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Poll

Do you agree with me that libertarians should choose Copyfree software over Copyleft whenever possible?

Yes.
- 4 (80%)
No.
- 1 (20%)

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Author Topic: Copyfree Software  (Read 17535 times)

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Riddler

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #15 on: March 06, 2011, 09:19:43 PM »

where's the re-ban libman button?
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The ghost of a ghost of a ghost

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #16 on: March 07, 2011, 12:03:20 AM »

This thread is geeky for sure.
But it's way more interesting than "me feckin truck" or any other ass clown thread with your half ass ebonic-like typing.
Thats all.
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #17 on: March 07, 2011, 04:47:41 PM »

Please don't feed the troll.


Stallman pisses me off.

But I do what I want cuz a pirate is free

That's like saying, "Obama pisses me off, but I'll wear an Obama t-shirt and vote for him cause I'm a pirate, arrr".  :roll:


Although seriously,  when I get the next computer I have -
when I get around to _building_ a computer -
it's probably gonna be dual-booting a flavor of BSD and a flavor of Linux.

(What's with the double-posting trend?  I'd just edit the previous post, but perhaps that's just me - always trying to maximize the substance per megapixel that I take up.)

Dual-booting is for people who can't commit.  There's really no reason to install more than one OS on bare hardware.  Whenever I need to test something on Windows (ex. IE9), Solaris, another BSD, Haiku, or Loonix, it's much faster to launch an emulated instance (which can have its memory saved, so it opens instantly), or remote-access a test computer in the cloud (ex. CloudSigma).  The latter is also great for any processing-intensive scripts I gotta run - rent as many gigahertz you want on demand!  I also hear they're coming up with a way to run Windows from a LiveDVD.
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TimeLady Victorious

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #18 on: March 08, 2011, 12:24:33 AM »

I seek liberty and I don't give a fuck about software licenses.

That being said, you're damn right I can't commit to a single OS.
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #19 on: March 08, 2011, 12:31:45 AM »

A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.
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TimeLady Victorious

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #20 on: March 08, 2011, 02:00:51 AM »

A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.

Yeah, that's kinda why I went to Ubuntu fulltime, because I realized I didn't give much of a shit about Windows after a while.
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Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #21 on: March 08, 2011, 11:10:42 AM »

A valid reason to dual-boot is to test if you can run the OS on your hardware and see how well it runs in order to evaluate using it as a full-time operating system. Dual-booting in the long run doesn't usually work out because you always end up using one or the other system and the other one is just taking up space on your partition table.

Yeah, that's kinda why I went to Ubuntu fulltime, because I realized I didn't give much of a shit about Windows after a while.
Same here, except I went the other way and stuck with Windows full time.
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #22 on: March 08, 2011, 11:54:43 AM »

I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #23 on: March 08, 2011, 03:13:21 PM »

WOW - did you accomplish the 13-OS feat with GRUB or something else?

Of course that's just vanity.  Every once in a while I go through an OS-hopping phase, which is made a lot easier by my habit of storing snapshots of my previous installations on a local file server.  (I think this started from all the time I've spent playing around with Gentoo, which sort of encourages you to save everything.)  One can have any OS image backed up and restored in just a few minutes - or even seconds with some scripting, a faster network, and SSD.  My method also has added advantages like being able to open any saved image in virtualization without all the dangers of virtualizing a live partition.


I've never tried OpenSolaris directly, but I've been using Sun's Solaris at work since the 90s - and I always hated it.  For example, a lot of servers didn't have a compiler back then (added licensing cost tens of thousands of dollars!) and getting GNU working on it or finding all the right binaries to do without a compiler was still a major pain in the butt back then.  Then I almost never used Solaris for almost a decade, but decided to give Solaris 11 Express a try a couple of months ago (with added OpenSolaris package repository). 

The first thing I noticed, coming from OpenBSD, was how freaking memory-hungry Solaris 11 was!  (I didn't notice this in the past, perhaps because I always worked on it on humongous Oracle servers - you wouldn't believe the size of the databases I once worked with...)  Also the 32-bit support is a joke - Solaris is not performance-competitive with Linux and perhaps not even FreeBSD unless you have a fast 64-bit machine (especially sparc64) and plenty of RAM.  On an older Intel x86 computer it can be even slower than OpenBSD, even without all the GUI Java crap Sun/Oracle now encourages you to run on top of it! 

