Well the arguments of the petitioners do not seem to be well prepared. However O'Connor is deeply wrong on making its starting argument on the fact that there were several extensions to the law. This can be seen on the History of Russian Law. While Russian and Anglo-Saxon judicial systems deeply differ in practices, on cases concerning the Constitution they are amazingly similar. The case is that if some law can be unconstitutional, but the law remains in force until someone questions it.
Frankly, there is something funny with Russian Constitution. The first one was created in 1918. It was a little clumsy and had several gaps but it was an historical difference between Imperial Russia and the new Russian state. Then came Soviet Union, its more reworked Constitution and finally the Stalin Constitution of 1936. It is a paradox but sincerly a fact - Stalin made the most perfect and complete Constitution of his time. Besides this corp of Law was so well elaborated that, for many years, it was taken as an example of how constitutions should be done.
However we all know Stalin as one of the biggest tyrants of History. Why? Because under the Constitution there were no laws supporting it. Stalin's Constitution was factually void because there was not a mechanism to check laws against it. The situation was so silly that, when Brezhnev changed the constitution, it did it by violating the old constitution and creating some piece of crap that some called American Constitution of the USSR (no offense people, but your Constitution is not useful for no one but you). Meanwhile, even this Propaganda Constitution was nearly void of action. Until 1993, Russian Constitutions were just pieces of paper. But in 1993, the Constitutional Court was formed and then many people started to give questions. And then, we started to see some cases very similar to O'Conner's arguments.
There were and still are laws that come from Soviet times. These laws were created, accepted, revised and changed many times. Some of these laws have more than 30 years life. Some of these laws are considered to be violating the Constitution. And you know what chaos is created? State organs that lived for tens of years under these laws, suddenly realize that they were violating the law and they should do things totally another way. So, sometimes we hear arguments that this law was here for so many years, everyone lived well with them and that there is no reason to change it. However the Constitutional Court is a final instance and no matter the pressure, it takes some rough resolutions.
Why I took this example? Well, for some, an outside view may make a new view to the situation. Also, I'm trying to show the possible consequences of what will happen if the system of constitutional control becomes void. Maybe the US will not have its Stalin, but something worse may happen.
Porbably the law has been broken since that nefarious year of 1790. It is possible that even the first Copyright law was voted with some violation of the Constitution. Maybe it was violated on one of these extensions. So, it is rather problematic for O'Connor to claim precedence of Law under this case. The Constitution is the Law that cannot accept precedence of any kind. A law either is constitutional or unconstitutional, no matter the acceptance, the revisions or the traditions (btw that's a position Russian Court clearly took on one matter). Frankly, that's an ideal that goes above nations and traditions, and that's the fundament for the existence of a Constitution. A Constitution can only term times in relation to itself, all other laws should go in accordance with constitutional terms no matter their lifetime, traditions or revisions. That's what some people call the dictatorship of the Fundamental Law. If it is turned void then other tiranny may substitute it.
Constitution is not the same body of law as the anglo-saxon traditional jurisprudence. If O'Connor will play with this, then either he will be burned to the stake or there will be many questions about the effectivness of the American Constitution.
The Demo scene had always beat the usual coders. Not long ago we had a national festival with guys coming all over from Russia. Some demos, mainly Amiga and Spectrum, were impressive. Some 3D effects were shown on machines that lack any types of acceleration. And these things ran nearly with the same speeds we frequently saw in some powerful Pentiums. Besides, the PC demo presented things shrinked to the impossible with a speed, sound, space and color effect that beated many popular games.
I wonder the speed and the effects some Doom III would have if it was written mainly in Asm...
Well this reminds me the golden days of DOS (not Denial Of Service but Disk Operating System... well, anyway it didn't made a difference). Back then people fought for every bit of code. And assembler was as popular as C or Pascal.
However, using assembler this way is not the most optimal resource. Frankly this piece of code is only useful if you need some real tiny program and you are running out of space and speed. But, today, 99.99...% of tasks don't need it. The optimal way to use such tricks is to concentrate in tasks that really need "the best and fastest code ever". These are drivers and situations where speed's price costs gold. Usually this is done by injecting the necessary asm directives into C or any other language. Writing everything in pure Assembler is unpractical and the result may become harder to understand than the Rosetta Stone.
However the article is making a point - how unoptimised are the present compilers. For example, GCC is mostly C in C. It makes it highly portable, but, if anyone decided to repeat Turbo Pascal feat (most of its base code was Assembler), I know that binary code would shrink to the impossible. Right now we may not be feeling this drawback as bloatness still doesn't clog everything. In the future this situation may change if speed and reliability turn to higher priorities.
Some note for the bloat FUDders: This is not a reason for Linux distros being bloat. First learn to be rational on your needs and don't install everything in one box. Second, learn a little bit of administration, maybe some programming and kick that (mega_kernel) + (some_highly_featured_libs) + (several_unuseful_apps) out of your box. Then you will know that Linux can help fry eggs on your processor with lightning speed. Till then, keep the flame for yourself and read "Why I switched from Mac to Windows".
Europe never went the same way as some other countries. Even the huge backslash in Russia is nothing compared to what happened in some other places. The blistering fury, which blowed while Eastern block tried to reach its Western brothers/cousins, was mainly due to the fact that they were not so backward as it seems. Frankly, in the first years after Perestroika, things changed so fast that people joked that in this mood we "will reach and overcome America in its own remedy - Capitalism" (this didn't happen but that's another story). Besides, Europe was always crazy about technowars and the main problem was that a good part of it went once again in the technowar run after having a good dose of it in WWII. Europeans are very much alike and that's a reason why they don't love each other. But that's also the reaons why they can understand each other faster than anyone else.
However Korea is something completely different. They were for long under the grip of Imperial Japan. They suffered two of the most bloody wars of the 20th Century. One of them nearly turned the whole world again into war. Besides, Korea was not top in Science neither Technology. When South started its Long March it had a population in misery, ruled by one of the most bloody dictatorships and suffered several drawbacks from it. Its economy suffered from several problems and it had frequently serious inflationary hickes. It also as an endemic social/political conflict that frequently rises to clashes. Its politicians are also known to be severly corrupted and fall frequently into scandals.
However it is a fact that Korea is one of today's economic world powers, sometimes it even overshadows its past colonist, Japan. And its technological progress is on the top among many countries. Not many countries managed to reach such level. So I take the hat to these guys.
