[Advocacy] Understanding Software Development Models - (lengthy post)
Aragorn
with the how and why of Free & Open Source Software or the GNU/Linux
operating system, I have the feeling that there is both room and a need
in /comp.os.linux.advocacy/ for clearing out some misunderstandings
towards the newcomers and to some of the defenders of proprietary and
closed source software.
Note: I am spelling Free & Open Source Software with uppercase and an
ampersand, while not showing proprietary and closed source software the
same courtesy, but there is a subtle reason as to why I am doing this;
the former is a software development _movement_ - I'll come back to the
differences between Free Software and Open Source Software later on -
while the latter is a mere description of a software development
/model./
It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another way,
often - but not exclusively - financially.
First, let's take a look at the difference between Free Software and
Open Source Software...
Open Source Software is software of which the source code is publicly
available. Open Source Software is usually free of charge and can be
downloaded from the Internet as source code or as binaries, often but
not always in a GNU/Linux distribution-specific format - e.g. Debian
/.deb/ packages, RedHat or SuSE /.rpm/ packages, et al.
Free Software is software of which the source code is free for
installation, redistribution or modification. Free Software is about
freedom of choice and of access. It is not about whether software
should be free of charge, although most Free Software _is_ indeed free
of charge.
The distinction between Free Software and Open Source Software is
subtle, as they both originate from the same concept. Free Software is
stricter in its interpretation of how this software should be licensed,
so as to make a political statement about it, i.e. the "freedom"
argument, while the Open Source Initiative is more aimed towards the
technical benefits of having the source code available.
Software that is free of charge is not necessarily Free Software, and
quite often not even Open Source Software. Software that is free of
charge is called Freeware. Examples are certain freely downloadable
software firewalls or anti-virus software for the Windows platform,
plugins for viewing Macromedia Flash and Shockwave - regardless of the
operating system - or Adobe Acrobat Reader. The aforementioned
examples are all proprietary software of which the source code is not
available to the public.
The last main category of software is the commercially vended
proprietary software of which the source code is not available to the
public, nor to the buyer.
What we Free Software advocates firmly believe to be a Good Thing(TM),
is that we actually get to *own* our copy of the software. It is ours
to do with as we please, as long as we respect the terms and conditions
regarding redistribution or usage of the source code as stated in the
code's license.
There are various Free Software licenses. Among the most well-known are
the GNU General Public License - which I personally think holds the
best approach - and it's "less free" Lesser GPL (or LGPL). Other very
popular Free Software licenses are the MIT license and the very similar
BSD license.
A very clear example of the distinction between the GPL and the BSD
license is that the latter allows for the source code to be used in
tight conjunction with proprietary, non-Free code. This is how Steve
Jobs was able to use FreeBSD as the basis to build OS X on.
Whatever some Windows advocates believe or state, true GNU/Linux
advocates *do* believe in the philosophy of Free & Open Source Software
and are even willing to pay for software that can just as easily be
downloaded at no charge.
Personally, I strongly support the Free Software Foundation's
philosophy, but I also strongly support the more technical philosophy
of the Open Source Initiative, i.e. that Open Source Software allows
for much more constructive input, for a much faster bug or security
flaw detection, and for much more creativity.
As a small example, we have to take a look at the design that is so
typical for UNIX-style operating systems: the modularity of everything.
UNIX-like systems such as GNU/Linux are huge toolboxes. Many tools
share the same purpose, yet do things differently or offer a set of
extra options. The user is then free to pick the tool of his choice,
or to combine tools.
Now, the example I was going to mention is that there are developers who
scribble together small tools - the UNIX philosophy is to rather have
small tools that do something perfectly than to have big monolithic
apps that do things less perfectly - and simply put those tools up on
the Internet, along with their source code, even if those tools seem
somewhat ridiculous to others. It's the spirit of *sharing* something
that works for you with others, so that they can make use of it.
Yet, a strong misconception regarding Free & Open Source Software is
that it _must_ be free of charge. This is certainly not true. Nothing
prevents a developer from offering his code for sale - even Richard
Stallman did that with Emacs. The idea however is that once you've
purchased the software, it is yours to do with as you please, provided
that you don't use it to write proprietary code.
Lastly, I would like to explain why others as well as myself refer to
the GNU/Linux operating system as "GNU/Linux", rather than as plain
"Linux".
Linux is only a kernel, and while it is a monolithic kernel - in the
sense of having hardware access and filesystems inside the runtime
kernel; the "monolithic kernel" is unrelated to whether the drivers
were compiled as loadable modules or hardcoded into the kernel - it
still wouldn't be of much use without the other components which make
up for an operating system.
GNU was already an operating system long before Linus Torvalds developed
Linux, and as it was Free Software, Linus used the GNU tools to develop
the code for Linux. The distributions sold or offered as "Linux" today
are therefore mostly made up of the exact same components as the GNU
operating system, but with Linux as their kernel. The main difference
with the original GNU system - also known as GNU/Hurd - lies in the
fact that native GNU has a microkernel design.
There are of course more components to a GNU/Linux distribution than GNU
and Linux. For instance, there is the X11 implementation - for most
distributions, this will now be X.Org, a fork from the XFree86 project
which branched off because of licensing issues. Next to that, there
are such projects as Apache, the GRUB bootloader, The Gimp, etc.
It is therefore politically correct to speak of GNU/Linux when we're
talking of the operating system, to speak of Linux when we talk of the
kernel, or to speak of a distribution when we speak of the whole
collection of software that makes up for such entities like Mandriva,
SuSE, RedHat or Debian.
After all, GNU/Linux is a UNIX-style operating system, and in the UNIX
architecture, applications software is integrated with the operating
system such a transparent way that one can hardly still make the
distinction between what is the operating system and what is an
application. This is true both in the concept of the UNIX architecture
as a huge toolbox and at the directory tree level.
The latter however is for another post... ;-)
--
With kind regards,
*Aragorn*
(Registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
r.e.b...@usa.net
> While there are plenty of articles out on the World Wide Web which deal
> with the how and why of Free & Open Source Software or the GNU/Linux
> operating system, I have the feeling that there is both room and a need
> in /comp.os.linux.advocacy/ for clearing out some misunderstandings
> towards the newcomers and to some of the defenders of proprietary and
> closed source software.
> Note: I am spelling Free & Open Source Software with uppercase and an
> ampersand, while not showing proprietary and closed source software the
> same courtesy, but there is a subtle reason as to why I am doing this;
> the former is a software development _movement_ - I'll come back to the
> differences between Free Software and Open Source Software later on -
> while the latter is a mere description of a software development
> /model./
Keep in mind that "Open Source" and "Open Source Software" are
registered trademarks and/or service marks.
http://opensource.org/trademarks/
There are roughly 60 different copyright licenses that have been
blessed as "Open Source" http://opensource.org/licenses/
> It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
> mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
> and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
> contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another way,
> often - but not exclusively - financially.
Keep in mind that there was a great deal of Open Source technology
which had roots in government funded programs, including NASA, DARPA,
National Science Foundation, DOD declassified source code, and source
code repositories funded by the federal government such as "SimTel20".
Many of these programs were funded by the United States government.
Many other of these programs were implemented by students attending
college using federally subsidized tuition. It was a common practice
to have college students, especially those majoring in Electrical
Engineering (BSEE and MSEE) and those majoring in computer science
(BSCS, MSCS) doing these projects - to literally prevent the technology
from ever being patented. After all, if a classroom full of college
freshmen could create a significant number of implementations of a
published - non-patented specification, the argument that this
technology could be intuitively derived by basic practitioners of the
technology - is pretty well established.
More and more of the Linux code is being implemented and/or introduced
by more experienced practitioners from all over the industry, including
clients and users. In fact, both Open Source UNIX
applications/libraries such as GNU and BSD software were often user
generated.
> First, let's take a look at the difference between Free Software and
> Open Source Software...
>
> Open Source Software is software of which the source code is publicly
> available. Open Source Software is usually free of charge and can be
> downloaded from the Internet as source code or as binaries, often but
> not always in a GNU/Linux distribution-specific format - e.g. Debian
> /.deb/ packages, RedHat or SuSE /.rpm/ packages, et al.
>
> Free Software is software of which the source code is free for
> installation, redistribution or modification. Free Software is about
> freedom of choice and of access. It is not about whether software
> should be free of charge, although most Free Software _is_ indeed free
> of charge.
>
> The distinction between Free Software and Open Source Software is
> subtle, as they both originate from the same concept. Free Software is
> stricter in its interpretation of how this software should be licensed,
> so as to make a political statement about it, i.e. the "freedom"
> argument, while the Open Source Initiative is more aimed towards the
> technical benefits of having the source code available.
As I pointed out above, Open Source Software is a registered trademark
which can be used do describe any software released under one of the
listed approved licenses.
The Free Software Foundation is also a registered trademark.
http://www.fsf.org and the Free Software Foundation authored a number
of licenses, which are included in the list cited above. Specifically
the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the Lesser GPL (LGPL).
Free Software is a subset of Open Source software. Free software is a
larger portion of the Open Source Software, primarily since it has been
around since 1984 (I was part of the usenet (net.legal) discussions on
the original GPL drafts).
> Software that is free of charge is not necessarily Free Software, and
> quite often not even Open Source Software. Software that is free of
> charge is called Freeware. Examples are certain freely downloadable
> software firewalls or anti-virus software for the Windows platform,
> plugins for viewing Macromedia Flash and Shockwave - regardless of the
> operating system - or Adobe Acrobat Reader. The aforementioned
> examples are all proprietary software of which the source code is not
> available to the public.
Furthermore, not all software that is available in source code form can
be called Open Source. Microsoft has tried, on several occaisions to
claim that they offer Open Source software. This is not true. None of
Microsoft's licenses have been approved by the holders of the "Open
Source" service mark.
There are specific legal requirements for approval. The deal-killer
with Microsoft is that there can be no form of nondisclosure or
non-compete terms in the license. Only one of Microsoft's proposed
licenses could theoretically meet those legal requirements.
Keep in mind that ANY copyright license, whether it's Microsoft's EULA
or GPL, is a legally binding contract between not only the original
author and users, but all of those contributing enhancements or
creating derivative products. Altering a license, or attempting to
move code from one license to another requires the consent of every
single contributor, including those who have contributed to the value
of the product through testing, technical support, marketing and
promotion, or even design of enhancements.
Often, licenses are sponsored by organizations, and these organizations
represent the class of the contributors. Most of these are non-profit
organizations, which eliminates the risk of an economic take-over,
either through buy-out, share proxy purchase/campaign, through
lawsuits, or other attempts to take "ownership" of intellectual
property placed into a public trust.
> The last main category of software is the commercially vended
> proprietary software of which the source code is not available to the
> public, nor to the buyer.
>
> What we Free Software advocates firmly believe to be a Good Thing(TM),
> is that we actually get to *own* our copy of the software. It is ours
> to do with as we please, as long as we respect the terms and conditions
> regarding redistribution or usage of the source code as stated in the
> code's license.
This isn't quite true. Even with Free Software, you don't OWN the
copyright on the software. You are granted the USE of the software, so
long as that use is consistent with the terms of the license. For
example, if you were to download GPL software, you could not then take
"ownership" of this software and create a proprietary, enhanced version
loaded with proprietary enhancements.
This is the key distinction between Copyrighted and LICENSED software
and Public Domain software. Prior to 1984, most software placed in
government repositories were simply placed in public domain. Some
organizations such as UC Berkely used the BSD license to make sure that
users didn't try to sue them for buggy software. Public Domain
software however, had no restrictions on the creation of "Derivative
Works". A program could be placed in public domain, be enhanced by
hundreds of contributors, and then a commercial interest such as
Microsoft or AT&T could add a few lines of proprietary code and market
this "public" code as their own proprietary code, complete with
nondisclosure agreements. In this case, they literally "Took
Ownership" of the enhanced public domain software. Furthermore, since
the copyright license included a nondisclosure agreement and
restrictions on reverse engineering, it was illegal to tell anyone that
99.9% of the code was actually public domain code.
This is exactly why the GPL was created. Richard Stallman had written
emacs, placed it in public domain, and had placed it in a public
repository (Simtel20) where hundreds, perhaps even thousands of
contributors added new features, mostly written in lisp, in source code
form.
Ed Gosling, now famous for Java, downloaded the Emacs code, added a
driver for a popular printer, and resold it as "Gosling Emacs" complete
with $300/user price tag, nondisclosure agreements in the license, and
no source code.
The thousands of contributors were irate. They thought that Richard
had sold the rights to EMACS to Gosling without including them in the
deal. There were threats of lawsuits (fortunately Richard did not have
deep enough pockets to be worth even a small claims case), there were
even threats of physical violence.
In 1984, Richard posted a request to the net.legal group on usenet,
requesting information about copyright law and asking how he could
copyright his code and create a license which would allow people to
copy and distribute the software, but not turn it into proprietary
code. Furthermore, since many of his supporters were UNIX
administrators who needed source that could be compiled on a variety of
UNIX hardware platforms, he wanted to make sure that anyone who
downloaded the software could get the source code. About 200 people
participated in the discussion over about 3 months, and before long,
the drafts were being put together for the first General Public
License. I had majored in Music/Theater/Management and knew quite a
bit about copyright law, including solutions used by the theater,
music, and entertainment industry. I had also spent quite a bit of
time studying the Copyright Act of 1976, which introduced the concept
of the copyright License to govern how software could be used.
Keep in mind that when you run a computer program from a hard drive or
network storage, the executable version of the program must be COPIED
from the hard drive or network into the RAM. This implicitly means
that the terms of this copy can be governed by the license.
> There are various Free Software licenses. Among the most well-known are
> the GNU General Public License - which I personally think holds the
> best approach - and it's "less free" Lesser GPL (or LGPL). Other very
> popular Free Software licenses are the MIT license and the very similar
> BSD license.
>
> A very clear example of the distinction between the GPL and the BSD
> license is that the latter allows for the source code to be used in
> tight conjunction with proprietary, non-Free code. This is how Steve
> Jobs was able to use FreeBSD as the basis to build OS X on.
