equity?
Do you really want the lan gamers sucking up everybody's shared bandwidth on the wireless?
> I live in detroit and I agree.... why novi?
> They could have done Troy or even downtown...
Because although I'd had the idea of doing this for years, Tracy Worcester had experience (con chair of ConFusion in 2000) and had con staff she could call on in the area. She lived in Ypsilanti.
Our first year, we were in Warren.
Oddly enough, Tracy's thinking about being con chair again next year, which should seriously rock...
I wonder if she has anything to say on the matter?
...eek! An actual audience!
(hands over keyboard)
(quickly hands the keyboard back)
There aren't any conference facilities in Ann Arbor (or Ypsilanti) big enough to hold more than about 500 people. Trust me, Tracy Worcester and I (the co-founders of Penguicon) looked a _lot_ back in 2002.
Downtown Detroit may be deeply frightening (I'm from Austin Texas, all I hear about Detroit is people making fun of it), but the suburbs aren't so bad. This year's hotel is on the northwest corner of the beltway around Detroit. You can avoid the actual city entirely.
Rob
Yes, but both times Wil cancelled on us it was because somebody was offering him an acting work. At least this time, he actually GOT the work...
I'm under the impression he's trying to set up some kind of videoconference from his living room into our theatre to make up for cancelling again. (Dunno if we can pull it off, but it'd be cool.)
Wil's been really nice to us ever since we got one of last year's guests of honor (Neil Gaiman) in touch with him to do the foreward of Just a Geek, even though Wil cancelled and thus couldn't make the pitch in person.
And yes, Neil mentioned Penguicon in the foreward. Same Penguicon. We're everywhere.
> Wow. You two have sequential user IDs. Did you
> register just for this story?
They might have, but I didn't. And I'm co-founder of the event.
Rob
You mean like "What's up Tiger Lilly" predating MST3K by many years...
The Mr. Sinus guys do witty commentary about movies. Woo. Google for "Wizard People, Dear Readers" for somebody else doing the same thing to Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. (You can download the MP3 to play along with the movie.) A group called "The Yuppie Pricks" does it to the movie "Office Space" down at the drafthouse from time to time too.
The Sinus guys _don't_ have fake plastic robot hand puppets, they don't have a fake sattelite, their logo is a kite with eyes (not a ball of string planetoid), there's no banter with some mad scientist conducting experiments on them... None of that. They just make fun of movies that haven't aged well, and a few years ago there was no way to explain that to people in a small number of words except "like MST3K". When people started understanding who they were, they backed as far away from that as they could without losing the name they'd built for themselves.
It sounds like the Drafthouse's lawyers invited this by prodding the original guys into action worrying about a contingency that wasn't a problem before they made it one. John, Owen, and Jerm are cool and funny, and they parody their OWN movies. (Not the 1950's drek that MST3K parodied primarily because they didn't have to pay to license them.)
By the way, the Sinus guys can't do DVDs because they're parodying stuff that's still actively under copyright like "The Karate Kid" and "Mac and Me". They DO respect intellectual property, big time. They've never parodied even one movie that MST3K parodied, it's all original material.
You'd rather they used a less crowded formula like stand-up comedy, or new lyrics to popular songs? Sure, there are FAR fewer people doing those, that would be WAY more original...
Sun's nightmare scenario is Linux 2.6.10 or so (bugs squeezed out) on a 16 way Opteron system. This goes toe to toe with their core business, and it's only six to twelve months away.
.NET have that you can't get better from a scripting language. Portable bytecode allows you to run on multiple platforms, but so do Python, Perl, and PHP. (And a JIT is comceptually almost identical to just compiling the source when you try to run it, which is what modern scripting languages actually do. Python will even cache .pyc files for library imports, automatically). And you can debug a scripting language during or after deployment.
Java is nice, but until they start pushing themselves as "Java experts" rather than "Java's owners", nobody's going to be too interested. (Calling their Linux distribution the "Java Desktop" actually hurts their case here.) And deep down, there's nothing that Java or
Rob
If a letter is moved two or three places away from where it normally is, the brain adjusts automatically. (It's sort of dyslexia in reverse; possibly this is the mechanism that goes WRONG in dyslexia.)
What the british columbia people did is used the longest words they could, and moved the letters as far away away from their original locations as possible (notice they simply inverted the inside contents of each word. planoissefors = professionals).
Once they'd bent it 720 degrees to the point it broke, they declared bending it had obviously never worked in the first place.
Rob
> Most people *I* know consider ESR to be a bloated
> windbag with a penchant for fanatical gunrights
You need to get out more.
