when I first could afford to but before I had responsibilities, I bought a breguet classique off secondary market, which is already understated, and I wear it with an even more understated leather band. I consciously chose to wear it as a daily cary, which means that on more than one occasion I wore it through ghettos on the way to raves, including through one attempted and failed robbery. By now it's well worn in, and I prefer it to be a subtle signal: those who don't care don't notice, so it's not ostentatious, those who pay attention but don't know will figure it out through closer observation, and those who know, don't need to ask any questions. I do occasionally consciously take them off so as not to be flashing, when that would be particularly crass or foolhardy.
I've lost many watches in my life, but this one has trained me in the discipline of care and attentiveness towards my possessions, which extends to all things and not just the watch.
There was no particularly good reason for me to buy it though, except for the watch maker name's frequent mention in the 19th century literature, including a famous line from Pushkin's Onegin, "he strolls down boulevards, until a sleepless Breguet, calls out time for supper". now it's likely that Onegin specifically didn't wear an actual breguet, because that was a generic name for a chiming timepiece, but the imagery stuck. I grew up on 19th century literature, byronic heroes, this line is explicit reference to flaneur culture, a self-conscious decadent movement, associated with aimless strolling down boulevards dressed in provocative clothing, breguet fits here, and that's the joke of the line: at a time when a timepiece would be associated with a serious vocation, politics or military, it is being used for the most frivolous task of letting one man know when it's time to eat. I reflect on this point occasionally, when I look at my watch.
for the attentive readers, I found an error in the translation of the Gogol quote, asked Eugene about it, and he said that he also just noticed that the HTML version posted here has "considerable differences" from the original PDF[0]
compare footnote 87 in pdf and 79 in html, the html version of the translation is invalid and reverses the meaning, uses transliteration instead of Cyrillic, but also where did the other 8 footnotes go? I have a feeling the html was transcribed by hand after the fact
cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality.
[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it
[1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY
this is a pure grift post, which is what one would expect from a former director of an adtech grift (but I repeat myself) company. it should be obvious that the goal here is not to communicate the poor state of the job market, but to exploit the narrative of the poor hiring market in order to attract attention to a subpar candidate.
I find it amusing that fedir ("ted") skyba was still the ceo of AIR this past January, when AIR reported record profits and purchased another mcn grifter "ScaleLab". google reviews and elsewhere of scalelab are hilarious "don't use! pure scammers!". the co-founders of air decided to get rid of their star ceo just as the company started turning serious profit. no honor amongst thieves!
an mcn, or a multi-channel network, is a company that helps "content creators" promote and monetize their channels. they provide additional services that are generally value add fluff. you go to an mcn in order to boost your subscriber numbers, in exchange for a cut of your profit. if the pimp analogy comes to your head, it's not unwarranted, there are giant mcns for onlyfans and other such services. an mcn becomes successful through aggressive on boarding practices, and then acts as a rainmaker: if the channel makes it on merit, an mcn takes a cut and claims it as huge success, if it doesn't the mcn still takes a cut until the content creators wises up and leaves. if you ever wonder how YouTube channels lose their souls, it's through the deals with mcns.
from this perspective fedir's inflated ego combined with, the way another commenter put it, parody-level fluff cv should not be a surprise.
Burton Weltman, the author of this article, is a humorless old man, who plays an old game of reframing whimsical and fantastical in cynical terms, but he doesn't do it for comedic effect, no he plays it straight! Mr Weltman has at least two things going against him, he's an old bore (he was a history professor for 20 years, god help his students) so his imagination and whimsy faculties have entirely atrophied, and before that he was a deputy attorney general for the state of New Jersey, so it's a safe bet he didn't have imagination and whimsy faculties to begin with. Reading this article is a literary equivalent of approaching an old man at a dinner party expecting a lively conversation, but the man starts telling you how we should outlaw kids, because they are noisy and rambunctious and make messes wherever they appear, and you think that it's a jest, until you realize with horror and pity that the man is dead serious and is in the early stages of senility. As you attempt to flee you hear his last attempts at your attention, something about hitler being a kid once.
That doesn't address any of what he said, though. It's just a personal attack on the author with a dismissal that is essentially like the glossing over he talks about.