The primary purpose of the original BSD license was to limit the
liability of the UCB board of regents. They had two fears. They
didn't want some corporate customer to install BSD Unix on a server and
then sue them if it crashed. In exchange, the corporations who were
using BSD wanted the source code. These companies typically donated
roughly $25,000, one half the amount being charged for source code to
AT&T Unix. This way, of there was a problem, their system
administrators could trace the problem all the way down to the kernel
code.
Ironically, AT&T had not been allowed to sell UNIX until 1983, and
because of this, they had given UNIX to a number of colleges and
universities, along with documentation. There were no nondisclosure
agreements and no restrictions on reverse engineering. The professors
at the UCB as well as many other colleges, including MIT, would look at
the man pages, and assign various functions as assignments. The kids
created their own implemenetations, many of which were even better than
the AT&T implementations. Masters degree students would design new
applications, and would have undergraduates do the implimentation.
When the DEC VAX came out, it had a different memory model and memory
management unit. UCB students came up with new ways to implement
features such as demand paged memory, faster interprocess communication
(using memory mapping instead of copies), faster context switching, and
better library sharing.
This code was so good that when AT&T was finally permitted to sell
their proprietary version of UNIX, the users who had been using BSD
just weren't impressed by AT&T System III UNIX. Eventually, AT&T had
to license nearly all of their code from BSD, and BSD was given
nonexclusive rights to some AT&T code in exchange. BSD licensees were
eventually allowed to pass on source code, but not required to do so.
Furthermore, the BSD license permitted proprietary enhancements.
When AT&T released System V, they didn't tell their licensees how much
of the code was BSD. They had strict nondisclosure agreements to keep
licensees who had seen BSD UNIX from telling others how much of the
code was BSD based.
Ironically, the key elements which were kept - from the original
version 6 code (unrestricted) included object oriented design used in
the bdevswitch and cdevswitch which made it possible to "hide" the
internal structure of block mode and character mode devices. The other
feature which AT&T had patented was the regular expression compiler
(regex).
AT&T tried to market their own alternative to the Berkeley Sockets
interface by offering the TLI and IPC application programmer
interfaces. Novell eventually adopted TLI for a while, but most
programmers just preferred the more modular and portable sockets
interface. The IPC application programmer interface was published in
hopes of making it a standard, and the BSD kids came up with an
implementation which used the BSD libraries to implement the IPC APIs.
These are the versions used in Linux.
> Whatever some Windows advocates believe or state, true GNU/Linux
> advocates *do* believe in the philosophy of Free & Open Source Software
> and are even willing to pay for software that can just as easily be
> downloaded at no charge.
The significant difference is that Microsoft pricing is based on
"perceived value" which pretty much means "I'll charge you as much as I
possibly can, because you can't afford NOT to purchase this software".
Microsoft targeted the OEMS, who wanted to be "IBM Compatible" because
at the time, "Big Blue" was setting the standards. The OEMs knew that
if they didn't use MS-DOS, there was a risk that applications wouldn't
run, and that they would end up with lots of unsold inventory that
would become obsolete in a few months. Many vendors of CP/M hardware
got a very sudden shock when their market literally dried up in a
matter of about 18 months.
Open Source pricing is based on "Pay for service" model. The royalties
on nearly any major work of art rarely exceed 6% of the gross.
Furthermore, the consumer pays for a package, not just the raw
software. There were many "kitchen table software companies" where
people spent a few weeks or months writing a relatively primative
program, often knock-offs of BSD Unix programs, and then put $300/user
price-tags on them.
Most of this money was spent on advertizing to get more people to buy
the product.
GNU and other Open Source software was freely downloadable, but back in
1984, most computers were using 300 baud modems to pass UUCP e-mail and
usenet newsgroup postings between UNIX boxes. Downloading emacs could
take several hours and over long distance lines could cost hundreds of
dollars to download. The Free Software Foundation suddenly found
itself getting requests for the source code on magnetic tape, along
with "donations" of around $400 per tape (based on the estimate of the
cost to download). Keep in mind that AT&T UNIX was going for
$50,000/copy, BSD was $25,000 per copy, and commercial applications
such as OfficePower were going for $300/user (a VAX 11/780 could
typically support about 100 concurrent users).
> Personally, I strongly support the Free Software Foundation's
> philosophy, but I also strongly support the more technical philosophy
> of the Open Source Initiative, i.e. that Open Source Software allows
> for much more constructive input, for a much faster bug or security
> flaw detection, and for much more creativity.
There are other advantages as well. Open Source software can be
reviewed for various forms of "Mischief", including attempted
introduction of viruses, worms, and other "back doors" into otherwise
secure systems. It also reduces the risk that someone will attempt to
introduce illegally copied proprietary code into the mix. When pirated
code is found, it is quickly identified, and the pirate can be very
easily prosecuted. Most Open Source projects require that those
contributing source code provide contact information and other
information which are needed to establish a relationship of trust.
Keep in mind that in 1984, UNIX came on a whole bunch of hardware
platforms, and there were already trojan horse programs and other
"hacks" being used to access or alter such things as acedemic records,
customer mailing lists, and even personal correspondence.
Administrators began to insist that publishers sending code to
"net.binaries" also send the source code to "net.sources".
When usenet merged with arpanet in 1985, a number of public
repositories became available, along with faster communications links
based on X.25 and 9600 baud dedicated lines. Furthermore, routing
software in Unix made it possible to use multiple lines of this type.
With 3-4 56 kb X.25 lines, a program could be downloaded in less than
an hour. Furthermore, since the links could be shared, it wasn't as
much of an issue when people wanted to FTP this software to the
corporate site.
Before long, public repositories were being created. Arpa had simtel20
configured for FTP access, FSF had their own FTP site. Before long,
administrators were pulling down the software as it was updated. This
meant that bugs were getting fixed by other administrators. Soon
administrators were circulating bug fixes to the source code in the
repositories. Rather than send the entire program again, they would
send the differences in an "ed script" generated by the "diff" command.
This made it possible to keep software up to date without having to
download millions of bytes of software for each update.
Ironically, in those early days, there were attempts to sneak
proprietary code into these products, and when the perpetrators were
caught, they were often prosecuted. At minimum, they were blacklisted.
> As a small example, we have to take a look at the design that is so
> typical for UNIX-style operating systems: the modularity of everything.
> UNIX-like systems such as GNU/Linux are huge toolboxes. Many tools
> share the same purpose, yet do things differently or offer a set of
> extra options. The user is then free to pick the tool of his choice,
> or to combine tools.
Let's go back to UNIX history again. Remember we talked about those
student projects? Well in some cases, two very different solutons
would come out of the same specification.
One might be very fast, but very lean and not terribly user friendly.
The other has lots of user controlled perameters which can be adjusted.
A classic example was ex and vi. The "ex" program was a simple text
editor which was similar to the "ed" editor created by K&R for UNIX.
The ex editor had a number of new features including failure recovery,
history, and an interface for editing the line. At the same time, Bill
Joy had seen the AppleWriter word processor/text editor and wanted to
create something like it for UNIX.
Rather than try to create his own text editor which might be harder to
manage, he simply used the ex editor and created the visual interface
to coordinate what was displayed on the screen with what was being sent
to the ex editor.
Of course, UNIX users accessed UNIX from terminals. The problem was
that there were lots of different terminals available, and they were
all different. The most popular was the VT100, but it was expensive.
Another fellow at Berkeley came up with a basic library which would let
you put a character or line at a particular location on the screen, by
converting a function call into terminal "positioning commands". This
"curses" library was then used to make it possible to use the "vi"
editor on lots of different terminals.
This is a very simple example of how a few very simple "components"
could be combined to create a very powerful system - without having to
alter the original components. The result was a huge increase in
"software reuse".
Rather than reinvent the wheel every time you wanted to create a
slightly different applicaton, you could use the same core components.
This assured that the components could be interchangable. For example,
today, I can edit a text document with nano, pico, vi, or emacs, and
not have some bizarre file that can only be read by one program.
Ironically, because these standards were followed, and because software
reuse was so common, it was very often undesirable to store content in
a proprietary format such as a relational database. Simple
tab-delimited files could be searched, joined, and merged, using simple
command line tools, and these scripts could be used by "vi" and other
"pipeline" editors (which could take the output from a shell command
directly into the editor buffer) and then reformatted into a report.
In fact, grep, sed, awk, and now perl are often still used to extract
data extract critical information, and reformat it into a form more
useful to another program. For example, statistics from a relational
database can be pulled using a command line interface - fed through
perl or sed, and turned into commands to a graphing or charting tool.
Compare this to zip which actually has it's roots in the unix comands
"ar" which was used for library archiving, and "compress" which was
used to compress text documents. Because MS-DOS couldn't really do
multitaskng effectively (TSRs were a very unstable form of multitasking
- nearly useless) - it was necessary to compile these two applications
(ar and compress) into a single program called arc.
Pkware liked the idea, but they wanted to use the newer Limel-Ziv
compression algorythm, and replaced compress with this new compression
tool and called it pkzip.
In the Unix world, the compression tool, ar tool, and even the TAR tool
(which provides even MORE compression effeciency when archiving
multiple versions of the same file or program) were kept separate - and
GUI interfaces were developed to allow the user to "browse" the
archive. Different archive browsers were popular based on the needs of
the user. There were archive browsers for emacs, Athena, and Xview.
The Windows version became known as WinZip and again, was compiled into
a single executable due to the limitations of the Windows scheduler and
interprocess communications.
Windows requires these huge monolithic applications because lots of
little components, each running on their own process would be
intolerably slow on Windows. Windows 2000 and Windows XP have faster
schedulers, but Microsoft is now realizing that they need to be more
efficient and less wastful of cycles and are developing a new core
scheduler which should make independent components much easier to
manage. This will make applications much easier to manage, develop,
and enhance as well. But then this is already available with Linux and
UNIX which already has extremely efficient context switching and
interprocess communication.
> Now, the example I was going to mention is that there are developers who
> scribble together small tools - the UNIX philosophy is to rather have
> small tools that do something perfectly than to have big monolithic
> apps that do things less perfectly - and simply put those tools up on
> the Internet, along with their source code, even if those tools seem
> somewhat ridiculous to others. It's the spirit of *sharing* something
> that works for you with others, so that they can make use of it.
Again, there is that whole thing of software reuse. If I have the
source code to a library function, and my initial attempts at calling
the new library function aren't successful, I can trace into the
libraries to see what I did wrong. If the library is a "black hole" -
I will probably try to create my own "wrappers" to hide the ugliness of
the library, which means that I'm more likely to duplicate effort or
introduce incompatibilities.
Ironically, Linux/Unix environments have many very simple tools which
can be used to produce remarkable results in very short time. For
example, I can use a Python script to call a shell script that takes
parameters from the python "Form", uses those to formulate a request to
another system (request an edgar filing, for example), then use Perl to
convert the EDI into XML then use xmlto to convert the XML into a
pretty document or a spreadsheet, this display can then be shown by the
Python program. When I want to print it, I can have the Python program
send the XML from the previous EDI to XML pipline to xmlto TeX then
have TeX convert the output into postscript and have CUPS convert the
postscript into HP PCL.
We have the same capabilities with graphics, music, and databases.
Each component uses a public standard interface for input, and a public
standard interface for output. This means that if I don't like what
one XML to HTML engine produces, I can replace it with another one, or
grab the source and generate exactly what I want.
> Yet, a strong misconception regarding Free & Open Source Software is
> that it _must_ be free of charge. This is certainly not true. Nothing
> prevents a developer from offering his code for sale - even Richard
> Stallman did that with Emacs. The idea however is that once you've
> purchased the software, it is yours to do with as you please, provided
> that you don't use it to write proprietary code.
Because of the high "software reuse" Open Source is often tightly
coupled to consulting. Rather than simply dropping a "dead fish" in
your lap, an Open Source project usually starts with a study of the
business problem to be solved, followed by a breakdown of that problem
to identify key components. At that point, existing open source tools
can be used to generate a solution without having to write everything
from scratch.
The bonus here is that when business needs change - which almost always
happens, the interfaces between components can be refined and enhanced
- without having to go into the bowels of each component.
> Lastly, I would like to explain why others as well as myself refer to
> the GNU/Linux operating system as "GNU/Linux", rather than as plain
> "Linux".
I wish you wouldn't :D
> Linux is only a kernel, and while it is a monolithic kernel - in the
> sense of having hardware access and filesystems inside the runtime
> kernel; the "monolithic kernel" is unrelated to whether the drivers
> were compiled as loadable modules or hardcoded into the kernel - it
> still wouldn't be of much use without the other components which make
> up for an operating system.
This is a popular conception. In practice, Linux is perceived to be an
ENVIRONMENT, not just a kernel. This enviornment includes the
GNU/Linux kernel, MIT/X11 graphical interface, BSD applications,
utilities, and libararies, GNOME, QT/KDE, and open source tools using
about 40 different open source licenses. We generally refer to these
software anthologies as "Distributions".
When the general public refers to "Linux", they are generally referring
to the distributions. In fact, now there are standards such as LSB
which even define what should be in a distribution to meet the minimum
requirements of LSB. The LSB3 standard has been adopted by pretty much
everyone.
> GNU was already an operating system long before Linus Torvalds developed
> Linux, and as it was Free Software, Linus used the GNU tools to develop
> the code for Linux. The distributions sold or offered as "Linux" today
> are therefore mostly made up of the exact same components as the GNU
> operating system, but with Linux as their kernel. The main difference
> with the original GNU system - also known as GNU/Hurd - lies in the
> fact that native GNU has a microkernel design.
Actually, HURD was a bit stalled when Linus introduced Linux. Had HURD
been a bit further along, it's likely that Linux would have been
ignored. The problem with HURD was that it's microkernel was very
difficult to debug. You needed a logic analyser, in-circuit emulator,
and you had to disable 80386 memory management to get valid test
results. There were problems with race conditions, deadlocks and other
thread related issues. To make matters worse, anyone who had ever seen
the AT&T Unix kernel was not welcome. They were specifically asked NOT
to participate or contribute - for fear of "polluting" the HURD kernel.
In fact, UNIX vendors were encouraged to review the HURD source to
make sure that nobody's proprietary code got mixed in.