So it was a major disappointment.  I might give Solaris another try after I get a new Laptop and after Oracle has had more time to turn it into a viable proprietary UNIX with all the open source shit scraped out.  Having native Nvidia drivers and Flash is definitely a huge advantage on the desktop, but it has little to offer Linux users who are not anti-copyLEFT zealots like myself...


I've been giving a lot of thought to going back to Windows...  (As you know, I've thought about that many times over the past few years...)

Windows feels like a different planet where everything is weird compared to every other planet I've been on, but it's nostalgic as well...  It does offer plenty of advantages, especially as developer focus gradually moves ever-more from the server to the client (i.e. AJAX, HTML5+, HTTP-P2P, etc).  Windows is definitely the best Web developer and Web multimedia workstation you can get, even simply because you do have to test Web-based features as your clients will see them, and a huge fraction of the Internet runs the Web browsers that won't run on any UNIX OS (ex. Linux and FreeBSD are missing native IE and Safari, Solaris is also still missing Chrome, OpenBSD is also missing Opera, etc).  Windows also offers better browser performance for the browsers that are available, and more / better IDE's and other tools available for it as well.

Best of all, Windows liberates you from having struggles of conscience about bowing down to the GNU or Berkeley-loving commies you meet in the FLOSS world!  No one has ever banned me from a Microsoft forum for stating the truth!  (And I never really needed to use a Microsoft forum because everything in the Microsoft world is so well implemented, well-documented, and intuitive.)  And certainly no one at Microsoft has ever called me a "troll"!

On the other hand, can Microsoft really be trusted in a Galt's Gulch / seasteading scenario?  In some ways corporations are the best friends of liberty, but the governments have their hooks in them pretty deep...  :?

Man, why can't anything in life just be freaking straightforward?!  I could have completed a CS Masters and a PhD in the time I've wasted OS-hopping and thinking about the licensing politics crap!
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blackie

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #24 on: March 08, 2011, 03:40:25 PM »

I ended up running windows 7 on my new system cus if the kids want to use it for their games, it pretty much needs to. It is running VMware Server so I can mess around with other OSes. It's worked well so far.
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #25 on: March 08, 2011, 11:08:35 PM »

I used 3 separate disks. One of them had Sun's hacked-up GRUB (needed for ZFS support), one had a normal GRUB, and one had the normal Windows bootloader (though I added entries to other OSes to it).


Opensolaris had pretty good package management for the most part, a big improvement over Solaris Express, had a totally different package management that was more like most Linux distros on the front end, and didn't give me any weird or stupid package dependency issues. The software available wasn't usually very limiting, though it did take a while to find a working Blender binary. The service management was pretty easy too, and the snapshotting (works like Apple's TimeMachine but on the local disk) was well implemented. The transactional and rollbackable upgrades were really cool as well, I've never used another OS that offered anything like it except for the FreeBSD install I did manually to achieve the same effect. It had its hassles but for the most part it was pretty trouble-free. I only stopped using it because of the Oracle deal. I still keep an eye on OpenIndiana and IllumOS. The licensing is not as free as BSD but it's less than GPL and is GPL-incompatible (sort of? there's disagreement). Play with it a little bit, OpenSolaris is different in a number of ways from Solaris. After you dig in deeper than the initial sickeningly ubuntuesque GNOME default there's some neat stuff there that I would like to see default in other operating systems.
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TimeLady Victorious

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #26 on: March 09, 2011, 02:06:25 AM »

I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.

I might switch to that instead of Ubuntu eventually because I like what I've read about ZFS.

But I can't think of any other reason not to go BSD unless BSD supports that as well for the /home partition or whatever you call it in BSD.
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #27 on: March 09, 2011, 10:35:42 AM »

FreeBSD lets you mount ZFS partitions with a limited set of features.  (As does NetBSD, and to some degree pretty much every major OS except Windows and OpenBSD.)  FreeBSD 8.2's "improved ZFS" is actually just Zpool version 15 (`zpool upgrade -v`), while Solaris 11 is at least v31, which means absence of Solaris FS features like ZFS-level encryption, deduplication, RAID-Z 3, etc.  However, you can bring FreeBSD 8.2 up to Zpool v28 via a patch, and that's already included in FreeBSD 9-CURRENT.

