Discussion on:

bITs and blogs

blog root

It's a dangerous thing to run a blog about one's IT career. It's the technically proficient who are most likely to read a website like this, and who are most likely to read a tech-related blog, and it's the technically proficient on whom I'm most likely to want to make a good impression as my career advances. Blogs are a good way to make bad impressions on people you've never even met. Blogs are self-conscious things. They assume an audience, and without that audience there's no point to them. Sure, you might think of the idea of a private journal or diary, but blogs are not that at all: they're very public things. If you're reading one that isn't your own, you'll find it difficult to justify such a thing on purely private grounds without lying to yourself in the process. As such, you should expect that every blog you read is written with its audience in mind. Things will always be censored to some degree, in some way, or will be made intentionally shocking for the "benefit" of the audience. You'll see a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in blogs, a lot of pity-seeking, a lot of trend-chasing and a lot of trend-resisting, and a lot of attempts to spread ideas and opinions to infect the minds of others. This blog is no exception. Keep that in mind whenever you read what I have to say about someone else here, and keep that in mind whenever you read anyone else's blog entries, too. Blogs can be great advertising. People link to things they want other people to see. Sometimes they use those links to advertise themselves by making their own blogs seem interesting by way of what they link. Sometimes they advertise things they support or other online endeavors of theirs by linking to them. Often, they do both at once. It's typical to see people throwing gratuitous links to things into their blogs to drive up traffic and to show how cool they are, and also to drive traffic to whatever it is they're linking. What that will sometimes translate to in TR blogs is links to businesses that TR members run or that employ them, in hopes of increasing business. I'll do that too, right now, just to get it out of the way. Here's one of my employers: Wikimedia Foundation Here's what you've probably already seen of the Wikimedia Foundation: Wikipedia As of this writing, I'm a thirtyish professional computer geek: I work both as a datacenter technician (for the above-linked nonprofit organization) and as an IT consultant (as an employee of a consultancy, mostly doing 1. web development and 2. unix/linux systems implementation and management). I'm an ethical theorist with very strong and well thought out political opinions, and that spills over into my analyses of IT industry trends quite a bit. I'm an INTJ, a "synthesist", the focus of whose strengths is apparently in qualitative analysis, according to the personality tests. I'm also "smart" and "lazy", according to Rommel's leadership metrics. Perhaps I should explain that: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, despite taking orders from a bunch of murderous, genocidal Nazis (but I repeat myself), was a brilliant military commander in World War Two. He has made interesting statements about the desirable qualities of leaders, and if he wasn't hampered by basically insane superiors (Hitler, in short), he may well have won the Second World War for Germany. I'll just directly quote what he said about how he selected leaders within his command. "Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." Enough about me. What do you think of me? In case you're interested, you can look up Field Marshal Rommel at Wikipedia.

Good read in fact even as I am trying to move away from IT again, I know I will become more involved in the fall. So you just may keep my interest in IT alive.

As for looking up Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel, I always thought you were a we bit younger that, but it is a good picture if it's recent.

And you're right in saying that he was a brilliant commander, I've seen several biographies and history recreations that accredit him well. There are a lot of things Germany did that were very clever, yet they are often looked at as being so inferior, I feel a great deal of that actually came later in the war when hitler had deteriorated mentally from his STD's.

Every so often a post comes along that represents a real paradigm shift. This is one such post. I never real thought about the impact of a "simple" blog turning on you from a career point of view. I'll have to watch what I write from now on...oh, man, I hope this doesn't sound too stupid..darn first impressions. Thanks for the terrific post!

I think it took alot of guts to be the first one to take the step into blogging on TR. After all, you are putting a more personal side of you out for all to see; it makes you very vulnerable. Its different than posting to the TR forum because that only shows your view on that particular subject.

I'm not sure what to think of blogging yet as a medium. Its a great advertising technique I have to agree and it also offers anyone anywhere their 15 minutes of fame. I've been looking at alot of blogs lately because I'm working on one for work and the sad thing is that many of them have no comments to their daily posts. They all work so hard too. I still don't think that makes them useless though. Its actually a good outlet for the person involved and it does give you a web presence all your own. A blog is truly a modern day diary about what you thought about on that day.

The Desert Fox is an interesting choice to mention. You must be a history buff. You have also compared yourself to the smart and lazy ones that became commanders. Thats good. I don't think I'd say I was one of the dumb and lazy ones ever in my blog; though I don't know, smartness doesn't guarantee popularity.

Ok, tell me, what is an INTJ?

