While waiting for Doug's server to be unslashdotted, you can also check out an earlier effort, Lutz Prechelt's PhoneCode Project in which competitive implementations of the same problem in different languages were measured on several criteria. Doug's project is much more ambitious, but since he wrote most of the code it may not be as competitively written.
Ugh. That was horrible. I'm glad I read it though. I'm so glad the internet is no longer a cloistered group of elitists looking for reasons to kick off 'tourists'. All the AOL spewage and spam seems a small price to pay.
Every time a spam story is on slashdot, the same ideas are expressed. I tend to disagree with all of them. Here are the common themes, with my comments:
Free speech does not apply, because mail servers are private property. I disagree. Free speech is a positive value which ought to be actively preserved, not merely the absence of government coercion of speech. Corporations have tried many tricks to suppress speech, and have been frequently blocked by courts and legislature from doing so. Moreover, I think the absolute right of property is weakened when the property is used in a highly public manner. Your home is your castle, but when you open a huge store that employs and sells to half the people in town, you develop some of the obligations (and privileges) of a public institution. With DSL providers dropping like flies, we are approaching a world where broadband is offered by two large monopolistic entities in each town. If they decide to start censoring your internet connection based on obscenity or copyright violation or other private agenda, are you going to champion their 'private property' rights as you would champion the rights of a homeowner to control his living room? If you do, you are failing to see that gap in status between you and the communications provider.
I don't get much spam. What's the big deal? You are probably downstream of MAPS filtering already. And even if you aren't, you're indirectly benefiting from the huge efforts of others to make spam unprofitable. So this question is like asking, "Why bother drilling for oil? There's lots of gas at the gas station."
Just keep your email off web/usenet. That's what I do. Having to conceal or munge one's mail address to avoid harvesting is an admission that abusers have taken over the medium. I reluctantly make that concession in some fora, but there are places where a public address is essential. Email should allow well-intentioned people to contact me.
Spam is theft. Not really. When two mail servers exchange messages, it's a consensual transaction. There is no way to inject a mail message into a properly functioning server without the cooperation of that server. Imagine that your wife is home while you're working. A man comes up to your gate and sells her a leaflet of advertisements for one cent. That night you tear it up in disgust and tell her not to buy another. But she does, and the peddler keeps coming back until your house is awash in these leaflets. You don't really have a case against the peddler - you have a dispute with your wife. She has the right to admit items into the house, and she's exercising that right in a way that displeases you. If you run a mail server, you've delegated the right to admit mail messages into the spool based on whatever criteria you specify. If you don't like the messages you get, change the criteria. Don't call the messenger a thief.
ISP's should give users a choice of filtering. Some do. But generally this is going to be more expensive than router-level blackholing. ISP's compete in a cost-sensitive marketplace, and the cheapest approach is to null route the spam domains. Accepting spam traffic into the network so users can have the luxury of applying their own filters costs money.
In summary, I'm on neither side. I have little sympathy with spam-fighters, and none with spammers. I'm afraid MAPS is the only bandaid keeping spam in check for the time being, and it must be constantly watched for abuse.
Re:Since when is helplessness a virtue?
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 2
Regarding the Chesterton quote, I think you may be missing the point of control. Chesterton lived with technology, and would have been miserable without clothes, boots, beer and tobacco. But he was unhappy when control of technology (in the most general sense) was taken from the small, independent operator and given to the huge monolithic operator. Public houses were becoming tied houses, openly or secretly chained to a particular brewery. Chesterton didn't want to abolish the beer; he wanted to free the beer from corporate control. To relate this to your complaint about wafers and boards: the PC hardware market is one of the best markets from a Chestertonian perspective because it's filled with tons of small shops and the customer has a lot of choice and control. I have more control over the composition of my PC than I ever had over the construction of a typewriter. With regard to hypocrisy, Chesterton didn't sew his clothes, make his boots, brew his beer or grow his tobacco. And yet his dependence on tailor, cobbler, brewer and planter did not smack of slavery.
Re:Radical actions ...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
...and who the hell are you to decide what people need?
Maybe another road user who is endangered and inconvenienced by these vehicles. Taller vehicles block visibility. Heavier vehicles increase injuries and fatalities in crashes. Nobody was complaining about SUV's when they were owned by a small minority. The resentment has risen as they totally change the character of the roads. They are imposing costs on other road users and not compensating us.
