New Sidekick Will Run NetBSD, Not Windows CE 262
jschauma writes "Many sites are reporting that the next Sidekick LX 2009/Blade, from Danger (acquired by Microsoft early in 2008), is going to run NetBSD as their operating system, causing Microsoft's recruiters to look for NetBSD developers."
Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just asking.
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hear Microsoft is good to work for.
Why not, if you are going to be doing NetBSD work? It's not like you would be going in to code the next Microsoft Useless Widget 2.0.
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I hear Microsoft is good to work for.
Why not, if you are going to be doing NetBSD work?
Perhaps, but do they force you to use a Microsoft Windows box to do your work? That would be a show stopper for me.
Maybe 6.0/6.1 is better, but I did try out Microsoft Windows XP for awhile for educational purposes on a work machine and the only moments I truly enjoyed the experience were when I was turning the machine off and later installing RHEL over XP at the end of the time.
Mac OS X is not too bad, not great, but nothing beats KDE 3.5 for ease of use and development.
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Better than the other way around. That would be like digging your own grave or training your successor after being given notice.
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And there's a problem with that?
Even if a closed-source app statically links *BSD libs it's not a problem. That's the fundamental point of difference between the GPL & BSD licences.
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"A non compete clause in your contract perhaps ... so that Microsoft [could] sue you for copyright infringement, and win?"
Um. Not even wrong. Non-competes have absolutely nothing to do with copyright.
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That is interesting, but I was more referring to the fact that MS will be distributing this product.
Most users will never know that Hotmail and Apache are running on Linux.
Thanks for the info, though ;)
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Wait, now that you REPEATED that I realize the significance...
Serving Hotmail with Apache on a dinky little SIDEKICK? That's fuckin AWESOME!
No wonder MS is the best company ever.
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BSD [wikipedia.org] is not Linux.
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Hotmail is/was powered by a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris. NOT Linux. Get it right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:5, Informative)
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Personally I think the switchover was too fast. I suspect they just simulate an IIS (which Apache easily allows).
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:4, Informative)
The second server is obviously a known IIS/Win2003 box.
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Presumably you understand that most of the OS type guessing in nmap uses quirks in the TCP stacks to determine which OS it is.
So if the "first" box you talk to exhibits FreeBSD quirks, ie the load balancer / cache, no matter what is behind it, it will be identified as FreeBSD, right?
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It claims that's running Linux to this day, which I know for a fact is not true.
If Netcraft says it, it is true by the very definition of truth!
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No, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. The F5 BigIP does load-balancing and traffic management, it's not used for content delivery.
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Which isn't what the BigIP does. F5 is a company, BigIP is a hardware load-balancing and traffic-management system. I've seen 'em, I know what they do.
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It's actually the other way around - they used to show up in Netcraft as Linux servers even though they were IIS on Windows Server 2003 for a long time.
This is because the server version reported was actually Akamai's balancing and caching infrastructure in front of the Hotmail servers.
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean, Hotmail used to run FreeBSD before Microsoft bought it, and for the 4+ years it took them to migrate it over to Windows without failing?
Hotmail itself has never run on Linux. It may however have some of its content delivered by Akamai's CDN, which does run Linux (but not Apache).
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course no. Hotmail run Apache on Linux :)
Hotmail never ran on Linux. Originally, before Microsoft bought it, it was running on FreeBSD with Apache, with some backend servers running Solaris.
Microsoft had a lot of trouble switching to Windows, and even after they claimed they had migrated, they had to admit that some things were still running on BSD.
However, by now I'm sure they've had enough time to finish that switch.
Re:Is a 'Holy Fuck' in order? (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect; Hotmail never ran on Linux. It did continue to use Apache for some time, however.
Hotmail, when originally purchased, ran on FreeBSD and Solaris. Portions of it were moved to NT, running on Apache in the POSIX subsystem of the NT kernel (at the time, Apache for Win32 was not available, and Apache was miles ahead of IIS). This is one of the few cases I know of where the POSIX subsystem was used internally by Microsoft, although it is still under development and available in recent NT-based operating systems (some editions of Vista and Win7, and their server equivalents).
Embrace. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be "embrace", but you can't do any more than "extend" there. As long as the *BSD crowd's interested it'll be around. Much like Linux will be.
No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it .
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It might be "embrace", but you can't do any more than "extend" there.
This is actually one of the things I admire about developers in a position to release their code under BSD licenses. The end user is free to do anything they please with the code, including rolling it into a proprietary product, as long as they follow the attribution requirements. As for myself, most of my public code is licensed under the GPL, for various reasons (some being financially related). No one can reasonably argue that BSD-licensed code isn't truly free.
