| Subject: Re: there's a firefly in my brain |
Author:
Geo
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Date Posted: 01/12/06 12:53:01pm
In reply to:
tjm
's message, "there's a firefly in my brain" on 01/12/06 11:26:55am
>
>tjm:
> there is an interesting minor culture of codewriters
>that believe that like the air we breath, these
>programs were intended to be free to all users.
>there's some groups with that as their goal. you on
>the voy probably know more about unix or soemthing
>like that than i ever will but it's a ...what's the
>term? an equivalent to windows ...o yea..operating
>system
Firefox is a decendent of the Netscape Mozilla browser - which was the commercial name for "Mosaic Killer" - Mosaic
being the original web browser developed at the University of Illinois and freely distributed.
Richard Stallman started a project in 1983 called GNU - for GNU's Not UNIX in which he was going to write a version of that operating system, as well as all the other supporting programs (like compilers, linkers, parsers, spreadsheets, etc.) you'd need to make a computer useful. He was the author of a text editing program called emacs - which I use to this day. He is a very strong willed persona. Anyway, this was a precursor to the Free Software Foundation and their GNU General Public License and associated copyleft:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
http://www.gnu.org
Their C and C++ (gcc) compilers are used extensively by the business world, it is the main compiler we use here at Rockwell.
This also led to the version of UNIX that was developed for windows under the GNU Public License called Linux. Linux is actually just UNIX-like as opposed to being a version of it. It is generally considered to be faster, more efficient, more reliable and more secure than windows. Which is a big reason most of the file and webservers use it. The main drawback is that programs designed (and compiled) for windows will not run on Linux, so sharing things like word files is not possible across OS's. Also, since the installed base of windows is so much greater, the breadth of software available for Linux is limited. Linux can be obtained for free, but most people buy a distribution (e.g. RedHat's Linux) that includes extra utilities and programs for installing, document editing, etc. Firefox has a version for Linux and you can use iexplorer as well.
I personally have installed firefox but abandoned it due to incompatibilities with certain websites/plugins that I must have used regular enough that led me back to iexplorer. There are guys here at work who love it, especially the tabbed browser feature.
>tjm:
>anyway it's an interesting debate. i personally don't
>quite understand the logic behind the "free" concept
>but perhaps i am Utopian in believing in the ideal
>that if you create a product like art, education or
>software that you will be compensated by its users and
>thus you are able to sustain your own growth and
>product development and the like.
>
Yeah, it's funny. I think part of it came about because companies were all making versions of OS's that were incompatible, and Microsquash would purposefully inhibit other software from being compatible, etc. In some ways it has evolved into a "don't reinvent the wheel" mentality so businesses can move forward and develop new products to make money using these tools.
>tjm:
>i'm just unclear what you mean by feeling dirty. i
>assume tho that by inference i should feel dirty too
>b/c i use the dark empire's wares?
>
Starbucks makes web browsers?
You certainly have a far greater risk of becoming infected if you use iexplorer.
>i think we all have personal habits and pjk i notice
>one of yours is to poke cryptic barbs at 'war
>criminals' and things like that without much
>clarification as if we are all to understand what you
>are saying. i guess everyone else does.
>
it usually goes over my head.
>
>...how much is google worth in shares again?]
>
the next evil empire?
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