You would get paybacks? You're imagining a scenario in which the eco-terrorists kill a loved one and you mount a private war of revenge against them? Sounds like a Hollywood action movie. I don't believe it for a second. What makes you think you are better qualified to fight such a war than the killers are? They have teamwork, experience and (misguided) idealism. Some likely endings to this movie in the real world:
You are framed for the original crime. Spikes and hammer are found in your basement and a repentant eco-nut turns state's evidence against you.
You track the treehuggers to a seedy house on the outskirts of town. One moonless night you slip through an unlocked window, your razor-sharp kukri clenched in your teeth. Unfortunately you trip over a cat and fall headlong into the stained glass representation of Gaia, the earth goddess, which someone has been making. Before you know what's what, strong hands are grasping you and you're bundled into a police car. At your bail hearing, two of the women living in the house talk about how frightened they'll be if you're let out. The judge agrees and denies you bail.
You manage to infiltrate the local band of eco-nuts. By showing enthusiasm for the bloodiest deeds, you become a trusted member of the hard core. It turns out that the man who hammered the fatal spikes never comes to these meetings - his identity has to be protected. But by a lucky chance you discover his name and address. You slip into his house in the dead of night with a revolver. He awakes with you sitting on his chest and the muzzle in his mouth. You say, "I hope you enjoyed hammering those spikes, asshole. Now you're gonna die." He makes incoherent muttering noises and struggles vainly to force the weapon from his mouth. You squeeze the trigger, and it feels good. Next morning, you are awakened by the police banging on your door. What happened? The have a tip. A chemical test shows you have recently discharged a gun, and the gun is soon found. It turns out the person you shot is a manager at a timber company. And the eco-nut who 'accidentally' let slip that name? She also went to the police and said that (over her protests) you were plotting his execution for crimes against the earth.
The point, if any? Payback is a boy's fantasy. Many people are harmed every day by governments, guerillas, criminals. None will get payback - the aggressors are usually optimized for what they do.
OK, so you invent the luser-proof authentication scheme. Implant a crypto chip in Joe's belly and have it talk to the keyboard. Hooray! Nobody can social-engineer Joe's password, because he doesn't know it. But someone will email him an executable and tell him to run it. Or phone him and SE him into using his privs to do something he shouldn't. You are only shifting the impact of cluelessness around, not reducing it.
Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.
In In the Beginning was the Command Line. A little transparency is lost. The Eloi/Morlock split of which Stephenson wrote is reinforced - you won't know how to view the kernel messages unless you're already a member of the technical tribe. However I'm still not clear whether Linus wants to squelch all 'happy messages' or only author attributions. If it's the latter, I don't care.
When you talk provately with people from all the big companies in this industry, they will tell you, without exception, that Linux is a toy built by kiddies compared to Solaris, HP/UX, and AIX.
Yes, and Windows is also a toy. Didn't stop it from thoroughly kicking Unix's ass in the corporate world. Linux runs faster and is more responsive than Solaris on single-cpu SPARCs. At least, that's what I hear from everyone who's compared. And Linux distros are complete and polished to a reasonable degree, and look like someone worked on them in the last 10 years. I love when I log into a Sun and EDITOR=/bin/ed, which I usually discover when trying to edit a crontab. Face it: if Sun were a software company selling Solaris, they'd be long since dead. They may have brilliant kernel hackers, but the userland feels unmaintained and obsolete. Linux on commodity hardware offers vastly more bang for the buck than traditional Unix on high-end hardware. The only logical role for high end hardware is problems that do not lend to parallelization, such as databases. And yet Oracle is attacking this problem space via parallelization too. There is an irrational attachment to 'big iron' which is not going to survive continued economic downturn and the increased visiblity of Linux solutions. Believe me, I know exactly the people you're talking about, and many are talented sysadmins. But they are a little isolated from the outside world - they still speak in terms of 'PC vs Unix' and merge the shortcomings of Windows with the shortcomings of the PC platform in their discussion.
I mostly agree, but I'd point out that some established art forms use numbers. Music, for instance, is mathematical at heart. And what about a sculptor welding up a big steel monstrosity? It might look like a random pile of junk to the observer, but I'll bet a tape measure and some calculations were behind it.
