Problem is that for most people, digital activism amounts to bitching and whining on /. and maybe voting for people who have no chance of winning.

GNU-Darwin is an activist distribution

GNU-Darwin has been an ardent defender of digital liberties, and it is a platform for digital activism. Given the current state of things in the US and elsewhere, strident expressions of democratic power are necessary.

blah-blah

We have been prepared to take the Distro off-line a couple of times as a form of political action.

Damn, my skin crawls just remembering it ...

Seriously, what's this political rah-rah attached to software making? sure free software is about freedom of speech and it's very preferrable for a million valid reasons, but gee, let go of the melodrama-mode button.

That GNU-Darwin people decides not to link to "proprietary" libraries is, of course, a result of them using the GNU Public License so extensively-- and now the primary supported Darwin platform is not even supported in this project!

This makes me shake my head and think, "what the fuck?" This project is not only shooting itself in the foot by choosing a platform not fully supported by the OS, but is also screwing over the real meat of Darwin's userbase: PowerPC owners. This move is akin to opening a car garage (in America) whose mechanics are all experienced in servicing American cars, and then changing policy months later, stating that the garage will only work on foreign models.

Where's the fucking logic?

Seriously, am I the only one who is wondering who the Hell is in charge at that project? Kool-Aid Man? This move makes so little sense I can't tell if the people at GNU-Darwin are really that stupid, or if I am waking up in alternate realities every damn morning. I almost kind of hope for the latter.

This is the GPL in action, Mac faithful. Get down and kiss Apple's butt for choosing the BSD license.

While I seriously doubt a free os will be able to muster the clout to be taken seriously on theri Antiwar stand or for that matter their Anti DMCA stand. Its very good to see people taking a stand and getting out the message.

This does point out the bigger question of why the technical community is not taken seriously on political issues. If you caught the Diane Rehm show this morning, they were doing a piece on voting systems. While they did have a few C.S. people talking about the problems of electronic voting machines, the election officials managed to stonewall and treat their concerns as non issues. The trick for technical people of any stripe is to make certain that the opinion of their community is heared outside their community. GNU/darwin, free BSD, or linux will only serve as a platform for speaking to those allready within a particular community.

Now, I'm probably mistaken, but if they took down their site, couldn't someone just immediately pop up a mirror site and carry on from there?

You are and you aren't.

Nothing legal to prevent it. On that you're right.

But it costs money and time to make something like that available and keep it updated. What makes you think that there are enough people out there who would spend that time and money to keep this thing alive that don't care about Freedom? What on earth would be their motivation?

The Hurd seems to have survived the onslaught of Linux over the past few years

How could Hurd not survive? Something that was never born cannot possibly die.

Repeat after me: Microkernels are like pure OO programming, very attractive and sexy on the paper, but obese and slow in the real world.

What seems to be missing from the article is an explanation of why anyone would care about the project. Is it because they think the Darwin kernel is technically superior to other kernels? In what way? Is it superior in ways that normal users would care about? If you've got a PPC box and want to put a free OS and free apps on it, why not just install a PPC version of Linux? There may be good reasons, but they aren't evident from the article.

The whole article just comes off like a crank piece to me. I'm against the war in Iraq, but if they think blacking out their web site is a real form of anti-war protest, that's pretty pathetic.

Well, I'm not very familiar with Darwin, but now I can say, based on this story, that my mind is pretty closed to it. I would certainly be hard pressed to ever consider it for anything in a production environment.

I don't want politics with my OS. I don't want the distribution site going black because Bush decides to bomb koala bears or even humans for that matter. Call me cold-hearted, but if I'm in a production environment, and I need to deliver a box that's expected to be supported and work as advertised, I don't want to worry if the freaking OS "activists" -- whatever the hell they are, exactly -- are going to pull the Distro (capitalized, no less) because the Malaguan butterfly's habitat is endangered by oil drilling or 250 million U.S. citizens have strong opinions about war.

Screw that. Give me my FreeBSD, which, to my knowledge, is pretty much always available, regardless of what Dan Rather is spewing at any given moment, and give me peace of mind. Hey, I know that's a lot less eloquent than "give me freedom, or give me death", but in my mind, and with some of the pressures I face from clients, I really don't distinguish between the two.

Activists need to shut up and get jobs anyway.

Now, I'm probably mistaken, but if they took down their site, couldn't someone just immediately pop up a mirror site and carry on from there? If it really is free software under the GNU licence, how can they remove GNU-Darwin from the Internet?

That would require someone outside their project to actually give a shit if they took it down. All their stunts in the name of 'activisim' have marginalized them even more than they would have been anyway.

This has nothing to do with 'liberal' or 'conservative'. Plenty of left-wing warmongers out there (just look at the US Congress) and plenty of conservatives are anti-war.

Being against war isn't a right-left thing. It's a humanity thing.

While I am not sure why someone would want to run Darwin instead of Linux-ppc if not because they have to run one or more proprietary apps (that's my excuse) this is just nonsense:

GNU-Darwin decided to support only x86, not PPC, some time ago in a fit of 'activisim'.

I know it's nonsense, because I have a lot of their packages installed on my TiBook at the moment. Look here [gnu-darwin.org]. Packages for PPC and x86, no problem.

What do you mean by "care about Free Software" in this context? I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Are you asking why anyone would work on and maintain an open source project without strong ideological reasons, such as considering closed source software amoral? In that case, I expect that the majority of open source project communities do not fit your criteria. BSD, Apache, MySQL, Bind... many projects exist because they filled a niche and the open source method just out-competed their commercial rivals. People participate in the projects for many reasons that have nothing to do with ideologies that require Capital Letters to discuss.