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BSD code license is truly free, but GPL makes other code free as well. They are saying "if you don't want to give your users the freedom we think they deserve, you shouldn't use other people work to gain profit".
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Insightful)
BSD code license is truly free, but GPL makes other code free as well
That's good. So, I can download the GoogleFS code that is linked into Linux? Oh, they don't distribute it? I guess I can't then.
More often recently the GPL has made other code not exist rather than be free. Take a look at the huge (BSDL) contributions Apple has made to LLVM, for example, because GCC GPL'd and so they can't use it for syntax highlighting in XCode.
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why you think that it's better for corporations to be able to profit from someone's work without giving back, but that's up to the authors anyway
Who said anything about not giving back? Apple have made a lot of improvements to GCC and to a number of other projects, including several BSDL ones where they were not required to release their changes. They have released a number of new projects under permissive licenses, such as Launchd and the clang front end to LLVM.
People who actually create things and genuinely give back have overwhelmingly voted for a model in which someone else can't just grab your code and run.
Did they? Most of the code on my system is not GPL'd. A fair bit is LGPL'd, but huge amounts are under BSD, Apache, and similar licenses. This includes a lot of well-known projects, like *BSD, Perl, LLVM, subversion, PostgreSQL, Lighttpd (or Apache, if you prefer), Squeak, X.org, and so on. The only bits of GPL'd software I use regularly are bash, gcc, and vim. Of these, gcc is slowly being replaced by llvm/clang and the others are hardly the 'overwhelming' majority of the code I run.
According to Ohloh.net, I have released around 150,000 lines of code, putting me well into the top 2000 open source developers, and all of this has been under BSD-style licenses. I wonder where you are on this list.
Are you an anti-GPL zealot, or an Apple fanboy?
No, I'm a pragmatist. I want contributions from companies and from individuals. I'm more interested in the contributions companies do make than they don't. If Apple, Sun, IBM, or Google releases something under an open license, I prefer to count this as a positive, rather than count the number of lines of code in products they didn't release. I look at gcc and llvm/clang (which, by the way, I've contributed a fair bit of code to that isn't counted by Ohloh since I don't have commit access there) and I see a lot of the companies that used to contribute code to gcc are now backing llvm because of the license.
When Apple released a new ARM back end for LLVM to use as the iPhone compiler, I chose to be happy that LLVM had been improved, rather than complain that the iPhone was not open. I can choose not to buy an iPhone because it is not open (and did) and still benefit from the improvements in LLVM for other ARM-based devices I own.
The same is true of a lot of corporate contributions. When Yahoo! releases improvements to FreeBSD, I am happy that the operating system on my ThinkPad gets better, I don't complain that they didn't also open source their search engine.
In the modern world of interconnected systems, the GPL's distinction between what code you do need to release and what you don't is quite arbitrary.
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No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it .
At least in the short term. MSFT appear to have bought this product from elsewhere. To keep it alive they need to get a release out the door. Maybe in parallel they are porting the software to run on WinCE.
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it .
Not really. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, development was well underway when Danger got bought by MS. That means it was likely cheaper to just continue doing what they were doing rather than scrap the work and start again using Microsoft's stuff. Not to say that something like that would have been unheard of, but it would have delayed a product that they wanted to get out the door. The real test will be whether the next iteration of this hardware runs this same OS or whether it comes with WinMo/WinCE.
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, for the longest time, MS was going to move the Sidekick over to WinCE- they were even gearing up for it. Unfortunately, after many months of this (A year ago, in reality...), they have announced that they're doing it with a *BSD core and they're HIRING *BSD devs for it.
If you're doing what you're claiming, you don't spend 12 months doing it that way and then gear up for the other OS that you don't sell...doesn't look good to investors to spend 225 billion or so on someone to do something like this. ;-)
sorry, you're making too much sense (Score:3, Insightful)
development was well underway when Danger got bought by MS. That means it was likely cheaper to just continue doing what they were doing rather than scrap the work and start again using Microsoft's stuff.
Hm, if only it worked that way. But out there in Biznis land that kind of rationality rarely prevails in my experience. The "NIH" and "OMG ITZ NOT MS" factors rank higher than "faster, better, cheaper" (i.e. anything not MS).
Plus, executives are, often, ah, "incented" to choose the Microsoft solution in t
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i also agree this is admitted winCE is crap. we have ruggised hardware at work that uses it and i fucking hate it. activesync is the worse idea evar.
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, would it be nice to have seen MS contribute some code back? Yes, but that was not required by the license so there is no problem. That is the whole point of the BSD-style licenses: you can take my code and do whatever you want with it; you are under no further obligation to me.