You're right - I just tried a subselect and Postgres executed it happily. It was something else, something quite standard, that I was thinking of: I tried $thing and Postgres knew exactly what I meant, because it said "$thing not implemented". And for some reason I thought $thing == subselects. So I tried strings `which postgres` | grep -i implement and I think it was ORDER BY and DISTINCT on views are not implemented which seemed such an arbitrary limitation. Admittedly a lot less important than subselects.
"Windows 2000 will be either cancelled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft's history."
And the press made much of IT managers' reluctance to upgrade to Win2k. But this is like prisoners going on a hunger strike - sooner or later they must eat. And they only have one choice of what to eat. So in the next generation of OS, Microsoft will do what best furthers their strategic interests. They have no need to balance this against market requirements, because realistically their customers have no choice. They will grumble about the loss of control over their data, etc, and pay through the nose for the same. Free things will nibble the edges of the market while MS dominates the center.
You're right. And those of us who played with, and were burned by, the immature Postgres have a permanently bad impression of it. I tried Postgres before MySQL because the license was more free. (A few years back). I found it slow and buggy. I also found that nearly everyone was using MySQL in the real world, so I got over the license and started using it. And loved it - it's a polished and really functional product, within its admittedly limited domain. I played with Postgres again recently, and realized that because it (proudly) supports transactions and integrity constraints, I expect it to support a reasonable subset of SQL92. And yet, no subselects. And other annoying omissions I've forgotten. Anyhow, what I want is a free Oracle-like database. I'm not sure how to even measure when Postgres gets there (although subselects are a necessity!) given the difficulty of benchmarking databases. Some say adabas is comparable to (pre 8i) Oracle. If so, I hope it catches on. To use it now would be to walk out on a very thin limb - I like the fact that all my Oracle and MySQL questions have been asked and answered on usenet.
Glad that's over. When I first noticed the outage, I thought it'd be brief. When it continued, I had a sinking feeling and started to consider the entities that would like to shut down slashdot legally. It was like a mystery story that begins with the death of a controversial man. Everyone had a motive, from Microsoft to the MPAA to the Scientologists. I had a surge of unhappiness at the thought that if Slashdot were really the victim of legal asault, we probably wouldn't learn the truth for a long time. VA's attorney would have told the employees not to comment. The whole community revolving around this site really counts for less to the legal system than some shopkeeper's (in the last analysis) claim of malicious interference with his tomatoes. It made me think of the moment in The Hacker Crackdown when AT&T pulled the plug on a machine hosting an online community. I tried reading kuro5hin. Everything is more reasoned, grammatical, lucid, correclty spelled -- and yet strangely lacking vitality. It was like walking through a clean and quiet museum, with 'do not touch' signs everywhere. There were no street urchins chalking obscene sketches on the marble walls. Maybe I'm a denizen of the lower depths of the internet and not suited to such musem atomspheres. Slashdot is like a real city, complete with beggars and drug addicts, while kuro5hin is perhaps like a mall.
Skepticism is always warranted, but I don't find Anne's lack of an account very surprising. First, she claims to be a contractor, not an employee. Second, the Cisco router folks I've known are culturally a bit different from sysadmins, and less likely to be interested in things like/. I've worked on several web applications which have user accounts. I don't think I have an account on any of them. Obviously I created lots of accounts during testing, but if they're still active I don't remember them. I didn't sign up because they didn't personally interest me. (or because it costs money or is otherwise restricted). You seem to think that anyone working on/., however indirectly, must be a fan of the site. In general, technical professionals are not fans of the things they work on for a living.
And yet apparently the local phone system worked, (if people are bitching you out on the phone) despite the weather. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
I think an acceptable outcome would be for her to win, but be awarded only the value of the credit she was supposed to get on her bill.
What do you suppose would happen if courts generally ruled like that? It would become standard practice to refuse to meet one's contractual obligations, knowing that even if the other party sues and wins one is no worse off than before. This is why courts award punitive damages.
They do? That must be why Windows has a desktop market share of around 95% while Linux has a desktop market share well under 1%.