OK American Voter, apparently you didn't follow the links to the Jungian paradigm of the human spirit and you've never done a Myers-Briggs personality profile. None of this will make sense to a Freudian, much less to someone who isn't interested in psychology as a way of studying the human spirit. So here's the decoding of INTJ, made as short as possible.

I: introverted, not extroverted. Jungian use of the terms, basically an extrovert is slowly energized by dealing with ANY other people whereas an introvert is slowly drained.

N: guided by intuition, not senses.

T: processes using thoughts, not feelings.

J: trusts judgment, not perception.

Any three of these vectors occurring together are the obvious formula for the anti-"people person." A geek, someone who lives internally and keeps his own counsel. All four of them together are the classic IT professional, "Give me a computer any day, I'll never understand people."

I was a textbook INTJ, with four strong vectors, the first time I took this test about 25 years ago. Over the years I've mellowed. Now my N and J are less strong, and I'm right on the borders between I and E and between J and P.

There's hope for geeks.

BTW Joseph Campbell was a magnificent popularizer of Jung's work. He worked heavily with "archetypes," images that occur in our "collective unconscious," e.g. in nearly all cultures and eras. You can transpose a discussion in Jungian jargon into one involving Greek gods or Shakespeare's characters to make it more accessible.

The concept of the archetype itself is wonderfully accessible. To a pragmatist it's a preprogrammed synapse that happens to be included in our brains because sometimes nature is random. To an evolutionary biologist it's an instinct that at one time was a survival trait so the individuals who had it were around to pass down their genes. To a spiritualist it's a legend that was breathed into us by the Goddess on our way down the birth canal.

Actually, DC_GUY, I didn't see any links to explain INTJ in the post. I have never taken a Myers-Briggs test though I do know what they are about. Many years ago I worked in a contract position for an outplacement agency for executives. They relied heavily on those tests for placement purposes.

Thanks for your explanation, it was very in a nutshell. I'm glad to hear that you've mellowed over the years. I think you should rephrase that and say you've grown. Geeks today have to have it all.

Well. Oz_Media has created a wanted poster inspired by my own subtly personalized TechRepublic user icon. I might as well commemorate and chronicle the occasion here, as my first non-introductory TRB post. Here 'tis: Wanted: Apotheon Feel free to have a good chuckle. I know I did. Oz_Media has passed copyright for the image to me (TR logo included under fair use), and I hereby provide it to the public under terms of CCD CopyWrite with fair use restrictions in place as regards the TR logo.

So this person named Kat said something about Godzilla, and that inspired this post. She wants everyone to "know" that this was all her idea. Yeah, right. _______ vs. _______ That's right, folks, Tokyo is in trouble again. An epic battle between titanic monsters looms, and untold destruction will result. It's Mozilla Versus Microsoftra! Sadly, that's all I've got. I'm lacking in originality right now. I rather imagine a big red dinosaur stepping on some pathetic little multicolored butterfly/moth thing, then going on about its day like nothing happened. Could be fun. As I was composing this, doing searches for icons and so on, I did make the k3wlest monster noises, though. You really missed out on quite a show here. The other four people here (one of them about two years old), on the other hand, were much amused. Well, maybe frightened. It's hard to say. Roar.

The Washington State House and Senate passed Engrossed Substitute House Bill 1012. This means that spyware is now illegal in the great State of Washington, home of Microsoft (in Redmond, Washington). In fact, Microsoft helped support the passage of the bill, along with eBay. Does anyone else here see the irony of this? Here's Microsoft, purveyor of some of the worst spyware on the planet (especially by the broad standards of Bill 1012 ), supporting the passage of a law in its own home state that will effectively make a criminal organization of it. Consider what you know of Microsft's planned "Black Box" functionality for Longhorn, its inclusion of spyware-riddled software such as MSN Messenger and Windows Media Player in Windows already, and its recent use of Windows Update functionality to remove competing products from end-users' computers. Now read this description of what is defined as "spyware" according to the new Washington law: software that opens "multiple, sequential, stand-alone advertisements in the owner or operator's internet browser", logs keystrokes, takes over control of the computer, modifies its security settings, falsely represents "that computer software has been disabled", or prevents "through intentionally deceptive means, an owner or operator's reasonable efforts to block the installation or execution of, or to disable, computer software by causing the software that the owner or operator has properly removed or disabled automatically to reinstall or reactivate on the computer". The only question now is whether the EFF and ACLU will get together and sue the crap out of Microsoft as they should. One can only hope.

I'm not much of a fan of MMORPGs. They just seem like a tremendous waste of time to me. They're misnamed: they should be called MMOAGs, or something, for "Adventure" rather than "Roleplaying". Computer roleplaying games of any kind are just roleplaying games without the roleplaying.

