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  • #61
    Is that so? Let me present what I consider a sane argument against the so-called "permissive" license then and I'd be interested if you consider it sane too or hear your counter-arguments.
    Nice, a well elaborated and polite post .. awesome, let's see !

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
    * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
    * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
    The BSD license provides those freedoms, PLUS the freedom to make a privative fork and PLUS the freedom to partially use the work in a privative enviroment.

    [quote]The so called "permissive" licenses enable anybody to take those freedoms away. So only someone who doesn't believe those freedoms are essential can advocate for it as he doesn't mind them being taken away. It means little that he himself perhaps doesn't take them away directly (albeit he could at any moment change his mind) but "just" enables anyone else to do so - there is no significant difference there.[quote]

    You can make a privative fork of the original source code, and that's correct ... but you can't take the freedom of the original source code away.
    if OpenSolaris was BSD licensed, even in that case Oracle would face the impossibility to "close" the original source code ... and threaten the community to stop the work that today continues on IllumOS
    To clarify, I use to see the CDDL (which is the IllumOS license) as some intermediate point between GPL and BSD.

    CDDL requires the source modifications to be open (like the GPL for example) and we still have no notice from Oracle last time I checked ... same thing happened to other GPL projects that were work-arounded and subverted in privative enviroments.
    I don't like to repeat arguments, so I'll quote this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05...rs_and_takers/
    Tell me what you think of it. Thanks !

    With GPL the community gets all the innovation stemming from it and building on top of it, there is no situation where some entity can take the code away, add some polish and never contribute back - if you want to build upon the thousands/millions of hours others spent improving the code that you get for free, it's only fair you contribute back any modifications you make. And this model works great for Linux, on the other hand maybe that's why BSD is being left behind, there is no such balance in "permissive" land - anyone who wants to "invest" in it can just take the code and never contribute back - that doesn't work long term either for BSD or the ones forking it into proprietary products (but they keep trying - and failing wasting valuable coding effort that could be used to improve the underlying system for all).
    Let me show you an example: Replay converter took ffpmeg (GPLv2) compiled and built an interface atop of it by invoking it as an executable, thus by workarounding the license ... that it's a 2cent polish and it's legally accepted.
    And the company that sells it, is getting cute ammounts of money (ffmpeg used to have a "wall of shame" for those infractors, and replay converter was there sitting a loooong time )
    Again, I invite you to read that article.

    The best testament to this is indeed the contrast between the adoption of BSD vs. Linux - copyleft works, it works great - if you're looking for long term benefit that is, it doesn't work for short-sighted entities who want to take away the essential freedoms it provides for the shot-term "benefit" of being able to monopolize their contribution.

    So two interrelated arguments:

    1) "permissive" licenses do not protect the 4 freedoms that are essential to benefit the users and long term innovation (the next point)
    2) copyleft provides long term innovation vs. short-term benefits of "permissive" licenses such as BSD which hinder innovation in the long term
    Well, licenses are tools, and people chooses the right tool for the right job ... BSD license just remove some clauses of "obligations" that are found by the GPL, but in essence allows the same and a little bit more.
    If Google goes badass overnight with Chromium, we could take the code and keep it as a community project as some examples we had. Google can not take away the freedom of BSD licensed code (except for a patent-trojanized code that should be cleaned up... but GPLv2 doesn't cover that too )

    note: why do I keep putting "permissive" in quotation marks? It's because I consider it grossly misleading - the only thing it "permits" you to do is to take away freedom from others - so in effect it "permits" you to restrict others. I do not consider a permission to restrict others a permission at all - it's power, power over others, not permission...
    Should I repeat the mantra of "no, no one is taking your freedom away!!!!!" ? I'll ignore some portions of other posts until you read this one, there we can keep up with some understanding.

    Relicensing LLVM/Clang under GPLv3 is exactly that and people should be happy that it gets exercised (why would they include it otherwise), yet you refer to it as "ripping it off" and we all know that is without doubt as many in the "permissive" camp would actually feel like. But why? Because the whole so called "permissive" charade is about making things "corporate friendly" - which means eliminating the 4 freedoms so they can monopolize their contribution and take away control from the users - it has nothing to do with software freedom. If you relicense to protect those freedoms they're not going to like you very much - funny that, isn't it
    It would be "ripping off" in the sense that it would be a fork that could not contribute to the original project (as the privative fork example), remember that I mentioned atheros driver? well, I didn't wanted to open that can of worms again, but there you have it.