Uuuu. Just a note near-offtopic but which I think it deserves attention. "C and "K", in many European languages, have nearly the same intonations. For Spanish, Portuguese and French the correct name is Corea. At least for Russians is "Koreya". Germans seem to use the term Korea. English don't make a big difference between "C" and "K" but they seem to highly prefer to use "K" in names.
The correct name for Japan is Nippon and it seems that this is the way Japanese name its country. Besides Koreans and Japanese have completely different alphabets and intonations from us, Eurasians. So I don't get the reason why Japanese would be so pecky with one letter. I know that Japan and Korea have lots of problems between each other. However this story seems to have a reason completely different from what you state. The first europeans to reach East Asia were the Portuguese. So they named it Corea. But that was nearly 450 years ago and a lot of water went on since then. Today English is the main language in the world and Russian had lots to do with Korea (the Russian "C" is latin "S" btw). So I wouldn't be admired to see that this was the reason for the shift.
There is some strange paradox here. Korea in fact is two Koreas. They started just in the same line and nearly with the same problems but today they seem to make a difference like Earth and Moon. We have the North with its rich resources but backward economy, its hunt for nukes, militarisation and lack of Internet (probably with exception of some bureaucrates). And we have the South that was considered to be more poor in resources, but which, in the end, is becoming the top technocratic country in the world. Yes, the South was also highly militarised and had nukes from the US. But the same went for the North with USSR.
I just wonder what will happen when someone will try a real reunification. What will happen when a North, which still cannot give up its dependency on someone else, with an economy in shambles and one of the biggest armies in the world meets a South which a big part of the world depends on, an economy that gives envy to anyone and carrying a more pacifist mood than ever?
North - What do you mean by "using Internet"? South - What do you mean by "not using Internet"?
The term robot came from RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. It was a play very popular in the beginning of the 20th Century created by Czech writer Karel Capek. In the majority, if not all, slavic languages, the term "robota", "rabota" means either "work" or "job". Many consider that Capek was meaning exactly this. However his play goes about machines that are factually slaves and which rise up against their tyranic human masters. So many people consider that robot is an evolution of the word "rab" - "slave".
Which one is the true meaning is hard to know. Capek was highly influenced by the turmoil of his time and his ideas were clearly pro-communist. Some may shudder at this, but I highly recomend to read his works before thinking. I only read a few excerpts from RUR. So I can only consider its quality for the popularity it had then. However, his "War with the Newts" ("War of the Salamanders" in some languages) is one of the best pieces of SF I ever read.
Well I am probably on my 6th Mandrake 9 install, 3 of them fresh from start. I used mouse, no mouse and text only. Yes, Mandrake has serious drawbacks on its install procedures, some of them quite stupid, ex. I had one machine where I had to force a fresh install because the install script had a bug related to listing RAID devices.
However...
I don't get why this guy had pains on installing XFS on root. Well, either Matrix is having me in full force or I have installed XFS on root in all machines. One of them starts from SCSI, one starts from plain dumb IDE and others have UDMA-66 and UDMA-100.
Besides, his troubles with mice seems that he is a cat that doesn't try hard. All wheel mice have a problem with Mandrake. When one starts rolling the wheel, the cursor goes crazy (even with MS wheeled mouse). However a few runs up and down and the thing comes back to normal in most mice. This problem is endemic to Mandrake, it was there since they started this wheel test. So, I suspect that this guy made his first install in his life...
Frankly this critic looks much like FUD to me. Yes, Mandrake has problems and this guy seems to have restricted his look only to them. However, he seems to have forgotten that the new Mandrake has some great things like enhanced security, a more wheighted level of apps, OpenOffice from start and several more things.
Was it Windows 95 that ended the diversity? Or had Office been the de facto before that?
Both destroyed diversity. Windows95 was the cheap system for dummies, but it carried lots of incompatibilities and conflicts. Some were created by dodo developers at Redmond, others were the result of a smart and well-weighed campaign, where M$ exploited the difficulties people had on adapting products to the new OS. In a few monthes this nearly wiped out every concurrent from the market.
One of the main loosers in this fight was exactly the WordPerfect suite. Back then it belonged to Novell and they were poised to make a serious concurrence against M$. But it is curious that everything Novell went nuts when Windows95 came. Their Netware network client was unstable in every detail, it took nearly an year to see a stable version. Quattro Pro, a very powerful and popular spreadsheet, which was much better and more stable than Excel on Windows 3.1, couldn't work on Win95. And while I didn't like too much of WordPerfect, the thing suffered the same ills as Quattro. And Paradox, the equivalent of Access, a very popular veteran among databases, died in unglory, due to the fact it never returned the stability of the old days.
There were also several tools like QEMM and SuperStack that died in similar ways. Some of this was due to the fact that we were enteringthe true world of MBs of RAM. But many of these systems died because of the crapyness of Win95
The real truth about Linux
on
The End Of Minix?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The statements about the death of Minix are out of the line. Minix is dead, dead from the very start. It is not a OS in the same way other OSes are and never was supposed to be such way. Minix is the crash dummy, the body of the anatomic room, the prototype A. Tanenbaum was not trying to make a real OS but a tool for students to learn how to create operating systems. And he kept this OS in such way.
However, there was this guy that came from the Northern cold, played a little with the cadaver and thought he could even overwhelm Frankenstein. For a few starry nights, he chunked, cutted, ripped Minix body into pieces to rejoin them into a new more perfect body, something that today reminds to some people a cute penguin...
That is probably one of the reasons for the harsh reaction of Tanenbaum on seeing the new monster and realizing that "it's alive". Well, Frankenstein was made from mortified human pieces, while Minix was dead from start and should have stayed in that status for long. So we may understand his shock seeing a living Linux.
Well this is half-humour half-stupidity but I tried to give another view of the story, in a more dummy way. Minix is a great system but, it was never intended to become another OS in the market. It is interesting that it gave birth to such an OS, but it never was in a position to concur with it. Minix and Linux have had always different purposes. The fact that it is being buried down, is not a problem on Minix but on the system. If one looks well around, he may see that the bottom line of development is dying. For the last years, there's been a fall on the creation and development of software infrastructure like OSes. So, this is not a sweet thing to see. It is a worrying signal that we may see some downgrade on specialists for the near future.
Well the theme is quite interesting but the story is, as usual relatively superficial, I don't get up what level of investigation they reached. So I fear that soon the Mass Media will start publishing such stories:
Eggheads can be knock down only with a hammer... Shaking melonheads as a new form of anesthesy... Lemonheads give always a twisted smile after receiving the approporiate dose of anesthesic...
