h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nephew Who scanning his MA?type=2
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A2515538 Free Software
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A2515547 Some Open Source Operating Systems
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A2526194 Use Open Source Full or Closed

I can't see anything wrong with A2515538 except a lack of debunking of the microsoft "shared source" initiative. I have already done that in one of the other threads, so you can just cut and past to add it.

A2515547 is a mess, so I will wait until it has been put into some sort of order to comment further.

A2526194 seems fine, but open office needs a further comment to state that the main incompatability is VBScript macros in MS office files, however this usually breaks between versions of microsoft office / word, so it is no great hardship. There is a perfectly functional alternative scripting system in it.

Anything going on with these entries?

Traveller in Time on his head
"Sure, I was waiting for the threads to get quiet.
By the way was it not 'HappyDude' who would do some entries about it? "

he actually said "if nobody else was rash enough".

I was only asking as they seemed to invite comment, but the comment got no reply.

Traveller in Time on his head
"Well, as you noticed before, it is a job to get the information sorted. Special as we now have half a dozen threads to collect info from and glue it together in a fancy way.

Anyway feel free to comment on them, it keeps me on the topic. I have started entries before that could become something but due to lack of any comment forgot about them.

Currently I am doing a rewrite of the MARQUEE, as soon as I am satisfied I will return to Free Software. (Quite the opposite?)

By the way, I try to make any entry small enough to keep the interest of even a vaguely interested reader. My experience is I do not want to read more then about a thousand words about a subject that is not normally in my region of interest. If the entry is much longer I will assume it is dedicated to specialists. "

Traveller in Time on his head
"It is beginning to take shape < A2515556 >"

ouch, with that many problems, where do you start without sounding too discouraging?

well, the obvious things first I think.

there are too many things on the page A2515556 which are broken links, and end up pointing at the front page. if you are not ready to link to something, leave it unlinked, rather than having bad links, which make sensible comment harder.

also, what is the story with the open source "projectiles"?

the open drain projectiles will have to go as well, because as far as I can tell, they will link to the most recently modified thread on their pages, which will change as soon as someone posts to any of the threads.

If you have them there fore reference while you work on it, then just stick them in as links at the bottom to their pages.

Then we come to the licenses. The h2g2 terms are definately not open source. specifically they state that exactly 2 groups have the right to modify and use your postings, the bbc, and you.

in principle this means that anyone who copies a page which was being worked upon by someone who elvis'ed is actually technically in breach of the terms and conditions. If you were to copy something from one of my articles, and quote it verbatim on one of the web pages of your website, you would definately be in breach.

the whole set of licence tiles needs to be of the licenses page A2545689 but the page A2515538 already covers licences much better than this, so you need to do more work on it.

the page on proprietary licences leaves a lot to be desired at the moment, because it basically reads as a "this nasty software company doesn't like customers" type rant. it has the beginings of a decent page, but the current content isn't it in it's present form.

On your history, you have got it mostly wrong.

Unix was initially written on a spare pdp7 in machine code by Ken Thompson in 1969. it was intended as a system for doing research into writing operating systems, a function it is still fullfiling.

As it was stuck in pdp7 machine code, it stayed almost totally in his lab at at&t until 1973, when Dennis Richie created the language C for research into mixed level (high level and machine code like) languages.

It proved to tie in so well with the philosophy of unix (see http://www.xyroth-enterprises.co.uk/unixphil.htm for more info) that unix was quickly re-written in C. because of it's mainly machine independant nature this meant that it could be mostly compiled for any machine you could write a C compiler for if you have the source code. (this is why unix is now available on over 40 different processor families).

at this time, it was not considered as anything more than a curiosity by at&t, so thompson and richie would take the tapes with the code when they went to universities to work on the at&t operating systems that their computers were using, and often ended up copying the tapes for the university researchers to use.

this resulted in the berkley systems distribution (bsd), and it was only later that at&t got interested in unix, when it started spreading through at&t and their customers started hearing about it.

Later in the early eighties, the situation was very strange. a lot of modifications had been done at berkley, with a lot of them being sent in to at&t and ending up being included in at&t unix. at&t got interested in selling unix as a product, and as it took of, they took berkley to court for copyright infringement.

the resulting judgement caused 6 files to need re-writting, and the bsd licence was formalised near the same time. this is why it became freely available, and microsoft could bundle the bsd network drivers into win95.

it is also part of the backdrop to the SCO farse.

At the same time, there were multiple incomatable versions of unix from different vendors (under licence to at&t), which is partly why the gnu tools became so popular. you installed them on your unix varient, and then anything you wrote to use them would work on any unix. Because of these incompatabilities, the unix community missed the boat and allowed microsoft to ride the pc revolution to it's current monopolist position.

Soon after this, the 386 became available, but there were problems with getting the versions completed and available, resulting in the three bsd varients "openbsd, freebsd and netbsd".