Market changes can take time, especially in the software world. Consumers are trapped by issues of compatibility and familiarity. Most large corporations spend a small amount of money buying what they want (what's hot now) and a lot of money buying what they're locked into (what was hot 10 years ago). I think it's fair to speak of Joe wanting or even 'preferring' Linux and yet opting for Windows as the practical choice on his next computer, because he thinks Linux isn't there yet. I think Young is probably right that the future belongs to Linux. You dismiss Young's claims of government intervention in the software market. Let's remember the most fundamental intervention: the invention of 'intellectual property' rights. These are a non-obvious construct and their application to software is also non-obvious and was disputed at the time. Selling identical copies of a string of bits is not a viable business model unless the government uses coercion to protect your monopoly. And I disagree that commercial software offers superior reliability. I will grant performance as a theoretical point - commercial vendors have the resources to optimize things - but not as a real issue. For example, IIS is faster than Apache, but in reality a very slow site is usually powered by IIS. Unix and related software contain many decisions that elevated flexibility and elegance over raw speed. It turns out that in practice, flexible, elegant software lends itself to fast systems.
You seem to be thinking in terms of the individual developer, midway between Microsoft and GPL worlds, who might be repulsed by Microsoft revoking his license, thus pushing him into the GPL camp. However, I'm thinking of a corporate environment where Microsoft is the official standard but GPL stuff has seeped in all over the place. Management doesn't care once they realize it's not shareware and they have no obligations. However a license like this could make management care. That said, I agree with the beta nature of the license.
But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers?
This question must be asked 100 times a day on/. The answer is that very few programmers make money from shrink-wrapped software. Most of us are writing code for our employers/clients to use. The GPL is irrelevant to this code because it essentially says, "Where the binary goes, the source goes." But the binary isn't going anywhere outside the company. Free Software has already brought huge productivity benefits to this (majority) sector of programmers. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. In this respect we are like medical doctors, who all benefit from combined medical knowledge. Sure there might be a doctor here or there that makes money by withholding medical knowledge and charging for it (the shrinkware approach) but generally they make money by applying their diagnostic and curative expertise.
people with REAL talent
I notice that the smokers you hung out with seem to have a pretty high opinion of themselves. Perhaps it's justified. Perhaps, though, it's a function of being a big fish in a small pond. People who work in the Unix/Web/Database world become humble because we move from shop to shop and see gifted individuals of different stripes. Also I think we are more attuned to the Internet, which has enough smart people to provide some perspective on one's own accomplishments. I make this guess because the Microsoft coders I've met (not MS employees, just users) seem to have this parochial and boastful attitude.
I think you're right, and the authors of the license didn't realize how it could apply to text editors, etc. But as for it not being workable or enforceable, it could be powerful tool if used right. Microsoft audits their customers to see if they have unlicensed copies of Microsoft software. They could add to the audits a check for GPL software. If GPL software is found on the same machine as this SDK, it could be viewed as presumptive proof that the license has been violated. Not good enough for court, perhaps, but these negotiations never go to court. Thus the friendly Microsoft rep tells the IT department, "When we're auditing you next month, make sure you get rid of any GPL stuff, because we have to count that as a license violation." And the IT guy says, "We're not using any GPL stuff. Oh wait... I better make sure." So Free Software, which has been quietly seeping into large organizations, becomes a problem on IT's radar.
Maybe we should try to 'open' discussion between MS and OSS techs and discover which problems Microsoft encountered when they started using open source.
OK, here goes. OSS techs: What problems have you encountered when using open source? Microsoft: I tried to compile this program and got a bunch of error messages. Someone told me to edit the Makefile, but I can't figure out what application produced that file as there's no filename extension. I tried notepad in case it was plain text but it's full of formatting codes or something. OSS techs: What else? Microsoft: I double-clicked on the README and instead of opening it just turned reverse video. What's the use of that? OSS techs: Sounds pretty bad. Anything else? Microsoft: I wanted to change my password so I edited the password file and when I tried to save it it said "Permission Denied". What the hell? This is my computer; I should be able to change anything I want! Who the hell is Richard Stallman to limit what files I edit or how I reuse his code in commercial apps?
The ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software--and customers always get to decide which they use--that's a very important and healthy ecosystem.
Gates posits a symmetric relationship between Richard's Diner (free software) and Bill's Diner (Commercial software). So far, so good.
The GPL, he continued, "breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work."
Should Bill be able to take hamburger patties out of Richard's freezer? If so, then surely Richard should be able to take hamburger patties out of Bill's freezer. Bill complains that Richard has locked his freezer door. Has Bill unlocked his freezer door? The complaint about the 'viral' or 'Pac-Man-like' nature of the GPL makes me ask, "isn't Microsoft's license viral?" If I use a piece of Microsoft's code in my own, does Microsoft accept my right to "use any of that work or build on any of that work"?