What made Linus' kernel unique was that it didn't require complex
hardware to test and debug. He had actually figured out a way to use
the debugger to debug the kernel. Furthermore, he had solved many of
the problems of memory management and scheduling without resorting to
threading within the kernel. Tannenbaum almost ridiculed Linus for
taking such a radical departure from his Minix microkernel approach,
but nearly everyone else was far more interested in getting a working
kernel that could run GNU software without any of the encubrances of
other UNIX variants. At that time, BSD and AT&T were still hashing out
who would have rights to what parts of the kernel. When the first BSD
4.4 CDs were finally released, you still needed proprietary code, which
had to be purchased elsewhere - or taken from Linux - to generate a
working functional UNIX system.
> There are of course more components to a GNU/Linux distribution than GNU
> and Linux. For instance, there is the X11 implementation - for most
> distributions, this will now be X.Org, a fork from the XFree86 project
> which branched off because of licensing issues. Next to that, there
> are such projects as Apache, the GRUB bootloader, The Gimp, etc.
The average LSB distribution has over 1000 packages included. Many LSB
distributions have as many as 3000 packages available, including
commercial software. Many of these packages have as many as 100
components within them. They are all open source, but not all GNU.
> It is therefore politically correct to speak of GNU/Linux when we're
> talking of the operating system, to speak of Linux when we talk of the
> kernel, or to speak of a distribution when we speak of the whole
> collection of software that makes up for such entities like Mandriva,
> SuSE, RedHat or Debian.
GNU/Linux is the correct term when referring to the combination of:
The Linux kernel.
The glibc libarary (access to the kernel)
The gnu application packages (bash, bison, gcc, gdb, ...)
GNU/Linux is the "CORE" of every Linux distribution, but is not what is
generally meant when referring to "Linux".
> After all, GNU/Linux is a UNIX-style operating system, and in the UNIX
> architecture, applications software is integrated with the operating
> system such a transparent way that one can hardly still make the
> distinction between what is the operating system and what is an
> application. This is true both in the concept of the UNIX architecture
> as a huge toolbox and at the directory tree level.
>
> The latter however is for another post... ;-)
>
> --
> With kind regards,
>
> *Aragorn*
> (Registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
Rex Ballard - Linux user since 1992, Unix user since 1982
Piss Clam
> While there are plenty of articles out on the World Wide Web which deal
> with the how and why of Free & Open Source Software or the GNU/Linux
WOW!
Talk about a war of words!
Aragorn and Rex Ballard talking to themselves.
I'll bet you were the kid in the class who raised his hand and said "why
not make it 1000 words?", when the teacher told the class to write a 200
word theme.
billwg
"Aragorn" <str...@telenet.invalid> wrote in message
news:vVhdf.45925$uL6.2...@phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>
> It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
> mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
> and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
> contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another
> way,
> often - but not exclusively - financially.
>
would claim in the past was that they occasionally filed complaints with
the developers describing bugs or clumsy operating features that the
reviewer did not like the looks of.
The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both profit
from the exchange. Today's model is that of a central project committee
or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept and
what tasks to undertake. The developers work on what suits their fancy
and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use the
software. Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can get a
job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair kind
of organization that OSS has become.
Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers need
them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to mostly
exist on this sort of fawning.
Kier
>
> "Aragorn" <str...@telenet.invalid> wrote in message
> news:vVhdf.45925$uL6.2...@phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>>
>> It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
>> mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
>> and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
>> contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another
>> way,
>> often - but not exclusively - financially.
>>
> You are almost all total freeloaders, pure and simple!
Really? I'd like to see how you can substantiate that claim, even just in
COLA, particularly when a number of regular posters have stated that
they've gone out of their way to buy commercial distros for a number of
years.
> The most anyone
> would claim in the past was that they occasionally filed complaints with
> the developers describing bugs or clumsy operating features that the
> reviewer did not like the looks of.
That's a lie. Why do you wintrolls always have to lie to try to discredit
Linux advocates? Won't your arguments stand up on their own merits?
>
> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both profit
> from the exchange. Today's model is that of a central project committee
> or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept and
> what tasks to undertake.
How much more lame can you be, bill? You don't have an argument, so you
drag the Nazis in. Ou must be slipping.
> The developers work on what suits their fancy
> and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use the
> software. Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can get a
> job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair kind
> of organization that OSS has become.
Except that is not at all what the FOSS community is, and you know it.
Lying isn't going to save you, bill. Try the truth, for once, just for
novelty value if for nothing else.
>
> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers need
> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to mostly
> exist on this sort of fawning.
Once again, you are uttering only lies and distortions. You have never -
repeat *never* - produced any evidence of freeloading on the part of the
FOSS community.
--
Kier
Kier
> On Sat, 12 Nov 2005 08:42:03 +0000, Aragorn wrote:
>
>> While there are plenty of articles out on the World Wide Web which deal
>> with the how and why of Free & Open Source Software or the GNU/Linux
>
>
> WOW!
>
> Talk about a war of words!
No, he wasn't. He was making an advocacy post.
>
> Aragorn and Rex Ballard talking to themselves.
Why do you drag Rex into this?
>
> I'll bet you were the kid in the class who raised his hand and said "why
> not make it 1000 words?", when the teacher told the class to write a 200
> word theme.
At least he writes well-constructed posts and not a lot of lying trash,
unlike you, flatfish. Don't like 'em, don't read 'em.
--
Kier
GreyCloud
> "Aragorn" <str...@telenet.invalid> wrote in message
> news:vVhdf.45925$uL6.2...@phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>
>>It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
>>mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
>>and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
>>contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another
>>way,
>>often - but not exclusively - financially.
>>
>
> You are almost all total freeloaders, pure and simple!
And why does M$ aquire the BSD tcp/ip stack? Does this mean that M$ is
a freeloader of free software too?
Beowulf Trollshammer
> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both profit
> from the exchange. Today's model is that of a central project committee
> or individual Nazi ...
^^^^
I invoke Godwin. You lose, tardfuck.
billwg
"Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.11.12....@tiscali.co.uk...
>
> Really? I'd like to see how you can substantiate that claim, even just
> in
> COLA, particularly when a number of regular posters have stated that
> they've gone out of their way to buy commercial distros for a number
> of
> years.
>
>
That story seems to amplify in the continual retelling, Kier. My direct
memory of it is that one or two COLA regulars claimed to have purchased
a boxed set or two in the past but were downright proud of how they were
so self-sufficient to be able to get the latest and up to datest on a
continuing basis from various "bit storm" sources. A couple had said
that they had filed bug reports but were a little vague on the details,
making their claims a little suspect as to how worthwhile these reports
might have been. No one professed to running any organized matrix
testing of new releases to uncover any regressions that might have crept
in. It seems kind of hit or miss to me and no different than the
support mechanisms for commercial apps. They would complain if they
paid and they complain if it is free.
>>
>> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
>> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both
>> profit
>> from the exchange. Today's model is that of a central project
>> committee
>> or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept
>> and
>> what tasks to undertake.
>
> How much more lame can you be, bill? You don't have an argument, so
> you
> drag the Nazis in. Ou must be slipping.
>
I don't see where you are saying that what I am claiming is not
accurate, Kier. Surely the term "Nazi" has much more modern meanings
that you imply with "the Nazis"? Think of the "Soup Nazi" for example
in the Seinfeld series. I think that is clearly much more my meaning
than Himmler and the old crowd. They are long since dead, IIRC. The
term these days simply means someone who is exercising excessive control
over something.
>> The developers work on what suits their fancy
>> and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use the
>> software. Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can get
>> a
>> job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair
>> kind
>> of organization that OSS has become.
>
> Except that is not at all what the FOSS community is, and you know it.
>
No I don't know that, Kier. What I do know is that the idea of
contributing source to a community that contributes back expansive
versions of the original that can enrich the originator is a lot of
malarky. I think that it actually happened in the past, but the modern
day linux, Apache, etc., projects are nothing even remotely resembling
these beginnings.
>
>>
>> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers
>> need
>> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to
>> mostly
>> exist on this sort of fawning.
>
> Once again, you are uttering only lies and distortions. You have
> never -
> repeat *never* - produced any evidence of freeloading on the part of
> the
> FOSS community.
>
I think that you can make the obvious assessment that the linux product
space, seen as a sort of alternative to Windows, is a fairly complete
and effective entity overall. If you look at the amount of money that
the users of the alternative product, i.e. Windows, are paying willfully
to obtain the benefits of using the software, and compare that amount of
money to the amounts being paid collectively by the people who are using
linux and accept the counts of users offered by the linux advocates, you
can see where linux users are skating for essentially no charge at all.
That is freeloading, pure and simple, Kier, and you can say "Lie!, Lie!"
all you want and hold up a crucifix to ward off the devil, but you are
fooling no one. There is a huge number of people contributing code to
the OSS effort and they are receiving Butkus in return when compared to
the value that the world has set for this activity.
billwg
"Beowulf Trollshammer" <beow...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:Xns970CC04B735FC...@213.155.197.138...
Not so fast there, wolfie! You are apparently passé!
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
"It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
Plus, as I pointed out to Kier, a more well read poster would recognize
the transition in the meaning of the term "Nazi" from a goose-stepping
minion of the 3rd Reich to simply an overbearing and excessive
controller of an environment.
billwg
"GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
news:WtudnR-j5ax...@bresnan.com...
>
> And why does M$ aquire the BSD tcp/ip stack? Does this mean that M$
> is a freeloader of free software too?
They are only trying to please the irascible COLA crowd, cloud! Think
of how you all would howl if MS used their own rather than this
standard? Try to be more consistent.
Kier
>
> "Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:pan.2005.11.12....@tiscali.co.uk...
>
>>
>> Really? I'd like to see how you can substantiate that claim, even just
>> in
>> COLA, particularly when a number of regular posters have stated that
>> they've gone out of their way to buy commercial distros for a number
>> of
>> years.
>>
>>
> That story seems to amplify in the continual retelling, Kier. My direct
> memory of it is that one or two COLA regulars claimed to have purchased
> a boxed set or two in the past but were downright proud of how they were
> so self-sufficient to be able to get the latest and up to datest on a
> continuing basis from various "bit storm" sources.
Really? Who might they be?
A couple had said
> that they had filed bug reports but were a little vague on the details,
> making their claims a little suspect as to how worthwhile these reports
> might have been. No one professed to running any organized matrix
> testing of new releases to uncover any regressions that might have crept
> in. It seems kind of hit or miss to me and no different than the
> support mechanisms for commercial apps. They would complain if they
> paid and they complain if it is free.
Really? Why?
>
>>>
>>> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
>>> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both
>>> profit
>>> from the exchange. Today's model is that of a central project
>>> committee
>>> or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept
>>> and
>>> what tasks to undertake.
>>
>> How much more lame can you be, bill? You don't have an argument, so
>> you
>> drag the Nazis in. Ou must be slipping.
>>
> I don't see where you are saying that what I am claiming is not
> accurate, Kier. Surely the term "Nazi" has much more modern meanings
> that you imply with "the Nazis"?
To call someone a Nazi is still an insult most decent people won't stoop
to.
> Think of the "Soup Nazi" for example
> in the Seinfeld series. I think that is clearly much more my meaning
> than Himmler and the old crowd. They are long since dead, IIRC. The
> term these days simply means someone who is exercising excessive control
> over something.
Really? Maybe you need to read some history books. I don't find the word
'Nazi' very funny in any context whatever.
>
>>> The developers work on what suits their fancy
>>> and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use the
>>> software. Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can get
>>> a
>>> job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair
>>> kind
>>> of organization that OSS has become.
>>
>> Except that is not at all what the FOSS community is, and you know it.
>>
> No I don't know that, Kier.
Then you should. It's been demonstrated to you often enough.
> What I do know is that the idea of
> contributing source to a community that contributes back expansive
> versions of the original that can enrich the originator is a lot of
> malarky.
Is it? Can you prove it, you liar? Really prove it?
I think that it actually happened in the past, but the modern
> day linux, Apache, etc., projects are nothing even remotely resembling
> these beginnings.
Everything changes, bill. Except you, of course. You remain an arsehole.
>
>>
>>>
>>> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers
>>> need
>>> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to
>>> mostly
>>> exist on this sort of fawning.
>>
>> Once again, you are uttering only lies and distortions. You have
>> never -
>> repeat *never* - produced any evidence of freeloading on the part of
>> the
>> FOSS community.
>>
> I think that you can make the obvious assessment that the linux product
> space, seen as a sort of alternative to Windows, is a fairly complete
> and effective entity overall. If you look at the amount of money that
> the users of the alternative product, i.e. Windows, are paying willfully
> to obtain the benefits of using the software, and compare that amount of
> money to the amounts being paid collectively by the people who are using
> linux and accept the counts of users offered by the linux advocates, you
> can see where linux users are skating for essentially no charge at all.
Once again, you miss the point. *MS Windows* is about making money.
Gnu/Linux is not. It's about serving users. Certainly, there is a living
to be made with Linx, but not in the same manner. It's a completely
different model.
> That is freeloading, pure and simple, Kier, and you can say "Lie!, Lie!"
> all you want and hold up a crucifix to ward off the devil, but you are
> fooling no one.
Really? You think so? You're mistaken at best, lying at worst.
> There is a huge number of people contributing code to
> the OSS effort and they are receiving Butkus in return when compared to
> the value that the world has set for this activity.
Bollocks, to be blunt. Why is you wintrolls only think in terms of money?
Why are you stuck on $$$$$?
'The value that the world has set'? What shite are you spouting now? What
world are you talking about? Just consider this: Linux may not reside in
the same world. It doesn't need to reference your world at all if it
doesn't want to.
--
Kier
Kier
Any 'well-read poster' would know that calling someone a Nazi is in poor
taste at best. Imagine if I were Jewish (I'm not, but just pretend for a
moment) - how do you suppose I would regard you?
I don't give a toss about Godwin's supposed Law, but I do objecttot the
mention of such disgusting human beings as Nazis being used to further
some specious argument of yours.
