On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: need tool for high quality
>typesetting, unicode-capable":
> > Of course, I don't know how many of these projects are of actual
> > substantial worth. Some labs give exactly the same project semester after
>
> They are usually of near-zero substantial worth unfortunately.
> Just like the homework I did while studying math was rarely (if ever!) worth
> publication. It was usually just repeating what was already done N+1 times
> in the past, and many times - badly.
>
> I was talking about major projects taking several experienced people (like
> professors and graduate students) and spanning years, not about something a
> single completely inexperienced person does in two days (or even two weeks)
> of effort.
>
Actually it took me and my partner much more time to finish our projects
(we worked on both of them the entire summer, and I think I'm a relatively
fast coder and quite experienced). But you are right, of course, they are
not of a substantial worth.
Note that my attempts to work on Freecell Solver as part of a university
project were not fruitful. However, Muli was able to achieve the same for
syscalltrack. I guess it means you need to have the right connections and
knowledge. (or attractive suggestion) ;-)
> > In any case, the reason openMosix was forked (in part by Israelis) was
> > because Prof. Amnon Barak does not accept patches to it from the outside.
>
> This is a valid reason for forking, exactly like it is valid for me to
> declare "NYH Linux" based on Linux with a few patches I wrote and which
> Linus refused to enter into the official kernel.
>
Right.
> What is not ok, however, is to go around saying that my version is "Open
> Linux" because Linus's is closed. It's simply not fair. Especially when
> you do it to one of the "good guys" (like Prof. Barak or Linus Torvalds).
>
I think the open in openMosix meant that it had an open development model.
Of course, some people could (and will) misinterpret it as saying it is
open as open source. So it isn't a nice think to do.
I would have picked bazaarMosix... ;-)
> > That said, I believe that software that is developed inside universities
> > and not released to the public is not a good or advisable thing. It is
> > possible that it technically legal. In the U.S. there's the issue of the
> > stanford checker, which was used to find some bugs in the Linux kernel,
> > but has otherwise not been made available in source or binary forms.
>
> The tradition in Universities has always been to publish their results,
> *and* give enough information in that publication for the readers to be
> able to replicate the work, and build on it.
>
> Does it sound like free software, where you have to publish both the
> binary *and* the source code needed to replicate this work and build on it?
>
> It sure does!
>
[ long explanation skipped ]
Very well. I don't know how close is the universities model of doing
things to the free software's one. We discussed it in Hackers-IL
previously and I still believe there may be some differences between the
two. In HtN, ESR identifies some differences between the hackers'
Ethics and the common one in the Academia. It is possible that they stem
from more practical differences as well.
Nevertheless, you are generally right in your insights. However, the
Stanford checker was given as an example, and I'd like to say I'm not
going to hold it against Stanford for not releasing it, because I don't
know what it involves. As a general more software was released in the U.S.
by universities under a free or partially-free license, than in Israel.
It's hard for me to approximate it relative to the U.S. and Israel's
sizes.
Note that some of this software eventually was continually developed by
commercial or open-source entities. For instance, X11 is now maintained by
the X Consortium and XFree86.org, rather than MIT. It was at a time
partly sponsored by Digital Corp. who used it as a free alternative to
proprietary display systems by various competing UNIX vendors. But even so
the contributions of universities abroad to open source software have been
substantial. This is excluding the contribution of individuals who studied
or worked for these universities, which makes the phenomena much bigger.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
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"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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