Because of this, when the student (not professor) linus torvaltd got a 386, the situation was as follows....

the bsd community was split, non of them producing something usable.

the gnu hurd kernel was not available (and even now it is not ready for anythng but experimental use).

the other versions were both proprietary and expensive.

the gnu tools were generally available.

this meant that he was able to start coding a minimal monolithic kernel which he called linux for use on his own pc, and he made it generally available under the gpl for others to extend for their machines.

After a while, it grew enough to be able to host the gnu tools in its own right, and thus gnu/linux was born.

Later on, slackware took a hole host of .tgz files (the standard archive format for unix) and produced the first distro.

red hat and debian were both spawned from slackware.

mandrake and suse were spawned from redhat.

lycoris, caldera and later lindows were all spawned from debian.

but all these different distributions are still gnu/linux.

so at the moment you have microsoft in one rapdly shrinking corner, and everyone else is pretty much using a unix base.

the unix base is split into bsd (which also includes apple's OSX), the linux distributions, and the gnu hurd.

most software is source code compatable between bsd, osx, and hurd, and that which isn't usually works across the distributions with a common history (bsd stuff usually work on all the bsd's, linux stuff usually works on all the linux's, and the hurd stuff works on hurd).

A minor complication is that the really incompatable linux code might only work within the stuff derived from the same family of ditributions, (so redhat-ish code might work on redhat, suse and mandrake, but have a problem with the debian type distributions, or the other way around), but the situation is getting a lot better every month.

now onto the next bit.

the applictions section is a bit sparse. telnet has been legacy code only included for compatability since the mid nineties. everyone uses SSH and the related scp, sftp, etc tools.

only microsoft thinks that telnet is secure for online access, and include it in their unix tools for windows cd, even though the open source program putty would have been a more realistic choice.

A2526194 covers he range of "best of breed" applications fairly well, but if you are going to split it into the current sections, you need to add the other applications which were mentioned in the multimedia posting to round off that section. While they are not yet best of breed, they are comming along fast.

I am sure that there is more that I should add, but I can't hink of it right now, but I would lose those boxes in the history section, as they don't help, and probably get in the way.

I hope all this helps.

Traveller in Time on his head
"Hmm, quite a workout.
I know some facts where doubtfull but most of this is what I came up with just from the threads and the edited entries. "

some of the edited entries leave a lot to be desired.

in many cases they date back to before rupert, the great h2g2 dissapearing trick, and while they were mostly ok back then, the situation has changed a lot.

also, there were less unix and linux on h2g2 at the time so scrutiny was less than it should be.

Hopefully my comments will have cleared some of it up a bit.

if you have any specific areas of doubt, then let me know and I will try and resolve them.

Traveller in Time on his head
"I will, I will,

First we have to celebrate five years of HooToo (unfortunately on MS servers)"

any progress with this?

Traveller in Time rereading backlog
"I came on a third of your list so far.
I have not spend any time at this last week.
However I see it as a project, with tiles on more specific subjects. Perhaps some of them are suitable for the Edited Guide. Is that the only goal? Or are we collecting information, heavily coloured by our own experiences.
Like my vision on Closed Software. I see it as an 'insult' to read what they think we could do to their software.

'Best of Breed' You suggest to include (some of) the applications as in the multimedia thread. I tried to include applications where users confirmed the use as beeing described, where I taste you only opened the most of the discussed applications to read their own comment.

I think I will find inspiration again somewhere next quik."

dealing with some of the stuff you have mentioned, the stuff I mentioned in the posting about the video stuff was what is currently in general usage in hollywood for animation work. If that doesn't class it as "best of breed", I don't know what does.

The stuff on the music / sound processing post was the current state of the art as regards musicians a few months ago. it has no doubt moved on a little since then, but all those mentioned will still be major players.

both postings could form the basic of articles about using linux for animation and video work, and for music and audio work respectively.

I see no reason why the entries have to be for the edited guide, they could just as easily be good entries linked to from the h2g2 linux user group pages, but if they become good enough to get edited status, I wouldn't mind.

I have not re-checked all the things you linked to, but the problems I had with the pages were both specific and detailed, and commented on in this thread, so it is all collected in one place for ease of reference in case the entries were split or joined.

when you have updated the pages, comment on here, and I will happily have another look and see what I can spot as being good and bad about them.

If you have any questions about linux, open source, or specific applications, or anything else relevent, then ask here, and I will try and comment in as helpfull a manner as possible.

Traveller in Time on his head
"I started my linux adventures with Slackware, currently is DebIan my favourite.

Do you know perhaps an archive with a nice long history of the stable kernels? I still miss some in my collection.

Now I got to get myself building linux boxes again. . . "

me too.

Of my seventy computers, I can currently use 2, and one of those only works fully in windows ME due to a redhat bug.

Specifically I need to get my software testing machine rebuilt, complete with bsd, hurd, linux (deb and rpm based) and a copy of windows with djgpp so I can get back to testing my self written software for cross-incompatabilities.

let me know when there is any news on these entries.