    P.S → I'll answer the non-philosophical post when I get back from dinner ♥

    Comment


    • #62
      Originally posted by vertexSymphony View Post
      The BSD license provides those freedoms, PLUS the freedom to make a privative fork and PLUS the freedom to partially use the work in a privative enviroment.
      FreeBSD == Free BDSM, both in terms of license and usage.
      A freedom to be owned.

      Nuff said.
      Last edited by crazycheese; 03 June 2012, 09:28 PM.

      Comment


      • #63
        Originally posted by vertexSymphony View Post
        The BSD license provides those freedoms, PLUS the freedom to make a privative fork and PLUS the freedom to partially use the work in a privative enviroment.
        The "only" problem is that to actually USE these extra freedoms when it comes to large project like OS you have to be some huge corporation. Else you're doomed to fail due to lack of resources to keep fully blown closed fork yourself. And even some corporations failed that and switced to Linux (BSDi and WindRiver for example).

        You can make a privative fork of the original source code, and that's correct ... but you can't take the freedom of the original source code away.
        Looking on the fact that *bsds are older than Linux but outperformed by Linux, I can admit that every decision comes with price. Freedom of one should end where freedom of others start. GPL protects this idea. BSDL don't. Result is obvuious: one gains more freedom. Project as whole loses in development.

        Well, licenses are tools, and people chooses the right tool for the right job
        And as for me it looks like if GPL performs better in large long term project like OS. At least Linux kernel younger but develops better than *bsd and Solaris all together.
        Last edited by 0xBADCODE; 03 June 2012, 11:00 PM.

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        • #64
          And as for me it looks like if GPL performs better in large long term project like OS. At least Linux kernel younger but develops better than *bsd and Solaris all together.
          Is that because of the license or maaaaybe the number of developer, companies and obviously, funding?

          ---

          1) Unlike Linux, they do not have package management system at all. No, really, they don't! So software management is a real headache compared to Linux. Sure, there are ports. However they're only convenient for "chosen few" and real nightmare for anyone else. To make things more funny, even some of these "chosen few" could be really scared by the idea to build whole OpenOffice or Firefox, etc.
          and pkg_* and the recent pkg-ng?
          Sure, there are linuxes that also lacks package management or use the good old tarball with some extra info on it (Slackware for example), it's a matter of point of view.
          I never had issues managing ports (never used binary packages), even when I did experiments and some tinkering that broke the packages ... it was a matter of purging the database and rm -rf, and voil?, clean system again (something I can't do on linux because base system and irrelevant software like firefox is all mixed up together, specially with the merge proposal :S ), and some minutes to have a clean setup again (that's if I'm not using ZFS and snapshotted)

          2) Okay, if someone so inclined to building things from sources, you would expect at least convenient and trouble-free compilation, right? WRONG! By default you have a ancient GCC 4.2 which is bugged and seriously loses to recent GCCs like 4.6 in terms of code optimization. Then they plan to replace it with immature clang. So you have a very good choice. You can choose between gcc internal errors and clang internal errors. When you need to build 3rd party program not in ports, you will soon figure out that everyone on this planet has stored gcc 4.2 at the graveyard of technologies and never tests their program on this antuque stuff.
          Yes, it was stalled with GCC 4.2 because upstream decided to re-license to GPLv3 ... which is awesome in some points, in some others is a PURE "do not want", devs, investors and users decided to look around for compilers. pcc didn't quite cut it, and llvm/clang appeared in the scene.
          You might call it inmature, but I used it (along with a LOT of people) to compile MY ENTIRE system for one year until I did some changes (never production, tho), and NEVER had an issue (even if I was using the "unstable" branch -CURRENT) ... in fact, more efficient code, faster compiling, better error detection (really, clang caugh some really nasty stuff), so it was and still is a win-win. specially because Clang wasn't enabled overnight, it was in "staging" in the FreeBSD world during A LOOONG TIME while some issues were being fixed in freebsd's code and llvm/clang code. when both things matured to a point of usefulness then they made the switch (which is scheduled for 10.0)