I've addressed what he said for exactly one sentence in the beginning of my review: reframing fairy tales or children's tales in cynical terms is a whimsical pastime, rather than a serious literary criticism. The rest of my review is necessary, because I don't otherwise understand what would compel a grown man to engage in such an activity with a kind of serious fervor. From this perspective addressing him point by point is a waste of time, his entire approach is at fault.
First, I'll say that I find this characterization of Weltman to be relevant to understanding his intended point.
Second, I'll say that Weltman seriously misunderstands children's literature. The point has been made by many famous children's writers that kids love comic gruesomeness. When J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, Britain had just ended the Victorian era, when children's literature was serious, morally upright, and deadly dull. Peter Pan upended that and became a smash hit, possibly even bigger than Harry Potter has been.
I think addressing child's inner world on its own terms was attempted by the victorians to begin with, they had the whole cult of child thing, lewis carol serenading a prepubescent girl. but I think j.m. barrie did it with gusto, recognizing the symbolic and the gruesome, like you said. the grab bag of sword fights, scalps, pirates is an old time-y equivalent of going "and then the transformer shot his laser at the dinosaur, and the whole thing EXPLODED!!!"
the deliberately constructed world is essential to the various actual points of the story. it strongly delineates peter pan's world of childhood imagination and whimsy, from the various intrusions into it: Wendy as a romantic partner and a mother figure, the various lost boys accidentally growing up, etc. this is not a complicated idea, and Jim hart and nick castle have a field day with it in their Hook adaptation. like the amazing food fight scene.
Kinda like how Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a parody of Horatio Alger's moralizing novels. Tom is the opposite of an Alger hero: instead of succeeding through hard work of his own, he succeeds by manipulating others.
Aw, I liked the article. It repeats itself a bit, but framing a beloved childhood character as a narcissistic serial killer is fun; with a bit of work this could be onion-level satire.
“I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago.”
“You promised not to!”
“I couldn’t help it. I am a married woman, Peter.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby.”
“No, she’s not.”
But he supposed she was; and he took a step towards the sleeping child with his dagger upraised. Of course he did not strike.
Of course?
Big Little Panther, a brave of so many scalps that in his present position they somewhat impede his progress
Lines like this are funny, because kids don't think too hard about what a scalp is. Like raping and pillaging it's good exposure to adult topics in a fun way (David Mitchell on raping and pillaging - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJqEKYbh-LU)
I think the only reason pen's gratuitous violence stands out is because the tropes and the narrative structure are outdated. a trigger happy scrapper is played for laughs in children's cartoons today, but the joke is telegraphed so that there's no confusion. j.m. barrie instead relies on the reader's ability to keep context in long form.
unrelated to your point, Sonya keene's book is the only one I know that was authored and typeset using Symbolics's in-house publishing system Concordia. (besides symbolics documentation sets of course)
Concordia (and its display component document examiner) had a pretty novel hypertext approach to authoring. all the content was made up of individual notes, that you could link together either with explicit links, or implicit one-follows-the-other links. I don't know if that's how Sonya used it, but when I authored some documents using Concordia, I discovered that it was very easy to focus on addressing specific points in almost a throwaway fashion. write a note on some subject you want to address. if you don't like it, write another take on the same subject. now you have the option to put either note into the book flow, refine them in parallel, and defer editorial decisions to the very end. the process is very reminiscent of explorative programming in lisp, so in other words symbolics people figured out how to write books in the same way as they write their code. ultimate vertical integration.
"Lisp Lore: A Guide to Programming the Lisp Machine" by Bromley&Lamson was also written using Concordia AFAIK. The Symbolics documentation also has Jensen&Wirth "Pascal User Manual and Report" and Harbison & Steele, C: A Reference Manual.
> Symbolics's in-house publishing system Concordia
What you describe regarding Concordia sounds very intriguing. I can search for information on Concordia, but do you have any goto references (books, papers, videos) on it that you'd recommend?
Cool video, interesting. Looks though like a very complicated way of creating and entering the content, compared to just typing in a buffer with some markup language. When I saw the video first I thought it was just textual hyperlinks, sort of what we with clickable text in Emacs. Info and help-mode are Emacs apps that uses it quite heavy. But then I looked up Concordia on Wikipedia, and I see it has same ancestor as texinfo :).