--
Kier
billwg
>
> Really? Maybe you need to read some history books. I don't find the
> word
> 'Nazi' very funny in any context whatever.
>
years any more. The people involved are all in the Old Folk's Home now,
if they are still alive. I doubt you are that old.
As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the rounds
of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis involved
with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is apparently
something that the Brits found funny enough to produce quite a few
episodes. You might know more about that than I.
We had Hogan's Heros for a few years that found the Nazis funny too.
>>
>>>> The developers work on what suits their fancy
>>>> and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use
>>>> the
>>>> software. Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can
>>>> get
>>>> a
>>>> job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair
>>>> kind
>>>> of organization that OSS has become.
>>>
>>> Except that is not at all what the FOSS community is, and you know
>>> it.
>>>
>> No I don't know that, Kier.
>
> Then you should. It's been demonstrated to you often enough.
>
>> What I do know is that the idea of
>> contributing source to a community that contributes back expansive
>> versions of the original that can enrich the originator is a lot of
>> malarky.
>
> Is it? Can you prove it, you liar? Really prove it?
It seems useless to continue to correct you, Kier, but it is not
possible to lie about an opinion. But explain to me how code
contributions, such as they are, coming back to linus enriches linus in
any useful way. I doubt that Linus has ever purchased a copy of linux,
of course, but even so, the incremental benefit that he might obtain
from using an improved linux is nothing compared to the value of his
time.
Well I don't know about the "serving others", Kier, that is a strange
concept for a technology development. I can see where the association
of linux with undeveloped countries, due to the effects of pricing for
linux being within the low reach of these areas, can confuse linux with
some humanitarian issues that extend to the same clientel, but I don't
believe that linux is such a thing itself.
>
>> That is freeloading, pure and simple, Kier, and you can say "Lie!,
>> Lie!"
>> all you want and hold up a crucifix to ward off the devil, but you
>> are
>> fooling no one.
>
> Really? You think so? You're mistaken at best, lying at worst.
>
>> There is a huge number of people contributing code to
>> the OSS effort and they are receiving Butkus in return when compared
>> to
>> the value that the world has set for this activity.
>
> Bollocks, to be blunt. Why is you wintrolls only think in terms of
> money?
> Why are you stuck on $$$$$?
>
Well the essence of freeloading is getting some value for no money,
Kier, you seem to be admitting that is the case with the linux users.
> 'The value that the world has set'? What shite are you spouting now?
> What
> world are you talking about? Just consider this: Linux may not reside
> in
> the same world. It doesn't need to reference your world at all if it
> doesn't want to.
>
Well you can consider linux to be an alien entity, Kier, I'm sure Bill
Gates would go along with you! But if it were, it would be worth it's
share of the aggregate valuation of the technology and it is not
receiving that credit from its users. Q.E.D. freeloading.
billwg
without the caps?
> I don't give a toss about Godwin's supposed Law, but I do objecttot
> the
> mention of such disgusting human beings as Nazis being used to further
> some specious argument of yours.
>
I think you just putting on airs, Kier.
Kier
>
> "Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:pan.2005.11.12...@tiscali.co.uk...
>>
>> Really? Maybe you need to read some history books. I don't find the
>> word
>> 'Nazi' very funny in any context whatever.
>>
> Crocodile tears, I think, Kier, no one pays any attention to the WWII
> years any more. The people involved are all in the Old Folk's Home now,
> if they are still alive. I doubt you are that old.
You think that's something to laugh at? Pray that you never know why it
*isn't* funny, you fool.
>
> As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the rounds
> of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis involved
> with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is apparently
> something that the Brits found funny enough to produce quite a few
> episodes. You might know more about that than I.
Yeah, and for a long time I hated even to watch it. It's actually a parody
of a serious drama on the subject.
>
> We had Hogan's Heros for a few years that found the Nazis funny too.
You might mock them, but actually thinking them amusing is different. But
don't try to obscure the real point here.
What hell are you talking about? You continue to make no sense whatever.
That's because you don't understand a single thing about what you're
talking about. You may pretend that you do, but we are not fooled by you.
>>
>>> That is freeloading, pure and simple, Kier, and you can say "Lie!,
>>> Lie!"
>>> all you want and hold up a crucifix to ward off the devil, but you
>>> are
>>> fooling no one.
>>
>> Really? You think so? You're mistaken at best, lying at worst.
>>
>>> There is a huge number of people contributing code to
>>> the OSS effort and they are receiving Butkus in return when compared
>>> to
>>> the value that the world has set for this activity.
>>
>> Bollocks, to be blunt. Why is you wintrolls only think in terms of
>> money?
>> Why are you stuck on $$$$$?
>>
> Well the essence of freeloading is getting some value for no money,
> Kier, you seem to be admitting that is the case with the linux users.
Really? You had better find some evidence for that. See, you continue to
miss the point. Utterly.
>
>> 'The value that the world has set'? What shite are you spouting now?
>> What
>> world are you talking about? Just consider this: Linux may not reside
>> in
>> the same world. It doesn't need to reference your world at all if it
>> doesn't want to.
>>
> Well you can consider linux to be an alien entity, Kier, I'm sure Bill
> Gates would go along with you!
No, it's not alien, bill. That's your twisted lying interpretation. Just
different.
> But if it were, it would be worth it's
> share of the aggregate valuation of the technology and it is not
> receiving that credit from its users. Q.E.D. freeloading.
Utter bollocks. You are still full of piss and wind, and not much else.
Little of what you claim actually makes sense.
--
Kier
Kier
Stupid ass. If you have Jewish blood, you are even sicker than I thought,
to drag the Nazis into any argument you make.
>
>> I don't give a toss about Godwin's supposed Law, but I do objecttot
>> the
>> mention of such disgusting human beings as Nazis being used to further
>> some specious argument of yours.
>>
> I think you just putting on airs, Kier.
Nope. See, I live in a country that was nearly destroyed by Nazis. I don't
think they are funny at all.
--
Kier
Madhusudan Singh
>
> "Aragorn" <str...@telenet.invalid> wrote in message
> news:vVhdf.45925$uL6.2...@phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>>
>> It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
>> mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
>> and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
>> contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another
>> way,
>> often - but not exclusively - financially.
>>
> You are almost all total freeloaders, pure and simple! The most anyone
Most of us give back to the open source that we benefit from, but even if
your premise be right, my question is, " so what ?".
Only someone terminally stupid (or ignorant) would want to spend good money
on something that can be had for free. Many people like to give their
software away for free, and an even greater number like to use it for free.
What exactly is your problem with that ?
(Other than it completely wrecks the buy-upgrade-repeat cycle model that a
certain monopoly depends upon, especially as that free software turns out
to be technically superior to whatever that monopoly and its lemmings come
up with.).
Aragorn
words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
> On Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:02:58 +0000, billwg wrote:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the
>> rounds of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis
>> involved with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is
>> apparently something that the Brits found funny enough to produce
>> quite a few episodes. You might know more about that than I.
>
> Yeah, and for a long time I hated even to watch it. It's actually a
> parody of a serious drama on the subject.
The comedy series is called "Allo Allo" and takes place in Belgium, if
my memory serves me right. It's being rebroadcasted here at the
moment, although I'm not watching it. It's indeed a parody to the
"Secret Army" series from the late 1970's and early 1980's, which dealt
with the Belgian resistance during World War II and their efforts to
smuggle crashlanded British pilots back to the UK.
The series even got a sequal called "Kessler", taking place in the
"present" time - it was the 1980's, and revolving around a Jewish girl
whose parents had died in a concentration camp after they were sent
there by Kessler, the Gestapo officer from "Secret Army", who steals
the identity of a dead soldier at the end of the war and thus manages
to escape prosecution over his active role in the holocaust.
The girl then goes hunting for this Kessler, helped by an older Nazi
hunter. If I recall correctly, they track him down to Latin America,
where he leads a business empire, under a false name of course.
Eventually, they manage to expose him and he commits suicide. The
actor - Clifford Rose - who played Kessler in the series with that name
was the same actor who convincingly played Kessler in "Secret Army".
The original "Secret Army" series also often portrays the conflicts
between the Gestapo officer Kessler and the Wehrmacht - regular German
military - officer. It is the latter who discovers that the Belgians
at the café had been smuggling pilots back to the UK, but instead of
reporting it to Kessler, he goes out to confront the café owner and his
mistress in person, before he turns himself over to the British army.
My grandmother was still alive when that show was being broadcast, and
she vividly remembered many of the things from back then. She even
kept on having strong prejudices against the German people until she
died, probably because she had experienced both World Wars and thus two
episodes of German occupation. My parents on the other hand were only
children during the Second World War.
<snip>
mlw
>
> "Aragorn" <str...@telenet.invalid> wrote in message
> news:vVhdf.45925$uL6.2...@phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>>
>> It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
>> mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
>> and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
>> contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another
>> way,
>> often - but not exclusively - financially.
>>
> You are almost all total freeloaders, pure and simple! The most anyone
> would claim in the past was that they occasionally filed complaints with
> the developers describing bugs or clumsy operating features that the
> reviewer did not like the looks of.
OK.
>
> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both profit
> from the exchange.
True, and for the most part, we do.
> Today's model is that of a central project committee
> or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept and
> what tasks to undertake.
Perhaps from a particular point of view.
> The developers work on what suits their fancy
> and bask in the supposed gratitude from the few who actually use the
> software.
in some cases, maybe.
> Anyone with such a bent who has any talent at all can get a
> job doing just that kind of work and doesn't need the vanity-fair kind
> of organization that OSS has become.
"if" they get to do what they want to do. Many professional developers have
ideas that are really cool but which are not part of the market focus of
their direct employment and thus open source as a release.
>
> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers need
> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to mostly
> exist on this sort of fawning.
As an open source developer, my motivation is simple. I need the software I
write to make money as a consultant. These "free loaders" are helpfull to
me as bug testers and feedback. Maybe I ignore what they say, but sometimes
they find issues that make sense or offer an interesting perspective I may
not have considered.
For me, Open Source, Free Software make sense.
GreyCloud
Only in your own peculiar world. You are still grasping at straws
there. But in your deluded mind you think are grabbing for ballmers ...
Mark Kent
Aragorn <str...@telenet.invalid> espoused:
> On Sunday 13 November 2005 02:48, Kier stood up and spoke the following
> words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
>
>> On Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:02:58 +0000, billwg wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the
>>> rounds of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis
>>> involved with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is
>>> apparently something that the Brits found funny enough to produce
>>> quite a few episodes. You might know more about that than I.
>>
>> Yeah, and for a long time I hated even to watch it. It's actually a
>> parody of a serious drama on the subject.
>
> The comedy series is called "Allo Allo" and takes place in Belgium, if
> my memory serves me right. It's being rebroadcasted here at the
> moment, although I'm not watching it. It's indeed a parody to the
> "Secret Army" series from the late 1970's and early 1980's, which dealt
> with the Belgian resistance during World War II and their efforts to
> smuggle crashlanded British pilots back to the UK.
>
It is a lightweight humourous drama. It's been very popular all
over europe, it doesn't take any particular political position, it
doesn't attempt to demonise any of the nationalities involved, in fact,
it makes gentle humour against inoffensive stereotypes, with many of the
jokes being sex-based rather than anything else. It's no more offensive
than Dad's Army was, and certainly no more offensive than eg., Hollywood
putting Yanks into The Great Escape or claiming that the US Navy captured
the first U-boat Enigma machine.
There is no 'bunch of Nazis' involved, as billwg!!!! is trying to claim,
in order to justify his entirely inappropriate comparison.
I'm not sure how well it would do outside Europe, as the linguistic
jokes probably don't translate, and the sexual ones are probably too
overt for many countries.
--
end
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
What!? Me worry?
-- Alfred E. Newman
Peter Jensen
Hash: SHA1
billwg wrote:
>> And why does M$ aquire the BSD tcp/ip stack? Does this mean that M$
>> is a freeloader of free software too?
>
> They are only trying to please the irascible COLA crowd, cloud! Think
> of how you all would howl if MS used their own rather than this
> standard? Try to be more consistent.
He was not talking about the standard itself, but rather the actual code
for the TCP/IP stack. They originally lifted this directly from BSD.
By your argument that makes them freeloaders of the worst kind. Be
careful not to trip over your double standard on your way out.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFDdwiId1ZThqotgfgRAhaNAKCu5dgsexkw6Xh1YkGzTGE+TrlodwCeJNIr
8copvYmTG1xrFmwxaWjM0D0=
=DWPE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
PeKaJe
It's hard to think of you as the end result of millions of years of evolution.
Mark Kent
Peter Jensen <use...@pekajemaps.homeip.net> espoused:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> billwg wrote:
>
>>> And why does M$ aquire the BSD tcp/ip stack? Does this mean that M$
>>> is a freeloader of free software too?
>>
>> They are only trying to please the irascible COLA crowd, cloud! Think
>> of how you all would howl if MS used their own rather than this
>> standard? Try to be more consistent.
>
> He was not talking about the standard itself, but rather the actual code
> for the TCP/IP stack. They originally lifted this directly from BSD.
> By your argument that makes them freeloaders of the worst kind. Be
> careful not to trip over your double standard on your way out.
>
That is the fundamental problem with the BSD licence. Although it's
fine from a 'use in free software' projects perspective, it doesn't
appear to protect the developers from having their code re-used
with no gain for themselves.
Peter Jensen
Hash: SHA1
Mark Kent wrote:
> That is the fundamental problem with the BSD licence. Although it's
> fine from a 'use in free software' projects perspective, it doesn't
> appear to protect the developers from having their code re-used with
> no gain for themselves.
Well, it's only a problem if you actually don't want that to happen.
You would probably use something like the GPL instead of a BSD license
for your code, if that is the case. Like all other licenses, it has its
place.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFDd16Id1ZThqotgfgRAqO2AJ44VQ4htzKYA4sXVOcOnIOaanzhWgCdGH/Q
lFNt8K1MDPHMRfYQUoaKPPM=
=aibh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
PeKaJe
"Every man has his price. Mine is $3.95."
billwg
>
> Nope. See, I live in a country that was nearly destroyed by Nazis. I
> don't
> think they are funny at all.
>
about it. Be grateful for all the help!