          Same problem with clang as well - nobody tests their programs on it, so it would be you who collects all internal compiler errors, etc. So you could easily end up working around compiler bugs, one way or another. Instead of just getting your program running! The most stupid thing is that it's 10 times easier to build same program even in binary-based Linux distro. They have a recent gcc and binutils and virtually all programmers are testing their software in similar setups so they will catch most of bugs and quirks instead of you. So unless program is in ports, building it from source could be a real nightmare.
          Well, the FreeBSD team is building ports in a tinderbox all time and detecting issues with clang and fixing them ... amazing numbers in there.
          afaik those patches are commited upstream → http://wiki.freebsd.org/PortsAndClang
          That results in FreeBSD meeting their goals and actually better code for upstream (and for linux people too), because most of the issues are BAD CODE (code that assumes a compiler, code that's not ansi, and such ..)

          3) The hardware support is bad-bad-bad. If you develop something for web, something for *nix-based systems, or simply prefer *nix-like approach, it can be far more convenient to have more or less the same system on desktop as well as on your target. However, FreeBSD can't really offer that. Most notably, they lack KMS so their Intel and AMD opensource drivers are from stone age and don't support recent hardware and have zounds of bugs, fixed years ago. You can also figure out that some wi-fi, controller or whatever does not works. If you have notebook, you will fugure out that a lot of things does not works at all. You maybe will be able to fix half of issues but why the ... on the Earth I should do that myself? Just because devs do not care what would happen to their OS users? I think it's a completely wrong approach.
          Well, yes, it does have crappy support specially when it comes to laptops and graphic cards (nVIDIA does provide an official driver for FreeBSD, though) ... but again, unless you are on the HPC world (which freebsd fails at) or desktop world (which freebsd desn't aim at), it is non-relevant.

          Wi-Fi is not as bad (it actually improved), is just horrible to configure.

          4) Remembering about desktops and package systems once more, those guys haven't got one very simple idea: "one size does not fits all". Linux dudes learned it very well, so they conquered anything from small embedded to huge supercomputers. FreeBSD guys are slow. They still live in the world where nothing exists except their x86 servers. So they offer some "base system". Should I tell that I don't need bloatware like apache and bind on desktop? I don't need it on most of my web servers either. However, FreeBSD guys are fairly persistant on pushing their odd ways to the masses. Which seems to produce spectacular failure. As I seen few enterprises replacing FreeBSD with Linux for outlined reasons.
          FreeBSD does not have any apache source in base code, but it does come with bind in the -RELEASE ... otherwise, you can disable it if you don't want it to be built (as any other part of the system)
          I insist you to re-read the "FreeBSD DOES NOT aim to desktop usage", thank you.

          5) Well, they tell they're good for servers. But you see, they do not have virtualization support. In fact you can't use FreeBSD to host guest systems at all - it can't serve as self-sufficient hypervisor (like KVM) or as "hypervisor controller" (Xen Dom0). At very best it can be guest. But you would need some other kind of OS as hypervisor boilerplate. Managing 2 different kinds of OSes is more hassle than using one kind of OS as both hypervisor boilerplate and guests. To make things even worse for FreeBSD, on lightweight isolation front Linux guys have seriously outperformed FreeBSD "jails" with their LXC + Cgroups combo. Not to mention third party OpenVZ used by hosters almost decade or so.
          For virtualization you have Jails, BHyVe and I think you can actually use KVM ... but Virtualization is not my area (only did a casual usage and my knowledge about it is pretty basic)

          6) To make things even more funny, FreeBSD can offer you either simple but antique, slow and clearly outdated UFS filesystem or fully blown ZFS enterprise monster, Which is terribly slow unless you have 64Gb RAM or more and performs well only on a limited range of workloads. To add up, ZFS seems to have stability issues on heavy workloads so when you complain about lockup, you're warmly welcomed with "are you using ZFS?!" questions. These guys absolutely do not have any medium-range solutions for file systems. You can choose between bicycle and rocket. But in their world there are no cars, bikes, airplanes and trains. This is very inconvenient to my taste.
          Bullshit, with ZFS you're good to go with 512MB of RAM, 4GB if you want some extra candy like prefetch, and with a little more you're fine with more heavy stuff like deduplication.
          ZFS did have stability issues on 7.x and 8.x (specially when it came to ARC behavior), but those fixes are MFC'ed by 8.2 and incorporated 9.x.