But very interesting to see, I'll watch your other videos when I have more time, it is a bit of history. Thanks for recording them and uploading videos. Is that machine still alive and running, or did you record it on your Linux port?
One doesn't need to use the menus, one can use the keyboard commands. The UI provides several ways to interact: key commands, interactive command line and menus.
> I see it has same ancestor as texinfo
Genera comes with a Scribe-based markup language and formatter.
> Is that machine still alive and running, or did you record it on your Linux port?
I made this video years ago on Lisp Machine. The new emulator for the Mac & Linux is many times faster and runs silent on something like a MacBook... Thus it's ,uch more convenient to use that for a demo, unless the software does not run there. The emulator has its own native code format and, for example, lacks emulation of the console hardware (graphics hardware).
> One doesn't need to use the menus, one can use the keyboard commands. The UI provides several ways to interact: key commands, interactive command line and menus.
> Genera comes with a Scribe-based markup language and formatter.
You mean, the humanity has not gone too far away when it comes to computer-human interaction back from those days? :-). Just kidding; that sounds like they were quite modern back in 80's. I saw the other video on YT about their graphics software and hardware. While it looks relatively simple compared to modern image editors, modellers, fx and animation packages, it still feels like they had all the right ideas. What do you think put them out of the business? Just the economy or some other more technical reason?
> The new emulator for the Mac & Linux is many times faster and runs silent on something like a MacBook.
Yeah I saw another video, and saw "machdd" or something similar on the modeline somewhere, so I assumed you made it on a mac.
> lacks emulation of the console hardware (graphics hardware)
That explains why all the demos are black and white.
I don't have so much time to install and configure virtual machines and programs, but one beautiful day I'll try it, just for the curiosity; I have seen the repo on GH.
> What do you think put them out of the business? Just the economy or some other more technical reason?
The main reason was the end of the cold war and the end of the high-tech war. Means there were too few commercial customers. Where they had commercial customers (like the Graphics & Animation business), there was a disruption by other technology, like SGIs (RISC CPUs with powerful graphics accelerators) and also Windows NT. The graphics software was sold to Nichimen and ported to SGIs and Windows NT.
> That explains why all the demos are black and white.
All the Symbolics early consoles were black & white, so all the software was using b&w. Typically the machines had an additional color screen, then with an additional color graphics board. All driven by Lisp. But the megapixel color screens and graphics boards were very expensive. They also might have been too slow to use as an interactive console screen.
The emulator support graphics. It's X11 and one can use color graphics, but the graphics & animation software hasn't been ported to X11 AFAIK. It's just that the normal tools don't use color in their UI, though there were applications which used color.
> I have seen the repo on GH.
Don't expect too much. That's an old, unsupported emulator, which has a bunch of technical problems.
> Means there were too few commercial customers. Where they had commercial customers (like the Graphics & Animation business), there was a disruption by other technology, like SGIs (RISC CPUs with powerful graphics accelerators) and also Windows NT. The graphics software was sold to Nichimen and ported to SGIs and Windows NT.
And now even SGI is out of business. It is a little bit unfortunate, but I think there is a history lesson to learn. Symbolics, SGI, Sun, Xerox, IBM, AT&T, they are all gone from the software business, more or less. I mean IBM, AT&T and Xerox are alive, but they are just a shadow of former self they once were, at least on the software front. Seems like all companies that target high-level industry with big profits, and ignores the consumer market are fading away.
Compare that to Microft which exploded in market share after their Dos/Windows and Intel which exploded after their 8086/8088. It just shows how important it is to put the technology out to consumers. Not because mass consumers will create so much value, they will that too of course, but foremost they will learn how to use the technology and once they come to businesses and have to solve problems, they will use it. I think that is a problem Symbolics faced. They run on dedicated hardware that probably was a multum in price and was used for specialized problems, while worse technology was cheaper and more accessible. People used what was accessible and when a generation grew up and went to work of course it is cheaper to let them use what they have learned then to buy specialized hardware and train them in specialized language. I think same thing happened to SGI when big graphics software names released their software for Windows. I think it is a circle, or a rolling stone. It is important to put the technology and knowledge out in the hands of people.