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands there is nothing to make them release the source code to drivers they have written.
I don't think you get it. You consider "freedom" to be the ability to force other people to release their own code under terms you find favorable? Wow, dude. That's awesome.
You're still free to download any BSD distribution you like, in its entirety, and do whatever you please with it. Stop whining about the fact that the developers of that codebase made a personal decision that they don't care what others do with their code. What's that, you feel you have the right to make that decision for them? Wow.
Re:Embrace. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Insightful)
you are arguing against a mind set that has attempted to redefine free.
As though 'Free' didn't have enough definitions already.
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The question here is, whose freedom?
The BSD license gives freedom to the developer; the GNU license gives freedom to the code itself.
That is: with BSD, you can take code from the community, do work on top of theirs, and keep it for yourself. In a sense, you can take fre
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No. Code cannot be free. Only people can be free.
Actually, BSD and GPL give exactly the same rights to the developers who get the licensed code. However, the GPL restricts the rights of distributors (not all developers distribute the code they develop; as long as they don't, the restrictions of the GPL don't apply; OTOH the restrictions do apply even if you distribute the unmodified code).
The BSD is designed to
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This deserves 5, Insightful. No biased view, just a good explanation.
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Informative)
Straight up, anybody that declares a BSD-licensed project to be "less free" than a GPL-licenses project is either intellectually dishonest, confused, or an imbecile. (I apologize in advance if anybody falls into category 1 or 3)
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GPL doesn't force anyone to give away their source code. If you don't want to give your code, well, maybe you should code it yourself instead of using other people's code.
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If you give people too much freedom, then they will use that freedom to take yours away...
If you let people run wild with no rules, then the strongest will become dictators and everyone else will be subjugated or killed.
BSD gives people too much freedom, because they can now take the free bsd code and close it up...
GPL ensures that the code will remain at a constant level of freedom.
Society is the same, we are not free to go around killing people or forcing others to be our slaves, we sacrifice some of this
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Entity A makes open source code, using BSD license. Entity B makes a close product based on that code. I, as a consumer of that product, don't have the freedom to adjust B's code to my needs as I would have if the original code was GPL.
On the other hand, Entity B is more free than if the code was GPL.
The question is, what freedom is more important? Anyone would codes should choose on their own. No need to argue about which is better.
Re:Embrace. (Score:4, Informative)
NetBSD is not less free. The drivers that they have written are. I don't understand why people try to confuse matters.
The BSD license is more free for users and distributors. Derived works /may or may not/ be released under a BSD license. This has NO BEARING on the original work.
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If netbsd was gpl licensed I would be Free to compile my own version of the OS to run on the Sidekick. As it stands there is nothing to make them release the source code to drivers they have written.
From my POV netbsd is less free.
No, only the derived, unpublished code could be considered less free. The original NetBSD code is more free, easily demonstrated by the fact that it was able to be combined with other Microsoft code. If it was GPL code, it would have been locked out of this particular product. Ie. GPL makes to code more limited, less free.
GPL is good though if you ask me. It enforces limitations, which I as a programmer often want to put on my code. It's good for this purpose precisely because it limits the freedom of the c
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Who says that's "trouble?"
Anyone who discovers that the product they are using and need to bug fix or update is 99% BSD code, and yet they have zero freedom, because BSD didn't extend freedom downstream, so while the original authors said the code was free, and some developers along the way got some of that goodness, by the time the end users got it the freedom was gone.
Look, I get it, this is the point of the BSD, and nobody did anything 'wrong' in the above scenario. But that's what the criticism with the
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"I don't use *BSD because I hate Microsoft, I use it because I love unix"
That's the whole of the point. It doesn't matter who uses the code; there's no sense of "being ripped off" in the BSD world. You develop it because you love it, and because you want to make things (all things) work better. Not because you want to kick Microsoft (or anyone else) in the teeth.
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Just in time! (Score:4, Funny)
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In other news (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes I know this country. It's next to the country of Amsterdam, yeah? :D
Try try again. (Score:3, Insightful)
This reminds me of the Hotmail Unix to Windows conversion a few years back. They failed the first time. But eventually got it right.
Re:Try try again. (Score:4, Funny)
But eventually got it right.
No they didn't, they made it run on Windows.
Even better... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Domain Name: FRONTBRIDGE.COM Registrar of Record: Corporate Domains, Inc. Administrative Contact: Microsoft Corporation Domain Administrator One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 US domains@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329
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Its like for version control they use perforce, while MSFT fans are stuck using visual source safe.