          I remember you that Linux atm doesn't have a decent competitor to ZFS and I remember you that UFS2+SUJ is perfectly stable.

          Note: We like to talk about UFS2 to avoid confusions with the old UFS, thank you.

          7) There is virtually no distros who would at least try to fix at least some of idiocies of original system. For me it appears like if only apple and juniper are really interested in this system to use it as free boilerplate for their proprietary things without need to show their sources.
          If linux world works with distros, it's fine, but don't force that way of working into others ... I didn't mentioned PC-BSD in the BSDs because this is ACTUALLY a distro of FreeBSD that tries to be more friendly for desktop usage.

          Bottom line: Linux appears to be far more promising and rewarding thing. Why would someone need a third rate solution plagued with technical and political problems when there is first-class solution for free and with a source code? OpenSource collaboration seems to clearly outperform old business model where free part attempts to pad intertests of proprietary corporations. Not to mention Linux guys are always making things running first, and doing politics, system polishing and brave declarations second. Unlike FBSD guys who seems to prefer quite an opposite approaches.
          Well, I wonder WHY people at GNU and Linux bash BSDs when they get *so dickhard* talking about distros, choices and diversity.
          Last edited by vertexSymphony; 04 June 2012, 12:21 AM.

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          • #65
            Well, strictly saying FreeBSD IS aiming to desktop and this is official statement from one of FreeBSD team engineers (Scott Long said it back in 2006, after that many things have been broken or pulled into linux kernel to develop and FreeBSD were unable to keep up ).
            The main setback on Desktops/Laptops for FreeBSD is lack of graphics and sound drivers. First issue is going to be resolved soon as DRI2 and KMS support for Intel hardware have been already committed to head and would be present in FreeBSD 10, given that all infrastructure is already in other graphics drivers should follow shortly.

            Also the lack of OpenCL/CUDA even for nVidia's driver is quite disappointing, but well, given Linux has it only with closed source AMD and nVidia drivers it seems like situation out there is not much better compared to OSX or Windows.

            Comment


            • #66
              Originally posted by vertexSymphony View Post
              Is that because of the license or maaaaybe the number of developer, companies and obviously, funding?
              Yes but you have to ask yourself why did all these developers, companies converge around Linux. Was it because of a BSD lawsuit 20 years ago where EVERYTHING was decided and Linux suddenly got all the mindshare, or is it that companies and developers in general find GPL which legally binds all participants to distribute their enhancements a better fit for cooporation (particularly in a corporate sense) on such a large scale project?

              Obviously we can't tell for sure but my personal view is that Linux has benefited greatly from using GPL in this regard. I also think it has benefited greatly from the developers playing hardball with out-of-tree drivers which has resulted in Linux having by far the best hardware support out-of-the-box of all systems, which in turn has made it such a popular solution even outside of the x86 realm, no need to beg for hardware makers to supply a binary driver for obscure architecture x, if it's in the kernel it's supported.

              As for the whole BSD vs Linux thing in general it's soooo old, mostly I think users of each side tolerate eachother perfectly fine, but there are of course exceptions. Amongst the Linux users there seems to be a faction which enjoys saying 'HA! HA! You suck' because they can point on another system and see that Linux is vastly more supported than it even on the desktop. It's just sad. And on the other side we have the faction of BSD users who thinks 'Linux ate our lunch' and dislikes it because it got the limelight they think BSD deserves. Equally sad.

              I was glad in seeing David Chisnall (who was spearheading the 'Why use FreeBSD' thingy) play down the Linux adversity from the mailing list when compiling the arguments (although I, like Smitty had to chuckle at the 'technology not ideology' when thinking of the gcc 4.2 debacle).

              Speaking of David Chisnall, if you are interested in programming then you could do alot worse than reading some of his excellent articles over at informit.com on a wide range of programming subjects.

              Comment


              • #67
                Originally posted by XorEaxEax View Post
                Yes but you have to ask yourself why did all these developers, companies converge around Linux. Was it because of a BSD lawsuit 20 years ago where EVERYTHING was decided and Linux suddenly got all the mindshare, or is it that companies and developers in general find GPL which legally binds all participants to distribute their enhancements a better fit for cooporation (particularly in a corporate sense) on such a large scale project?