Kier
I wouldn't boast about that on this day of all days, bill, if I were you.
--
Kier
billwg
>>
> You think that's something to laugh at? Pray that you never know why
> it
> *isn't* funny, you fool.
>
hands of the real Nazis?
>>
>> As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the
>> rounds
>> of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis involved
>> with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is apparently
>> something that the Brits found funny enough to produce quite a few
>> episodes. You might know more about that than I.
>
> Yeah, and for a long time I hated even to watch it. It's actually a
> parody
> of a serious drama on the subject.
>
>>
>> We had Hogan's Heros for a few years that found the Nazis funny too.
>
> You might mock them, but actually thinking them amusing is different.
> But
> don't try to obscure the real point here.
>
Oh I doubt that you have one, Kier! You are trying to impute some
terrible meaning to terms that you clearly don't understand from
context. No one can be as obtuse as you are trying to appear!
The only argument that you can make is that linux has no value so that
compensating developers is not necessary and the failure to do so is not
freeloading. Else you are a hypocrite.
>>
Kier
>>> Well the essence of freeloading is getting some value for no money,
>>> Kier, you seem to be admitting that is the case with the linux users.
>>
>> Really? You had better find some evidence for that. See, you continue
>> to
>> miss the point. Utterly.
>>
> The only argument that you can make is that linux has no value so that
> compensating developers is not necessary and the failure to do so is not
> freeloading. Else you are a hypocrite.
>>>
Wrong. Linux has great value. But its value is not simply a matter of
money. When are you going to understand that the developers often do get
paid for their work, and even when they do not, it's not because their
work is considered without worth?
You fail, deliberately I am sure, to understand anything about the
principles of FOSS.
--
Kier
Aragorn
Yes, I know what it's about. I have seen it a couple of times, and it
is indeed amusing, albeit that it's not really something I would switch
on my TV for. ;-)
The most amusing is that they all speak British English, but the Germans
with a German accent and the Belgians with a French accent, and then
they have to speak in a clean "Oxford English" to converse with the
pilots.
And then there's that police officer, who speaks with an accent very
similar to that of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the "Pink
Panther" movies. ;-)
One particularly funny scene I remember was when that woman of the
Resistance was leaving René's "office" through the window with the
dramatic phrase that she "was going to silently vanish into the dark as
a phantom of the night".
Shortly after she leaves, one of the German officers comes in to talk to
René about something when they both hear loud metallic noise outside.
The German asks René what that sound was, and René - without even
showing any fear on his face - calmly says: "Oh, zat are ze phantoms of
ze night tripping over ze trashcans". ;-))
> There is no 'bunch of Nazis' involved, as billwg!!!! is trying to
> claim, in order to justify his entirely inappropriate comparison.
There are one or two Gestapo officers in the series, for as far as I
know, but most of what they seem concerned about is that painting of
"Ze fallen Madonna wiz ze big boobies". ;-)
The other Germans in "Allo Allo!" are just regular military, and they
don't even seem to take the war seriously. They're far too much
involved with their own little schemes and plots. ;-)
> I'm not sure how well it would do outside Europe, as the linguistic
> jokes probably don't translate, and the sexual ones are probably too
> overt for many countries.
Possibly... ;-)
GreyCloud
What do you mean by 'we'?? You gotta turd in your pocket?
billwg
"Madhusudan Singh" <spammers...@spam.invalid> wrote in message
news:4376a002$0$41140$1472...@news.sunsite.dk...
>
> Only someone terminally stupid (or ignorant) would want to spend good
> money
> on something that can be had for free. Many people like to give their
> software away for free, and an even greater number like to use it for
> free.
> What exactly is your problem with that ?
>
> (Other than it completely wrecks the buy-upgrade-repeat cycle model
> that a
> certain monopoly depends upon, especially as that free software turns
> out
> to be technically superior to whatever that monopoly and its lemmings
> come
> up with.).
Exactly so, but it still qualifies you for the freeloader title.
Freeloading has to, by its definition, occur from willing donors, else
it is theft.
billwg
> principles of FOSS.
>
developers towards the impoverished and needy users who cannot otherwise
afford conventional software. I think that is laughable, Kier.
billwg
"mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
news:n7KdndF1BK1...@comcast.com...
>>
>> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
>> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both
>> profit
>> from the exchange.
>
> True, and for the most part, we do.
>
the system.
Does this project have a name?
mlw
There are people in the world to whom charity is a way of life. Yes, one has
to make money to survive and prosper, but not every waking moment need be
dedicated to greed and averice.
As an open source developer, I understand it is a difficult balancing act,
but there is a way to make good money in an honest and beneficial way. What
more could one ask?
mlw
>
> "mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
> news:n7KdndF1BK1...@comcast.com...
>>>
>>> The open software sharing concept was to be among peers who could
>>> exchange software features amongst one another and thereby both
>>> profit
>>> from the exchange.
>>
>> True, and for the most part, we do.
>>
> IIRC, mlw, you were one of the ones not contributing any code back to
> the system.
What is "the system?" I have submitted code to the 2.0 Linux kernel, as well
as other open source projects.
Actually I have a number of projects. I try to be anonymous on this news
group because of the types of people that come here.
John Bailo
> You seem to be saying that FOSS is some form of charitable act by
> developers towards the impoverished and needy users who cannot otherwise
> afford conventional software. I think that is laughable, Kier.
Actually, it's following some very tried and true business advice.
For example, imagine FLOSS as a corporation.
It sees that there is a far greater demand for software than is being met,
yet the demand is from people who cannot afford traditional pricing for
software.
Enter FSF and Open Source. By allowing zero pricing on the generic
versions of products, they build a market that was untapped and potentially
huge for software. From there, they have locked in their market, and can
sell customization services.
Very smart.
Very businesslike.
John Bailo
> As an open source developer, I understand it is a difficult balancing act,
> but there is a way to make good money in an honest and beneficial way.
> What more could one ask?
As for me, I can forget all the Lib bleeding heart stuff and just admit that
Open Source simply has a great business model -- one that allows a Firefox
to make revenues of $32Million from a market formerly dominated by a
browser that has to be forced on people and makes a loss for its owners.
mlw
> mlw wrote:
>
>
>> As an open source developer, I understand it is a difficult balancing
>> act, but there is a way to make good money in an honest and beneficial
>> way. What more could one ask?
>
> As for me, I can forget all the Lib bleeding heart stuff and just admit
> that Open Source simply has a great business model
It is "a" business model, for sure. I was told by my father, who worked hard
as an ironworker all his life, "It is always easier to steal." His meaning
was to explain why one works instead of steals, not because it is easier,
but because it is right.
Mark Kent
It was more background for the wider audience. I agree that it's a
lightweight programme, and not something I'd go out of my way for.
>
> The most amusing is that they all speak British English, but the Germans
> with a German accent and the Belgians with a French accent, and then
> they have to speak in a clean "Oxford English" to converse with the
> pilots.
The whole motif of the show is the play on language in accents - it's
an amusing idea.
>
> And then there's that police officer, who speaks with an accent very
> similar to that of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the "Pink
> Panther" movies. ;-)
Indeed - he's a British Agent with a cr*ppy accent "Good moaning" for
"good morning", and so on.
>
> One particularly funny scene I remember was when that woman of the
> Resistance was leaving René's "office" through the window with the
> dramatic phrase that she "was going to silently vanish into the dark as
> a phantom of the night".
>
> Shortly after she leaves, one of the German officers comes in to talk to
> René about something when they both hear loud metallic noise outside.
> The German asks René what that sound was, and René - without even
> showing any fear on his face - calmly says: "Oh, zat are ze phantoms of
> ze night tripping over ze trashcans". ;-))
Rene's part is by far the best...
>
>> There is no 'bunch of Nazis' involved, as billwg!!!! is trying to
>> claim, in order to justify his entirely inappropriate comparison.
>
> There are one or two Gestapo officers in the series, for as far as I
> know, but most of what they seem concerned about is that painting of
> "Ze fallen Madonna wiz ze big boobies". ;-)
Quite. The senior gestapo officer is called "Herr Flick", as in "Hair
flick", ie., push your hair out of your eyes. It's all just lightweight
humour. The other fave 'gestapo' activity is something with whips and his
attractive assistant partially clothed, afairc...
>
> The other Germans in "Allo Allo!" are just regular military, and they
> don't even seem to take the war seriously. They're far too much
> involved with their own little schemes and plots. ;-)
There's an Italian general in it as well.
>
>> I'm not sure how well it would do outside Europe, as the linguistic
>> jokes probably don't translate, and the sexual ones are probably too
>> overt for many countries.
>
> Possibly... ;-)
>
--
end
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
"There is no statute of limitations on stupidity."
-- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.
Mark Kent
billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> espoused:
No, you didn't. The very brave men of the RAF and RN saved our 'bacon'.
No amount of revisionist history will take away the sacrifice, bravery
or achievement of those men. That you would say such a thing so close
to rememberance day serves to demonstrate what an unpleasant character
you are. I feel very sorry for you.
Whilst it was valuable to have 40% of the invading army into Europe
provided by the US, though, for sure, if I were a yank, I'd be highly
embarrased about how long it took the US to engage, and would be
apologising for letting everyone else down for so long.
The Russians provided by far the largest direct input in Europe, and the
Chinese did so in Asia. Perhaps you should look into the Royal Navy's
convoys to Russia to keep them supplied. Also, the road across Burma to
keep the Chinese supplied - look up "The forgotten army" sometime, you'll
learn something about the first modern jungle warfare. Aude Wingate is
a very interesting character - created the first Jungle-based special
forces.
In terms of the sacrifices made, the US was a small player. It did get
/very/ rich out of the war, though.
Karel "de Jazz" Jansens
> On Sunday 13 November 2005 09:39, Mark Kent stood up and spoke the
> following words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
>
>>It is a lightweight humourous drama. It's been very popular all
>>over europe, it doesn't take any particular political position, it
>>doesn't attempt to demonise any of the nationalities involved, in
>>fact, it makes gentle humour against inoffensive stereotypes, with
>>many of the jokes being sex-based rather than anything else. It's no
>>more offensive than Dad's Army was, and certainly no more offensive
>>than eg., Hollywood putting Yanks into The Great Escape or claiming
>>that the US Navy captured the first U-boat Enigma machine.
>
>
> Yes, I know what it's about. I have seen it a couple of times, and it
> is indeed amusing, albeit that it's not really something I would switch
> on my TV for. ;-)
Still, it could have been worse: it could have been about an amateur
soccer club with a shoddy garage as a neighbour. >:)
[for non-Belgian readers: ... ahh, just skip it. It'd take too long to
explain]
--
Karel "de Jazz" Jansens
"Those of us who fail history, are doomed to repeat it in summer school."
(Buffy Summers)
Ray Ingles
>> I invoke Godwin. You lose, tardfuck.
>
> Not so fast there, wolfie! You are apparently passé!
>
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
>
> "It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
> the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
> that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
> unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
In addition to boorishness and a complete unwillingness to back up any
of your statements, we can now add depressingly poor reading
comprehension to the list of your attributes. The "codicil" you mention
is, in context (should be a familiar word to you, eh Bill?) a warning
that if *you* "arbitrarily raise such a comparison with the motive of
ending the thread", it won't work.
*You* are the one who raised the comparison, and you didn't do it with
the intention of ending the thread - you did it to inflame readers, i.e.
to troll. So Godwin's Law indeed applies. And so you lose pro forma,
leaving aside the feeble nature of your assertions (they can't even
properly be called arguments).
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"When a friend of mine quit his last job, the reason he gave in his
notice was 'because Dilbert isn't funny anymore.' In his exit
interview, he was asked what he meant by that." - Stefan Bethke
r.e.b...@usa.net
> >
> > Really? Maybe you need to read some history books. I don't find the
> > word
> > 'Nazi' very funny in any context whatever.
> >
> Crocodile tears, I think, Kier, no one pays any attention to the WWII
> years any more. The people involved are all in the Old Folk's Home now,
> if they are still alive. I doubt you are that old.
It's a good thing that you are posting as an anonymous WinTroll instead
of as the Chairman of Microsoft. I'm sure that the surviving holocaust
survivors and their children would take exception to this sentiment.
Many major cities have holocaust museums as well. Calling someone a
Nazi is still an issue.
Yes, there have been times when Torvalds and the Linux support team
have been a bit totalitarian, especially when it comes to last minute
contributions to a new major release of a kernel. This is usually
because there isn't time to test, validate the legality of the
software, and permit the peer review process. The few times that the
Linux support team has allowed last minute contributions, it has burned
them. It takes weeks to get that all sorted out, and months to recover
from the PR hit.
> As to comedy, there is some BBC comedy series or other making the rounds
> of the British cable channels here that has a bunch of Nazis involved
> with some innkeepers in France set in that period that is apparently
> something that the Brits found funny enough to produce quite a few
> episodes. You might know more about that than I.
> We had Hogan's Heros for a few years that found the Nazis funny too.
Werner Klemperer, who played Colonel Klink on Hogan's heros was Jewish.
He told the writers that if Klink EVER won out in the end, or got the
last word, he would quit the show immediately. Very often, the writers
would add a last zinger just to make sure that Hogan got the last word.
One of the ironies of the Nazis is that they would never interrupt a
couple who were romantically engaged, especially if they looked Aryan.
The French underground knew this and when the Gestapo was searching for
downed american airmen, the french women would protect them by pulling
the airman into their bedrooms and making loud, passionate, and obvious
sex with them. The SS officers would hear the sounds of sex and move
directly onto the next house, often without even entering.
This often led to some funny antecdotes from airmen who were never
actually captured.
Most of those officers who were captured by the SS, and especially the
Gestapo, were much less "fond" of the Nazis. An airman who was
captured while still in Uniform, often still connected to his
parachute, would be sent to a prison camp directly. Those who were
captured in civilian clothes were treated as spies and were
interrogated in an attempt to identify members of the Underground who
had protected them. They were usually tortured and often did not
survive the "interrogation".
> Well you can consider linux to be an alien entity, Kier, I'm sure Bill
> Gates would go along with you! But if it were, it would be worth it's
> share of the aggregate valuation of the technology and it is not
> receiving that credit from its users. Q.E.D. freeloading.