You're right. The page provides adequate information. I realize now that for some reason (failure to be a bright boy?) my eye has always skipped over the block of text you quoted. Usually I'm using Lynx, and the first two screenfulls or so are meaningless noise. I'm afraid the speed with which I skipped that noise has carried me past the meat of the page. However, I still don't like SF, and still think the pages are less effective than average open source pages. And your comment on the lameness filter and suitable uses for the editors' time is apt. I have on occasion spent an hour on a carefully crafted post to explain some abstruse topic, only to be prevented from posting it by the lameness filter.
Slashdot Mirror
While waiting for Doug's server to be unslashdotted, you can also check out an earlier effort, Lutz Prechelt's PhoneCode Project in which competitive implementations of the same problem in different languages were measured on several criteria.
Doug's project is much more ambitious, but since he wrote most of the code it may not be as competitively written.
Ugh. That was horrible. I'm glad I read it though. I'm so glad the internet is no longer a cloistered group of elitists looking for reasons to kick off 'tourists'. All the AOL spewage and spam seems a small price to pay.
In summary, I'm on neither side. I have little sympathy with spam-fighters, and none with spammers. I'm afraid MAPS is the only bandaid keeping spam in check for the time being, and it must be constantly watched for abuse.
Regarding the Chesterton quote, I think you may be missing the point of control. Chesterton lived with technology, and would have been miserable without clothes, boots, beer and tobacco. But he was unhappy when control of technology (in the most general sense) was taken from the small, independent operator and given to the huge monolithic operator. Public houses were becoming tied houses, openly or secretly chained to a particular brewery. Chesterton didn't want to abolish the beer; he wanted to free the beer from corporate control.
To relate this to your complaint about wafers and boards: the PC hardware market is one of the best markets from a Chestertonian perspective because it's filled with tons of small shops and the customer has a lot of choice and control. I have more control over the composition of my PC than I ever had over the construction of a typewriter.
With regard to hypocrisy, Chesterton didn't sew his clothes, make his boots, brew his beer or grow his tobacco. And yet his dependence on tailor, cobbler, brewer and planter did not smack of slavery.
Maybe another road user who is endangered and inconvenienced by these vehicles. Taller vehicles block visibility. Heavier vehicles increase injuries and fatalities in crashes. Nobody was complaining about SUV's when they were owned by a small minority. The resentment has risen as they totally change the character of the roads. They are imposing costs on other road users and not compensating us.
- You are framed for the original crime. Spikes and hammer are found in your basement and a repentant eco-nut turns state's evidence against you.
- You track the treehuggers to a seedy house on the outskirts of town. One moonless night you slip through an unlocked window, your razor-sharp kukri clenched in your teeth. Unfortunately you trip over a cat and fall headlong into the stained glass representation of Gaia, the earth goddess, which someone has been making. Before you know what's what, strong hands are grasping you and you're bundled into a police car. At your bail hearing, two of the women living in the house talk about how frightened they'll be if you're let out. The judge agrees and denies you bail.
- You manage to infiltrate the local band of eco-nuts. By showing enthusiasm for the bloodiest deeds, you become a trusted member of the hard core. It turns out that the man who hammered the fatal spikes never comes to these meetings - his identity has to be protected. But by a lucky chance you discover his name and address. You slip into his house in the dead of night with a revolver. He awakes with you sitting on his chest and the muzzle in his mouth. You say, "I hope you enjoyed hammering those spikes, asshole. Now you're gonna die." He makes incoherent muttering noises and struggles vainly to force the weapon from his mouth. You squeeze the trigger, and it feels good.
The point, if any? Payback is a boy's fantasy. Many people are harmed every day by governments, guerillas, criminals. None will get payback - the aggressors are usually optimized for what they do.Next morning, you are awakened by the police banging on your door. What happened? The have a tip. A chemical test shows you have recently discharged a gun, and the gun is soon found. It turns out the person you shot is a manager at a timber company. And the eco-nut who 'accidentally' let slip that name? She also went to the police and said that (over her protests) you were plotting his execution for crimes against the earth.
OK, so you invent the luser-proof authentication scheme. Implant a crypto chip in Joe's belly and have it talk to the keyboard. Hooray! Nobody can social-engineer Joe's password, because he doesn't know it. But someone will email him an executable and tell him to run it. Or phone him and SE him into using his privs to do something he shouldn't. You are only shifting the impact of cluelessness around, not reducing it.