It is a bit sad that LW and Franz are keeping their software behind the locked gates instead of letting them out in the free. I bet some middle-tier manager is sitting at the Boeing as of this writing and trying to figure out how to save $$$ by cutting out that crazy expensive expert-knowledge Lisp thing out of their software stack, just to save some $$$ and get promotion or a bigger bonus.
If LW and Franz are going to survive and not go same way as Symbolics, Sun & Co, they should probably rethink their strategy of licensing their stuff free for GPL/non-commercial use, similar as Qt and some other companies do. Perhaps SBCL is good enough, but Lisp community needs more and better tools. In expert hands Emacs is s superb tool, but it is not the average mass tool.
It is a bit shame. I think Lisp is such a great tool for software engineering and applications development, but it is so underused because the knowledge pool is so small and the best tools are locked away behind the pricey tag seems like. If/when those two guys are gone, LW and Franz, Lisp will be seen even more as an academic exercise rather than a useful practical tool.
I don't know, perhaps I am wrong, just thinking loud.
> If LW and Franz are going to survive and not go same way as Symbolics, Sun & Co, they should probably rethink their strategy of licensing their stuff free for GPL/non-commercial use, similar as Qt and some other companies do.
I'd think there were like 30 commercial implementations of Common Lisp. LispWorks and Franz are still alive. None of the others are. Personally I'm happy that they exist and fear what you propose would kill them very quick. There are also a few inhouse implementations "alive".
> and the best tools are locked away behind the pricey tag
If there would be a business opportunity someone else can pick it up.
LispWorks reused bits and pieces of CMUCL. But the stuff they've added provided real value: robust ports to different platforms, an extensive implementation and a portable GUI layer.
If someone sees a business, they could easily layer something on top of SBCL or provided other improvements.
Scieneer tried that with CMUCL by adding concurrent threading for multi-core machines.
Clozure CL was alive while there was the expertise of the old hackers. Once they were gone it was difficult to keep it ported to new platforms and to fix hairy bugs. They tried to have a business model with an open sourced variant of Macintosh Common Lisp.
We'll see dev tools financed by big companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Google, ...
Then there are a bunch of companies trying to provide tools (Intellij, ...) or alternative languages (Scala, ...).
The specialized niche languages tend to have capable implementations with large price tags. See for example the commercial Smalltalk implementations of Cincom or SICStus Prolog ( https://sicstus.sics.se/order4.html ).
Other financing models tend to be fragile... or depend on other sources... like research/academic funding.
Yes, but what makes us believe they won't go the same faith as all the others?
> fear what you propose would kill them very quick
Why? Is their technology that bad? I don't think so. I think they need to let people use their stuff, show to the masses the good things about Lisp and their tools and let the masses learn how to use those tools.
> If someone sees a business, they could easily layer something on top of SBCL or provided other improvements.
It is not just. Layering something on top is a lot of work :). It is software, everything is possible, but who has the manpower and time? However people do layer stuff on top. We do see people making cool and interesting stuff, but it is relatively few enlightened persons. We don't see a mass movement; perhaps masses need to see a "killer app" or something, like when JavaScript got Chrome and went from verbotten on every computer to No. 1 language (more or less)?
I think the business is made by giving the technology to people, and letting them use it. Once it is in use by individuals and people realize the power of their tools, I believe it will see more use in businesses too. As I said; I think it is a "vicious circle" as they say here in Sweden.
> Once they were gone it was difficult to keep it ported to new platforms and to fix hairy bugs.
Yes, that is a normal thing. Once the experts are gone, the platform is dead. To survive, a platform needs to attract new people and bring them up to expertise level. But every platform also has to adapt and as well to be well documented. I wish to make an extension for sbcl, I don't see any writing anywhere on how to proceed, so I have to look through the source code. It is not impossible, but is more tedious than it perhaps should be. The best thing with Emacs is actually the documentation, and the openness. I think. I don't know for sure, but it seems so.
