GNU-Darwin: blackout anniversary

While the Madrid attack is likely to be caused by Islamic terrorists, relating it immediately to the war on Iraq is somewhat too simplistic. Remember, the Bush administration used the same flawed "reasoning" to conclude that Saddam Hussein was somehow in cahoots with Al-Qaida.

Why must (gnu slash) people mix software and politics? They both have their place, but only one of them belongs here.

For once, I agree with tk. I think it would make more sense that terrorists would attack the US if they were mad at the US for Iraq.

I would rather say that the Madrid statement lacks support, and sorry for that. I should have stated that this is a hunch, or a possible insight based on the date of the attack. In fact, NPR reports that the attack occured on 3/11, which is exact 911 days after the 9/11 attack, which adds support to my Madrid assertion. There is other support out there, if you look for it, although it appears that the current rulers would like it to be anyone but Al-Quaeda for a change.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Finding patterns in numbers after the fact is trivial since your resource pool is infinite.

Did you know that if you take 3/11 and add 6 to the 3 you get 9/11?

Clearly there is a connectiong since 6 is a number that when said three times is associated with the satan.

HOLY COW! IT IS A CONSPIRACY!

Also, I agree with etrepum, this will be my only post on the thread.

-dau

It's 912 days, actually.

Have the gnu darwin people accomplished anything non-political yet? Do they have any technical things to talk about? My impression from all these stories is that they repackage a lot of apple stuff and then make lots of political noise.

In addition to providing an enhanced version of Darwin, we provide many thousands of free software packages that are compatible with the system, and with Mac OS X. We maintain a ports system for building and packaging software, and nearly all the free software that was added to Mac OS X in recent years was first brought to the platform by GNU-Darwin, but our offerings are certified free software only. We also provide internet services, such as webmail, IMAP, and SSH shell accounts.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Reuters service just reported that Spain's intelligence service is "99 percent certain" that Muslim militants are responsible for the train attacks. As more data comes in, it appears that my hunch is correct.

Now as for the free software question, to the extent that free software is about freedom, then issues of politics are on-topic and relevant for discussion. GNU-Darwin has shown that a free software project can engage in strident political activism and maintain a high profile software distribution at the same time. In fact, I would argue that free software projects must by definition engage themselves politically, especially at this time, when the values that underlie those projects are under attack, WRT Patriot Act, DMCA, software patents, copyright abuse, corporate hegemony, etc. Bush's so-called war has facilitated many of these outrages, and we should stand up and loudly oppose them.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

I was talking about the connection to Iraq, for crying out loud!

Oh well, I guess certain people just like to lump all "Arabs" together. Suck.

If that was a cheap shot, then I'm overlooking it. Otherwise, I will just ask you whether you think that "Muslim militants" in general are angry about US aggression in Iraq. If so, then the connection stands. If not, I'm sure that you will explain why not.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Because Iraq under Saddam Hussein was more a secular state than anything else, and Saddam didn't have much currency in the rest of the Arab world.

The Muslim terrorists could've launched the attack for any of a gazillion reasons. You choose Iraq as the reason simply because it fits your desired conclusion. Why isn't Palestine the reason? Why isn't Afghanistan the reason? Because you say so.

Even if you're willing to overlook the rather frantic leaping after conclusions in advance of the facts (we do not currently KNOW who was behind the attacks in Madrid, we have only speculation), it's hard to overlook the trumpeting of some rather feeble accomplishments that's threaded throughout the rest of the message. First, proclus was hardly the only person who spoke out against the war a year ago, and "blacking out" a website can hardly be compared to the contribution of those who organized rallies, demonstrated in front of public buildings and otherwise got themselves arrested or travelled to Iraq as independent photojournalists for the non-mainstream press in an effort to get the real story.

You can say "OK, fine, those people did a lot more, what's your point?" and my point is simply that if THOSE people aren't currently jumping up and down going "we were vindicated, vindicated I tell you! It's a damn shame those Spaniards weren't as effective in their own anti-war efforts or they'd still have most of their body parts attached!" then you'd think someone who did so much less might at least have the good grace to stay off the soapbox of moral righteousness and leave it to those more entitled to occupy it.

