But that's not the point of a reference implementation,

I agree that's not the point of a reference implementation. The MIT license is a good license for a reference implementation, as is the BSD license. The question was whether it is a good license to advance free software or not. That was the argument. The goals of a reference implementation are not the creation of a free software ecosystem.

You don't know that they would have even bothered with X at all,

I don't know. But it is likely. X was the GUI for Unix. Unix was a cheap operating system that allowed hardware vendors to create workstations and then servers without investing a ton in software. Much the same role as Android (another Unix flavor) plays today. If they didn't use X and went with another GUI they would have had to invent it and support it on an ongoing basis. I can see SGI and maybe Sun. But would DEC for example have wanted that for their GUI? IBM? HP?

Then Linux fails that metric in almost all cases too.

No it doesn't. Linux as used in almost all cases is open source freely available software. The big distributions are mostly free or at the very least have free versions. Linux as an operating system mainly sells support or hardware.

Show me that claim in the context of a "BSD license failure" then.

Just keep clicking parent from this very post. You'll get to this: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The 3 examples to prove that the open version wouldn't be replaced where:
OpenSSH, Apache and X11. X11 of course is the example that the GPL have used for 30 years since it was such a disaster. OpenSSH has had problems. Apache has been more of a mixed bag, it mainly has remained free with a broad community of support. But a lot of the advanced capacity is proprietary.

All the ISPs that are going to switch to IPv6 are going to offer IPv4 for sites that don't support v6.

That would be good. I assume you meant FCC and not FTC. I'm not sure FTC has that power.

I agree there are government mandates and some serious work. There are also some exceptions being made that shouldn't exist. The government for example could move many of their commercial EDIs to IPv6 only and forcing companies (and thus their ISPs) to be at least partially on IPv6.

And that's how it is supposed to work, the better product wins out.

No that's not how it is supposed to work. How it is supposed to work is the free product stays free, and gets so far ahead there isn't a competition at all. Like what's happening in many domains with GPL.

If those competing UNIX vendors had to contribute back then they likely would have used their own fully proprietary implementations to differentiate eachother anyway.

You don't know that. The GPL has a track record of preventing such things.

You define failure as the existence of proprietary extensions, a definition devoted to your ideology rather than based on any objective metric.

The objective metric is whether the in use in the broader ecosystem is free or not. The claim of BSD advocates is that their software doesn't end up proprietary. Their claim is that it is a good free software license, where good is defined as advancing the interests of free software. Saying that advancing the interests of free software is an ideology is simply refusing to address the point.

Anyway I've given you clear failure. You are pretending that failures aren't failures by redefining the criteria so that everything is success. That's just dishonest.

Which it has done with a permissive license.

True. The point is not that permissive licenses always fail to maintain free software but that they do often enough so as to have established a long track record of failure.

Eventually these died out and the permissively licensed project that remained became the defacto standard

You have the order wrong. The permissive product gave birth to the proprietary product. Then another permissive product started which copied ideas from the proprietary products, passing them over a decade later.

For all the humdrum about permissive licensing being bad there is *still* no decent restrictively licensed implementation.

When it mattered there were. In 2015 no. All through the 1990s that wasn't true.

Your fantasy is that had that reference implementation been restrictively licensed the proprietary UNIX vendors would have still supported X and they would have done so by building a collaborative free X implementation, but this is just fantasy.

How do you know? That's what's happened many times with GPL products. Again there is a track record.

Additionally given the defacto implementation is still permissively licensed, what are you (or anybody else for that matter) doing to prevent this "disaster" from happening again? Or with any other permissively licensed projects for that matter?

Encourage people not to use the license. Once they have, too late.

Good point.

so how do I set up my internal DNS server so that everything works fine when my ISP gives me a new prefix every 24 hours, or every time the router is rebooted, or every time they feel like changing my prefix?

They don't do that either. They no longer use DHCP either so you have a fixed (and often more than one) IP as well. No more contention for you, no more contention for them. Remember even a midsized ISP now has more IP addresses in an allocation block than the entire internet is under IPv4.