However I'm still not clear whether Linus wants to squelch all 'happy messages' or only author attributions. If it's the latter, I don't care.
Face it: if Sun were a software company selling Solaris, they'd be long since dead. They may have brilliant kernel hackers, but the userland feels unmaintained and obsolete.
Linux on commodity hardware offers vastly more bang for the buck than traditional Unix on high-end hardware. The only logical role for high end hardware is problems that do not lend to parallelization, such as databases. And yet Oracle is attacking this problem space via parallelization too.
There is an irrational attachment to 'big iron' which is not going to survive continued economic downturn and the increased visiblity of Linux solutions. Believe me, I know exactly the people you're talking about, and many are talented sysadmins. But they are a little isolated from the outside world - they still speak in terms of 'PC vs Unix' and merge the shortcomings of Windows with the shortcomings of the PC platform in their discussion.
I mostly agree, but I'd point out that some established art forms use numbers. Music, for instance, is mathematical at heart. And what about a sculptor welding up a big steel monstrosity? It might look like a random pile of junk to the observer, but I'll bet a tape measure and some calculations were behind it.
You're right - I just tried a subselect and Postgres executed it happily. It was something else, something quite standard, that I was thinking of: I tried $thing and Postgres knew exactly what I meant, because it said "$thing not implemented". And for some reason I thought $thing == subselects.
So I tried strings `which postgres` | grep -i implement and I think it was ORDER BY and DISTINCT on views are not implemented which seemed such an arbitrary limitation. Admittedly a lot less important than subselects.
So in the next generation of OS, Microsoft will do what best furthers their strategic interests. They have no need to balance this against market requirements, because realistically their customers have no choice. They will grumble about the loss of control over their data, etc, and pay through the nose for the same.
Free things will nibble the edges of the market while MS dominates the center.
You're right. And those of us who played with, and were burned by, the immature Postgres have a permanently bad impression of it. I tried Postgres before MySQL because the license was more free. (A few years back). I found it slow and buggy. I also found that nearly everyone was using MySQL in the real world, so I got over the license and started using it. And loved it - it's a polished and really functional product, within its admittedly limited domain.
I played with Postgres again recently, and realized that because it (proudly) supports transactions and integrity constraints, I expect it to support a reasonable subset of SQL92. And yet, no subselects. And other annoying omissions I've forgotten.
Anyhow, what I want is a free Oracle-like database. I'm not sure how to even measure when Postgres gets there (although subselects are a necessity!) given the difficulty of benchmarking databases. Some say adabas is comparable to (pre 8i) Oracle. If so, I hope it catches on. To use it now would be to walk out on a very thin limb - I like the fact that all my Oracle and MySQL questions have been asked and answered on usenet.
Glad that's over. When I first noticed the outage, I thought it'd be brief. When it continued, I had a sinking feeling and started to consider the entities that would like to shut down slashdot legally.
It was like a mystery story that begins with the death of a controversial man. Everyone had a motive, from Microsoft to the MPAA to the Scientologists.
I had a surge of unhappiness at the thought that if Slashdot were really the victim of legal asault, we probably wouldn't learn the truth for a long time. VA's attorney would have told the employees not to comment. The whole community revolving around this site really counts for less to the legal system than some shopkeeper's (in the last analysis) claim of malicious interference with his tomatoes.
It made me think of the moment in The Hacker Crackdown when AT&T pulled the plug on a machine hosting an online community.
I tried reading kuro5hin. Everything is more reasoned, grammatical, lucid, correclty spelled -- and yet strangely lacking vitality. It was like walking through a clean and quiet museum, with 'do not touch' signs everywhere. There were no street urchins chalking obscene sketches on the marble walls. Maybe I'm a denizen of the lower depths of the internet and not suited to such musem atomspheres. Slashdot is like a real city, complete with beggars and drug addicts, while kuro5hin is perhaps like a mall.
Skepticism is always warranted, but I don't find Anne's lack of an account very surprising. First, she claims to be a contractor, not an employee. Second, the Cisco router folks I've known are culturally a bit different from sysadmins, and less likely to be interested in things like /. /., however indirectly, must be a fan of the site. In general, technical professionals are not fans of the things they work on for a living.
I've worked on several web applications which have user accounts. I don't think I have an account on any of them. Obviously I created lots of accounts during testing, but if they're still active I don't remember them. I didn't sign up because they didn't personally interest me. (or because it costs money or is otherwise restricted).