> The specialized niche languages tend to have capable implementations with large price tags. See for example the commercial Smalltalk implementations of Cincom or SICStus Prolog
Anyone still using Smalltalk? :) Yes, of course, I agree. What you describe is how the business was done, but I don't think the history speaks in that favor. I don't know, all this are just my speculations of course, but I think that is an obsolete view on the business. It seems that all those specialized companies that target big biz are sooner or later out of that biz. What would it mean for Franz to loose Boeing? Probably quite a lot. I don't know. I am not sure Oracle is doing that great as they did in the past either. There is a lot of inertia too; big customers can't easily switch. I mean, Cobol is still there, but it does not mean Cobol as a platform is doing well.
> Other financing models tend to be fragile... or depend on other sources
I didn't mean they should switch to some other form of making business and financing. I just mean they should let their tools go free for the masses, for people making open source code for non-commercial use. For businesses they should still sell and charge of course. I don't know, perhaps I am wrong; but which hobbyist like me will pay LW 400€ for the basic license? Or whatever is the price now. They wont make money out of hobbyists, students, indie devs and alike, so they can as well let those people use the thing for free for non-commercial and open source use like other companies do. Perhaps if they have good tooling, gui builders and so on, people will use it to create some interesting stuff, more people would learn how to use their software, and that I mean would play in their favor in the long run.
By the way, to mention is that Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Google gives away their tooling basically for free, because they have realized that they want people to learn and use their tools. I don't know, perhaps there is not money in traditional tooling like GUI builders at all in the world of web technologies.
Don't get me wrong, I don't wish them anything bad, but I think that the Lisp community is so small and fragile, and it would perhaps help with the better tools. I think is a shame because it is a nice language for rapid prototyping and development with lots of potential that the humanity perhaps is slowly loosing; but now I am perhaps bit too dramatic and cheesy :).
> Yes, but what makes us believe they won't go the same faith as all the others?
Switching to an open source model would mean that only 1% of the users would pay anything. To make that viable you need a good business model for a much larger or a different market. The business model is vastly different with a vastly different product.
Just open sourcing the thing is an easy way to kill an existing company, which now has a small, but paying customer base.
No, no; it wasn't was I meant; I clarified in the last one; release things for free for already non-paying customers for non-commercial use only, Qt style. I am hard to believe Boeing would count in that group :).
How do you enforce that? Experience shows that most companies ignore that code is only for non-commercial use and it's hard to enforce for small companies.
The issue with console hardware is that some applications use old code paths that directly call into the most basic framebuffer Symbolics Lisp Machines had, and that is not supported on X11 - thus said software doesn't work neither on OpenGenera, nor on UX400, UX1200, and NXP1000 physical lisp machines (all of which lack console hardware and use X11.
The only exception is AFAIK MacIvory, which has special subsystem that emulates console hardware on top of Macintosh toolbox calls done over Sun RPC.
Yes, but that's used by COLOR package, whose interfaces are IIRC mostly available on X11 client as well (minus acceleration).
The TV package in the full was redirected only on MacIvory, not on Unix-based setups, notes from OpenGenera suggest that the plan was to fix the application packages to use new interfaces instead.
I'm glad Rainer recommended his video, because I learned Concordia purely by word of mouth and exploration. There's a paper by Janet H. Walker, the principal on Document Examiner/Concordia for a hypertext convention https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/317426.317448, but it's more about DE.
a blast from the hackernews past, when obscure hacker's personal home pages made it to the front page. timonoko is a hacker's hacker, but then it's kind of hard to figure that out without attentively going over his website, something there's no motivation to do without some kind of pitch.
it should be clarified that red hat is not violating gpl license. they are free to repackage software, then sell it closed source, and only distribute the source to its paying customers. this use-case is explicitly endorsed by rms and generally follows the spirit of free software.
That is fine. The problem is redhat is allegedly making business agreements with their customers requiring no redistribution of the code. This is a direct violation of the GPL by denying one of the freedoms it guarantees.
Isn't Red Hat's position, "You have the freedom to redistribute this code but if you do so, we will sever our relationship with you as a customer of ours, so you won't get any more code." Which might go against the intentions of the GPL but not its actual wording.