Is it only me or did this M$ LumberJack(TM) go off one more of these deared and strange effects that/. causes on certain sites? I can't see it at all...
That's good. that's just greeeeeaaaat! And how about secret information hidden in Excel files, but which was supposed to be deleted? And how about one Word file that carried data from every computer the damn document passed through? And how about all those GUIDs and other IDs that end in M$ Office documents? And why some Word files manage to carry spurious information from deleted data? And, for God's sake I saw several times how certain Windows machines (and NOT ONLY the ill-famed Win98) send small little packets to one address that occurs to belong to M$?
Who fails to respect the intelligence of their customers?
Soooooooo, is this the company that promises us a full-fletched Terminator 1001B termed "Palladin" to protect our privacy and safeguard our security? Is this that same company that recently promised to solve privacy concerns for its bullet-holed Passport in front of the Government? Is this that same company that cries foul of seeing holes, bugs, trojans roaming all its platforms and claims there should be some order on publishing such things on Inet? It seems so...
Only M$ could publish an article signed by an anonymous writer. And show who she is in front of hundreds of millions of Internet users...
That's a lot of privacy... I like it! How long it will take to see M$ MUD - Where BG went today?
Well, here Lego Mindstorms story is not being clearly covered...
When Mindstorms came, Lego was only willing to deliver a little more complex toy for older kids (~12 years old). In their minds, this was just an extension of Technics, nothing else. But then it came the surprise. Some crazy hackers broke into the robot and realized that it had a relatively powerful chip inside. And some realized that this chip was in accordance to some MIT basic theories on Robotronics. And that made a boom of all kinds, even US Air Force had one guy porting Ada to Mindstorms.
Meanwhile sales were not looking so good. As far as stories go, Lego planned to make a small launch of 10000 units and forget the matter. At that time they saw what hackers were doing and started the get mad. Back then there were a few articles with disgruntled managers claiming that hackers were hurting Lego by violating its property rights. There were even some voices that hinted about Lego preparing a run to courts. However, this mood suddenly stopped. Why? Because Mindstorms sales hicked. And Lego came to create three robot versions and sell some 100000 units.
Frankly, as I could see over one shop nearby, it was not 12 year-old kids that helped Lego in this. It were hackers. The clerks told me that they tried hard to sell two units, but, not even the big daddy with golden rings and buckstuffed pockets was willing to buy such a toy for his kid. Absolutely no one was interested on it, except two weird guys. One was some middle-aged guy from some institute, the other was me who is also not a teenager. Interesting to note that my box was gaining dust on the shop for some 6 monthes before I bought it.
The robot is some marvel. You may think it is crazy to play such a thing, that an adult should have much more important things to do. Wrong. Try to run over the deep bottom of programming a $200 robot and you may realize that there are a few things that make you look as a teenager in front of his first Z80, typing its first BASIC program. There are a few things on robots, which are outside the scope of your usual programming skills. Before you try, programming Mindstorms may look simple and stupid. But, when you see the robot going nuts or breaking his leg, you realize that you still have something to learn.
Presently, Lego is still fighting with that brief lack of vision, however, its support over the hacker community has been slowly rising. It were all those big kiddies, some with little kids who barely understand why daddy/uncle also plays Lego, that made the Robot a success.
Partially, I could agree with you on this. This ad is to stupid for the majority of us here. But we all have to remember that we are a little more experienced than the rest of the crowd. I know lots of people who would fell like flies into this gluepaper. Who? Secretaries, models, office clerks with daddy or uncle in a president chair and even housewifes. Just pick up some Cosmopolitan an try to read it. Doesn't this look the same? It the same manners, the same tone and the those same "intime" counsels.
And how about TV ads? I don't know presently what commercials go in the US, but in Europe we have this crap of showing shirts "before" and "after". They lock them in safes, call testimonies, wash the thing in front of the camera. However, everyone can perfectly see that they use new clothes in the end. Sometimes, they don't even care to check if the shirt is of the same fabric. And who sells this piece of crap? Two major corporations of Europe. And you know? Some people do believe that "Shushy-Muffy-Puffy" cleans all stains...
Importing Messages. I upgraded to Outlook when I installed Office XP. I chose Yes when Outlook asked whether I wanted to import messages from Outlook Express. Later, I had to uninstall and reinstall Outlook, but all was not lost.
Hmmm. In the way she writes her excitement on using this piece of crap, it looks she is another outlooker that says yes, Yes, YES to every Klez juicy flavour and every LOVE YOU letter... Probably the new, fresh and exciting BugBears will make her dreams sweet... I imagine the ride of joy she'll have when some Barby/Trojan will salute her in one more of these exciting [censured] M$ gifts...
Well, while people were discussing here about security, in one of my works a Linux box was just hacked. Frankly, I am an anti-Windows. And please note that I been more than 15 years in touch with this OS (since the first beta). So my anti-Windows feelings are deeply rooted in inside my experience. It will be hard to change someone who dig up in several Windows, looked to tons of code and worked in more than 15 jobs... Besides I have a relative who managed to see who's BG from inside, so I have no sympathy for that guy.
However I had and have no doubts about the security of Linux. Because I know its level of security, I know it is much better than Windows and I know that if an admin takes care of its boxes, then Linux is much more secure. But not inpenetrable. People do hack it (I hacked it very frequently btw) and hack it deadly. And the worst is that a hacked Linux box can be 10 times deadlier to your network than a silly Windows machine. That's a trouble Linux has - it is too powerful for both sides. Besides it is even more powerful when you go into combat. Fighting someone installing rootkits and changing every piece of soft in your machine is something. It is spectacle that no Holywood director can be able to describe. It also can be timeconsuming, depressive and boredom like the hack I'm fighting now.
To work on Linux one should take care of a few things: Absolutisms and maxima are dangerous here. If you came to see the gun then learn to shoot or someone shoots you. Forget all those books and "Hackers", enter the Matrix religion and learn from your experience. And most: If you can't stand up maybe you should choose something else, but don't go flaming because you feel not smart enough. It makes you look like a jerk.
1. The problem is that his license agreement goes much far than just restricting competitors... Read the license, carefully, please...
2. I call all his statements arrogant... and I am not a member of the thought police. It is my frank position. I know I am not a natural born brittish, american, martian or whatever (probably, I am just an alien among aliens >:) ). But I can still divide arrogance from eloquence coming from my english-speaking neighbors.