I tend to stay away from FS-dependent tricks to keep my work portable, and in ZFS's case for license purity as well.  OpenBSD is great for conservative grouches like me.  Though I still have big dreams that DragonFly's HAMMER would catch up to ZFS someday, and, because of its licensing, become the universal FS that works on everything - Windows, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.  But I'm not holding my breath...  :roll:
« Last Edit: March 09, 2011, 10:47:26 AM by /sbin/libmand »
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #28 on: March 09, 2011, 12:37:07 PM »

I used to multiboot between 13 different OSes including various Linux distros, all three BSD's, GNU HURD, and Windows XP and Vista (7 wasn't out yet). At the end I wiped them all out and put OpenSolaris on that system because OpenSolaris is pretty awesome.

I might switch to that instead of Ubuntu eventually because I like what I've read about ZFS.

But I can't think of any other reason not to go BSD unless BSD supports that as well for the /home partition or whatever you call it in BSD.

You can do ZFS on root, however it doesn't multiboot very well because it works best on a GPT partitioned disk, and most OSes (including Windows) can't boot off anything but MBR on most systems.


FreeBSD lets you mount ZFS partitions with a limited set of features.  (As does NetBSD, and to some degree pretty much every major OS except Windows and OpenBSD.)  FreeBSD 8.2's "improved ZFS" is actually just Zpool version 15 (`zpool upgrade -v`), while Solaris 11 is at least v31, which means absence of Solaris FS features like ZFS-level encryption, deduplication, RAID-Z 3, etc.  However, you can bring FreeBSD 8.2 up to Zpool v28 via a patch, and that's already included in FreeBSD 9-CURRENT.

I tend to stay away from FS-dependent tricks to keep my work portable, and in ZFS's case for license purity as well.  OpenBSD is great for conservative grouches like me.  Though I still have big dreams that DragonFly's HAMMER would catch up to ZFS someday, and, because of its licensing, become the universal FS that works on everything - Windows, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.  But I'm not holding my breath...  :roll:


I use ZFS root on GPT partitions on all my FreeBSD systems.

ZFS's license may be impure, but it's not viral like GPL is, so in that sense I find it more tolerable than for example GCC. I'm patiently awaiting 9.0-RELEASE, I don't want to patch an 8.2 system and break backward compatibility in case I need to roll back.

Maybe someday HAMMER will outperform and outfeature ZFS, but it doesn't look like it's going to be soon. Such a shame that Btrfs isn't free (fucking Linux).
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #29 on: March 15, 2011, 06:50:14 PM »

I'm always experimenting, and I'm running FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD at the moment.  The purpose of this rant is to say "bah, humbug" to the added benefits that FreeBSD claims to offer.


Performance

FreeBSD is faster based on the default settings, since OpenBSD is fanatical about security and stability, but there are many things you can do to equalize the playing field.  I'm not saying that OpenBSD can be as fast as FreeBSD, but the gap isn't as wide as most people think.  Network performance, for example, can be significantly improved with some tweaking.  Other performance differences come as the result of memory management - you'll notice OpenBSD frees up as much memory as possible, which has certain security advantages.  Having to say NO to copyleft and proprietary code in the kernel did reduce OpenBSD's performance a bit, as did the focus on source code readability and simplicity.  And then there's proactive security, crypto, etc...

You must remember that CPU cycles are just a commodity, like the fuel efficiency of a car - Gentoo Linux is a Prius, Fedora is a Honda Civic, FreeBSD is a minivan with half a Honda Civic strapped to the roof, and properly set up OpenBSD is a Hummer with a 5 tons of missile launchers attached.  Sure, the latter is more expensive, but which would you rather drive?  :twisted:

So, yes, I would be willing to pay more for CPU to run a "Copyfreer" and more secure OS, and those added CPU cycles will also benefit the things where OpenBSD is just as fast.  Given enough CPU power, all things are possible - even lighting-fast Windows 7/8 with all the graphical bullshit running in virtualization on top of OpenBSD!

But one thing that isn't a commodity is security - once your secret data leaks, you're screwed for good!  Code auditing and security will become increasingly important as operating systems come to control things like home intrusion detection systems, self-driving cars, robots, medical devices, cyborg implants, holograms / virtualization suits that offer real physical stimulation (and could thus hurt the user if they malfunction), etc, etc, etc.