I'm sure their lawyers have though out a good defense but it very much does sound like an additional restriction placed on the right to distribute the source. Hopefully Red-Hat will be proven wrong before more companies jump on this.
but how does red hat structure their stuff? I know that gnu projects must surrender their copyright to gnu, in order to prevent future shenanigans. if red hat had their core infrastructure (package manager, package definitions, etc.) copyrighted to red hat, then they can change the license on future releases of red hat to make it restrictive. you're then free to release a gpl source of the packaged code and the red hat specific modifications, since they fall under gpl, but you can't release the scaffolding anymore that make up the rest of the red hat system. I'm not a lawyer, but I've seen this kind of trick pulled on gpl projects before, where version 2 is now bsd/proprietary, while gpl version 1 remains in public access.
(edit: I'm reading the rest of the thread, and it seems there's some confusion about what exactly is in the new red hat contracts.)
Only one historical exception: Cygwin, basically inertia from the Cygnus acquisition.
Maybe more significantly, Red Hat has only made limited use of CLAs in the past and hasn't used any CLAs for many years now. It's basically corporate policy.
There was one other Cygnus-era one... libgcj, the gcj runtime library. However, Red Hat assigned copyright to the FSF in exchange for them adopting a more permissive license for the GNU Classpath project; one that was eventually selected by Sun when they open-sourced Java.
What is your interpretation of the following text from GPLv2 (I added link to the official text above):
"2 b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
That language is referring to copyright permissions (i.e. promising not to sue people for copyright infringement for using or distributing the software in accordance with the GPL). It doesn't refer to providing access.
A trickier thing for Red Hat might be
> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
One may argue about how to interpret that with regard to, for example, terminating a business relationship as a result. (I could see arguments on both sides.)
Also, Red Hat's method for complying with section 3 could be a subtle issue, because one of the options for compliance requires promising to provide "any third party" with the source code upon request. I don't know whether Red Hat is using that option or a different option.
>One may argue about how to interpret that with regard to, for example, terminating a business relationship as a result
I think there's been far too little focus on this, which is the crux of it. IMO (an IANAL) it seems pretty clear that even though this is not an explicit new license condition, it de facto does prevent redistribution: i.e. "you can do business with us, but only if you do not exercise one of your rights" in de facto limiting that right
I would love to see this adjudicated. Is there a company that builds statically against RHEL and resells, or modifies RHEL as a paying customer and resells that could show material injury by this move?
>> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein
Is it all that obvious or clear that "if we don't like what you do with our stuff, we will not renew your contract next year or sell you anything anymore" a restriction on the software they already delivered?
The software to which that clause applies was already delivered, and redhat is not, as far as I know, applying any restrictions on that software.
As a company, they are not obliged to sell to anyone who shows up with the sticker price, so this doesn't look, to me, like a restriction on the software itself.
After all, the right to choose your customers is a very basic one that only has few exemptions related to individuals in protected classes.
> Is it all that obvious or clear that "if we don't like what you do with our stuff, we will not renew your contract next year or sell you anything anymore" a restriction on the software they already delivered?
Red Hat is not using that option. In fact GPLv3 restricts that option to physical products, which RHEL is not. By distributing the packages via SRPMs, Red Hat has a single method that complies with GPLv2, GPLv3 and also with the attribution requirements of permissive licenses.
Recent versions of RHEL actually include a GPLv2-oriented written offer for source, but this is in addition to Red Hat simultaneously making corresponding source available along with binaries (for all packages regardless of license).
It's explicitly valid for any third party. I would assume that a customer could use it even where (as should normally be the case) the customer would have source code access under 3a.
There are a lot of drawbacks to use of the written offer option so I'm not sure if Red Hat will continue to use it with RHEL in the future.
I suspect that RH is not complying with the GPLv2. I can use yum to install a package from RH’s repo and it does not result in me having the source, so 3a is out. They don’t offer to distribute source code at cost to any third party, so no 3b. And 3c is non commercial distribution, so that’s out. There is no 3d.
You only need to enable the companion source repo(s) to get access to the source. To be able to access the binary & source repos via our CDN, you need to be a registered “customer” of Red Hat (which includes no-cost developer account agreements) which then gives credentials to access our CDN. If you have a valid credential to pull binary RPMs, you also have access to pull source RPMs.
> They don’t offer to distribute source code at cost to any third party, so no 3b.
If you are a customer of RHEL, then you do in fact have the ability to request a copy of the source code, including on physical media, and the ability to download it yourself from the customer portal, or from the srpm repositories.
