What's up with the Q and A posts?
Just realized that I have gotten into the bad habit of writing stuff on a web questions and answers site instead of here. (cue kid from The Simpsons saying HA HA!)
Saving some, deleting the rest.
What are the benefits of participating in open source?
Depending on the project and your role in it, you might get lots of different benefits.
Learn new languages and tools to keep your skill set current.
Practice techniques that you might not be able to justify putting time into in a corporate environment. (For example, coding for extreme security or efficiency or minimum power and memory usage.)
Make connections with people outside your company.
Signal your technical competence and ability to work with others. Often, willingness to put time into open source depends on the job market for high-skill non-management programmers. The more that the hiring process depends on formal education and certification, and the less input it has from peers, the less incentive that a programmer has to Signal his or her skill using open source.
Talk with real users about bugs and features without a company filter, to get a better understanding of a software problem space.
How does AIA affect open source?
The America Invents Act increases the benefits of participating in open source in two ways.
First of all, defensive publication
becomes a much more powerful tool. The First
To Blog
rule means that a blog post or other
publication is more likely to count as prior art,
since a patent applicant can't claim an earlier
invention date to beat it. Although it is possible
to do defensive publication of just documents
while keeping the code itself secret, it's less
administrative overhead to just open source as much
as possible.
AIA also provides for a challenge system, which will be difficult for most companies to use independently. Industry organizations will probably have a new role in challenging patents that attack their members. The EFF is already doing this for 3D printing patents.
More details: The America Invents Act: Fighting Patent Trolls With "Prior Art"
What does ssh -t do?
Using the -t option allocates a pseudo-terminal for
ssh. This comes in handy when you want to "double
ssh".
Let's say you can reach the host bastion and bastion can reach internal but you can't reach internal. No problem, right? You can log into internal like this:
ssh bastion ssh internal
No joy: "Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal."
Now try that again with -t...
ssh -t bastion ssh internal
And it works.
What are the differences between open-source licenses?
Open-source licenses require different degrees of reciprocity from a licensee. In this list, each license category includes the same basic terms as the previous category. I'll leave out the corporate vanity licenses, since they aren't typically adopted by new projects.
No reciprocity: new BSD, MIT. These licenses simply grant permission to copy the software, and disclaim warranty.
Patent reciprocity: Apache. In order to redistribute software under this license, a licensee must offer a license to any of the licensee's patents that apply.
Partial copyright reciprocity: Mozilla Public License, Lesser GPL. A licensee must provide source code for changes to the original work, but can still add code that is somehow kept distinct from the original, and keep it proprietary.
Broad copyright reciprocity: GPL (all versions). If a licensee distributes a modified version that constitutes a "derivative work" for purposes of copyright law, that derivative work must be available in source code form.
Protections from complex legal schemes: GPLv3. Some patent trolling schemes and code signing systems have the effect of working around the reciprocity requirements of the GPL. This later version of the license closes some loopholes.
SaaS reciprocity: Affero GPL. The only commonly used license that requires a licensee to redistribute source even if the code is not actually redistributed. Offering AGPL-licensed software for use over a network also triggers the requirement to redistribute source.
Why did Linux succeed on servers?
Unlike the RISC Unix boxes from back in the day, a typical PC-architecture server is a Purchasing Manager's grab bag of cheap parts available on attractive terms. As an OS developer, you don't know what weird mix of hardware you're going to have to support, even if you're part of the OS team at the hardware vendor. ("Hey, it turns out that the new server is going to have RatBag 2000 Ethernet cards after all. That's not a problem, it it?") This situation was even worse when more parts were on PCI cards, not the motherboard.
So in order to make an OS that will run on all the bastard spawn x86 servers out there, you need to have either (1) the market power to make the hardware vendors code and test the drivers for you to support a stable driver ABI, as Microsoft did for Windows NT, or (2) the hacker chutzpah to break incompatible drivers frequently, so that in order to work at all, a driver has to "live in the tree" and be maintained as part of the OS. This is the route that Linux chose.
So the secret to Linux's success on servers is here: Stable API Nonsense
Why is git popular?
Projects outside the kernel began adopting Git shortly after its release. A key landmark in Git adoption came when Keith Packard, one of the lead developers of the X Window System, published two influential articles in 2007.
He saw Git as more robust from an administration point of view, which matters for open source projects that tend not to have a lot of infrastructure support.
After X moved to Git based on Keith's research, a lot of other projects outside the kernel started considering it more seriously as well.
Lanier on Flushrights
The Plumbing Clause of the US Constitution gives
Congress the power To promote the Installation of
Sanitary Plumbing, by securing for limited Times to
Plumbers the exclusive Right to their Fixtures.
Jaron Lanier has writen a powerful defense of the flushright system. Read the whole thing. The key points:
Flushing without paying flushright royalties ruins economic dignity. It doesn’t necessarily deny the plumber any form of income, but it does mean that the plumber is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to install or repair, perhaps, but not paid for plumbing one has done in the past. It is one thing to plumb for your supper occasionally, but to have to do so for every meal forces you into a peasant’s dilemma.