                Obviously we can't tell for sure but my personal view is that Linux has benefited greatly from using GPL in this regard. I also think it has benefited greatly from the developers playing hardball with out-of-tree drivers which has resulted in Linux having by far the best hardware support out-of-the-box of all systems, which in turn has made it such a popular solution even outside of the x86 realm, no need to beg for hardware makers to supply a binary driver for obscure architecture x, if it's in the kernel it's supported.
                My thought is that while BSD have been under AT&T lawsuit Linux have gained momentum, I believe no one but RMS have cared about BSD vs GPL at that time, but since Linux were distributed under GPL, GPL have gained its momentum as well. Once both have been adopted by corporations it became very hard to change things since corporations are very slow to change things and technologies (why do that if it already work?).

                Another topic is very little press coverage for BSD, you can hear about Linux, GPL, RMS all around - in internet, magazines and even in printed newspapers. There are no such publicity for BSD. New users and developers who have mostly heard about GPL and Linux won't come directly to use BSD systems or BSD like licenses, they would use that is the first on their mind and that would be GPL and Linux.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by vertexSymphony View Post
                  Is that because of the license or maaaaybe the number of developer, companies and obviously, funding?
                  Don't you think these things are related? First, Linux became more or less usable and there was efficient and working team. Only then companies recognized they could use it and joined their efforts as well. And unlike *BSD where companies usually (ab)used their freedom to make code private at the cost of project improvement, there was no such option. So project development skyrocketed. Outperforming much older BSD systems. License comparison - real world version

                  and pkg_* and the recent pkg-ng?
                  You see, package manager is just a half of work. Another half is actlual repositories with maintainers who are willing to keep packages in working state. When linux distro uses more or less common packaging system and it's established as distro's choice, there are many persons capable of packaging and maintainig programs are working in this task. Not a case with FBSD. And even best of package manager is just useless piece of junk (for users) when it lacks good repos.

                  Sure, there are linuxes that also lacks package management or use the good old tarball with some extra info on it (Slackware for example),
                  Sure. But these are either some special-task things like ones targeted to embedded or they "enjoy" being almost as "popular" as FBSD

                  it's a matter of point of view.
                  It is. And my point of view is that I want decent and working package manager and working and maintained repos with software. That's why I happy with Linux...

                  I never had issues managing ports (never used binary packages),
                  As for me, it's not like I'm addicted to rebuilding LibreOffice sized things myself without serious reason. I'm only willing to rebuild such monsters if I actually changed some code. Else it's very silly to my taste and wastes ton of my time and ton of computational resources for stupid technical task. In binary distros this task just offloaded to system maintainers. You see, not every OS user wants to be a full-blown maintainer of localhost.

                  even when I did experiments and some tinkering that broke the packages ... it was a matter of purging the database and rm -rf, and voil?, clean system again
                  Not really clean. Because of leftovers like configs/logs/mans, dependencies, etc, etc, etc... In fact, any decent package manager would handle package removal much better than stupid rm. You can foget to revert some changes, erase configs, trash unneeded libs, etc. Package manager would not forget all this. It does not cares if there are 1 config or 20. It knows all files in all dirs. Keeping all this crap in my head is not good at all - package manager's DB works better for these tasks.

                  (something I can't do on linux
                  Something that I never need in Linux. Because package manager would do this both better and without unwanted leftovers.

                  Yes, it was stalled with GCC 4.2 because upstream decided to re-license to GPLv3 ...
                  And that's where FBSD politics starts. And backstabs FBSD users... I don't want to have troubles with building software just because of crappy politics. Sure, corporate patrons of FBSD are so unhappy about GPL3! Fortunately it's not my problem at this point.

                  pcc didn't quite cut it, and llvm/clang appeared in the scene.
                  Oh yea, FBSD guys always try to pad interests of proprietary corporations. Corporations are ignoring them in exchange or just taking some code from them for free, most of time returning nothing in exchange. Fair deal! , Then these guys are surprised when they have 10 years longer history but already outrun by younger system. Fairly predictable outcome to my taste.

