181–190 of 198 posts
> what was “free software” was defined by the Free Software Foundation, but in a way that left much to be interpreted I don't understand what the author means here. What is unclear about the four freedoms? To me, Debian's definition looks redundant.
Considering how the FSF's own AGPL conflicts with freedom #1, they clearly can't be that clear.
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A few of my gripes: * creating Debian packages is a difficult process to learn. There’s a bunch of tools and wrappers around those tools to handle inadequacies and it’s not clear how to do it “right”. For example, if I just have a binary and want to put it into a Debian package without pulling in some random shell scripts that aren’t part of Debian proper, it’s not immediately clear how to do that. * Non-atomic and i…
If you "just have a binary" then you aren't compiling from source, which means you can't make modifications to that binary easily, which Debian wants to be able to do to fix security issues and other bugs. There is a large range of documentation, everything from the simple to the more advanced to different packaging niches. The large amount of docs makes that harder to navigate though, and a lot of stuff is moving to…
I agree it always makes sense to have sources involved for packages that are getting distributed as part of the distro, but what if I want to just deploy my product on a server without the sources?
I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…
The hell happened with Murdock after Debian? His trajectory since he stepped down until his death seems quite erratic.
After that, I heard he was CTO of Sun. At that point his marriage had fallen apart and his drinking had become a problem (I got all this second hand through mutual friends).
Everyone was shocked by the suicide and the events leading up. Seemed like he spiraled at the end.
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With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.
I wonder if the end-game is a BSD, or some sort of hard fork of the Linux ecosystem. Ubuntu and RedHat basically don’t work by any of my definitions of “work”. They’re both enterprisey and bloated and flaky in all the ways Windows was in the 90’s, except they add flatpack/snap, letting each program be its own flaky OS install, compounding the problem. Want to save a file to ~? Read this 1000 page tome on the 21 succe…
I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…
Its rare that we read a piece of content on the internet from 1994! Thanks for sharing this, its older than me.
It was a different world. Full of hope and wonder at this new thing. Remember the first major browser wasn't out until '94. We were all playing with Mosaic from the NCSA (which us Purdue kids got to have a small hand in).
I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…
With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.
I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…
Can someone explain the controversy surrounding Bruce Perens? I never heard the story and Google isn't being helpful.
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> Debian loses the very thing people chose it for I don't buy this. People don't choose Debian for the third party software in the repo. If they did, it's a bad choice. People choose Debian as a rock solid and stable base OS, and it's perfectly rational to use it as a base for third party software on top from other sources.
>If they did, it's a bad choice. It's an excellent choice. Debian provides about 60k software packages compared to say 15k in the Fedora repos. Debian and derivatives vastly outnumber other distributions in terms of available software, it's what drove Ubuntu's popularity, everything's available on it. You can use it as a stable base OS, but it doesn't have any particular advantage, and even some disadvantages compare…
If I need a specific app to always be up to date, I can get it from external sources on a case-by-case basis, such as downloading an AppImage/Flatpack from the developer's website or using Docker.
Why wouldn't you want a rolling distro if you want everything updated all the time?
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A few of my gripes: * creating Debian packages is a difficult process to learn. There’s a bunch of tools and wrappers around those tools to handle inadequacies and it’s not clear how to do it “right”. For example, if I just have a binary and want to put it into a Debian package without pulling in some random shell scripts that aren’t part of Debian proper, it’s not immediately clear how to do that. * Non-atomic and i…
The spec for .deb packages is in the deb(5) manual page: https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/dpkg-dev/deb.5.en.html
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With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.
If you want to get in on the ground floor of something today... Forth on RISC-V. Go nuts. https://hackaday.com/2023/01/08/forth-cracks-risc-v/