See also: last week's Letters page.

Letters to the editor

From:	 Torsten Howard <torsten@inetw.net>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: SourceForge
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:33:16 -0500

Dear Editor:

I read with some concern your subtopic, " VA Linux goes proprietary?"

It is a critical failure to concenctrate too much power in the
hands of a few.  Good systems are engineered without such a single
point of failure.  Politics has usurped power from dictators.  Microsoft
has bore the condemnation of the courts for abuse of its power.

And thus the saying, "Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts
absolutely."  Dr. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same 
thing over and over, and expecting different results each time. 

At some point, I begin to wonder.  Exactly when do we learn from
the mistakes past?  From the politics of GPL radicals, one would 
take a look and realize there is a huge concentration of power in the
sourceforge website.  The same company owns two of the most visible
advocacy sights, Freshmeat and Slashdot.org.

In addition, sourceforge is abusing their power.  Let me explain.
When I download non-sourceforge GPL software and wish
to communicate to the author or mailing lists, I do so.

Sourceforge has hidden all communication to its projects behind
a "login."  It is the attempt to control communication, mailing lists,
and access to emails which is an abuse of power.  It is this very 
communication which is the lifeblood of open-source contributive 
projects.   Now we see the insanity of repetition, and failure to
change the way things are done.

We have not learned that concentrating power is a poor choice.

So what does this topic have to do with SourceForge.net adding
proprietary extensions?  Only that they have the power to do so - 
the power to undermine the ideas upon which they stand without 
falling over - because nobody is pushing.

And one final quote - "Power concedes nothing without demand."

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Torsten Howard

From:	 Michael Carniello <mlcarn1@home.com>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: VA Linux
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 21:18:32 -0500

To The Editor,

Your recent piece on VA Linux (8/30/2001) was interesting, as most of your
leading items are ... and it reflects a fact which you and most of this
community truly believe, yet with a strange duality, fail to recognize. And
that fact, reflected in a quote from your article, is this: "VA is ... just
finding a way to more readily sell its free software..."

Somebody may think of a clever of selling free stuff in the future, but it
hasn't worked in the past. I'm not saying that free software isn't good or
right, I'm saying that (right now, with current business models), it's
impossible to make money off that which can be had for free.

Mike Carniello
mlcarn1@home.com

From:	 "jacob navia" <jacob@jacob.remcomp.fr>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Selling free software
Date:	 Sat, 1 Sep 2001 14:04:17 +0200

Dear Sir:
I would like to point you to this sentence in your magazine:

"According to Eric, VA is not changing its focus as an open source company in
any way, it's just finding a way to more readily sell its free software"

Excuse me but if it's free of charge it can't be sold, and if it is sold, int
can't be free of charge. I am sorry but I think logic should at least play a
part in this discussion. VA Linux is beginning to fail financially, because
there is no way around logic, no matter how many lengthy explanations you come
up with.

Yours sincerely

---
Jacob Navia Logiciels/informatique
41 rue Maurice Ravel
93430 Villetaneuse
France

From:	 Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: LNX-BBC and LBT
Date:	 Wed, 29 Aug 2001 23:57:57 -0700

Thanks for the nice review of the LNX-BBC project!  We've also enjoyed
the reaction from people at LinuxWorld who came by to pick up copies.

Your article says that Linuxcare is no longer developing a bootable CD
project.  Although we thought that might be the case when we sent our CD
to press, it turns out that Linuxcare has done a new version of their
project, now called LBT (Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox).  They have been
giving these out at LinuxWorld; that means there are now two maintained
projects derived from the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, their
project

http://lbt.linuxcare.com/

and our project

http://www.lnx-bbc.org/

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> | Its really terrible when FBI arrested
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | hacker, who visited USA with peacefull
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF) | mission -- to share his knowledge with
     http://www.freesklyarov.org/      | american nation.  (Ilya V. Vasilyev)

From:	 "Toni SOUEID" <djt2000@inco.com.lb>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Fighting the DMCA and the Like.
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 18:04:13 +0200

Dear reader,

It is with sorrow and anger that I read the news about Dmitry Slyarov's
case.  What a shame for all of us if researchers and developers will begin
to be threatened just for writing a good paper or publishing a good piece
of software.  Some of us think the DMCA is good (especially governments and
big corporations) and some think is it bad.  Those who think it is good are
enforcing it by every mean imaginable.

So what can we do, we who think the DMCA is bad ?  The answer is pretty
simple. Fighting fire with fire. Fighting law with law.  We all need to get
involved in Free/Open Source software and/or in Free/Open Content
documentation movements.  While donating money for such initiatives is fine
and necessary it is not enough.  Contributions should be made by writing,
using and reviewing such software and documentation.  People should be
educated about the GPL, the FDL, the OPL and other similar licenses. They
should also be encouraged to use such licenses.  Who will need to buy
copyrighted material protected by a restrictive license when Free
alternatives exist ?  If just everyone of use could write a little piece of
software or a little piece of documentation in one of his areas of
interest, and release it under Free/Open licenses we could build a huge
alternative library of software and documentation that could benefit all of
Humanity and at the same time protect it's rights.

I've decided to release all of my own written tutorials under the OPL and
all of my own written software under the GPL to help protest against what's
happening out there.  On another hand I've decided to erase every piece of
proprietary file formats from my website and replace them with standards
compliant ones.

Can you do the same ?

Toni SOUEID,
Beirut - LEBANON.

From:	 rjh@world.std.com
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Financial customers are not conservative
Date:	 Thu, 30 Aug 2001 15:30:55 -0400 (EDT)


The financial marketplace is "conservative" in their financial
attitudes, not their computer purchasing.  They have long been Unix
strongholds.  Sun workstations, Thinking Machine supers, and other
leading edge hardware has a long history of penetration of these
financial markets.  The IBM sale to SIAC is signficant for Linux, not
for the Unix family.  Several major stock market functions are Unix
based.  More than 10% of the world stock settlements traffic has gone
through SCO Unix based systems for several years.

So while the SIAC sale is important and worth publicizing, do not read
too much into it.

R Horn

From:	 Vulture <t.sippel-dau@ic.ac.uk>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Terabyte disks and Linux kernels
Date:	 Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:51:11 +0100

Hello,

some weeks ago I got my sweaty palms on one of the Barracuda-180 disks
and fitted it into a system. However, I see a problem lurking on the 
horizon: SCSI commands have a 32 bit block address in the command, and 
can be formatted for blocks of size of any power of 2 bits, up to 2**35. 
However, Linux systems (and many others) have so far used "sector" sizes 
of 4096 bit (512 bytes), and aggregated these into "blocks", typically
2, 8, or 16 sectors per block.

File systems and paging work in these block sizes, but at the device 
driver level it will go down to the smaller sectors again.

Now 4 billion blocks times 4000 bit gives 16 Tb or two Terabytes, and 
that is only 12 times as big is as currently available disks, and will 
probably be surpassed in 4 years or so. We could start making the 
sectors bigger, up to 32 kb (8 kilobytes) for 64 bit systems with an
8 kilobyte page size, but how many disks will take kindly to a format-unit
command specifying anything but 4096 bit blocks is anybodies guess.

Disk manufacturers could also start to subdivide their disks into up to
8 "logical units" for another 4 year's leeway or so. However, it might
be a good idea to start thinking now about that particular limit and
how to handle it in the kernel. A quick Google search yielded many articles
on "Terabytes", but I found none that discussed it as a problematic limit.

N.B. IDE drives have their next limit at 137 Gigabytes (according to 
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q114/8/41.ASP), which
should become a problem in weeks rather than months. 

                                Thomas

*   Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ?
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