                  You might call it inmature, but I used it (along with a LOT of people) to compile MY ENTIRE system for one year
                  I do not have so many time to waste. If I have to rebuild all from scratch I should have some really strong reason to do so.

                  of usefulness then they made the switch (which is scheduled for 10.0)
                  Oh yes, replacing ancient gcc bugs with immature clang bugs. Hey, I want system that works and builds what asked without problems. That's why I stick with Linux on both desktop and servers and leave uber-cool licenses with their "theoretic" freedoms to others if they need this at such costs.

                  Well, the FreeBSD team is building ports in a tinderbox all time and detecting issues with clang and fixing them ... amazing numbers in there.
                  You see, I once seen internal error in ancient GCC 4.2 in a 3rd party program which was not in ports (fixed in upstream gcc ages ago). Only idiots don't learn and repeat the same mistakes again. I'm not going to - I would let FBSD guys to eat their politics outcome themselves.

                  Well, yes, it does have crappy support specially when it comes to laptops and graphic cards (nVIDIA does provide an official driver for FreeBSD, though)
                  And of course you can rebuild all it's parts from source, as you told above? (sorry, can't avoid being sarcastic due to double standards)

                  ... but again, unless you are on the HPC world (which freebsd fails at) or desktop world (which freebsd desn't aim at), it is non-relevant.
                  And in server world it lacks virtualisation support and decent package manager to reduce management hassles.

                  Wi-Fi is not as bad (it actually improved), is just horrible to configure.
                  Should I admit I'm not a sado-maso inclined?

                  FreeBSD does not have any apache source in base code, but it does come with bind in the -RELEASE ... otherwise, you can disable it if you don't want it to be built (as any other part of the system)
                  And again, package managers are EPIC WIN. Base system? Metapackage which would install known-good predefined set of packages is way better. And it's even better that you can install only part of this thing if you want. And package manager would do it's best to keep things working by resolving dependencies.

                  For virtualization you have Jails,
                  Ahh, those 10 years old statements...

                  BHyVe
                  Not in a production state and seems to be abandoned. Unlike KVM in Linux who works and kicking the a$$ as you can see in recent phoronix benchmarks...

                  and I think you can actually use KVM ...
                  And I do... in Linux.

                  but Virtualization is not my area (only did a casual usage and my knowledge about it is pretty basic)
                  Not a huge surprise for me. All FBSD guys are the same. Then they get suprised by the fact world actually needs virtualisation and package managers, loves when things are working, etc.

                  Bullshit, with ZFS you're good to go with 512MB of RAM,
                  I've been using Windows and Office on 8Mb... the only question is that it has been, er, SLOW. ZFS is an enterprise monster, it's design isn't a speed devil on it's own. So without huge RAM it would work but would be fairly slow.

                  I remember you that Linux atm doesn't have a decent competitor to ZFS and I remember you that UFS2+SUJ is perfectly stable.
                  Yeah, as for ZFS you're right but I seen dozen of complaints about it's stability though. So as for me I could use btrfs too, but I'm positive that it's devs don't call things stable when they are actually not, unlike FBSD guys who seems to be overoptimistic (because of lack any other alternatives?).

                  Note: We like to talk about UFS2 to avoid confusions with the old UFS, thank you.
                  Granted that nobody bothered to really rededign ancient on-disk structures and take into account modern state of art (unlike EXT4 did) it's still a piece of ancient stuff on steroids. At least, even ext guys finally got idea that extents are good idea and make things faster. Still not a case with UFS. Sure, this requires on-disk format overhaul. Something that FBSD guys failed to do.

                  If linux world works with distros, it's fine, but don't force that way of working into others ... I didn't mentioned PC-BSD in the BSDs because this is ACTUALLY a distro of FreeBSD that tries to be more friendly for desktop usage.
                  Yes, I don't force anyone but I admit that one awkward "wannabe-server-OS" and one "wannabe-desktop-OS" things aren't really cool to my taste.

                  Well, I wonder WHY people at GNU and Linux bash BSDs when they get *so dickhard* talking about distros, choices and diversity.
                  Granted that 1st servers I managed were under FBSD I can tell you that for me Linux is simply better. It takes only small part of time to manage it to get the very same or better results, doh!