The peasant’s dilemma is that there’s no buffer. A plumber who is sick or old, or who has a sick kid, cannot work and cannot earn. A few plumbers, a very tiny number indeed, will do well, but even the most successful real-time-only careers can fall apart suddenly because of a spate of bad luck. Real life cannot avoid those spates, so eventually almost everyone living a real-time economic life falls on hard times.
Meanwhile, some third-party spy service like a social network or search engine will invariably create persistent wealth from the buildings and activities made possible by the plumbing. A plumber living a real-time career without the cash flow from coin boxes on stalls, is still free to pursue reputation and even income (through repairs, upgrades, etc.), but no longer wealth. The wealth goes to the central server.
The next time that you think about the hassle of being unable to flush the commode because your smartphone has an incompatible plumbing app, remember how the Framers in their wisdom gave exclusive rights to plumbers to protect them from misfortune. Similarly, local authorities have created exclusive rights to operate taxis. But as the global precariat grows, how can we give more workers the kind of automatic retirement and disability plan that flushrights can provide?
Finance, parking, and more
Attention people of the Internet. The links to EXAMPLES OF REALLY GOOD STUFF FOUND VIA RSS will continue until you quit it with the "RSS is dead, it's all about [chat site du jour]" posts. That is all.
Mike Masnick: Of Clotheslines, Black Swans And Bad Measurements
Mark Cuban: What Business is Wall Street In ?
Charles Marohn: Not efficient, but orderly.
Nicholas Carr: The prehistory of the MOOC
Sid Stamm: ownership and transparency in social media
Yarden Katz interviews Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
David Gaughran: Self-Publishers Aren’t Killing The Industry, They’re Saving It
George Monbiot: Recipes for Disaster
Timothy B. Lee: Conservatives’ Reality Problem. Plus Nate Silver: In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.
Sara Robinson: Bring
back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com 150
years of research proves that long hours at work kill
profits, productivity and employees.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: Outward
and Visible Signs Stress has become, I think,
the contemporary sign of our salvation.
Alex Steffen: Move a little closer, please: ‘Carbon Zero,’ chapter 3
Yves Smith: Why Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee Puts Borrowers at Risk
Ann Patchett: The Bookstore Strikes Back
Joshua Foer: Utopian for Beginners (via TED Blog)
Seth Godin: The danger of starting at the top and Eleven things organizations can learn from airports
Jesse Drucker: Google Revenues Sheltered in No-Tax Bermuda Soar to $10 Billion - Bloomberg
Alastair Johnston: Opinion
Column: Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away? The
stark sans-serif look that had first symbolized
revolution in the hands of Russian typographers in
1917 became institutionalized as the bland face of
corporate smugness.
Tomi Ahonen: Kantar November Numbers: Suggest Decline in Windows Phone and.. Increase in Symbian? Nokia is so doomed
John Scalzi: A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It – Whatever Also: A Note to You, Should You Be Thinking of Asking Me to Write For You For Free (via Melville House Books)
Arnaud Lapierre's Doorknob Condition: Intuitive Privacy
Sheldon Richman: The Libertarian Case Against Right-to-Work Laws
Rand Ghayad and William Dickens: It’s not a skill mismatch: Disaggregate evidence on the US unemployment-vacancy relationship
Ryan Finlay makes his living buying, selling, and repairing appliances, using Craigslist: Opportunity is Often Dressed In Overalls, How to Buy a Used Washing Machine, How to Buy a Used Dryer.
Jeff Wofford: In Praise of Modern Board Games
Sheldon Richman: Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal
Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws - Boing Boing (via Sunlight Foundation Blog)
One Dad's Ill-Fated Battle Against the Princesses
BBC News - Japan's ninjas heading for extinction
Kas Thomas: Stop Stealing from Shakespeare
Why the Moon Landing Could Not Have Been a Hoax — It Wasn’t Technologically Possible to Fake It
Philip Greenspun: U.S. Limits Imported Cheese to Third of a Pound per American.
ROTFLMAO: The #MostDangerousGame by Jake Swearingen
Zócalo Public Square :: How Doctors Die
Paul Barter: Easing parking minimums is NOT war on cars (via Streetsblog Los Angeles)
Erin L. McCoy: What’s Cheaper than Solar, Slashes Carbon Emissions, and Creates Jobs in Kentucky?
Nate Hyun: The Direct Public Offering – The Original Securities-Based Crowdfunding Model
Team Hudson: Lessons from the Bounty — Pride
Erika Christakis: The Preschool Paradox
Tim Maly: The Corporation Who Would be King
QoTD: Ari Jacoby
We already have a situation where
most people don't click on ads, and the
ones that do are suspect people.
— Ari
Jacoby, CEO, Solve Media
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!