The fact that Linux is as successful as it is indicates that value is
being given for value. Users can contribute in many different ways,
such as:
1. Cash - buy a commercial release which financially suports
components of their distro
2. Support - help someone else install Linux.
3. Marketing - share linux with others, let them see you using it.
4. Code contributions - analysis, design, coding, testing, stress
testing, bug reports..
5. Advocacy - find out what's important to users and share how Linux
can be better.
6. Research - find out who is using Linux and why.
7. Education - train yourself in how to use Linux as effectively as
possible.
8. Training - train others in how to use Linux as effectively as
possible.
9. Consulting - use Linux in consulting engagements.
All of these things increase the market for Linux and increase the
acceptance of Linux.
Linønut
> Exactly so, but it still qualifies you for the freeloader title.
> Freeloading has to, by its definition, occur from willing donors, else
> it is theft.
You got it wrong, billwg. Freeloading is done to unwilling donors, and
is not theft. The donor provides the free item under some form of
duress (guilt, the necessity of having someone pay at a restaurant), but
pays nonetheless. Check a dictionary.
By the way, your American and business jingoism disgusts me.
--
Treat yourself to the devices, applications, and services running on the
GNU/Linux® operating system!
billwg
"mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
What exactly is an "open source developer", mlw? I think there are
multiple avenues of endeavor open to a software
programmer/engineer/author/developer whatever the title. You could
invent some sort of useful application and sell it as a product and run
a sort of one-man software company or even hire a few helpers to do some
of the non-programming tasks and even design task eventually. There you
are selling something that you think people will be willing to pay for
since they presumably derive some benefit from its use. That is Windows
on the extreme end of the scale and an example of a starting point might
be one of the many DVD copy programs on the market for $19 to $39.
Most such people do not do that, though. They start out with some kind
of sheepskin saying they are a computer scientist or a software engineer
or such and get a job with some company creating software that is either
used by that company internally or, better, sold by that company as a
profitable product. That is a more common path than that of the
software entrepreneur because it needs are limited to the techie skill
sets and these individuals are often fairly introverted by their nature.
An in-between sort of position is the "consultant" or "analyst" who
takes a lot of stuff from others and adds some custom glue software and
sells the whole system as a sort of product to companies who do not want
to keep enough in-house people around with the needed skill sets. I
think this is the logical hiding place of the OSS fan, since a lot of
that sort of stuff can be fobbed off on a price conscious client much
more easily than the pay-for versions needed to do a similar job.
But none of these are in any way dishonest as you sort of hint that
conventional software jobs and opportunities are. The world's software
makers and distributors and users reward these individuals at a fairly
high level and it is fair to ask as to why anyone who wanted to
participate in these careers should take less than the going rate.
billwg
"John Bailo" <jab...@texeme.com> wrote in message
news:DJ6dna0b-5sVueXe...@speakeasy.net...
lost billions of dollars, but the money has gone to the run of the mill
software engineers doing the development and made thousands of them into
millionaires over the past decade. Now many of those same engineers are
now putting a buck or two into the collection plate on Sunday, paying
for meals and medicines for the very same indigent third worlders who
are said to be most interested in linux as an OS. How ironic that the
food and medicines and clothing that these people get all comes from the
same oppressive software product that the linuxers are trying to
destroy? What happens when they finally manage to slay the golden
goose?
Can Linus come to their aid? I think not! Linus is setting up his own
pay-me window! LOL!!!
Kier
I am say nothing of the kind, as you well know.
--
Kier
Kier
>
> "John Bailo" <jab...@texeme.com> wrote in message
> news:DJ6dna0b-5sVueXe...@speakeasy.net...
>> mlw wrote:
>>
>>
>>> As an open source developer, I understand it is a difficult balancing
>>> act,
>>> but there is a way to make good money in an honest and beneficial
>>> way.
>>> What more could one ask?
>>
>> As for me, I can forget all the Lib bleeding heart stuff and just
>> admit that
>> Open Source simply has a great business model -- one that allows a
>> Firefox
>> to make revenues of $32Million from a market formerly dominated by a
>> browser that has to be forced on people and makes a loss for its
>> owners.
>>
>>
> Well, John, seen as a cost vs assignable revenue proposition, IE has
> lost billions of dollars, but the money has gone to the run of the mill
> software engineers doing the development and made thousands of them into
> millionaires over the past decade. Now many of those same engineers are
> now putting a buck or two into the collection plate on Sunday, paying
> for meals and medicines for the very same indigent third worlders who
> are said to be most interested in linux as an OS.
Don't be so quick to sneer at those third-worlders. One day soon they will
be beating you at your own game.
How ironic that the
> food and medicines and clothing that these people get all comes from the
> same oppressive software product that the linuxers are trying to
> destroy? What happens when they finally manage to slay the golden
> goose?
Nothing. Aint' gonna happen.
>
> Can Linus come to their aid? I think not! Linus is setting up his own
> pay-me window! LOL!!!
Liar.
--
Kier
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
news:slrndnh65f....@localhost.localdomain...
> On 2005-11-12, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>
>>> I invoke Godwin. You lose, tardfuck.
>>
>> Not so fast there, wolfie! You are apparently passé!
>>
>> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
>>
>> "It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison
>> with
>> the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
>> that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
>> unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
>
> In addition to boorishness and a complete unwillingness to back up any
> of your statements, we can now add depressingly poor reading
> comprehension to the list of your attributes. The "codicil" you
> mention
> is, in context (should be a familiar word to you, eh Bill?) a warning
> that if *you* "arbitrarily raise such a comparison with the motive of
> ending the thread", it won't work.
>
> *You* are the one who raised the comparison, and you didn't do it with
> the intention of ending the thread - you did it to inflame readers,
> i.e.
> to troll. So Godwin's Law indeed applies. And so you lose pro forma,
> leaving aside the feeble nature of your assertions (they can't even
> properly be called arguments).
>
shows that the reference to Godwin made by wolfie in saying "I invoke
Godwin. You lose, tardfuck." is simply to shut off debate since the
meaning of "invoking Godwin" only has one meaning. The codicil is the
supporting argument that makes wolfies action null and void and that is
all that I pointed out. I perhaps raised that issue to tweak wolfie's
nose, but not to end the thread.
As to the side issue of Nazis in general, I think that their day is long
past and, while there may be people still alive who suffered at their
hands, there is no need to dwell on their evils since they themselves
are long dead. The term Nazi is however frequently applied in today's
society to anyone wanting to exercise officious control over some
non-essential. Hence the "Soup Nazi" of Seinfeld fame. Are you so anal
as to want to deny that such references can be made in good faith? I
wouldn't press the issue in regard to Kier, since he does show
supporting evidence of that, but I don't believe that a modern American
would.
Even the Soup Nazi made out:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/business/0505/01/biz-166880.htm
Ray Ingles
> would claim in the past was that they occasionally filed complaints with
> the developers describing bugs or clumsy operating features that the
> reviewer did not like the looks of.
You forgot me actually contributing driver code to Linux. I made a heap
of money on the VA Linux stock bubble because of that. :->
> Today's model is that of a central project committee
> or individual Nazi who unilaterally decides what offerings to accept and
> what tasks to undertake.
Even assuming that were correct (which of course it isn't), how is this
different from an individual "Nazi" *company* that "unilaterally decides
what offerings to accept and what tasks to undertake"?
> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers need
> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to mostly
> exist on this sort of fawning.
The thanks I get for my open-source programs are nice, but I wrote them
because I needed them for myself, and I use them regularly.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"One of the main reasons for the downfall of the Roman
Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate
successful termination of their C programs." - Robert Firth
Kier
>
> As to the side issue of Nazis in general, I think that their day is long
> past and, while there may be people still alive who suffered at their
> hands, there is no need to dwell on their evils since they themselves
> are long dead.
Not all of them. And their evil legacy lives on in neo-Nazism, which is
once again on the rise in Europe. Almost all the supporters of the old
Nazi party that I have seen interviewed over the years have been
disgustingly unrepentant.
> The term Nazi is however frequently applied in today's
> society to anyone wanting to exercise officious control over some
> non-essential. Hence the "Soup Nazi" of Seinfeld fame. Are you so anal
> as to want to deny that such references can be made in good faith? I
> wouldn't press the issue in regard to Kier, since he does show
> supporting evidence of that, but I don't believe that a modern American
> would.
>
> Even the Soup Nazi made out:
> http://www.detnews.com/2005/business/0505/01/biz-166880.htm
It's unfortunate that the true meaning of the term has become debased.
--
Kier
Ray Ingles
> You don't seem to analyze well on the fly, Ray. A superficial effort
> shows that the reference to Godwin made by wolfie in saying "I invoke
> Godwin. You lose, tardfuck." is simply to shut off debate since the
> meaning of "invoking Godwin" only has one meaning.
Let's give a full quote from the wikipedia article you referenced:
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
Although the law does not specifically mention it, there is a tradition
in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the
thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost
whatever argument was in progress.
It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
Now, I ask: who was it who "raise[d] such a comparison"? QED.
(Feel free to respond, Bill. I shan't. I don't see how anything I could
post would make you look any sillier.)
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States
combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to
shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions
by the fall, senior allied officials said today.
- New York Times, May 3, 2003
Linønut
> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 04:09:16 +0000, billwg wrote:
>
>> "Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
>>> You fail, deliberately I am sure, to understand anything about the
>>> principles of FOSS.
>>>
>> You seem to be saying that FOSS is some form of charitable act by
>> developers towards the impoverished and needy users who cannot otherwise
>> afford conventional software. I think that is laughable, Kier.
>
> I am say nothing of the kind, as you well know.
You'd think billwg would know that setting up a strawman works better if
you can get someone else to do it for you.
mlw
>
> "mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
> news:9tSdnSG6EdrAvOXe...@comcast.com...
>> billwg wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> "Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
>>> news:pan.2005.11.13....@tiscali.co.uk...
>>>>
>>>> You fail, deliberately I am sure, to understand anything about the
>>>> principles of FOSS.
>>>>
>>> You seem to be saying that FOSS is some form of charitable act by
>>> developers towards the impoverished and needy users who cannot
>>> otherwise
>>> afford conventional software. I think that is laughable, Kier.
>>
>> There are people in the world to whom charity is a way of life. Yes,
>> one has
>> to make money to survive and prosper, but not every waking moment need
>> be
>> dedicated to greed and averice.
>>
>> As an open source developer, I understand it is a difficult balancing
>> act,
>> but there is a way to make good money in an honest and beneficial way.
>> What
>> more could one ask?
>
> What exactly is an "open source developer", mlw?
Quite simply, one who develops "open source."
> I think there are
> multiple avenues of endeavor open to a software
> programmer/engineer/author/developer whatever the title.
Yup, sure are.
> You could
> invent some sort of useful application and sell it as a product and run
> a sort of one-man software company or even hire a few helpers to do some
> of the non-programming tasks and even design task eventually.
Yup, you could.
> There you
> are selling something that you think people will be willing to pay for
> since they presumably derive some benefit from its use.
Yup.
> That is Windows
> on the extreme end of the scale and an example of a starting point might
> be one of the many DVD copy programs on the market for $19 to $39.
Sure. It is VERY hard to make real money with this model, by the way. You
have to deal with distributors, manufacturers, then there are the retailers
and buy backs, end-cap deals, etc. Unless you can demand that the retailers
promote your product, you won't make much. I have been down this road on
several occasions with several products.
My last time, before "The OpenCD," we started a company to distribute
OpenOffice, Mozilla, PostgreSQL and the ODBC driver, Gimp, and a few other
programs on one CD with one install program.
Everybody loved it. The retailers loved it. We even talked to Best Buy, who
loved it. To make a long story short, it was a good product, priced at
$39.99, and we got $5 a box. (if I remember correctly)
Now, to sell software in a store, you need to promote it. End-cap, are the
displays at the ends of the isles. A new product has to be on the end-cap
to sell. If it is just in the middle, with everything else, few customers
will ever see it. The retail outlets wanted a lot more money for the sale
to put it on the end cap. We would either have to increase the cost of the
box to make any money, or take a loss to get an end-cap for a week. We
decided we couldn't do afford the end-cap.
In short, we sold a pretty good bunch of boxes, but didn't make any real
money.
>
> Most such people do not do that, though. They start out with some kind
> of sheepskin saying they are a computer scientist or a software engineer
> or such and get a job with some company creating software that is either
> used by that company internally or, better, sold by that company as a
> profitable product. That is a more common path than that of the
> software entrepreneur because it needs are limited to the techie skill
> sets and these individuals are often fairly introverted by their nature.
What?
>
> An in-between sort of position is the "consultant" or "analyst" who
> takes a lot of stuff from others and adds some custom glue software and
> sells the whole system as a sort of product to companies who do not want
> to keep enough in-house people around with the needed skill sets. I
> think this is the logical hiding place of the OSS fan, since a lot of
> that sort of stuff can be fobbed off on a price conscious client much
> more easily than the pay-for versions needed to do a similar job.
Interesting, if I understand your rambling, you say that combining multiple
systems and writing code for them to work together is "fobbing off"
something lesser to a customer.
A solution the customer can control is better (IMHO) than a closed source
version that puts the customer in a single vendor risk. If the customer
depends on a single vendor for something key to their operation, they are
at the mercy of that vendor until they design the product out.
>
> But none of these are in any way dishonest as you sort of hint that
> conventional software jobs and opportunities are. The world's software
> makers and distributors and users reward these individuals at a fairly
> high level and it is fair to ask as to why anyone who wanted to
> participate in these careers should take less than the going rate.
Yes, all three of the above scenarios, if I understand what you are trying
to describe, are good and honest in general, and not at all incompatible
with free software and open source.
The open source, free software movement is not about limiting or eliminating
business models. It is about providing customers and users with a good
product with real rights to use it as they see fit. It is about freedom.
Madhusudan Singh
From Wordnet :
freeloader
n : someone who takes advantage of the generosity of others
The implication being that the freeloader tests the patience of those
exhibiting the generosity (like a house guest who overstays the welcome and
the host puts up with that behaviour with forced politeness).