The Klingons don't care how fuel-efficient your starship is, but whether they can hack past your shields could be a matter of life and death!  :roll:


Alleged Desktop Advantages of FreeBSD

On my computer being able to use Nvidia graphics drivers offers a significant performance advantage in Windows and Linux, and that is also one of the advertised benefits of FreeBSD.  Unfortunately I can't seem to get the Nvidia drivers working right at the moment - they cause flickering and some other weirdness in X.  I've spent over an hour trying various compilation and xorg.conf settings, then gave up.  Being banned from the official FreeBSD forum sucks ass, and even if I wasn't banned the fact that it's run my such total fascist assholes is a major turn-off from using FreeBSD.  Once again, if you have enough CPU power you don't really need GPU, and GPU is just a waste of money if you don't waste your time on games.

FreeBSD's Adobe Flash support is another benefit and it works fine, but it requires Linux virtualization and a fuckload of Linux components, which is also a major turn-off.  I think it's better to do without Flash, using work-arounds like youtube-dl (which can be integrated with an RSS-reading script to pre-download all your favorite channels), as well as certain browser plug-ins and Web-based features that convert Flash to HTML5.  Not having Flash most certainly makes things more secure!  And, once again, it's better to emulate / remote connect to a Windows machine if you really need to use a Flash feature, or any of the other things you can't do in a pure Copyfree software stack.

More Web browser choices (ex. native Opera) under FreeBSD is certainly a benefit, but much less so now that it looks like serious work will soon be done to stabilize Chromium under OpenBSD.  You only need one browser for surfing, and if you're doing Web design testing then you need access to a Windows box anyway, so you could also test under Internet Explorer (which looks like it's about to regain some market share thanks to the just released v9), real Silverlight, etc.


Server Virtualization

OpenBSD is alleged to have a very serious virtualization disadvantage, which is becoming increasingly important.  NetBSD's support for Amazon's EC2 just became official (though I was able to play with it many moons ago), and FreeBSD is getting there quickly as well.  But OpenBSD does run well on cloud providers that use full virtualization like VMware, and prices of real dedicated servers are dropping as well.  I think real servers are still a better solution, because security of virtualization is not bulletproof, and also because there are some freedom advantages to dealing with many small competing dedicated hosting providers (especially those that allow BitTorrent seedboxes) rather than mega-corp cloud giants that are more susceptible to government pressure.

Just compare the Basic package from ServerPronto ($69/month) to a Small EC2 instance using Amazon's calculator.   (Note that Amazon's Small instance gets you 0.2 GB more RAM, while the "1 compute unit" is "equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor", compared to AMD 2000+ you get from ServerPronto.)  You'll pay $62.22/month for the Amazon instance (or significantly less if you reserve the instance for a long period of time), but the 7 TB of transfer that ServerPronto includes for free would cost over $1000 with Amazon!  ServerPronto does charge an even more ridiculous $0.89/GB if you go over the 7 TB, so it could actually be more expensive if you overblow your limit significantly, but very few sites would need that much bandwidth and there are many things you can do to offload extra bandwidth to a cheaper host if you ever get close to the limit.

Amazon's data transfer (especially if you use CloudFront) is certainly faster than ServerPronto, but I think the best way to host a site is to mainly use static files, so you could use one "processing server" (ideally hosted in your home if there are no bandwidth constraints, or using something like ServerPronto) and to have multiple mirrors on cheap shared hosts in different countries.  For example, this forum could have all the threads as static HTML files, which would load more quickly, and the comparatively rare occasion where someone posts would trigger a server-side script to regenerate the thread HTML file and push it to all the mirrors.  Use of richer client-side technologies like AJAX can make this process a lot more effective and efficient.  You can use some server-side (ex. GeoIP) or client-side (ex. HTTP ping) tricks to route the user to the fastest mirror, or let them pick one manually.  You can also offer your larger downloads via Metalink and/or BitTorrent with HTTP seeds, which, given enough mirrors / seeders, can offer even faster performance than any single CDN, but more resilient and significantly cheaper!  And, of course having multiple mirrors in multiple countries is also the most effective anti-censorship precaution - never forget how Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot!


Summation

FreeBSD's advantages over OpenBSD are rather shallow.  OpenBSD's supposed limitations actually encourage you to do thing right - invest in CPU power, use scripting, avoid cloud giants, avoid Web server inefficiencies, avoid GNUshit, maintain a rational attitude toward Microsoft, etc.


(EDIT: this post was modified a zillion times, because I can be very disorganized sometimes, but I eventually decided that I wanted to make it good enough to cross-post on other forums.)
« Last Edit: March 15, 2011, 08:19:30 PM by /sbin/libmand »
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