Outside of one tiny (and fucked) company I had the misfortune of working at, I've never seen anyone use Visual SourceSafe.
Our Indian contractor apparently uses it as their standard source control tool.
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I once worked with an Indian consultancy company. They were working on software for a mobile phone and were using ClearCase. Now ClearCase is expensive, but it does the job. A colleague and I were writing code to test the peripherals on the baseband chips. Now one of the Indian managers said that the project was stalled because the I2S controller didn't support some mode.
Since we had code that tested the I2S controller, we were drafted in to help them. We asked for a config spec. It looked like this
foo.c@\m
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I pushed a DSCM solution (mercurial, git, bitkeeper) but I couldn't get people to listen and now I am out of that job.
I don't plan to be around to see it work (or not as the case may be).
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I used to work in an environment using ClearCase in multi site (7); including sites in the US, India, Brazil, and Russia. Everything worked fine.
ClearCase is a monster and not my preferential choice for lots of scenarios, but it does the job fine. The problem the GP was talking about is purely configuration management not being done at all.
They ported Sidekick to NetBSD? (Score:2)
Cool. Somebody tell Borland!
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Cool. Somebody tell Borland!
But the calendar only went up to 1999.
So what? Danger will still lock it out. (Score:2)
This is why the developer community for the SK imploded. While there's still a core of hard-core SK developers out there, the majority of them moved on to greener pastures after the whole fiasco with Danger and their multiple personality disorder with regards to developers.
This, and their shit hardware QC, are why the Sidekick stopped being a real, going concern several years ago.
wow! Does this mean that there might be... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, this isn't surprising... NetBSD runs on everything. The NetBSD team spends a significant amount of time supporting a large number of platforms - be it a modern X86 server or a sun pizza box.
You'll notice that commercial entities like the BSD license (see: OS X) And, I don't think that the NetBSD developers will suddenly panic: "Someone's going to steal our code!" Contrary to what some here might feel, there is room for more than one open source operating system and, believe it or not, more than one license.
Back in the old days, slashdot had the BSD link right on the front page.
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The NetBSD team spends a significant amount of time supporting a large number of platforms
Actually, they don't anymore. What they do spend a lot of time doing is ensuring that there are very clean abstraction layers throughout the kernel so that porting to a new platform can be as little as a weekend's work if the compiler already exists. You need to initialize the CPU and provide MMU functions, which is typically a few hundred lines of code, and write a driver for the bus controller. From then on you can use all of the existing drivers unmodified.
What about the Microsoft Xenix Sale Agreements? (Score:4, Interesting)
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They're not selling the OS. They're selling the phones which use an OS.
Doesn't breach their non-competes with SCO, sorry.
Not surprising really (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft have woken up to the fact that the only way to defeat Linux and the GPL is to support the BSD type licensed software.
What's the problem with that?
Every system has to have a basic set of rules. That basic set of rules is there to ensure that the system itself will continue to exist.
So for instance, democracy won't last very long if you allow a simple majority of voters to vote democracy out of existence. The dim witted might say that makes it more democratic to allow it, but the more thoughtful wil
Re:Not surprising really (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone can take that code, ignore the communal effort which went into producing it, close source the code and their own additions and benefit off the backs of the work of others.
You mean like the way Linus Torvalds did when he used the work that everyone from Thompson and Ritchie to Allman and McKusick had done in designing the system he cloned?
I'm not criticizing Linus, writing open source code to open systems APIs is a Good Thing. My point is that EVERYTHING we do is done on the back of others.
And if this is another step in Microsoft's slow and reluctant journey from proprietary APIs back to open ones, that's good too.
Hey Microsoft recruiters! Pick me! (Score:3, Funny)
Locked down platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it strange that until now there isn't a single comment on the open-ness of that platform. Yes, it may run a BSD flavour. Nonetheless, is the platform locked down? Is it possible for any end-user to reinstall the OS without the need of circumvention tools and hard hacks?
That, as I see it, is the single most interesting aspect of this article. After all, if the sidekick platform is locked down then it doesn't really matter it is running a BSD flavour. Moreover, it would once again emphasize the need for the legal constructs added to the GPL in the form of GPLv3.
So, is it locked down? Can it run linux?
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BSD is the only licence that is compatible with MS business practice.
MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.
Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:5, Funny)
BSD is the only licence that is compatible with MS business practice.
So can I get windows and word with a BSD license?
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Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:5, Insightful)
No but windows does have BSD code in it. Specifically ftp.exe and some zlib code.
Which is exactly the reason for all the BSD vs GPL holy wars.
