Re: an open letter to Geor

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

>Holy shit!
>
>You happen to have a tigon3 driver in forth that will work? ;)
>
>Ben, who is not under the influence of the Man, for what it's worth!
>
>--

osimplay is one of two truly modern assemblers, and is written in Bash.
H3sm is a Forth-like 3-stack machine. H3sm doesn't care how big an int is.

Rick HohenseeB

Re: an open letter to George Soros

[James Bottomley]

I'm not interested in disputing or evaluating any of the allegations raised in 
your letter, I'll leave everyone to draw their own conclusions.  However, I am 
curious about the consequences of what you propose.  In particular, your 
remedies.

Let us assume that George Soros accepts your letter and withdraws funding from 
Transmeta.  What are the consequences for Linux and Microsoft?

Transmeta could easily collapse, thus throwing several prominent Linux 
developers out into the job market.  Worse, the resulting publicity about the 
reasons would create a media circus that would be highly damaging to Linux as 
a whole and the release of 2.6 in particular.

Microsoft is bound to capitalise on this and sieze the opportunity to try to 
displace Linux from the server and enterprise (the very places it currently 
feels the greatest heat from Linux).  I don't claim it would succeed, but it 
will certainly try.

The net effect of your proposal therefore would be to cause a stall in Linux 
development and hand Microsoft an opportunity to capture the Server market and 
the Enterprise.  Is that really your aim?

If you really hold true to the principles of openness, why not instead ask 
Soros for funding to create a company that will produce the OS you think Linux 
should be and compete directly with Microsoft in "the client" arena?  At least 
that would be a positive remedy, intead of the wholly negative one you 
propose.  Perhaps it would even give you the opportunity to see at least one 
of your works proliferate?

James Bottomley

Re: an open letter to George Soros

[Rik van Riel]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, James Bottomley wrote:

> Is that really your aim?

+--------------+
|  Don't feed  |
|  the trolls  |
|              |
|  thank you   |
+--------------+
      | |
      | |
      | |
      | |
  ....\ /....

cheers,

Rik
-- 
A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?

http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

>>            I have devised a preliminary compensation scheme for authors
of
>>            open source software based on the songwriter royalties model.
>>
>> Yes, let's use the music industry to model how we compensate people
>> for their works, they schemes have an excellent track record
>
>Heh, you'd end up OWING money to the users, because of the
>value of bugreports, paying for the download infrastructure
>and rental of users' screen space ;)
>
>Rik

Problems I'd love to have.

Rick Hohensee

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

davem ridiculed...
>this is pure comedy, so I'll happily feed the trolls
>
>           I have devised a preliminary compensation scheme for authors of
>           open source software based on the songwriter royalties model.
>
><sarcasm/>
>
>Yes, let's use the music industry to model how we compensate people
>for their works, they schemes have an excellent track record
>
></sarcasm>
>
>

You like comedy? How about the "GNU business model" ?

Rick Hohensee

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

reformatted a bit before replying ....
>
>I'm not interested in disputing or evaluating any of the allegations
>raised in your letter, I'll leave everyone to draw their own conclusions.
>However, I am curious about the consequences of what you propose.  In
>particular, your remedies.
>
>Let us assume that George Soros accepts your letter and withdraws funding
>from Transmeta.  What are the consequences for Linux and Microsoft?
>

I didn't explicitly suggest remedies, but you presume my drift correctly.
I prefer to leave the bulk of that to the interested public.

>Transmeta could easily collapse, thus throwing several prominent Linux
>developers out into the job market.  Worse, the resulting publicity about
the
>reasons would create a media circus that would be highly damaging to
Linux as
>a whole and the release of 2.6 in particular.
>

And what would the overall adverse effect of that be? Linux has been
getting steadily less interesting since 1.2.13, and has done close to
nothing for the end-user. rtlinux is something of an exception. I'd have
that as the default kernel by now. rtlinux is clever, and historic, but
even that I suspect may be over-complex. I seem to recall an available NMI
even with rtlinux. Zimple.

>Microsoft is bound to capitalise on this and sieze the opportunity to try
to
>displace Linux from the server and enterprise (the very places it
currently
>feels the greatest heat from Linux).  I don't claim it would succeed, but
it
>will certainly try.
>
>The net effect of your proposal therefore would be to cause a stall in
>Linux development and hand Microsoft an opportunity to capture the Server
>market and the Enterprise.  Is that really your aim?

