On CowboyNeal's copy of Mosaic only

I was pleasantly surprised by the New Yorker's coverage of the shift from "free software" to "open source", which while less detailed (unsurprisingly) than other sources such as Free as in Freedom 2.0 also presented it simply as a thing that has happened, rather than either of the extremes that are usually applied: it's the worst affront ever to software freedom, or as the liberation of programmers from the crazy extreme ideology of RMS. Personally I'm more interested in free software than in open source: the source code is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But it's good to see that view handled as a view and the events (and responses to them) presented, without turning the story into a justification or rationalisation of the view. BTW, still waiting for that planned Chaosnet support...

While we're in a thread called "Pedantic, but..." I feel safe with posting that OS X actually _is_ a UNIX, with SUS03 compliance. They did that after being sued by The Open Group for claiming to OS X be a UNIX when they weren't in compliance.

I have a NeXT cube, currently residing in Leicester's retro computing museum. Now that is a nice cube. Luckily mine had a hard drive in. The magneto-optical discs were their day's iCloud or Dropbox, but they were very slow. Particularly for swap.

I switched from Debian to OS X in 2004, then from OS X to Ubuntu in 2014. The story of the switch back is told in full here. That meant that the cheapest route for me was to install a distro on my MacBook, because I already owned it :). And it really is good hardware, so I'm happy with the amount I paid for a high-quality laptop that fulfils my needs. The interesting part of the switch for me is the question "why not use OS X"? There are all sorts of bugs in OS X and its applications, just as there are in Linux, GNU and their applications. The difference is that I'm allowed to fix the bugs in GNU, and other people can take advantage of those fixes. So I've been learning about GTK+ and Vala, as well as getting back up to speed with GNUstep, so that when I find a bug I can contribute a fix back. Plenty of other posters have discussed that there are cheaper GNU/Linux-compatible laptop choices, and indeed had I not already owned a MacBook I probably would've considered some of those. But "cheapest" is a non-goal for me, or at least far down the chain below reliable wifi, good battery, solid construction and (to the extent that this is at all an option on any laptop) decent keys.

I was doing this with SunRays sharing a Solaris CDE desktop back in 2002. Apparently the past is here, but it isn't evenly distributed. Unfortunately it's not likely to be. With the exception of VNC, most of the remote desktop systems are proprietary so you can't pick up for example a Sunray session on an Android phone. And the proprietary platforms don't uniformly support VNC. It'd be great to see a general cross-platform approach to this, but the vendors are all going for supplying their platforms "as a service" instead.

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Was a failure to stop what happened, no doubt about that.

No need to move to a proprietary hosting service like Github.

I wrote about this previously: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah

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