I'm sure they might change your static address if they want to change their topology say once every 5 years or so. That's different than every boot.

Netflix I don't think uses AWS. In any case Netflix uses more bandwidth than most carriers they can get anything they custom they want from the people handling their data.

cooking my self I can manage a (I hope) tastier alternative for less,...

Sorry, but I really don't get why this is interesting at all

You answered your question in the first word of that quote. Soylent buyers don't want to cook. Many of them don't know how to cook. Few of those are interested in learning. I spoke with a man who literally gets anxiety just walking into a grocery store and seeing all these things he has no idea what to do with.

I think it's nutritionally foolish ("science" has a moderate but incomplete conception of nutrition), and I think with my stomach, but that doesn't mean there's no use case.

Anyone able to use a touring complete language in a productive way can learn basic M in a day or two.

Yeah, the hospital I used to work at would take tech school kids and teach them M in six months, and then have a competent programmer. It's not work I wanted to do, but it's a real job. Jesus, hasn't anybody here done assembly?

Using it to the fullest will take longer because one needs to grasp the elegance of the design to realize why constructs commonly seen in other languages seem to be missing in M.

The best thing about a Jim Jones joke is the killer punchline.

Seriously, I did Perl vs. M in the '90's with co-workers. Don't even. It was possibly a good argument in 1981.

M persists because managers are afraid of making big changes and those big changes cost more up front than staying with the existing junk. Also they have a cartelized industry to draw resources from, so cost-competitiveness is not really a factor. Third-world countries are running their medical-records systems on "low-end" modern stacks because that's all they can afford.

The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea.

Circles are great for organizing but I started to get weird, stupid, argumentative people on my posts because of the unidirectional nature, so I pretty much used it only for announcements after a while, and kept my microblogging on FB.

It also still took me more than ten seconds from when I hit 'enter' to when I could start to type into G+ and then reading it was awful. Did the person who did Maps 2015 also do G+? Why doesn't Google have a metrics-driven HCI lab to validate its developers' work product?

It seems like Google has lost the ability to develop web apps that users like. That should terrify management. It may be related to their hiring process, though - it narrows the personality types that will work at Google in an extreme way. Their corporate culture is not the same as the world's culture(s), and the impedance mismatch is causing lots of heat. And it may even be that they've positive-feedback-looped themselves into not being able to get out of that trap at this point.

On the scientific side the "house kept too clean" theory is interesting but by no means proven. Northwest Scotland is considered to have the cleanest environment in the developed world (due to wind and rain from the Atlantic) and that was true before 1970 as well but children there have seen the same increase in nut allergies as elsewhere.

On the human/interpersonal side the use of the word "coddle" points right back to the "illness as moral weakness" syndrome that a large percentage of the human race seems to suffer from.

That is a very good question. The incidence of severe food allergy, particularly but not limited to nut allergies, is documented as having risen sharply throughout the Western world since 1970. So your impression that there are more severely allergic food people today (not just children as the numbers were high in the 1990s) is correct. What the source of that increase is is not known despite a fairly large amount of medical research. The "houses kept too clean" theory is interesting but by no means proven; northwest Scotland is considered to have the cleanest environment in the developed world (due to wind and rain from the Atlantic) and that was true before 1970 as well but children there have seen the same increase in nut allergies as elsewhere.

What's a few deaths by suffocation (self-drowning) compared to feeding moral self-righteousness?

sPh

There is a also the third factor: where people who do not have life-threatening allergies, particularly life-threatening allergies to nuts, develop an attitude that (1) such immune system allergies really don't exist (2) those who claim they do, or who experience anaphylactic reactions to foodstuffs are (a) lying (b) morally weak.

I've seen people with that attitude try to push peanut butter cupcakes on 3-year-olds with severe peanut allergies. Oddly they are never very happy to be educated on their ignorance or its source, their attitude.

sPh