3. Well that's the problem - "if you don't follow our rules". What rules? This foggy license carrying several super-restrictive statements? Have you read it? I did.
And btw, I don't use BK and not intend to use it. And, really, I don't care about its use, superiorities and drawbacks. But I don't want to see someone binding this license to me just because I use Linux. And that's what many people see rising over the horizon.
About tact. While RMS loves to fume, BK should have been more kind from the very start. They are not alone in the Universe and the Sun doesn't turn around the Versioning System.
This is not FUD and it is not panic. It's a problem and a serious one.
The fact that RMS is frequently one-sided is a fact and I agree with partially with you on the case of single criteria. However you should note that a larger part of the people here is worried not about this but on the fact that someone is being more papist than the Pope. And it's not RMS but BitKeeper. These license policies may lead to the fact that, in one point of time, BK may hinder a lot the development of Linux. Note that Linux is not ONE product for ONE objective on ONE SINGLE environment. Inside of it, along with it and beyond it there are TONS of programs, applications, drivers and other stuff which depend on Linux and which Linux depends of. To understand how BK may hinder this, try to get a deeper look at their license.
This is a license directly against best value. It is a binding that forces people into conditions where they may be unable to find that same best value. The license is even anti-commercial as it forbids people to sell third-products, that may have nothing to do with BK, except some similarity on functionality. No matter the qualities of BK, such term is enough to put it more dangerous than M$.
If BK is sincere on being a good company, willing to receive a direct reward, they should choose three ways - turn the license into a genuine commercial license, make a license in terms near to BSD,or separate it into components with different licensings. Probably this would hinder kernel developers, but there is a problem on playing with half-agreements, not seeing dropped nets, accepting broad middle-terms and forgetting about consequences. In one way or the other this may one day turn into the bad corner. Much like M$ did since its advent, let's not forget that 10 years ago BG was Luke against the Empire. Frankly I would not like to see Torvalds being compared to Dart Vader...
First load of lumber: GNU is not nazi and it is not merely a vocal minority. If you consider GNU just a minority you are simply wrong because more than 99% of Linux soft is made on GNU stuff. If you consider that there are some fanatics in GNU, nazis as you name, they are more leftists rather than nazis and it is an offense to name them like this. And they have a right to voice because they are the founders of all things GNU, no matter the rant. And it is good to hear some voice from the Founding Fathers, to help us remind that all this didn't come from nowhere and there are reasons for things being what they are.
Second load of lumber: GNU/Linux is frankly a stupid name. But the ideology not. And the ideology states a very important thing - free software is a share of ideas among equals. Yes, we don't live in a perfect world but software is also not a perfect thing. Software is a mean term between Science, Technology and Human Thought. To develop, it needs to be shared. GNU tries to show one of the most optimal ways of sharing it. It is hard to be universally accepted, but is is the main engine that moves the whole machine Linux is now.
Third load of lumber: Bitkeeper may do what kernel devlopers want. Cool be this way. So why they didn't start Linux on some Borland C or Visual C++? The GNU/GPL/OSS ideals are not only a problem of technicities but also of ideology. And these ideals mean freedom of use, development or choice. And that's why people fit things to open source and not the other way around. The other way around would be furninshing a bunch of owners a cheap working force.
Yeah, some cool explanation but you fail on some things:
Don't teach me latin. I know much better than you because the word Cesar said is the same used by my people today.
Cesar is a deviation of the name Caeser. Cesar, Cesaro, Cesario and so on... Yes, it is a deviation, but it is a deviation commonly accepted by the german-latins for a few centuries...
Learn English? Was I teaching English to anyone??? I know that my English is far from the average Englishman. But don't teach latin to someone who latin is nearly his natural born language. Specially, in a verb that for centuries remains unchanged. Upon Cesar's times, only the accent of "vici" changed a little.
And it's not "we'-nee we'-dee we'-chee" - your spelling is worse than a Barbarian...
Apart of those prohibitions stated upon laws created and accepted by a nation, state, community or organisation, no one has the right to tell anyone whom he can sell and what he can sell on the basis of a service that is not based on a common agreement of rights and duties, for which, each party shares a common profit of the service.
BitKeeper violates to the deep this principle on its license. Independently of the case of being free or for a fee, BitKeeper shall not put broad restrictions on the subsequent rights of people to use it. This would be the same as M$ demanding that through Windows, only M$ software, made by M$, can be sold. The only thing that may soft the arrogation of BitKeeper's license, is the size of the company compared to M$. If we take the sizes apart, BG looks like an angel in front of Larry.
Well I don't like RMS due to many reasons, mainly that he follows his ideas like a religious fanatic altogether with some very faint ideals on how the world should be. It reminds me those hippy, extreme left revolutionaries that raised Che to the level of a saint, considered Mao's sentences the Bible and USSR a traitor to communist ideals... Meanwhile there are many things on RMS that deserve some high respect. Here is one of them, because, RMS is absolutely right...
I may understand the reasons kernel developers point to hold up to BitKeeper. However they can't and shouldn't ignore the consequences of ignoring the legalities of their move. The fact that BitKeeper is factually an EULA much worse than M$ is something that may put into question the future of Linux. Yes, it is much worse because ethically violates some principals of market, things that were formed not yesterday but millenia ago. It is much worse because it is clearly not a commercial license but a typical feudal decree of the worst kind, in common terms: "you can't do that or do this while you are under my service". This is what is inside this license and it is so superficial that any deviation may turn it void. For some you may have had the chance to read documents from the V up to IX centuries, one may note that feudalism started this way. First they said "while", then they said "because" and later they didn't say nothing as everyone considered it natural...
And to consider things worse: Larry McVoy of BitKeeper:
"Our position: "1) No free licenses for our competition, they can buy them if they like. "2) The software is not open source because the open source business model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development costs. "3) If you had built a decent system instead of sitting around and whining, we could be doing something else instead of sitting around listening to your whining."
If we look at the reaction of BitKeeper's owner, we can see that we are really going the worst way. He is ultimative, he is arrogant, for him OSS lacks prayers. But this is not the worst. The worst is that we are a mass of apatic whinners, but he stands higher and listens to the crowd of gentiles. And he only can listen whinning, nothing else, because the brilliance and crystal sound of BitKeeper's castle blinds and deafens everything else.
This is not OSS, this is not Free Software. This is not even the M$ Empire. This is the Black Cathedral.