Which is the complete opposite of what happens in open source - the creators
of software put it up for public use with the explicit intention of having
it used as widely as possible by as many people as possible. (See for
instance, my projects on sourceforge - gnuplotfortran and fortranposix). I
am an open source developer and I actually feel happy when more people
download my programs, find them useful, and/or provide bug reports that
lead to improvement.
I think you are just trying to force-use a word with pejorative connotations
where it is inapplicable. Maybe because you have run out of any reasonable
arguments against the open source model.
Aragorn
spoke the following words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
> Aragorn wrote:
>> On Sunday 13 November 2005 09:39, Mark Kent stood up and spoke the
>> following words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
>>
>
>>>It is a lightweight humourous drama. It's been very popular all
>>>over europe, it doesn't take any particular political position, it
>>>doesn't attempt to demonise any of the nationalities involved, in
>>>fact, it makes gentle humour against inoffensive stereotypes, with
>>>many of the jokes being sex-based rather than anything else. It's no
>>>more offensive than Dad's Army was, and certainly no more offensive
>>>than eg., Hollywood putting Yanks into The Great Escape or claiming
>>>that the US Navy captured the first U-boat Enigma machine.
>>
>>
>> Yes, I know what it's about. I have seen it a couple of times, and
>> it is indeed amusing, albeit that it's not really something I would
>> switch on my TV for. ;-)
>
> Still, it could have been worse: it could have been about an amateur
> soccer club with a shoddy garage as a neighbour. >:)
Oh yeah, that one... :-þ Well, I'd rather watch "Allo Allo" than to see
a bunch of high profile professional actors start behaving like they
are acting for an audience of 5-year olds... ;-)
> [for non-Belgian readers: ... ahh, just skip it. It'd take too long to
> explain]
And they're not missing a thing either! ;-)
--
With kind regards,
*Aragorn*
(Registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
billwg
>
> Don't be so quick to sneer at those third-worlders. One day soon they
> will
> be beating you at your own game.
>
those places have been on the verge of extinction and the people have
been ineffective on the world's stage. How is that suddenly going to
change? Last I saw, they were slaughtering one another at rates orders
of magnitude greater than anything perpetrated by even your feared
adherents to the Teutonic chancellor in the 1930's and 40's.
> How ironic that the
>> food and medicines and clothing that these people get all comes from
>> the
>> same oppressive software product that the linuxers are trying to
>> destroy? What happens when they finally manage to slay the golden
>> goose?
>
> Nothing. Aint' gonna happen.
>
Well that is the first time I have heard you suggest that linux cannot
supplant Windows. Maybe these posts are doing some good!
>>
>> Can Linus come to their aid? I think not! Linus is setting up his
>> own
>> pay-me window! LOL!!!
>
Well it is his window and he is collecting. You cannot deny that.
billwg
"mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
>
> Sure. It is VERY hard to make real money with this model, by the way.
> You
> have to deal with distributors, manufacturers, then there are the
> retailers
> and buy backs, end-cap deals, etc. Unless you can demand that the
> retailers
> promote your product, you won't make much. I have been down this road
> on
> several occasions with several products.
>
direct sales are for!
> My last time, before "The OpenCD," we started a company to distribute
> OpenOffice, Mozilla, PostgreSQL and the ODBC driver, Gimp, and a few
> other
> programs on one CD with one install program.
>
> Everybody loved it. The retailers loved it. We even talked to Best
> Buy, who
> loved it. To make a long story short, it was a good product, priced
> at
> $39.99, and we got $5 a box. (if I remember correctly)
>
> Now, to sell software in a store, you need to promote it. End-cap, are
> the
> displays at the ends of the isles. A new product has to be on the
> end-cap
> to sell. If it is just in the middle, with everything else, few
> customers
> will ever see it. The retail outlets wanted a lot more money for the
> sale
> to put it on the end cap. We would either have to increase the cost of
> the
> box to make any money, or take a loss to get an end-cap for a week. We
> decided we couldn't do afford the end-cap.
>
> In short, we sold a pretty good bunch of boxes, but didn't make any
> real
> money.
>
Well you weren't doing anything that people would pay much for. You
were aggregating a lot of free stuff and trying to sell it as a labor
saving device to a group of prospective buyers who were not so
interested in saving time to download.
Better to depend on a single vendow with a proven financial stability
than on no vendor at all, mlw. That is the way most companies view
Microsoft vs Linux.
Kier
>
> "Kier" <val...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:pan.2005.11.14...@tiscali.co.uk...
>>
>> Don't be so quick to sneer at those third-worlders. One day soon they
>> will
>> be beating you at your own game.
>>
> You gotta learn how to read a form chart, Kier! Since the dawn of man
> those places have been on the verge of extinction and the people have
> been ineffective on the world's stage.
Really? Seems to me Egypt and such places were once of great significance.
They might be so again. Empires rise and fall. One day, Microsoft's empire
will crumble, too.
> How is that suddenly going to
> change? Last I saw, they were slaughtering one another at rates orders
> of magnitude greater than anything perpetrated by even your feared
> adherents to the Teutonic chancellor in the 1930's and 40's.
In Africa, perhaps. At the moment. But that is not the whole of the third
world. The people there aren't just hungry for food, they are hungry for
knowledge, education, technology. And being poor doesn't make them stupid.
>
>> How ironic that the
>>> food and medicines and clothing that these people get all comes from
>>> the
>>> same oppressive software product that the linuxers are trying to
>>> destroy? What happens when they finally manage to slay the golden
>>> goose?
>>
>> Nothing. Aint' gonna happen.
>>
> Well that is the first time I have heard you suggest that linux cannot
> supplant Windows. Maybe these posts are doing some good!
There is no golden goose, that's why..
>>>
>>> Can Linus come to their aid? I think not! Linus is setting up his
>>> own
>>> pay-me window! LOL!!!
>>
> Well it is his window and he is collecting. You cannot deny that.
I deny it absolutely.
--
Kier
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> On 2005-11-14, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>> You don't seem to analyze well on the fly, Ray. A superficial
>> effort
>> shows that the reference to Godwin made by wolfie in saying "I invoke
>> Godwin. You lose, tardfuck." is simply to shut off debate since the
>> meaning of "invoking Godwin" only has one meaning.
>
> Let's give a full quote from the wikipedia article you referenced:
>
> "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
> comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
>
> Although the law does not specifically mention it, there is a
> tradition
> in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the
> thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost
> whatever argument was in progress.
>
> It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
> the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
> that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
> unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
>
> Now, I ask: who was it who "raise[d] such a comparison"? QED.
>
the code Nazi in charge of the kernel, I think, Ray. Are you
suggesting, based on your mis-read of the Wiki that I did that to try to
limit debate? You are on thin ice and should realize that. The meaning
is clear: Wolfie tried to limit debate by claiming the nonsense
vis-a-vis Godwin.
billwg
"Linřnut" <"=?iso-8859-1?Q?lin=F8nut?="@bone.com> wrote in message
news:voudnbkaXsq9P-Xe...@comcast.com...
> After takin' a swig o' grog, billwg belched out this bit o' wisdom:
>
>> Exactly so, but it still qualifies you for the freeloader title.
>> Freeloading has to, by its definition, occur from willing donors,
>> else
>> it is theft.
>
> You got it wrong, billwg. Freeloading is done to unwilling donors,
> and
> is not theft. The donor provides the free item under some form of
> duress (guilt, the necessity of having someone pay at a restaurant),
> but
> pays nonetheless. Check a dictionary.
>
Pronunciation: -"lOd
Function: intransitive verb
: to impose upon another's generosity or hospitality without
sharing in the cost or responsibility involved : SPONGE
- free·load·er noun
Seems correct to me. Here the linux users in COLA are sponging off of
the generous and hospitable developers and are not sharing in the cost
or responsibility. QED as Ray tries to say!
> By the way, your American and business jingoism disgusts me.
>
Sure sucks to be you, nut!
Kier
>
> "Linønut" <"=?iso-8859-1?Q?lin=F8nut?="@bone.com> wrote in message
Liar. Since there is no imposition involved - quite the opposite - you are
completely wrong. And you know it.
>
>> By the way, your American and business jingoism disgusts me.
>>
> Sure sucks to be you, nut!
Not nearly as much as it must suck to be you.
--
Kier
The Ghost In The Machine
<bi...@twcf.rr.com>
wrote
on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 21:42:21 GMT
<1x7ef.3495$bx3....@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>:
>
> "Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> news:slrndnhcpn....@localhost.localdomain...
>> On 2005-11-14, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>>> You don't seem to analyze well on the fly, Ray. A superficial
>>> effort
>>> shows that the reference to Godwin made by wolfie in saying "I invoke
>>> Godwin. You lose, tardfuck." is simply to shut off debate since the
>>> meaning of "invoking Godwin" only has one meaning.
>>
>> Let's give a full quote from the wikipedia article you referenced:
>>
>> "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
>> comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
>>
>> Although the law does not specifically mention it, there is a
>> tradition
>> in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the
>> thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost
>> whatever argument was in progress.
>>
>> It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
>> the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
>> that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
>> unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
>>
>> Now, I ask: who was it who "raise[d] such a comparison"? QED.
>>
> Well I was the first to mention the term in the context of Linus being
> the code Nazi in charge of the kernel, I think, Ray.
Whereas with the highly democratic closed-source model of Windows,
Microsoft has raised quality to a very high level.
Yeah. Tell us another one. :-P
[rest snipped]
--
#191, ewi...@earthlink.net
It's still legal to go .sigless.
mlw
>
> "mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
> news:T_GdnZ0JB8J...@comcast.com...
>>
>> Sure. It is VERY hard to make real money with this model, by the way.
>> You
>> have to deal with distributors, manufacturers, then there are the
>> retailers
>> and buy backs, end-cap deals, etc. Unless you can demand that the
>> retailers
>> promote your product, you won't make much. I have been down this road
>> on
>> several occasions with several products.
>>
> You don't need classic distribution, mlw! That is what the internet and
> direct sales are for!
You still have to sell the product. If you go retail brick and morter,
end-cap and disply, internet, downloads and marketing and cross promotions.
It is hard to sell software. For every "success" there are hundreds if not
thousands of failures.
At the time we did it, most people had dial-up, it was a great convenience.
Hey, say what you want "what people want" is mostly position and promotion
with less about what your selling. People sell water in bottles. Why?
because of promotion.
That is some pretty short sighted thinking. Adhering to standards and using
popular components that can be serviced by multiple vendors always makes a
better system.
Ray Ingles
> "Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> news:slrndnhcpn....@localhost.localdomain...
>>
>> "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
>> comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
>>
>> Although the law does not specifically mention it, there is a tradition
>> in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the
>> thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost
>> whatever argument was in progress.
>>
>> It is considered poor form to arbitrarily raise such a comparison with
>> the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely-recognized codicil
>> that any such deliberate invocation of Godwin's law will be
>> unsuccessful. See Quirk's exception below."
>>
>> Now, I ask: who was it who "raise[d] such a comparison"? QED.
>>
> Well I was the first to mention the term in the context of Linus being
> the code Nazi in charge of the kernel, I think, Ray. Are you
> suggesting, based on your mis-read of the Wiki that I did that to try to
> limit debate?
This is actually funny. You can't possibly be this obtuse. Apparently
you think you're a squid - throw up enough ink, you might be able to
slink away.
No, I'm suggesting that *you* raised the comparison (and hey, you admit
it!), and therefore "the thread is over" and you "automatically lost
whatever argument was in progress". You did *not* raise the comparison
with the "motive of ending the thread" (as you say), and therefore the
'codicil' does not apply.
Wolfger was merely pointing this fact out.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will
be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." - Martin Golding
Ray Ingles
> Pronunciation: -"lOd
> Function: intransitive verb
> : to impose upon another's generosity or hospitality without
> sharing in the cost or responsibility involved : SPONGE
> - free·load·er noun
>
> Seems correct to me. Here the linux users in COLA are sponging off of
> the generous and hospitable developers and are not sharing in the cost
> or responsibility. QED as Ray tries to say!
Ah, but you didn't look up the definition of "impose upon". Accepting a
freely-offered gift does not make one a freeloader. I assume you agree,
or else you return all the presents you get for your birthday, right?
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication,
every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out
about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use
it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is
characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society..."
- George Radwanski, Privacy Commissioner of Canada
http://www.privcom.gc.ca/information/ar/02_04_10_e.asp
billwg
"Mark Kent" <mark...@demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:ivol43-...@ellandroad.demon.co.uk...
>> Well, Kier, we saved your bacon, so we are allowed some slack in
>> joking
>> about it. Be grateful for all the help!
>>
>
> No, you didn't. The very brave men of the RAF and RN saved our
> 'bacon'.
> No amount of revisionist history will take away the sacrifice, bravery
> or achievement of those men. That you would say such a thing so close
> to rememberance day serves to demonstrate what an unpleasant character
> you are. I feel very sorry for you.
>
I doubt that very much, clark! LOL!!! You would all still be whistling
the Horst Wessel today if FDR hadn't stepped in on your side of the
channel. You folks would have been a lot of tin cans and various other
vessels and even airplanes short but for the Lend Lease Act.
billwg
>
> Not nearly as much as it must suck to be you.
>
Kier
Why should I bother with anything stronger - you're not even worth a
decent insult, given your behaviour.
--
Kier
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
>
> You forgot me actually contributing driver code to Linux. I made a
> heap
> of money on the VA Linux stock bubble because of that. :->
>
the stock market hardly fits with code contributions. How can you claim
any cause-effect relationship? As to driver code, what driver code?
>
> Even assuming that were correct (which of course it isn't), how is
> this
> different from an individual "Nazi" *company* that "unilaterally
> decides
> what offerings to accept and what tasks to undertake"?
>
Well they don't go around claiming to be some kind of new idea or
software Mother Theresa. The commercial company is offering products
that they expect to be mutually beneficial to the consumer and to their
own revenues.
>> Today's freeloaders are smug in the assurances that their suppliers
>> need
>> them and that is actually true since the code developers seem to
>> mostly
>> exist on this sort of fawning.