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by Libreman View Post
                    Sure, I see it as much more unfair to deprive the users of the derived sw from my code the freedoms I believe are very important and everyone should have. You cater to the Apples of the world, I care about the Joes and Janes of the world. It strucks me as foolish to serve as a free labor for corporations that make billions and rarely if ever give back but if that's what you want to do then go for it.

                    Also, "their code"? They can release their code under whatever license they want regardless of what license you use, if they however want to incorporate your code that is a different matter and you certainly have a say, wouldn't you think? And if you think freedom is important, it is only fair those who want to use your code respect that and not violate it (which is accomplished by using GPL) however if you do not care about that freedom ... well, we already established that and I can see where you stand on that Suffice to say, we disagree on that one ...
                    They can't take freedom from my code, only their code (modifications).
                    I care about freedom, but I don't force freedom.

                    Forcing freedom is like killing all people to make peace.


                    Originally posted by Libreman View Post
                    Aand one more thing - it never seizes to amaze me to how convoluted thinking can a "permissive" line of reasoning lead without the advocate realizing the absurdity. You're so considerate of the one who decides to use your code that you think it is "unfair" to demand any condition of him, he may do anything and everything with what you've created - to do otherwise would be to "restrict him" ... but when the users of the modified software are concerned all of a sudden restricting them is absolutely of no concern to you, they may get spyware, adware, backdoors and trojans as far as you're concerned and they do not deserve the right to inspect the code. As long as the developer is allowed to do whatever the heck he wants you're happy?
                    Yes, that is what freedom is.


                    Originally posted by Libreman View Post
                    How this makes sense from the point of view of software freedom?
                    I'm not religious GPL terrorist.


                    Originally posted by Libreman View Post
                    You serve as a free labor for one (the developer) and have no concern for the other (the user), isn't that quite disproportionate?
                    I have concern for the others, but I don't force them to have concern for the others.
                    Only your concern is GPL and it's world domination.


                    Originally posted by Libreman View Post
                    No wonder corporations love it LOL they get free stuff with no obligation not to abuse its users with it!
                    That's freedom. I treat corporations the same way as users.
                    Last edited by LightBit; 04 June 2012, 07:31 AM.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      @0xBADCODE → Well, you're just yet another troll? ... I'm just going to do leave some "notes" not because of you (you just basically trimmed my message and answered what came out of your ass), but for the casual reader that may read your misinformation

                      Don't you think these things are related? First, Linux became more or less usable and there was efficient and working team. Only then companies recognized they could use it and joined their efforts as well. And unlike *BSD where companies usually (ab)used their freedom to make code private at the cost of project improvement, there was no such option. So project development skyrocketed. Outperforming much older BSD systems. License comparison - real world version
                      This is where you show your lack of knowledge about the AT&T litigation that damaged the credibility of the BSDs for a long time, also it's a little bit of what XorEaxEax and blacknova said.
                      Now, just to repeat: No, a license that allows privative forks and someoe exercises that, that's not an abuse ... a GPL'ed software like the ffmpeg case I mentioned, well ... that's proper abuse

                      Now, you can jump to google and pretend that you already knew it.

                      You see, package manager is just a half of work. Another half is actlual repositories with maintainers who are willing to keep packages in working state. When linux distro uses more or less common packaging system and it's established as distro's choice, there are many persons capable of packaging and maintainig programs are working in this task. Not a case with FBSD. And even best of package manager is just useless piece of junk (for users) when it lacks good repos.
                      WTF? have you ever writed something like specfiles AAND a port? because I can ASSURE you, that this is plain fucking simple (it's a meta port example, but it's an example of syntax): http://www.freebsddiary.org/meta-ports.php
                      and with that, not only the port, the port system can generate the package for you.