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Well the arguments of the petitioners do not seem to be well prepared. However O'Connor is deeply wrong on making its starting argument on the fact that there were several extensions to the law. This can be seen on the History of Russian Law. While Russian and Anglo-Saxon judicial systems deeply differ in practices, on cases concerning the Constitution they are amazingly similar. The case is that if some law can be unconstitutional, but the law remains in force until someone questions it.
Frankly, there is something funny with Russian Constitution. The first one was created in 1918. It was a little clumsy and had several gaps but it was an historical difference between Imperial Russia and the new Russian state. Then came Soviet Union, its more reworked Constitution and finally the Stalin Constitution of 1936. It is a paradox but sincerly a fact - Stalin made the most perfect and complete Constitution of his time. Besides this corp of Law was so well elaborated that, for many years, it was taken as an example of how constitutions should be done.
However we all know Stalin as one of the biggest tyrants of History. Why? Because under the Constitution there were no laws supporting it. Stalin's Constitution was factually void because there was not a mechanism to check laws against it. The situation was so silly that, when Brezhnev changed the constitution, it did it by violating the old constitution and creating some piece of crap that some called American Constitution of the USSR (no offense people, but your Constitution is not useful for no one but you). Meanwhile, even this Propaganda Constitution was nearly void of action. Until 1993, Russian Constitutions were just pieces of paper. But in 1993, the Constitutional Court was formed and then many people started to give questions. And then, we started to see some cases very similar to O'Conner's arguments.
There were and still are laws that come from Soviet times. These laws were created, accepted, revised and changed many times. Some of these laws have more than 30 years life. Some of these laws are considered to be violating the Constitution. And you know what chaos is created? State organs that lived for tens of years under these laws, suddenly realize that they were violating the law and they should do things totally another way. So, sometimes we hear arguments that this law was here for so many years, everyone lived well with them and that there is no reason to change it. However the Constitutional Court is a final instance and no matter the pressure, it takes some rough resolutions.
Why I took this example? Well, for some, an outside view may make a new view to the situation. Also, I'm trying to show the possible consequences of what will happen if the system of constitutional control becomes void. Maybe the US will not have its Stalin, but something worse may happen.
Porbably the law has been broken since that nefarious year of 1790. It is possible that even the first Copyright law was voted with some violation of the Constitution. Maybe it was violated on one of these extensions. So, it is rather problematic for O'Connor to claim precedence of Law under this case. The Constitution is the Law that cannot accept precedence of any kind. A law either is constitutional or unconstitutional, no matter the acceptance, the revisions or the traditions (btw that's a position Russian Court clearly took on one matter). Frankly, that's an ideal that goes above nations and traditions, and that's the fundament for the existence of a Constitution. A Constitution can only term times in relation to itself, all other laws should go in accordance with constitutional terms no matter their lifetime, traditions or revisions. That's what some people call the dictatorship of the Fundamental Law. If it is turned void then other tiranny may substitute it.
Constitution is not the same body of law as the anglo-saxon traditional jurisprudence. If O'Connor will play with this, then either he will be burned to the stake or there will be many questions about the effectivness of the American Constitution.
The Demo scene had always beat the usual coders. Not long ago we had a national festival with guys coming all over from Russia. Some demos, mainly Amiga and Spectrum, were impressive. Some 3D effects were shown on machines that lack any types of acceleration. And these things ran nearly with the same speeds we frequently saw in some powerful Pentiums. Besides, the PC demo presented things shrinked to the impossible with a speed, sound, space and color effect that beated many popular games.
I wonder the speed and the effects some Doom III would have if it was written mainly in Asm...
Well this reminds me the golden days of DOS (not Denial Of Service but Disk Operating System... well, anyway it didn't made a difference). Back then people fought for every bit of code. And assembler was as popular as C or Pascal.
However, using assembler this way is not the most optimal resource. Frankly this piece of code is only useful if you need some real tiny program and you are running out of space and speed. But, today, 99.99...% of tasks don't need it. The optimal way to use such tricks is to concentrate in tasks that really need "the best and fastest code ever". These are drivers and situations where speed's price costs gold. Usually this is done by injecting the necessary asm directives into C or any other language. Writing everything in pure Assembler is unpractical and the result may become harder to understand than the Rosetta Stone.
However the article is making a point - how unoptimised are the present compilers. For example, GCC is mostly C in C. It makes it highly portable, but, if anyone decided to repeat Turbo Pascal feat (most of its base code was Assembler), I know that binary code would shrink to the impossible. Right now we may not be feeling this drawback as bloatness still doesn't clog everything. In the future this situation may change if speed and reliability turn to higher priorities.
Some note for the bloat FUDders: This is not a reason for Linux distros being bloat. First learn to be rational on your needs and don't install everything in one box. Second, learn a little bit of administration, maybe some programming and kick that (mega_kernel) + (some_highly_featured_libs) + (several_unuseful_apps) out of your box. Then you will know that Linux can help fry eggs on your processor with lightning speed. Till then, keep the flame for yourself and read "Why I switched from Mac to Windows".
Europe never went the same way as some other countries. Even the huge backslash in Russia is nothing compared to what happened in some other places. The blistering fury, which blowed while Eastern block tried to reach its Western brothers/cousins, was mainly due to the fact that they were not so backward as it seems. Frankly, in the first years after Perestroika, things changed so fast that people joked that in this mood we "will reach and overcome America in its own remedy - Capitalism" (this didn't happen but that's another story). Besides, Europe was always crazy about technowars and the main problem was that a good part of it went once again in the technowar run after having a good dose of it in WWII. Europeans are very much alike and that's a reason why they don't love each other. But that's also the reaons why they can understand each other faster than anyone else.
However Korea is something completely different. They were for long under the grip of Imperial Japan. They suffered two of the most bloody wars of the 20th Century. One of them nearly turned the whole world again into war. Besides, Korea was not top in Science neither Technology. When South started its Long March it had a population in misery, ruled by one of the most bloody dictatorships and suffered several drawbacks from it. Its economy suffered from several problems and it had frequently serious inflationary hickes. It also as an endemic social/political conflict that frequently rises to clashes. Its politicians are also known to be severly corrupted and fall frequently into scandals.
However it is a fact that Korea is one of today's economic world powers, sometimes it even overshadows its past colonist, Japan. And its technological progress is on the top among many countries. Not many countries managed to reach such level. So I take the hat to these guys.
Uuuu. Just a note near-offtopic but which I think it deserves attention. "C and "K", in many European languages, have nearly the same intonations. For Spanish, Portuguese and French the correct name is Corea. At least for Russians is "Koreya". Germans seem to use the term Korea. English don't make a big difference between "C" and "K" but they seem to highly prefer to use "K" in names.