>
> The thanks I get for my open-source programs are nice, but I wrote
> them
> because I needed them for myself, and I use them regularly.
>
So where is the altruism in that? If you did it for your own benefit
and you benefited, as you say, you are done.
billwg
"mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
>
> That is some pretty short sighted thinking. Adhering to standards and
> using
> popular components that can be serviced by multiple vendors always
> makes a
> better system.
>
used the Red Hat stuff and it did not seem to allow for simple updates.
I was always forced to install the whole thing over the top of the last
thing to get anything to work at all. Whenever I tried to simply update
a single section, nothing would run at all. I come to the conclusion
that linux updates are kind of mysterious, since they don't stand up and
shout how to do it like MS updates do.
You can boo and hiss all you want, but that is a fact.
>
Ray Ingles
> I doubt that very much, clark! LOL!!! You would all still be whistling
> the Horst Wessel today if FDR hadn't stepped in on your side of the
> channel. You folks would have been a lot of tin cans and various other
> vessels and even airplanes short but for the Lend Lease Act.
Ah, the squawk of the chickenhawk. Spoken like an obvious non-veteran,
Bill. Yet another area you know little about, yet regarding which you
are willing to make sweeping statements.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt, May 7, 1918
Ray Ingles
> news:slrndnhc98....@localhost.localdomain...
>>
>> You forgot me actually contributing driver code to Linux. I made a
>> heap of money on the VA Linux stock bubble because of that. :->
>>
> Seems like a non sequitor, Ray. Making money on the VA Linux fiasco in
> the stock market hardly fits with code contributions. How can you claim
> any cause-effect relationship?
When VA Linux went public, they offered developers credited in the
Linux kernel the chance to buy shares at the actual IPO price of $30. I
of course jumped at the chance and bought the maximum possible. The day
of the IPO they jumped to over $300, though my sale didn't make *quite*
that much. Still, I and my parents made tens of thousands of dollars.
Not a bad haul for about two nights of coding. :->
> As to driver code, what driver code?
http://nic.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/v2.2/patch-html/
patch-2.2.14/linux_drivers_char_joystick_joy-pci.c.html
Look for "Raymond Ingles". You might have to search for a bit, it's
all the way down at line number 4.
>> Even assuming that were correct (which of course it isn't), how is
>> this different from an individual "Nazi" *company* that "unilaterally
>> decides what offerings to accept and what tasks to undertake"?
>>
> Well they don't go around claiming to be some kind of new idea or
> software Mother Theresa. The commercial company is offering products
> that they expect to be mutually beneficial to the consumer and to their
> own revenues.
And open-source advocates aren't claiming that their model is mutually
beneficial to the developers and the users? Are you really admitting to
such a profound level of ignorance?
>> The thanks I get for my open-source programs are nice, but I wrote
>> them because I needed them for myself, and I use them regularly.
>>
> So where is the altruism in that? If you did it for your own benefit
> and you benefited, as you say, you are done.
Wow! Billwg has finally gotten a point!
I *didn't* release the source code to my applications out of
'altruism'! He understands now! He *admitted* that he understands!
(As Heinlein said, "Generosity is inborn, altruism is a learned
perversion.")
I wrote them because they filled my needs, and I released the code (a)
so that others could benefit, encouraging them to reciprocate with code
for their programs, (b) as a good advertisement of my programming skills
(and yes, I've gotten job inquiries and landed jobs because of them) and
(c) so that I could get bug reports, fixes, and suggestions for
improvements from others. All of which has come to pass.
And, after the VA Linux thing, what the heck, I might actually make a
little money once in while, too. Who knows?
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"Yes, but other than being useful, usable, reliable, extensible,
free, and unencumbered, what does Linux have going for it?"
- Hamilcar Barca
Ray Ingles
> used the Red Hat stuff and it did not seem to allow for simple updates.
> I was always forced to install the whole thing over the top of the last
> thing to get anything to work at all. Whenever I tried to simply update
> a single section, nothing would run at all. I come to the conclusion
> that linux updates are kind of mysterious, since they don't stand up and
> shout how to do it like MS updates do.
>
> You can boo and hiss all you want, but that is a fact.
Ah, sophistry. Your admitted inexperience *is* a fact, and I wouldn't
think to 'boo or hiss' about it. Of course, the 'conclusions' you draw
from that ignorance aren't. Just, y'know, FYI. You really should give
Ubuntu or the latest SUSE a try.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"I can write programs that control air traffic, intercept ballistic
missiles, reconcile bank accounts, control production lines."
"So can I, and so can any man, but do they *work* when you do write them?"
- Fred Brooks, after Shakespeare, "The Mythical Man-Month"
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> On 2005-11-16, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>> I doubt that very much, clark! LOL!!! You would all still be
>> whistling
>> the Horst Wessel today if FDR hadn't stepped in on your side of the
>> channel. You folks would have been a lot of tin cans and various
>> other
>> vessels and even airplanes short but for the Lend Lease Act.
>
> Ah, the squawk of the chickenhawk. Spoken like an obvious non-veteran,
> Bill. Yet another area you know little about, yet regarding which you
> are willing to make sweeping statements.
>
on an aircraft carrier fighting the Japs. Were you in the big one? Not
from your previous posts.
I was in the Navy for a few years during the Vietnam conflict, MOL
concurrent with the non president, Mr. Kerry. Were you there?
Were you ever anywhere?
mlw
>
> "mlw" <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote in message
> news:GoOdnRdCCZS...@comcast.com...
>>
>> That is some pretty short sighted thinking. Adhering to standards and
>> using
>> popular components that can be serviced by multiple vendors always
>> makes a
>> better system.
>>
> I will have to admit to some inexperience with this, mlw.
OK, so you admit that you don't know. Good.
> I have always
> used the Red Hat stuff and it did not seem to allow for simple updates.
Define "simple."
> I was always forced to install the whole thing over the top of the last
> thing to get anything to work at all. Whenever I tried to simply update
> a single section, nothing would run at all. I come to the conclusion
> that linux updates are kind of mysterious, since they don't stand up and
> shout how to do it like MS updates do.
>
> You can boo and hiss all you want, but that is a fact.
A "fact" from someone who freely does not know and is therefore not
qualified to make such statements.
billwg
>
> Why should I bother with anything stronger - you're not even worth a
> decent insult, given your behaviour.
>
be obvious.
tab
>unlike you, flatfish. Don't like 'em, don't read 'em.
What a trashy guy Keir is. BLIND AS A MORON.
Lets us look at the beginning of the post.
>It is argued by many Windows advocates that we GNU/Linux advocates are
>mere freeloaders. This is however untrue; most of us actually go out
>and buy retail packs of the distributions of our choice, or they
>contribute to the Free & Open Source Software community in another way,
>often - but not exclusively - financially.
Horse shit to the max. You all are flapping lips. The one
or two in the crowd that did buy it, will be marked as stupid.
The free loaders will just not report. That is the COLA WAY!
DEFEND AT ALL COSTS.
Let me see. Lets take a random sample of 10 COLA FREE LOADERS,
and see what they bought, or how they help out besides FLAPPING LIPS.
One of the 10 SAMPLED SHOULD BE KIER. Well, that only gives you
9 more chances.
lololol. lmao.
tab
FLAP KIER FLAP!
tab
Linønut
> I will have to admit to some inexperience with this, mlw. I have always
> used the Red Hat stuff and it did not seem to allow for simple updates.
> I was always forced to install the whole thing over the top of the last
> thing to get anything to work at all. Whenever I tried to simply update
> a single section, nothing would run at all.
I had trouble once with just updating RedHat (from version 6 to version
7, IIRC). So I always just over-wrote it.
But that was RedHat, and that was awhile ago. I haven't had nearly the
same trouble with Gentoo and Debian.
> I come to the conclusion
> that linux updates are kind of mysterious, since they don't stand up and
> shout how to do it like MS updates do.
They aren't too mysterious. You can, in fact, peruse the configuration
files and log files for both Gentoo's portage and Debian's apt.
Even more enlightening are the wikis.
> You can boo and hiss all you want, but that is a fact.
Nah, only some of "that" was factual.
--
Treat yourself to the devices, applications, and services running on the
GNU/Linux® operating system!
Ray Ingles
>
> "Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> news:slrndnn3mq....@localhost.localdomain...
>> On 2005-11-16, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>>> I doubt that very much, clark! LOL!!! You would all still be whistling
>>> the Horst Wessel today if FDR hadn't stepped in on your side of the
>>> channel. You folks would have been a lot of tin cans and various
>>> other vessels and even airplanes short but for the Lend Lease Act.
>>
>> Ah, the squawk of the chickenhawk. Spoken like an obvious non-veteran,
>> Bill. Yet another area you know little about, yet regarding which you
>> are willing to make sweeping statements.
>>
> Well, Ray, I wasn't around for WWII, but my pappy was out in the Pacific
> on an aircraft carrier fighting the Japs. Were you in the big one? Not
> from your previous posts.
Nope, a bit young for that. A couple uncles were in WWII, and they
spoke with a lot more respect for their European allies than you do.
> I was in the Navy for a few years during the Vietnam conflict, MOL
> concurrent with the non president, Mr. Kerry.
It's easy for you to say things like that. You make lots of
unsubstantiated statements.
> Were you there?
Nope, too young for that, too. Plenty of military friends and
relatives, though, and one thing I've noticed about them is the respect
they tend to have, even for enemies quite frequently. I've heard 'em dis
France, but not England. Your unjustified contempt was quite jarringly
out of character for the vets I know.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"Ironically, Microsoft's efforts to deny interoperability of Windows
with legitimate non-Microsoft applications have created an
environment in which Microsoft's programs interoperate efficiently
only with Internet viruses." -- Daniel Geer
Kier
Why? *I* know I am, I just don't care to waste any on you.
--
Kier
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
Nothing in my posts to imply contempt for the Brits either, Ray. You
are quick to take things over the top on your own and then ascribe the
action to someone else. My words were to the effect that the USA
involvement in WWII was critical to and fully determinant of its
outcome. Without US aid and direct military force intervention, the
scene would be much less. Clark pooh-poohed that with his response but
we know he's wrong by a mile.
Ray Ingles
> Nothing in my posts to imply contempt for the Brits either, Ray. You
> are quick to take things over the top on your own and then ascribe the
> action to someone else. My words were to the effect that the USA
> involvement in WWII was critical to and fully determinant of its
> outcome.
"Fully determinant"? Wrong. Without the critical intelligence
superiority the British had over the Germans (leaving aside their
not-inconsiderable actual military prowess and experience) the war could
easily have gone quite differently. Staging an invasion of Europe, not
to mention air raids, would have been much more difficult without bases
in Britan to work from, and those only existed because the British had
very effectively resisted Germany.
I'd also put Hitler's stupidity in opening up a two-front war as pretty
critical to the outcome as well.
In any case, if you want to discuss this further, take it to email, it
doesn't belong here. This newsgroup is where you could respond to, for
example, these posts:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/cb15a570c340add5
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/3e1deb5e814db4d4
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/776e4041a285e67a
...though I have no expectation of you doing so.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"It is error alone which needs the support of government.
Truth can stand by itself." --Thomas Jefferson
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> On 2005-11-17, billwg <bi...@twcf.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> Nothing in my posts to imply contempt for the Brits either, Ray. You
>> are quick to take things over the top on your own and then ascribe
>> the
>> action to someone else. My words were to the effect that the USA
>> involvement in WWII was critical to and fully determinant of its
>> outcome.
>
> "Fully determinant"? Wrong. Without the critical intelligence
> superiority the British had over the Germans (leaving aside their
> not-inconsiderable actual military prowess and experience) the war
> could
> easily have gone quite differently. Staging an invasion of Europe, not
> to mention air raids, would have been much more difficult without
> bases
> in Britan to work from, and those only existed because the British had
> very effectively resisted Germany.
>
Britain, Ray.
> I'd also put Hitler's stupidity in opening up a two-front war as
> pretty
> critical to the outcome as well.
>
Without the USofA there is no Western Front at all, just some Vichy
French guarding the shores against rowboats. Maybe the Russkies do just
as well as they did without the pressure, but maybe there's some kind of
stalemate in Poland.
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
> In any case, if you want to discuss this further, take it to email, it
> doesn't belong here. This newsgroup is where you could respond to, for
> example, these posts:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/cb15a570c340add5
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/3e1deb5e814db4d4
The AARD case is sort of interesting, Ray. I think that your apparent
attempt to use the SCO case filings as some sort of proof of malevolent
behavior on the part of MS is silly, though. You take the SCO lawyers'
premises and cite them as evidence, but there is certainly another side
and there is no adjudication of the charges in any case. They prove
nothing at all beyond the idea that SCO was suing MS.
Mark Kent
Ray Ingles <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> espoused:
It's impossible to make the statement billwg!!!!! makes, because it's
not possible to re-run without the US, but it's quite clear if you look
at the numbers that the US's involvement, whilst significant, was by
no means a majority inolvement in any theatre.
I'm quite certain that the war would've been won without the US's
involvement, and that the British plans for a european invasion with
just the British, Canadians, Anzacs, Indians, Africans, French, Polish,
Czechs, etc. etc. etc. would've been sufficient. It would merely have
taken a little longer.
--
end
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Do not seek death; death will find you. But seek the road which makes death
a fulfillment.
-- Dag Hammarskjold
Ray Ingles
>> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/3e1deb5e814db4d4
I've responded in the actual thread involved. You can find it here,
Bill:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/34a3b3fe9cfe19a3
But that's funny, there were *three* posts in that list. Bill must have
completely innocently and inadvertently edited that line out of the
message, purely by mistake of course. Here, I'll restore it:
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/776e4041a285e67a
Any response on this, Bill?
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"The meek can *have* the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!"
- Robert A. Heinlein
billwg
"Ray Ingles" <sorc...@localhost.localdomain> wrote in message
>
> But that's funny, there were *three* posts in that list. Bill must
> have
> completely innocently and inadvertently edited that line out of the
> message, purely by mistake of course. Here, I'll restore it:
>
>> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/776e4041a285e67a
>
make much sense outside of the information content, so I don't see where
any response is appropriate.