                      I know distros with horrible repos that can't hold a candle to what FreeBSD offers (and I'm not thinking about *indie* distros)

                      Sure. But these are either some special-task things like ones targeted to embedded or they "enjoy" being almost as "popular" as FBSD
                      So when it's linux it's ok, and when it's FreeBSD it's not? well, surely you are a popular person among the users of distros like Slackware or Arch. lol

                      As for me, it's not like I'm addicted to rebuilding LibreOffice sized things myself without serious reason. I'm only willing to rebuild such monsters if I actually changed some code. Else it's very silly to my taste and wastes ton of my time and ton of computational resources for stupid technical task. In binary distros this task just offloaded to system maintainers. You see, not every OS user wants to be a full-blown maintainer of localhost.
                      Then you have pkg_add to install the binary packages that the FreeBSD offers to you, of course, you'll loose some customization, but you don't seem to care about that ... in any case, you can mix binary packages AND ports

                      Not really clean. Because of leftovers like configs/logs/mans, dependencies, etc, etc, etc... In fact, any decent package manager would handle package removal much better than stupid rm. You can foget to revert some changes, erase configs, trash unneeded libs, etc. Package manager would not forget all this. It does not cares if there are 1 config or 20. It knows all files in all dirs. Keeping all this crap in my head is not good at all - package manager's DB works better for these tasks.
                      And this is where your lack of knowledge shines. Corrupt packages, package manager database and I assure you that you'll be S.O.L in a heatbeat mostly because linux puts everything in /usr (and with the merge, now even more) compared to base system of FreeBSD being in that folder and *everything else* being STRICTLY on /usr/local ... so you can just purge package database, rm -rf that and have a virgin OS. I wanna see you trying to fix that in linux WITHOUT leftovers. because yes, I CAN ASSURE YOU that what I mentioned leaves ... NO LEFTOVERS

                      And that's where FBSD politics starts. And backstabs FBSD users... I don't want to have troubles with building software just because of crappy politics. Sure, corporate patrons of FBSD are so unhappy about GPL3! Fortunately it's not my problem at this point.
                      [...]
                      Oh yea, FBSD guys always try to pad interests of proprietary corporations. Corporations are ignoring them in exchange or just taking some code from them for free, most of time returning nothing in exchange. Fair deal! , Then these guys are surprised when they have 10 years longer history but already outrun by younger system. Fairly predictable outcome to my taste.
                      1) You can install any gcc version you like, by now, that is (source → https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-p...ee/master/lang ) :
                      * gcc34
                      * gcc42
                      * gcc44
                      * gcc46
                      * gcc47

                      I won't repeat what I already said on my original post.

                      I do not have so many time to waste. If I have to rebuild all from scratch I should have some really strong reason to do so.
                      You don't (you don't have to do WHAT I like to do). You can compile or use a binary approach to almost everything, if you prefer binary updates → http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=freebsd-update
                      So don't blame your ignorance on others.

                      Oh yes, replacing ancient gcc bugs with immature clang bugs. Hey, I want system that works and builds what asked without problems. That's why I stick with Linux on both desktop and servers and leave uber-cool licenses with their "theoretic" freedoms to others if they need this at such costs.
                      They merged LLVM/Clang into base system, made it obligatory in the build process and left it there in "staging" A LONG TIME until bugs WERE FIXED and the system was of a comparable quality to what GCC4.2 produced.

                      And again, package managers are EPIC WIN. Base system? Metapackage which would install known-good predefined set of packages is way better. And it's even better that you can install only part of this thing if you want. And package manager would do it's best to keep things working by resolving dependencies.
                      Ports and binary packages DOES have dependency information. And you have "metapackages".

                      You see, I once seen internal error in ancient GCC 4.2 in a 3rd party program which was not in ports (fixed in upstream gcc ages ago). Only idiots don't learn and repeat the same mistakes again. I'm not going to - I would let FBSD guys to eat their politics outcome themselves.
                      Well, shame on your lazy you !!! you could have installed gcc on a newer version, lol.

                      And of course you can rebuild all it's parts from source, as you told above? (sorry, can't avoid being sarcastic due to double standards)
                      It's on a port (x11/nvidia-driver) that downloads and install the privative driver ... as entertaining as any linux distribution.

                      And in server world it lacks virtualisation support and decent package manager to reduce management hassles.
                      As virtualization is not my area, I'll avoid that topic as much as I can ... when it comes to package management, well, it depends on your needs, it can do some really cute stuff that linux package managers can't (at least without some problems), but it also MAY add moar complexity to maintenance on certain cases. it depends on the scenario, and again : the right tool for the right job.

                      --

                      I'll just ignore the unbearable and uninformed comments about ZFS and UFS2. I just can't find the patience to repeat myself and answer to what is clearly an uninformed aggression :S
                      Last edited by vertexSymphony; 04 June 2012, 09:22 AM.

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