The correct name for Japan is Nippon and it seems that this is the way Japanese name its country. Besides Koreans and Japanese have completely different alphabets and intonations from us, Eurasians. So I don't get the reason why Japanese would be so pecky with one letter. I know that Japan and Korea have lots of problems between each other. However this story seems to have a reason completely different from what you state. The first europeans to reach East Asia were the Portuguese. So they named it Corea. But that was nearly 450 years ago and a lot of water went on since then. Today English is the main language in the world and Russian had lots to do with Korea (the Russian "C" is latin "S" btw). So I wouldn't be admired to see that this was the reason for the shift.
There is some strange paradox here. Korea in fact is two Koreas. They started just in the same line and nearly with the same problems but today they seem to make a difference like Earth and Moon. We have the North with its rich resources but backward economy, its hunt for nukes, militarisation and lack of Internet (probably with exception of some bureaucrates). And we have the South that was considered to be more poor in resources, but which, in the end, is becoming the top technocratic country in the world. Yes, the South was also highly militarised and had nukes from the US. But the same went for the North with USSR.
I just wonder what will happen when someone will try a real reunification. What will happen when a North, which still cannot give up its dependency on someone else, with an economy in shambles and one of the biggest armies in the world meets a South which a big part of the world depends on, an economy that gives envy to anyone and carrying a more pacifist mood than ever?
North - What do you mean by "using Internet"?
South - What do you mean by "not using Internet"?
A small add.
The term robot came from RUR - Rossum's Universal Robots. It was a play very popular in the beginning of the 20th Century created by Czech writer Karel Capek. In the majority, if not all, slavic languages, the term "robota", "rabota" means either "work" or "job". Many consider that Capek was meaning exactly this. However his play goes about machines that are factually slaves and which rise up against their tyranic human masters. So many people consider that robot is an evolution of the word "rab" - "slave".
Which one is the true meaning is hard to know. Capek was highly influenced by the turmoil of his time and his ideas were clearly pro-communist. Some may shudder at this, but I highly recomend to read his works before thinking. I only read a few excerpts from RUR. So I can only consider its quality for the popularity it had then. However, his "War with the Newts" ("War of the Salamanders" in some languages) is one of the best pieces of SF I ever read.
Well I am probably on my 6th Mandrake 9 install, 3 of them fresh from start. I used mouse, no mouse and text only. Yes, Mandrake has serious drawbacks on its install procedures, some of them quite stupid, ex. I had one machine where I had to force a fresh install because the install script had a bug related to listing RAID devices.
However...
I don't get why this guy had pains on installing XFS on root. Well, either Matrix is having me in full force or I have installed XFS on root in all machines. One of them starts from SCSI, one starts from plain dumb IDE and others have UDMA-66 and UDMA-100.
Besides, his troubles with mice seems that he is a cat that doesn't try hard. All wheel mice have a problem with Mandrake. When one starts rolling the wheel, the cursor goes crazy (even with MS wheeled mouse). However a few runs up and down and the thing comes back to normal in most mice. This problem is endemic to Mandrake, it was there since they started this wheel test. So, I suspect that this guy made his first install in his life...
Frankly this critic looks much like FUD to me. Yes, Mandrake has problems and this guy seems to have restricted his look only to them. However, he seems to have forgotten that the new Mandrake has some great things like enhanced security, a more wheighted level of apps, OpenOffice from start and several more things.
Was it Windows 95 that ended the diversity? Or had Office been the de facto before that?
Both destroyed diversity. Windows95 was the cheap system for dummies, but it carried lots of incompatibilities and conflicts. Some were created by dodo developers at Redmond, others were the result of a smart and well-weighed campaign, where M$ exploited the difficulties people had on adapting products to the new OS. In a few monthes this nearly wiped out every concurrent from the market.
One of the main loosers in this fight was exactly the WordPerfect suite. Back then it belonged to Novell and they were poised to make a serious concurrence against M$. But it is curious that everything Novell went nuts when Windows95 came. Their Netware network client was unstable in every detail, it took nearly an year to see a stable version. Quattro Pro, a very powerful and popular spreadsheet, which was much better and more stable than Excel on Windows 3.1, couldn't work on Win95. And while I didn't like too much of WordPerfect, the thing suffered the same ills as Quattro. And Paradox, the equivalent of Access, a very popular veteran among databases, died in unglory, due to the fact it never returned the stability of the old days.
There were also several tools like QEMM and SuperStack that died in similar ways. Some of this was due to the fact that we were enteringthe true world of MBs of RAM. But many of these systems died because of the crapyness of Win95
The statements about the death of Minix are out of the line. Minix is dead, dead from the very start. It is not a OS in the same way other OSes are and never was supposed to be such way. Minix is the crash dummy, the body of the anatomic room, the prototype A. Tanenbaum was not trying to make a real OS but a tool for students to learn how to create operating systems. And he kept this OS in such way.
However, there was this guy that came from the Northern cold, played a little with the cadaver and thought he could even overwhelm Frankenstein. For a few starry nights, he chunked, cutted, ripped Minix body into pieces to rejoin them into a new more perfect body, something that today reminds to some people a cute penguin...
That is probably one of the reasons for the harsh reaction of Tanenbaum on seeing the new monster and realizing that "it's alive". Well, Frankenstein was made from mortified human pieces, while Minix was dead from start and should have stayed in that status for long. So we may understand his shock seeing a living Linux.
Well this is half-humour half-stupidity but I tried to give another view of the story, in a more dummy way. Minix is a great system but, it was never intended to become another OS in the market. It is interesting that it gave birth to such an OS, but it never was in a position to concur with it. Minix and Linux have had always different purposes. The fact that it is being buried down, is not a problem on Minix but on the system. If one looks well around, he may see that the bottom line of development is dying. For the last years, there's been a fall on the creation and development of software infrastructure like OSes. So, this is not a sweet thing to see. It is a worrying signal that we may see some downgrade on specialists for the near future.
Well the theme is quite interesting but the story is, as usual relatively superficial, I don't get up what level of investigation they reached. So I fear that soon the Mass Media will start publishing such stories:
Eggheads can be knock down only with a hammer...
Shaking melonheads as a new form of anesthesy...
Lemonheads give always a twisted smile after receiving the approporiate dose of anesthesic...
Is it only me or did this M$ LumberJack(TM) go off one more of these deared and strange effects that /. causes on certain sites? I can't see it at all...