The entire change is that the source code is now only being published in 2 places (CentOS stream and the customer portal) instead of 3 (the following two plus git.centos.org). I suppose it's 3 places instead of 4 if you include the srpm repositories.
Maybe that's covered as a 3a distribution by this additional language?
> If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
it's the recursive clause, that applies gplv2 to derivative works. the prescriptive part is "must cause … to be licensed", and nothing else. what is says is that paraphrasing "the work based on program must be licensed at no additional fee under similar terms as the original program". this part is self-contained and doesn't say anything about e.g. copy and distribution.
the copy and distribution clause is only part 3, where you "may" copy and distribute the program (or its derivative work, as per part 2) provided that you either "accompany it with complete … source code" or some means to get the source code from you on demand.
I can't claim this just from reading the license, because I'm not a lawyer, but in rms's reading and in Lessing's reading, the combination of part 1 and part 2 mean, paraphrasing, "if you make derivative work, compile it, and distributed it, you must also provide source code".
Derek Thompson, the author of the article, is an embedded Capitol Hill hanger-on, and a self-proclaimed politically progressive. It's entirely tone deaf of him to write such an article, and yet here we are. People like him look at the statistics of the historically lowest trust in the press, and blame online conspiracy theories, or similar, yet they fail to look at their own political biases, and examine their writing from the perspective of journalistic integrity, to realize where the blame lies.
The article itself is the classical piece of "who are you going to trust, The Atlantic or your own lying eyes" propaganda. the only supporting argument for his assertion of "vibrant economy" are select official statistics, where's the concerns of general population are dismissed on grounds of delusion. as an aside funny thing from the article, he says that half of the u.s. population think that u.s. is in recession but in the immediate next paragraph he says "discounting opinions of tens of millions of Americans." u.s. population is 330 million, so it would be discounting the opinions of hundreds of millions. but I'm sure that was an honest mistake. how about you leave your dc apartment, Derek, and actually interview some people and find out why they think that the economy is doing bad. and then having thus catalogued the grievances, explore them individually and the systemic effects that they might have on subjective experience of economic stability. you know, journalistic work.
it's an opinion piece written from the couch, dismissing the concerns of half of the u.s. population by quoting metrics without an attempt to get to the core of the issue.
Exactly. Half of Americans feel like they're in a recession because they're actively experiencing the financial/economic struggles reminiscent of one. Naturally, the corporate-owned media are eager to ignore this - almost as if they and their corporate owners have a vested interest in fleecing literally everyone else, the rest of society and economy be damned.
this article is fluff, that exploits Lancaster tourist take on the amish to clickbait into strange and deceptive conclusions.
there are two important points, ordnung is on per community basis, and second point is that the technology is exclusively used to facilitate business. (with the usual disclaimer that ordnung is often violated, for personal sinful reasons, like making personal, superficial calls on business cellphone, or taking business truck on personal trips).
therefore nobody "runs diesel for light" as a substitute for kerosine lamps, unless in gross violation of ordnung. those are not going anywhere. diesel, John deer tractors, ford trucks, cellphones, and now apparently solar panels are used in some communities to make farming work more effective with a smaller numbers in a community. Lancaster might afford to till soil with drafting horses, because they have large resource surplus, but smaller communities often rely on machinery to give them economic advantage.
from this perspective there's nothing special about the solar panels. they are a calculated and controlled addition to an existing roster of technological allowances.
I've lost many watches in my life, but this one has trained me in the discipline of care and attentiveness towards my possessions, which extends to all things and not just the watch.
There was no particularly good reason for me to buy it though, except for the watch maker name's frequent mention in the 19th century literature, including a famous line from Pushkin's Onegin, "he strolls down boulevards, until a sleepless Breguet, calls out time for supper". now it's likely that Onegin specifically didn't wear an actual breguet, because that was a generic name for a chiming timepiece, but the imagery stuck. I grew up on 19th century literature, byronic heroes, this line is explicit reference to flaneur culture, a self-conscious decadent movement, associated with aimless strolling down boulevards dressed in provocative clothing, breguet fits here, and that's the joke of the line: at a time when a timepiece would be associated with a serious vocation, politics or military, it is being used for the most frivolous task of letting one man know when it's time to eat. I reflect on this point occasionally, when I look at my watch.