Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm chuckling a bit. but then the whole GNU ecosystem is about catering to a tiny minority with special priorities... inside of an even tinier minority of users of open source OSes. I'm sure I am just an outsider who doesn't really understand the needs or the motivations... Linux does well in the server world, and Apple get a lot of attention, but even then, between them, they account for something like 4% of OS inst…
Wow. Thanks for bringing back visions of the 1990s. These arguments were tiresome then; they are boring now. You are conflating GNU, GPL and LGPL. The GNU system may never be as successful as you think. But portions like The GNU Compiler Collection (gcc, go, etc.) and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and thinks like GNU Emacs are the standard which others are measured against. Second the "absolutely awful" licenses; being u…
GNU Hurd 0.6 released
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Thanks for bringing back visions of the 1990s. These arguments were tiresome then; they are boring now. You are conflating GNU, GPL and LGPL. The GNU system may never be as successful as you think. But portions like The GNU Compiler Collection (gcc, go, etc.) and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and thinks like GNU Emacs are the standard which others are measured against. Second the "absolutely awful" licenses; being u…
That was Linksys not Netgear. re: GPL/LGPL being the most successful software licenses, that seems to be changing in favour of permissive licenses like MIT/BSD/Apache Back in 2013, Aaron Williamson of the Software Freedom Law Center did an analysis of licenses used on Github. The MIT license outnumbered all variations of GPL + LGPL licenses combined, second to MIT on the list was BSD (of course, it should be mentione…
That shouldn't be very surprising. I tend to licence small projects under MIT style licences because of the relatively small investment of effort. But if I was starting a much bigger project I would seriously consider something like GPL. It would be interesting to see how the use of licences scales with project size and longevity, rather than pure project count.
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's quite similar. The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom, it inhibits the power to erode freedom.
The only way you can consider this "quite similar" is if you are using a rhetorical flourish to manipulate the listener emotionally. Which is, of course, what is being done here, and not for the first time on this particular topic. Just remember, hyperbole serves no master. Employ it at the risk of having it employed right back against you.
Slavery is discussed in political philosophy all the time, even in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" by Nozik (with which I happen to disagree, but that's nor here nor there). I did not read the first message as an hyperbole, but simply as a consequence of the fact that "enjoying freedoms while preventing others from enjoying them" brings slavery to mind quite often. It's an unfortunate, possibly unnecessary metaphor, but not necessarily a piece of rhetoric (although, like everything under the sun, it surely has been used to that effect as well).
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#54Do we need some new terminology? There does not seem to be a word for the kind of thing Hurd is. "Replacement for the Unix kernel" seems a bit wordy. It's a thing that does what ordinary folk expect a kernel to do. So technically, it's a kind of virtual kernel , I suppose, but that would be far too easy to misunderstand. On a completely different note, just what is it about some software projects that stretches them…
Unix-like microkernel. In the same category as QNX and the like.
Regarding the second question, a mix of not a lot of resources, stubbornness and in a lot of cases, petty bickering.
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Thanks for bringing back visions of the 1990s. These arguments were tiresome then; they are boring now. You are conflating GNU, GPL and LGPL. The GNU system may never be as successful as you think. But portions like The GNU Compiler Collection (gcc, go, etc.) and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and thinks like GNU Emacs are the standard which others are measured against. Second the "absolutely awful" licenses; being u…
The GPL in practice hasn't always resulted in more freedom compared to other licenses. For example, GCC is purposefully designed to be non-modular, to prevent people from developing proprietary front ends. You may agree or disagree with the trade-off, but observe the LLVM project: you have the freedom to manipulate IR outside the compiler. With GCC, you have permission to manipulate IR outside the compiler, but they'…
But that is not a result of the licensing, it is a result of a design decision. While it may very well be that such a design decision was made to avoid GCC being used with proprietary front-ends (along with the fact that GCC is simply an older project), it does not provide an argument against GPL, at best against some choices made by the FSF. And after all, the LLVM license is the reason why people have to hope that Apple will open Swift, as opposed to that being a fait accompli. And the LLVM license is the reason why hardware vendors will be able to build proprietary back-ends. In my book neither of these facts increases freedom.
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#56Hurd was interesting a decade ago, but IMO these days the more interesting proposals are far more radical, such as the Ethos OS [1].
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#57I'm sure there will be a few people chuckling at the news that the Hurd is still under development. Yesterday I learned from one of my colleagues that the newer versions of OSX will only run kernel extensions signed by Apple. The need for the GNU project is as great now as it was in the 1980s.
Oh the humanity that a company you willingly purchase a license from restricts you from doing whatever you want with it. Cry me a river.
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#58http://xkcd.com/1508/
Spot on, as always.
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#59"GNU Hurd runs on 32-bit x86 machines. A version running on 64-bit x86 (x86_64) machines is in progress".
This sounds just like "HURD is almost ready" back in 1990s
Re: GNU Hurd 0.6 released
#60I'm sure there will be a few people chuckling at the news that the Hurd is still under development. Yesterday I learned from one of my colleagues that the newer versions of OSX will only run kernel extensions signed by Apple. The need for the GNU project is as great now as it was in the 1980s.
Not really, the opportunity cost means something else isn't getting done. Emacs, for instance, has had 440 years of development.
https://www.openhub.net/p/emacs
If the FSF wants to make more of an impact, perhaps they should build software in a higher level language.