Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I'm a hopeful pragmatist. Humanity has managed to survive this long, and I'm cautiously optimistic it will continue to do so.
|
Blink of an eye, my good man, blink of an eye.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I have no idea what sort of settlement RIM might be reaching with the Saudis and RIM. There may well be a local equivalent of due process involved.
|
According to
this, it appears the most popular solution is that of giving the Saudis their own server, and that solution is being tested now.
According to
this, it appears they already tried to gain access on their own and failed. So much for due process.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It's the "various degrees of skill to do it" that's the issue. A poster elsewhere was ranting at some lengths about what he had to go through to get root on his Android device (including a firmware downgrade to get a hole that would allow him to do it.) He thought it violated what open source was all about, and another respondent regretted the Linux devs didn't use GPL v3 instead of 2, which would provide some legal teeth to keep people from creating implementations where you couldn't easily get root. I think if I were in a position to make that change in Linux licensing and I wanted to bring Linux adoption by businesses to a screeching halt, going GPL v3 on Linux is how I would do it.
|
There's still a battle raging about v3 vs v2. Linus Torvalds hisownself had issues with it from the beginning:
"[This] means that now, suddenly, you maybe can't share code simply because of license issues. But that's not something new; we've always had that with other licenses...One of the few reasons GPL v3 might be useful was if there were lots of external code that were important and worthwhile and licensed under GPL v3. To avoid the licensing incompatibility, some kernel people could re-license to version 3 - not because it's the better license, but because it opens up code to us."
--Linus Torvalds, in Voicu, D. (2008, January 9). Linus Torvalds Says "No" to GPLv3. (link)
Phones/mobile devices are probably one of those situations; for instance, the bootloader on the Droid X is encrypted in order to keep people like myself from updating the OS outside of normal channels; that's code written my Moto and not (to my knowledge) open-source. Torvalds and Stallman will disagree over this until their last breaths.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It's a fundamental paradox. You want Linux to succeed and take over the world, but in doing so, it will get implemented in all sorts of places where you don't want the end user to casually become root, if for no other reason that the support nightmare it would generate.
|
Actually, I'm not sure I want Linux to take over the world inasmuch as it's already running the most secure and mission-critical servers on the planet; I personally don't care if Linux takes over the desktop either (I tried the evangelism route for the first 6 months I used Linux...complete waste of time). For such a thing to happen, users will have to learn to take responsibility for their actions, and Microsoft has conditioned the casual user for 15 years to believe that such responsibility shouldn't be necessary. As a matter of fact, Mark Shuttleworth and the group at Canonical are doing a bang-up job of it themselves.