Rob
What does it mean if you wrote it, then?
Rob
> Giga information group rings a bell with me too, old MS :)
> yay and Apple/Linux/everything else nay sayers
Giga employs some nice analysts. Stacy Quandt is quite clueful.
Rob
(Nope, never met the guy. Just liked the book.)
Linux won't get widespread third part software support (games, educational software, bundled device drivers, turbotax, etc) until it becomes #2. Why? Simple: There's Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and everybody else. Name the #3 cola. Anybody?
Most people look at the computer world the same way. You support the #1 platform, and maybe the #2 "to be diverse", and everybody else can go hang. It's _hard_ to make a business case to support anybody else, it's a case of diminishing returns with each new platform and the slope is STEEP.
The macintosh has been #2 since the mid 80's. Platforms like the amiga and OS/2 learned this. Pure java only got attention because it ran on Windows too. Even when the macintosh wasn't particularly significant (just before Steve Jobs came back), people were used to THINKING of it as #2, and targetting their retail software developent and hardware driver support that way. It will come as a surprise to a lot of people when it loses that spot. Confirming it will be news, and not just in the geek world but magazine covers and television evening news.
Now these days, the macintosh is a unix platform. If the mac loses its #2 position on the desktop, Jobs will just claim "we're unix, #2 is unix and that's us". Okay. Jobs does NOT want to give up the marketing advantage of being the "designated alternative", but WHEN the macintosh loses the #2 spot, he may be graceful about it since he does have a fallback marketing position. (You may have notice that on the tech side, he's trying to diversify into the server space.)
But right now, porting to linux without first porting to the macintosh is a really hard sell in a corporate environment, and after the mac port you have to sell linux AGAIN. (P.S. Try doing that sort of thing in the gaming environment, where windows as #2 to the playstation.)
Rob
(P.S. The "desktop" niche is dying, the laptop niche is what everybody should be worrying about. And apple's still doing REALLY nicely there...)
A possible advantage of the data reduction characteristic to remove all sound portions classified as "inaudible" could however even be that one could clean with it supposingly contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening.
Anybody think anything else this man has to say merits attention?
Rob
Huh. I'd have a better idea which project you were talking about if I had the slightest clue who you were. :)
Rob
You say...
>We have not even been able to transition to
>Win2K from 98SE for our field techs because
>many of the 3rd party maintenance packages only
>run under 98.
and a couple paragraphs later...
>What I (and I am sure many others also) need to
>move to Linux is an inexspensive and 100%
>compatible Windows API Layer for Linux, then I
>could slowly move my clients to Linux.
You just pointed out that windows isn't 100% compatable with ITSELF (95, 98, 98SE, NT4, 2K, XP, and even what service pack you're running)... So please shut up about 100.00% compatability. The only way you have it now is by keeping your existing custom installs and config tweaks preserved in formaldehyde and hoping you don't get a virus.
Now if you want approximately the same level of compatability you'd get migrating from 98 to 2K, of from 2K to XP, then give Wine a try. Yes, you'll have to re-test everything. Yes, you will have to fix some stuff. But if you've dropped $300k annually on your accounting system wouldn't a single $60k salary to hire a full time "make this work" person make sense? You'll spend more than that on licenses, hardware, and general support time however it goes.
You have the source code to wine. You have the source code to your app. Between the two of them, most stuff can be made to work. No, it's not going to just drop in and run. But it already doesn't do that between MS upgrades.
Yes, wine sucks. But 98 is a pretty old target by this point, they're getting pretty good with the old stuff by now.
Rob
The appeals court basically said that if you modify your patent at all during the approval process, you can't ever apply it to inventions similar to but not identical to what your patent describes. (It prevented the patent holder from making the argument at all: you modify the patent during approval and it WILL be very narrowly viewed.)
:)
The supreme court said we're not going to prevent you from making the argument that something similar to your patent is covered by the patent, but it moved the burden of proof to the patent holder rather than the challenger.
I.E If a patenter modifies the patent application during the approval process, the burden of proof falls on the patent holder, not on the infringer, to prove the modification didn't screw up the patent's enforceability (expanding an in-progress patent application to cover newly published prior art, etc).
Putting the burden of proof on the patent holder to prove their patent is valid is definitely a good thing.
From the article:
>The burden now falls upon the inventor to prove
>that the equivalent in question was not waived
>during prosecution.
Whaddaya mean no GUI? What about nethack qt?
s /l inux/nh331linQt.tgz
ftp://ftp.nethack.org/pub/nethack/nh331/binarie
Saw it at ALS. Looked a bit like a precursor to diablo...
Rob