"In fact, we did blackout the home page as a war protest in March, and we blackened the whole website, after Apple used the DMCA, but we have never actually taken it off line"

Did they take the site offline when "The war veterans - unleashed by President Robert Mugabe to seize white-owned farms - are not, however, killing only people: they are slaughtering animals on an unprecedented scale."?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ ne ws/2003/06/22/wzim122.xml

Did they take the site offline to protest the jailing and torture in china of people who speak out or worship?

Did they take the site offline to protest the actions of the goverment of iran to put down the student lead protest movement that has resulted in thousands being thrown in jail?

No? Why not? Do they only protest against things that are 'in style' and/or 'hip' with their 'progressive' friends?

The problem is that if you use your software as a lever for your political views, you only have leverage to the degree that anyone cares about your product.

Nobody gives a damn about the GNU/Darwin software; it contributes nothing new, it's unsafely done and it gets jerked around every time "Proclus" wants to make a political statement. The guy flames anyone who points out shortcomings in his distribution, rants at anyone who criticizes anything he does and one time accused the MacSlash editors of trying to smear him after they posted one of his press releases, verbatim, with no additional commentary!

It's not a coincidence that every post here is commenting on the controversies he stirs up, with nothing about the technical merit of his work.

Please don't confuse Proclus's trolling with Darwin, which is a fine operating system put out by a lot of good people at Apple, including Jordan Hubbard. Instead go to the OpenDarwin [opendarwin.org] web site, with people who are actually interested in improving the technology. The only reason GNU-Darwin offers bootable CDs is that an OpenDarwin team member mistakenly told him how to build a CD without linking to the Apple proprietary components; the OpenDarwin release ISOs do this as well.

GNU-Darwin also has a spotty history with replacing libraries with broken versions, installing stuff in /usr and /usr/local, and generally making a mess of the system. Please do not attempt to run GNU-Darwin and ask for support from the real Darwin folks; they will turn up their noses at you.

Pay no mind to Proclus's trolling. I'm just dismayed it ended up on Slashdot.

Our pipes are pretty full, but there is always the Sourceforge mirror.

http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

Regards,
proclus

This guy's pretty much a crank. He's not representative of Darwin in any way, other than that he put together a version of Darwin that has a bunch of GNU software. If you'd like to find something out about Darwin, check out either of Apple's Darwin site [apple.com], or the Open Darwin [opendarwin.org] site, which is a site for Darwin developers. Honestly, I think most people think of Michael Love as a troll; I don't know why he's getting play on slashdot.

Is it just me or does it bother anyone else that the same software developers who passionately scream about "freedom of choice", "open source", and "alternatives" are so ready to try to force their users towards a particular choice by removing access to their software? When we look at the "blackouts" that we've seen over the last few months, they amount to wholesale extortion of users.

For example, on the GNU-Darwin site, the developer mentions taking the distro offline as a protest to the war. What purpose did this really server? Do you really think that the leaders of the coalition had any high-level meetings where they said "You know, I really thought this war was a good idea. But the blackout on the GNU-Darwin software site has really made me think twice"? Of course not. What it DID do however was pressure some of the distro's users to get pissed off and write their MP or Congressman and oppose the war because they wanted their distro back damnit! And that was the intention: to force their USERS into taking a specific action.

Yep, there's that freedom they rant about huh? Software blackouts don't mean a thing and the developers/sites that use them should be ashamed of themselves for trying to extort their users in such a way.

Being antiwar doesn't equate with being liberal. There are plenty of conservatives and libertarians that don't agree with the Bush administration's foreign "policy". [lewrockwell.com]

What?

When the maintainer of BSD's ipf pulled a 180 and changed the license to something more restrictive (I'm at a loss for details right now), the OpenBSD people told him to fuck off, and they wrote their own firewall, now known to everyone as pf. Pretty sad that it had to happen, since pf is now regarded as one of the best firewalls around...

How is that sad?

Someone wrote software, and then wouldn't correct a poorly written license. OpenBSD decided that they liked the idea, but disliked the license, wrote it themselves, and published it with a truly free license.

That's a good thing.

Stallman has said that he would like to see proprietary software illegal.

Good point. And yet another example of a raving radical looney who believes that taking away choice is the only way to protect freedom to choose. Sheesh...

From the article in question:

We have been prepared to take the Distro off-line a couple of times as a form of political action. It is important to realize that the software freedom status of GNU-Darwin was tenuous before the change to the APSL, so we were ready to cut our losses, and remove GNU-Darwin from the internet, if necessary. Now things have improved very much.

Which pretty much sums up why these guys will never be any kind of serious competition for any real free OS. Who the hell would place any faith in this distribution? Doesn't exactly sound like the kind of dependable OS I'd want to put on my critical servers if it's going to come and go depending on the current political situation. And what kind of idiotic form of activism is it that goes out of its way to inconvenience its supporters, rather than the people its protesting against?

The problem is that the activism chosen doesn't necessarily have much to do with GNU-Darwin or free software or programming, and is just a random collection of the author's beliefs and prejudices, jumbled together because if you believe in one you're expected to believe in the others. What does the Iraq war have to do with the GPL or software patents, for example?

Having a political stance is fine, but you need to stay focused on what your real goal is. The FSF is a good example in this regard - they choose their goal (freedom for all computer users, in terms of using, sharing and changing software) and work towards it. Although RMS may talk about stuff on his own time, you don't see the FSF issuing press releases about global warming or saving the giant panda.