I won't even touch the comment that "nearly all the free software that was added to Mac OS X in recent years was first brought to the platform by GNU-Darwin". The chronology and magnitude of that contribution is far more open to debate than proclus makes it sound.

Your hidden implication is the black out is the only thing that GNU-Darwin did, of which you know nothing. Now as for this...

"nearly all the free software that was added to Mac OS X in recent years was first brought to the platform by GNU-Darwin". The chronology and magnitude of that contribution is far more open to debate than proclus makes it sound.

This seems like a good forum to have that debate. I stand by the facts, which are that no project has introduced more free software to the platform than GNU-Darwin, more than Apple, more than jkh. The cronology is not debatable nor is the magnitude. We were first, and we did the most, however some may wish it were otherwise.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

> If only they could have stopped their government from supporting the war, then today's tragedy would never have happened.

I'm sure among the dead were many people who thought the same.  may they rest in peace, and may the rest of you start using your head for a change.

It's not entirely clear whether you mean "more free" as in speech, or "more free" as in a lot of beer.. in either case, I wouldn't agree that the freeness of the software or quantity of free software is really a big deal to most OS X users. If they wanted more politically free (but GPL) software, they would use Debian, and if they wanted a larger quantity of software, they would use Windows. OS X users want stuff that works well, looks nice, and is easy to use. Most (as in quantity) free (beer or speech) software is neither, especially in comparison to Apple's proprietary contributions.

As software quality goes, GNU-Darwins is very good due to the excellent building and packaging infrastucture (which jkh can take some credit for ;-). I have a long treatment of the reasons for our advantages, which is now unfortunately getting a little dated.

http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ports/pseudo/

In short, we get most of the easter eggs turned on ;-}. It is a mature system, which leverages the work of free software developers worldwide, and which is well suited to high-thoughput packaging and distribution.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

I stand by the facts, which are that no project has introduced more free software to the platform than GNU-Darwin, more than Apple, ...

Yeah, and the fact is that whatever proclus says is axiomatically true; no supporting evidence is needed. If you disagree, see my previous comment regarding the connection to Iraq. If you still disagree, be prepared for an ad hominem attack:

... more than jkh.

If this is what "freedom" means, count me out, thank you very much.

It is easy to make such unsupported accusations, especially if you are too lazy to look up the evidence yourself. It is all a matter of record, "open source", on the web. I have given the links here many times.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Yes, and it's all a matter of record, "open source", on the web, that the Illuminati exists, but everyone's too lazy to look up the evidence.

Should I say something about the Iraq connection again?

As you like. Admittedly, it was a lame assertion, but the evidence is piling up to support it, for anyone who cares to look. BTW, the Illuminati does exist. It is me and my friends. ;-}

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Let's take a look at the evidence on the web then. In article #640, you said that the war against Iraq was wrong, without explaining clearly why it was wrong except saying that your "conscience" won't allow it.

In article #720, you claimed that the FSF's certification of GNU-Darwin was somehow of paramount importance; this claim was quickly shown to be hogwash.

Now you say that "all of the major points" in your argument against the Iraq war "have been vindicated". Quite true: there weren't any major points in the "argument" (if arguing by "conscience" can be called an argument).

And, well, that the Madrid attack was caused by Spain's support for the Iraq war, and that "the evidence is piling up to support it". Pray, what evidence? I only see evidence for a connection to Muslim terrorists.

Finally, of course, the assertion that "nearly all the free software that was added to Mac OS X in recent years was first brought to the platform by GNU-Darwin", and that somehow makes GNU-Darwin great.

I thought PhDs would be better than this, but since even Nobel laureates can be stupid, I shouldn't be surprised.

tk, your interpretation of those articles is very different from evidence, which I haven't seen from you. Personally, I'll stick with the laueates, etc in questions of evidence and intelligence.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Aside from the support cited here, the alleged al-Qaeda tape that is currently under evaluation flatly states that the attack was retaliation for Spanish support for the US in Iraq. If the tape turns out to be authentic, then the case is closed in favor of my Madrid assertion. If not, then it is still murky. If you had bothered reading any newspapers, then you would know this.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

The fact that GNU-Darwin is largest free software repository in the Darwin community is self-evident to anyone who bothered to look at the project directories or websites. Of course, we think that is great (insanely), but clearly others may differ.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Kudos to you guys for getting your viewpoint out on the war and any other political issue--more people should, it's an important part of living in a democracy. I think it's great you guys are doing that.