If Microsoft ever comes up with a real server OS, they surely won't have
the only one. There are *BSD, Plan 9, Linux, etc. And the as-yet unseen.

>
>If you really hold true to the principles of openness, why not instead ask
>Soros for funding to create a company that will produce the OS you think
>Linux should be and compete directly with Microsoft in "the client" arena?
>At least that would be a positive remedy, intead of the wholly negative
>one you propose.  Perhaps it would even give you the opportunity to see at
>least one of your works proliferate?

I leave all that to Mr. Soros and similar. I am in fact quite sick of C
and everything-is-a-file at this point though. And hardware gets easier
every day.

> >James Bottomley > In private email a curious party noted that I have no
smoking gun. True.  (Although I'm of the opinion that the scorn of DSFH is
at least a warm gun.) A George Soros will be able to see what's going on
without one, particularly with the George Soros view of Transmeta.

Good questions. I'm surprised at the generally mature response to this.
Thanks.

Rick Hohensee

Re: an open letter to Geor

[jbradford]

> If Microsoft ever comes up with a real server OS, they surely won't have
> the only one. There are *BSD, Plan 9, Linux, etc. And the as-yet unseen.

I hate to 'feed the trolls', but Plan-9 is _not_ free-as-in-speech software, and has never been free-as-in-speech software.  Please do not spread mis-information by implying that it is.  Have you read the license agreement?  It is nothing like the BSD or GNU licenses.

John.

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

A snippet of the Plan 9 license....


2.0     GRANT OF RIGHTS
2.1 Subject to the terms of this Agreement and to third party
intellectual property claims, Lucent grants to Licensee, a
royalty-free, nonexclusive, non-transferable, worldwide license to
use, reproduce, modify, execute, display, perform, distribute and
sublicense, the Original Software (with or without Modifications) in
Source Code form and/or Object Code form for commercial and/or
non-commercial purposes.  This grant includes a nonexclusive and
non-transferable license under any patents which Lucent has a right to
license and which, but for this license, are unavoidably and
necessarily infringed by the execution of the inherent functionality


The Plan 9 License was modified to resemble the GPL around Jan 2000 or so,
as was Kermit. I posted to linux-kernel on the matter at the time. These
two events changed the open source landscape substantially.

Rick Hohensee

Re: an open letter to Geor

[jbradford]

> A snippet of the Plan 9 license....

[snip]

That is, indeed, a quote from the current Plan 9 license.

You cut the paragraph a bit short though, and missed off the part that Richard Stallman argues excludes selling it for a profit, see:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

infact, he makes a lot of valid comments on the current Plan 9 license, and concludes that it is not free software.

Whether you agree with Richard Stallman's definitions of free software and open source, is irrellevant.  I certainly am _not_ saying that I do.  The issues he raises, though, demonstrate that there are big differences between the Plan 9 license and the GPL and BSD licenses.

Don't get me wrong, I like Plan 9, but you are spreading mis-information, by continuing to imply that it is free in the same way as Linux is free.

You can find the _whole_ Plan 9 license here:

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/license.html

> The Plan 9 License was modified to resemble the GPL around Jan 2000 or so,
> as was Kermit. I posted to linux-kernel on the matter at the time. These
> two events changed the open source landscape substantially.

I don't argue that.  Plan 9 is open source software.  What I am saying is that the license differs from the GPL and BSD licenses in a number of ways.  Comparing it to Linux, BSD, Atheos, OpenVMS, etc, etc, is comparing Apples to Oranges.

John.

Re: an open letter to Geor

[Rick A. Hohensee]

>I don't argue that.  Plan 9 is open source software.  What I am saying is
>that
>the license differs from the GPL and BSD licenses in a number of ways.
>Comparing it to Linux, BSD, Atheos, OpenVMS, etc, etc, is comparing
Apples >to
>Oranges.
>
>John.

Stallman wants a monopoly on freedom. The change from the previous Plan 9 
license clearly shows that they intend to liberalize it substantially. I
feel that my characterization is more accurate than yours, and not just on
this matter. Worst case, it's apples and pears.

Rick Hohenseee