GPL is about the freedom of the code: "I've shown you the code, if you use it, show your code to anyone who wants it". BSD is about the freedom of the software: "Hey, I wrote this. Use it."
Regarding Windows:
GPL: "Oh noes! They closed the source!"
BSD: "Cool, they're using my stuff! At least they got *that* part right."
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"I've shown you the code, if you use it, show your code to anyone who wants it".
a bit wrong.
if you use it, nobody cares. if you modify and then give somebody else, you have to give them code of the modfications as well.
distribution, as opposed to use.
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Well, the thread is about a commercial OS containing open source code, so I guess we can assume distribution.
+1 Pedant, though
Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:4, Insightful)
Regarding Windows:
GPL: "Oh noes! They closed the source!"
BSD: "Cool, they're using my stuff! At least they got *that* part right."
Or rather:
GPL: "Oh noes! They closed the source!"
BSD: "Shit, they added bugs to my perfect code and the billions of users can't do a thing to fix it."
Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:4, Informative)
MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.
True except that they did not "write" Xenix. Xenix was a licensed fork from AT & T source code.
In another lifetime I once thought Microsoft was showing promise by bringing a Unix-like interface to PC DOS 2.0. Most of the code was half-assed and broken and I guess they kind of just left it that way.
Oh and for the folks whining about 6.1 aka Microsoft Windows 7 being a paid-for bug fix release over the previous one, that's really old news because PC DOS 2.1 was the same thing over 20 years ago. That was as much abuse as I could take from a company, but I guess others have different tolerances for pain.
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Yes, I'm posting this from an Ubuntu laptop, while performing maintenance on a couple of Debian servers, and poking around at a CentOS server running several variants of Linux in virtual machines. So, yeah, I enjoy using GPL products. It doesn't mean the GPL bestows more freedoms on th
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What are the constraints that GPL bestows on the end user? Right, none at all.
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Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:4, Insightful)
What are the constraints that GPL bestows on the end user? Right, none at all.
You're right, none at all. Until you decide to change the code and redistribute it. Oops.
What part of the term "end user" confuses you?
Re:I never thought I'd see the day. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, BSD licensing allows the end user to do whatever their want with the code in question
End users do not use source. End users use binaries. Granted, they can compile from source if they have it. GPL binaries come with source. BSD-based binaries in general don't. It can be 99% BSD code, 1% special closed source driver code but the whole comes without source and it does me fuck all good that it's 99% BSD. BSD is ultimate freedom for the ones with the source, GPL is a little less freemdom what you can do with the source, but it makes sure I will have the source in the first place.
Unless you limit yourself to pure BSD you as an end user have absolutely nothing, no more than if it was through and through proprietary. The freedome that you could try to figure to what bits and pieces of BSD they used, how they put them together and add the secret source yourself is illusory at best, possibly plain out illegal through patent law at worst. Maybe it could help some developer make a similar product, but as user of a closed-source derivative you have no ability to make small changes to improve or fix anything. You are at the vendor's mercy, you have the same lock-in issues, you have the same "embrace, extend, extinguish", they support only the platforms they choose and end support when they choose. "BSD based" means nothing to the end user except maybe that it was slightly cheaper to produce rather than reinvent the wheel.
Of course you can just stay with pure BSD. But then you're fighting a million companies that want to kill off the userbase that actually could improve that code by making them use properietary "value-added" versions instead. Let me take an example:
Linux user use Konqueror, finds bug in engine, patches source, has better Konqueror instantly, sends fix upstream, everyone gets a better Konqueror.
Mac user use Safari, finds bug, can't compile Safari but has to compile Webkit engine by itself, sends fix upstream, someday get an improved Safari.
The last is much, much more unlikely because it doesn't fix the end user's problem. The far more likely story is that he'd file a bug with Apple that may or may not do anything about it but then you're right back to classic "report error to vendor, wait for fix" just as if you reported an IE bug to Microsoft. I just don't see the appeal of "based on open source" because it is not anywhere near "open source". And the only advantage of the BSD over the GPL is to make products "based on open source".
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I personally think it would be nice if everything was completely open, but I think that's the kind of utopic vision the world is not ready for.
I wish for the same thing, and look forward to the day when economic scarcity is no longer human concern.
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Offtopic? He's talking about the usage of BSD licensed code by Microsoft, how is this offtopic?
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Very poor moderation. MichaelSmith, we salute you for your non-offtopic comment.
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I, as an end user, like the possibility to adjust the software to my needs even if I never redistribute it. How can a developer using the code in his work be an "end user"? That's not the "end", the end is the people is sells/gives the code to.
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fedora on ppc? Or ubuntu?
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If you're going to try to goatse us, you should at least try to hide the link.