What bothers me are these comments like "If only they could have stopped their government from supporting the war, then today's tragedy would never have happened".

OH REALLY?!?!

First, that sounds like you think Al Qaeda or whoever did this was justified in their action. They're not. It's a sick, disgusting thing to do to basically innocent people. You should be ashamed.

Second, I don't think you can placate these people anyway. Who says they wouldn't have done it if Spain hadn't gone to war? These people blame the West for all their problems, they think we are to blame for everything wrong with their region--and you know what? We're NOT. But some people just have a victim mentality--they want to blame somebody else for their trouble, and they're going to go on blowing our people and our stuff up for so long as they continue with their idiotic, stupid, narrow minded blame-the-other-guy way of life.

The last thirty years has seen *trillions* of dollars of wealth transferred from the USA to the Middle East. That's the trade deficit, the result of buying all that oil. These guys should be rolling in the good life, they should be living in one of the richest areas of the world. In fact it is one of the richest areas of the world. But they live stupid miserable unhappy lives because of their own corrupt, greedy, selfish, repressive systems of government. Then they work themselves up into a religious rage and kill each other and kill us and all the while blame anybody but themselves for their troubles.

We in the West have made our share of mistakes and done our share of wrong things, but for all our mistakes and wrong things, we are NOT the problem in this region. You ought not to legitimize these repulsive acts of terrorism by pulling the wool over your own eyes and imagining that these are basically nice people who wouldn't do this if only we had been nicer. They're going to go on killing people for stupid reasons no matter what we do.

Obviously thereasons for going to war were suspect, obviously thehistory with Saddam was suspect, obviously mistakes have been made here. But now looking forward it might actually do this region a whole world of good if there were a functioning democracy in Iraq. Who knows if it can happen, but maybe if we can help them set up a decent system of government people there will eventually have a more constructive political outlet for their frustrations than blowing stuff up.

procus,

Your debating style certainly makes up in sheer persistence anything it may lack in logical foundation. In fact, it sort of reminds me of someone else... Who was it... Oh yeah, that Bush guy! Watching you in action impresses me enough, in fact, that I may just have to create a perl script version of you which I can use to attack arguments which I don't actually care enough about to address personally but still want to engage in. I'll simply give it a truth statement as input and have it reassert that over and over again, regardless of what anyone else says, until the more malleable readers accept the repetition of that statement as truth in its own right and the less malleable ones run away in disgust. Either way, I win! Learn from proclus, young grasshoppers, his kung-fu style is powerful yet easy to learn and duplicate. :)

For those actually motivated to go crunch the numbers for themselves, just out of perverse curiosity if nothing else, let me just make some points from personal experience that you may want to keep in mind as you add the numbers up:

1. When you start trying to verify who was "first", google is your friend. You'll find references to other projects like Fink and, if you're lucky, even a few references on various mailing lists to things being ported to Mac OS X in the early days of DP4.

2. A broken port does not really count as a port since it's not actually providing any service to its users. Count only the ones which FUNCTION and, if you're doing archaeology, the ones that functioned back when numbers were being waved around.

3. Some ports are not really ports in their own right, they're just the same base port with various options switched on. A better port system (not one based on my early make(1)-based monument to obfuscation ;) would allow you to express this all from a single port that leans on some unifying concept of option knobs (with introspection so you can figure out what they even are without having to have a PhD in make(1)).

I won't even get into the more subjective issues, like whether or not providing "27 mp3 renamers" is the same level of contribution as porting all of KDE, GNOME or MONO to Mac OS X, all of which require much heavier lifting and score far higher on the "user desirability" charts. FreeBSD's ports collection, for example, now exceeds 10,000 entries (10,357 at last count) but I think it's also fair to say that this eye-popping number includes a lot of ports which:

1. Contribute to the administrative overhead of the ports collection but have a user base in the single digit range, making the value of their addition to the ports collection rather questionable at best.

2. Flat-out don't work and haven't worked for a long time (adding ports is easy, finding effective maintainers for their long-term upkeep is not).