That's good. that's just greeeeeaaaat! And how about secret information hidden in Excel files, but which was supposed to be deleted? And how about one Word file that carried data from every computer the damn document passed through? And how about all those GUIDs and other IDs that end in M$ Office documents? And why some Word files manage to carry spurious information from deleted data? And, for God's sake I saw several times how certain Windows machines (and NOT ONLY the ill-famed Win98) send small little packets to one address that occurs to belong to M$?
Who fails to respect the intelligence of their customers?
Soooooooo, is this the company that promises us a full-fletched Terminator 1001B termed "Palladin" to protect our privacy and safeguard our security? Is this that same company that recently promised to solve privacy concerns for its bullet-holed Passport in front of the Government? Is this that same company that cries foul of seeing holes, bugs, trojans roaming all its platforms and claims there should be some order on publishing such things on Inet? It seems so...
Only M$ could publish an article signed by an anonymous writer. And show who she is in front of hundreds of millions of Internet users...
That's a lot of privacy... I like it! How long it will take to see M$ MUD - Where BG went today?
Well, here Lego Mindstorms story is not being clearly covered...
When Mindstorms came, Lego was only willing to deliver a little more complex toy for older kids (~12 years old). In their minds, this was just an extension of Technics, nothing else. But then it came the surprise. Some crazy hackers broke into the robot and realized that it had a relatively powerful chip inside. And some realized that this chip was in accordance to some MIT basic theories on Robotronics. And that made a boom of all kinds, even US Air Force had one guy porting Ada to Mindstorms.
Meanwhile sales were not looking so good. As far as stories go, Lego planned to make a small launch of 10000 units and forget the matter. At that time they saw what hackers were doing and started the get mad. Back then there were a few articles with disgruntled managers claiming that hackers were hurting Lego by violating its property rights. There were even some voices that hinted about Lego preparing a run to courts. However, this mood suddenly stopped. Why? Because Mindstorms sales hicked. And Lego came to create three robot versions and sell some 100000 units.
Frankly, as I could see over one shop nearby, it was not 12 year-old kids that helped Lego in this. It were hackers. The clerks told me that they tried hard to sell two units, but, not even the big daddy with golden rings and buckstuffed pockets was willing to buy such a toy for his kid. Absolutely no one was interested on it, except two weird guys. One was some middle-aged guy from some institute, the other was me who is also not a teenager. Interesting to note that my box was gaining dust on the shop for some 6 monthes before I bought it.
The robot is some marvel. You may think it is crazy to play such a thing, that an adult should have much more important things to do. Wrong. Try to run over the deep bottom of programming a $200 robot and you may realize that there are a few things that make you look as a teenager in front of his first Z80, typing its first BASIC program. There are a few things on robots, which are outside the scope of your usual programming skills. Before you try, programming Mindstorms may look simple and stupid. But, when you see the robot going nuts or breaking his leg, you realize that you still have something to learn.
Presently, Lego is still fighting with that brief lack of vision, however, its support over the hacker community has been slowly rising. It were all those big kiddies, some with little kids who barely understand why daddy/uncle also plays Lego, that made the Robot a success.
Partially, I could agree with you on this. This ad is to stupid for the majority of us here. But we all have to remember that we are a little more experienced than the rest of the crowd. I know lots of people who would fell like flies into this gluepaper. Who? Secretaries, models, office clerks with daddy or uncle in a president chair and even housewifes. Just pick up some Cosmopolitan an try to read it. Doesn't this look the same? It the same manners, the same tone and the those same "intime" counsels.
And how about TV ads? I don't know presently what commercials go in the US, but in Europe we have this crap of showing shirts "before" and "after". They lock them in safes, call testimonies, wash the thing in front of the camera. However, everyone can perfectly see that they use new clothes in the end. Sometimes, they don't even care to check if the shirt is of the same fabric. And who sells this piece of crap? Two major corporations of Europe. And you know? Some people do believe that "Shushy-Muffy-Puffy" cleans all stains...
Importing Messages. I upgraded to Outlook when I installed Office XP. I chose Yes when Outlook asked whether I wanted to import messages from Outlook Express. Later, I had to uninstall and reinstall Outlook, but all was not lost.
Hmmm. In the way she writes her excitement on using this piece of crap, it looks she is another outlooker that says yes, Yes, YES to every Klez juicy flavour and every LOVE YOU letter... Probably the new, fresh and exciting BugBears will make her dreams sweet... I imagine the ride of joy she'll have when some Barby/Trojan will salute her in one more of these exciting [censured] M$ gifts...
Well, while people were discussing here about security, in one of my works a Linux box was just hacked. Frankly, I am an anti-Windows. And please note that I been more than 15 years in touch with this OS (since the first beta). So my anti-Windows feelings are deeply rooted in inside my experience. It will be hard to change someone who dig up in several Windows, looked to tons of code and worked in more than 15 jobs... Besides I have a relative who managed to see who's BG from inside, so I have no sympathy for that guy.
However I had and have no doubts about the security of Linux. Because I know its level of security, I know it is much better than Windows and I know that if an admin takes care of its boxes, then Linux is much more secure. But not inpenetrable. People do hack it (I hacked it very frequently btw) and hack it deadly. And the worst is that a hacked Linux box can be 10 times deadlier to your network than a silly Windows machine. That's a trouble Linux has - it is too powerful for both sides. Besides it is even more powerful when you go into combat. Fighting someone installing rootkits and changing every piece of soft in your machine is something. It is spectacle that no Holywood director can be able to describe. It also can be timeconsuming, depressive and boredom like the hack I'm fighting now.
To work on Linux one should take care of a few things: Absolutisms and maxima are dangerous here. If you came to see the gun then learn to shoot or someone shoots you. Forget all those books and "Hackers", enter the Matrix religion and learn from your experience. And most: If you can't stand up maybe you should choose something else, but don't go flaming because you feel not smart enough. It makes you look like a jerk.
1. The problem is that his license agreement goes much far than just restricting competitors... Read the license, carefully, please...
2. I call all his statements arrogant... and I am not a member of the thought police. It is my frank position. I know I am not a natural born brittish, american, martian or whatever (probably, I am just an alien among aliens >:) ). But I can still divide arrogance from eloquence coming from my english-speaking neighbors.
3. Well that's the problem - "if you don't follow our rules". What rules? This foggy license carrying several super-restrictive statements? Have you read it? I did.