You seem to think that anyone working on
And yet apparently the local phone system worked, (if people are bitching you out on the phone) despite the weather. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
You dismiss Young's claims of government intervention in the software market. Let's remember the most fundamental intervention: the invention of 'intellectual property' rights. These are a non-obvious construct and their application to software is also non-obvious and was disputed at the time. Selling identical copies of a string of bits is not a viable business model unless the government uses coercion to protect your monopoly.
And I disagree that commercial software offers superior reliability. I will grant performance as a theoretical point - commercial vendors have the resources to optimize things - but not as a real issue. For example, IIS is faster than Apache, but in reality a very slow site is usually powered by IIS. Unix and related software contain many decisions that elevated flexibility and elegance over raw speed. It turns out that in practice, flexible, elegant software lends itself to fast systems.
You seem to be thinking in terms of the individual developer, midway between Microsoft and GPL worlds, who might be repulsed by Microsoft revoking his license, thus pushing him into the GPL camp. However, I'm thinking of a corporate environment where Microsoft is the official standard but GPL stuff has seeped in all over the place. Management doesn't care once they realize it's not shareware and they have no obligations. However a license like this could make management care.
That said, I agree with the beta nature of the license.
Free Software has already brought huge productivity benefits to this (majority) sector of programmers. We don't have to reinvent the wheel.
In this respect we are like medical doctors, who all benefit from combined medical knowledge. Sure there might be a doctor here or there that makes money by withholding medical knowledge and charging for it (the shrinkware approach) but generally they make money by applying their diagnostic and curative expertise.
I notice that the smokers you hung out with seem to have a pretty high opinion of themselves. Perhaps it's justified. Perhaps, though, it's a function of being a big fish in a small pond. People who work in the Unix/Web/Database world become humble because we move from shop to shop and see gifted individuals of different stripes. Also I think we are more attuned to the Internet, which has enough smart people to provide some perspective on one's own accomplishments.
I make this guess because the Microsoft coders I've met (not MS employees, just users) seem to have this parochial and boastful attitude.
I think you're right, and the authors of the license didn't realize how it could apply to text editors, etc. But as for it not being workable or enforceable, it could be powerful tool if used right. Microsoft audits their customers to see if they have unlicensed copies of Microsoft software. They could add to the audits a check for GPL software. If GPL software is found on the same machine as this SDK, it could be viewed as presumptive proof that the license has been violated. Not good enough for court, perhaps, but these negotiations never go to court. ... I better make sure."
Thus the friendly Microsoft rep tells the IT department, "When we're auditing you next month, make sure you get rid of any GPL stuff, because we have to count that as a license violation." And the IT guy says, "We're not using any GPL stuff. Oh wait
So Free Software, which has been quietly seeping into large organizations, becomes a problem on IT's radar.
OSS techs: What problems have you encountered when using open source?
Microsoft: I tried to compile this program and got a bunch of error messages. Someone told me to edit the Makefile, but I can't figure out what application produced that file as there's no filename extension. I tried notepad in case it was plain text but it's full of formatting codes or something.
OSS techs: What else?
Microsoft: I double-clicked on the README and instead of opening it just turned reverse video. What's the use of that?
OSS techs: Sounds pretty bad. Anything else?
Microsoft: I wanted to change my password so I edited the password file and when I tried to save it it said "Permission Denied". What the hell? This is my computer; I should be able to change anything I want! Who the hell is Richard Stallman to limit what files I edit or how I reuse his code in commercial apps?
The complaint about the 'viral' or 'Pac-Man-like' nature of the GPL makes me ask, "isn't Microsoft's license viral?" If I use a piece of Microsoft's code in my own, does Microsoft accept my right to "use any of that work or build on any of that work"?
You're right. The page provides adequate information. I realize now that for some reason (failure to be a bright boy?) my eye has always skipped over the block of text you quoted. Usually I'm using Lynx, and the first two screenfulls or so are meaningless noise. I'm afraid the speed with which I skipped that noise has carried me past the meat of the page.
However, I still don't like SF, and still think the pages are less effective than average open source pages.
And your comment on the lameness filter and suitable uses for the editors' time is apt. I have on occasion spent an hour on a carefully crafted post to explain some abstruse topic, only to be prevented from posting it by the lameness filter.