3. Could have been built just as easily by a user with a tarball and 5 minutes to type "configure" and "make". In some cases, they're still worth "porting" because other things depend on them or they come from obscure places, but in many other cases you get the feeling that the porter was just going for a high score in port imports that week.

That's FreeBSD, but these problems are pretty generic to ALL ports collections and constitute the seamy underside of the issue for anyone wishing to proudly announce that they've gone for quantity quantity quantity. Reading procus's posts, one is struck by the fact that he consistently uses words like "largest" but is conspicuously silent on the topic of quality or any notion that the project even offers statistics on the usability of its ports collection. I've browsed the web site looking for build failure reports or any charts which show the overall "health" of a collection which so proudly extolls its body count numbers, but there's nothing like the FreeBSD "your port is broke!" notification mechanisms I can see or anything like this:

http://bento.freebsd.org/errorlogs/

I guess quality is less of a priority than marketing. :) [to which I'm sure I'll see an immediate rebuttal claiming that quality is Job One at gnu-darwin, but hey, exposed QC mechanisms speak far louder than words!]

jordone,

Very funny and informative, especially from one who clearly has the historical insight and expertise to understand the issues at hand. I am confident that GNU-Darwin and my remarks will stand up well to this kind of analysis, and I welcome it. Bring'em on! ;-} Cheers!

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

And best wishes to you as well.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

I thought the stupid politicking on a.o would be over by now. My own mistake, I guess.

proclus, you're making the same mistake: thinking that the danger will pass with time. It is, by definition, impossible to appease terrorists. No matter how much you blame yourself, the only thing that will placate them is your funeral. Nothing less than that will be enough (just look at the Bali bombings).

It's also very self-contradictory, that you are using your freedom of speech on this board, to defend those who would take away that freedom of speech. Do you have any idea what is really at stake here? It's the Free World. It's your very right to speak here, without being dragged before a kangaroo court and summarily executed within the hour, then having your family follow you into eternity because you "poisoned their minds" with your independent thinking. You don't think that ever happened under the Taliban? You think Saddam Hussein never destroyed an entire town for the acts of a few? Then you're just as bad as a Holocaust denier. And if you persist in your inconsistent theories, you will only demonstrate that rational conversation with you, regarding what we did in Iraq, is impossible.

I haven't looked at this board for over a year. Now I remember why.

And when was the last time Saddam Hussein "destroyed an entire town for the acts of a few"? He certainly did destroy entire families, but entire towns? Where did that come from? And where is the "kangaroo court" set up by the Taliban that gets people "summarily executed within the hour"?

As for "using your freedom of speech on this board, to defend those who would take away that freedom of speech", aren't you yourself using freedom of speech to try to quash the freedom of speech of others? In the US at least, Holocaust deniers have the right to deny the Holocaust. So why are you criticizing them as being "bad"?

Both the pro-war and anti-war folks are looking bogus......

gus3, Are you saying that Saddam Hussein or the Taliban could take away our free speech? Pray tell how? If not, then your argument is made of straw.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Case closed, from Reuters....

Investigators believe that whoever made a videotape ... after the attack was linked to the bombings

The tape states flatly that the bombings were retaliation for Spain's role in the Iraq war. For those of us who have been saying all year that the war increases the threat of terrorism, this is no surprise, and also a good demonstration of my my great crystal ball. ;-}.

Here is the story link

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

For those of us who realize that proclus is all about proving himself right and his opponents wrong, this is no surprise.

Even if the war against Iraq was unjustified, do you at least have the decency to stop all this moral wankaging, and actually do something people care about? I'm not even going to say what's wrong with this "crystal ball" idea.

Ahem, I think that remark speaks for itself. ;-}

Tk doesn't like my "crystal ball" or the facts either. Oh well. Here is another link...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3568793.stm

The Spanish result will be recreated in Australia, etc. Have fun. Enjoy. Love. Peace.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

You really want to know what's wrong with your great crystal ball?

"The Spanish result will be recreated in Australia, etc." When will that be? 5 years down the road? 10 years? 100 years? Give a precise deadline, then we can talk. If you don't, your so-called prediction is just fluff.

And the "etc." part: more fluff. Give a precise country, or a precise group of countries. Then we can talk.

And do you remember the Bali bombings? I ask you, what did the Bali people do to deserve a terrorist attack?