And btw, I don't use BK and not intend to use it. And, really, I don't care about its use, superiorities and drawbacks. But I don't want to see someone binding this license to me just because I use Linux. And that's what many people see rising over the horizon.
About tact. While RMS loves to fume, BK should have been more kind from the very start. They are not alone in the Universe and the Sun doesn't turn around the Versioning System.
This is not FUD and it is not panic. It's a problem and a serious one.
The fact that RMS is frequently one-sided is a fact and I agree with partially with you on the case of single criteria. However you should note that a larger part of the people here is worried not about this but on the fact that someone is being more papist than the Pope. And it's not RMS but BitKeeper. These license policies may lead to the fact that, in one point of time, BK may hinder a lot the development of Linux. Note that Linux is not ONE product for ONE objective on ONE SINGLE environment. Inside of it, along with it and beyond it there are TONS of programs, applications, drivers and other stuff which depend on Linux and which Linux depends of. To understand how BK may hinder this, try to get a deeper look at their license.
This is a license directly against best value. It is a binding that forces people into conditions where they may be unable to find that same best value. The license is even anti-commercial as it forbids people to sell third-products, that may have nothing to do with BK, except some similarity on functionality. No matter the qualities of BK, such term is enough to put it more dangerous than M$.
If BK is sincere on being a good company, willing to receive a direct reward, they should choose three ways - turn the license into a genuine commercial license, make a license in terms near to BSD,or separate it into components with different licensings. Probably this would hinder kernel developers, but there is a problem on playing with half-agreements, not seeing dropped nets, accepting broad middle-terms and forgetting about consequences. In one way or the other this may one day turn into the bad corner. Much like M$ did since its advent, let's not forget that 10 years ago BG was Luke against the Empire. Frankly I would not like to see Torvalds being compared to Dart Vader...
Ok, burning you to the stake...
First load of lumber: GNU is not nazi and it is not merely a vocal minority. If you consider GNU just a minority you are simply wrong because more than 99% of Linux soft is made on GNU stuff. If you consider that there are some fanatics in GNU, nazis as you name, they are more leftists rather than nazis and it is an offense to name them like this. And they have a right to voice because they are the founders of all things GNU, no matter the rant. And it is good to hear some voice from the Founding Fathers, to help us remind that all this didn't come from nowhere and there are reasons for things being what they are.
Second load of lumber: GNU/Linux is frankly a stupid name. But the ideology not. And the ideology states a very important thing - free software is a share of ideas among equals. Yes, we don't live in a perfect world but software is also not a perfect thing. Software is a mean term between Science, Technology and Human Thought. To develop, it needs to be shared. GNU tries to show one of the most optimal ways of sharing it. It is hard to be universally accepted, but is is the main engine that moves the whole machine Linux is now.
Third load of lumber: Bitkeeper may do what kernel devlopers want. Cool be this way. So why they didn't start Linux on some Borland C or Visual C++? The GNU/GPL/OSS ideals are not only a problem of technicities but also of ideology. And these ideals mean freedom of use, development or choice. And that's why people fit things to open source and not the other way around. The other way around would be furninshing a bunch of owners a cheap working force.
Well, were I put the matches?
And besides you got me so mad that I'll state this in a more familiar language for me:
Julio Cesar disse:
Vim, vi e venci
Se tu nao sabes nada de latim e melhor nao dizeres nada.
Yeah, some cool explanation but you fail on some things:
Don't teach me latin. I know much better than you because the word Cesar said is the same used by my people today.
Cesar is a deviation of the name Caeser. Cesar, Cesaro, Cesario and so on... Yes, it is a deviation, but it is a deviation commonly accepted by the german-latins for a few centuries...
Learn English? Was I teaching English to anyone??? I know that my English is far from the average Englishman. But don't teach latin to someone who latin is nearly his natural born language. Specially, in a verb that for centuries remains unchanged. Upon Cesar's times, only the accent of "vici" changed a little.
And it's not "we'-nee we'-dee we'-chee" - your spelling is worse than a Barbarian...
Apart of those prohibitions stated upon laws created and accepted by a nation, state, community or organisation, no one has the right to tell anyone whom he can sell and what he can sell on the basis of a service that is not based on a common agreement of rights and duties, for which, each party shares a common profit of the service.
BitKeeper violates to the deep this principle on its license. Independently of the case of being free or for a fee, BitKeeper shall not put broad restrictions on the subsequent rights of people to use it. This would be the same as M$ demanding that through Windows, only M$ software, made by M$, can be sold. The only thing that may soft the arrogation of BitKeeper's license, is the size of the company compared to M$. If we take the sizes apart, BG looks like an angel in front of Larry.
Well I don't like RMS due to many reasons, mainly that he follows his ideas like a religious fanatic altogether with some very faint ideals on how the world should be. It reminds me those hippy, extreme left revolutionaries that raised Che to the level of a saint, considered Mao's sentences the Bible and USSR a traitor to communist ideals... Meanwhile there are many things on RMS that deserve some high respect. Here is one of them, because, RMS is absolutely right...
I may understand the reasons kernel developers point to hold up to BitKeeper. However they can't and shouldn't ignore the consequences of ignoring the legalities of their move. The fact that BitKeeper is factually an EULA much worse than M$ is something that may put into question the future of Linux. Yes, it is much worse because ethically violates some principals of market, things that were formed not yesterday but millenia ago. It is much worse because it is clearly not a commercial license but a typical feudal decree of the worst kind, in common terms: "you can't do that or do this while you are under my service". This is what is inside this license and it is so superficial that any deviation may turn it void. For some you may have had the chance to read documents from the V up to IX centuries, one may note that feudalism started this way. First they said "while", then they said "because" and later they didn't say nothing as everyone considered it natural...
And to consider things worse:
Larry McVoy of BitKeeper:
"Our position:
"1) No free licenses for our competition, they can buy them if they like.
"2) The software is not open source because the open source business model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development costs.
"3) If you had built a decent system instead of sitting around and whining, we could be doing something else instead of sitting around listening to your whining."
If we look at the reaction of BitKeeper's owner, we can see that we are really going the worst way. He is ultimative, he is arrogant, for him OSS lacks prayers. But this is not the worst. The worst is that we are a mass of apatic whinners, but he stands higher and listens to the crowd of gentiles. And he only can listen whinning, nothing else, because the brilliance and crystal sound of BitKeeper's castle blinds and deafens everything else.
This is not OSS, this is not Free Software. This is not even the M$ Empire. This is the Black Cathedral.