To understand my perspective, maybe it would help to understand that I started playing real, pencil-and-paper RPGs in the early-to-mid-eighties. I know what "roleplaying" really means in the abbreviation RPG. There is a lot missing from computer "RPG"s of any kind that we just don't have the technology to recreate from "real" RPGs using computers, yet. What's missing is what makes an RPG into an RPG rather than a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

I know some people that play MMORPGs. That's fine. To each their own. I'm not actually offended by MMORPGs, or other computer RPGs, at all. I just find them to be silly, pointless, and wastes of time. I have hobbies that are silly, pointless, and wastes of time too, probably.

Maybe. Well, maybe not, but I don't necessarily see such hobbies as being "bad". The fact that I'm very, very good at constructing arguments and recognizing spin on neutral facts makes it easy for me to chide friends for playing MMORPGs, though, so I do. It's fun. I guess that's one of my silly, pointless hobbies that wastes time. That's okay. They do the same to me about some of my own hobbies. I cheerfully accept chiding for being such a Linux geek. Such is life. Recently, though, I found myself singing entirely the wrong lyrics to the tune of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs". I'll post them here for your enjoyment. The following is released under CCD CopyWrite , just like everything else in this blog.

Dorks are gathered in their masses
Just like methods in their classes
Newbies desperate for instruction
In skills of character construction
Ships and victims bleeding, burning
Worlds of Warcraft keep on turning
City of Heroes wasting time
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Jolt Cola!

Computer game geek hide away
From the burning light of day
Why go out and get real jobs?
They leave that to dads and moms

Time slips by, more power-ups
Adding gemstones to their hoards
Collecting golden coins and cups
Playing GUI games without boards
Save!

The world outside could just stop turning
I'd never know my house was burning
Now the MMORPGs have the power
Evercrack has stolen hours
I'm selling characters to newbies
And buying magic swords and XPs
The swivel chair I'm sitting in
Is adhering to my skin
/pizza!

I've been sorta kicking around
inside my own head over the subject of comments in the TR blogs. I'm
used to threaded comments for blogs, where you can reply to a comment
with a comment of your own directly, rather than your comment simply
being tacked onto the end of the list of "root" level comments as it is
here at TR.

I've been thinking about the advantages and
disadvantages of a threaded comments approach, and I've realized that
it's nice, for a chance, to have a blog that does not have that
feature. For one thing, it reduces the conversational tone of the blog
to a certain extent, which changes the entire character of the blog.
This way, it's more geared toward article-like blog posts and comments
directed at the blog's author, rather than becoming sort of a social
circle centered around that author. In short, it's a little more
"professional" this way.

I'll be taking advantage of this
situation as an excuse to order my blog in a particular, probably
abnormal, manner: I won't post comments in it, ever. If I have
something important enough to say that is inspired by a comment, it
will be said in a blog article. This should help cut down on the level
of fluff, among other benefits, and will probably cut down on flame
wars as well, since the ability to answer back in anger will be
severely curtailed (in part by my nonparticipation, and in part by the
lack of threading in comments).

As for the frequency of posts,
it will certainly come in crests and troughs, with multiple posts over
a day or two and several days of silence. I'll post when I feel like
it, and when I have something interesting to say. I won't post random
crap just to ensure a steady flow of words. When you read something
here, it'll be because I thought what I posted was worth saying,
whether or not it's worth reading.

I'll likely post at minimum
once a week, at least for a while, though my online activity level in
any given forum rises and falls in irregular cycles, generally. It's
not like I'm getting paid for this, after all.

As TR member AmericanVoter reminded me in a comment to a previous post, not everyone in the world knows about the Jung Typology and the derived MBTI personality tests.

Famed psychologist Carl Jung developed a theory of psychology types, known generally as Jung Typology. This begins with some general statements about how people's personalities can be described by classifying them according to categories of psychological characteristics. For instance, most of the rambling that goes on in common parlance about "introverts" and "extroverts" arises from Jung's uses of the terms, though most people misuse them terribly. Also important in Jung Typology are four modes of experience that bear the labels Thought, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition. These have been grouped in opposed pairs, where Thought and Feeling are opposite sides of one coin, and where Sensation and Intuition are opposite sides of another. To these three (including Introversion/Extroversion) was another pairing added, consisting of Judging and Perceiving.

These four opposed pairs are assembled into a letter-code personality classification that makes up the basis of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is in turn used as the set of metrics on which many personality tests are designed. I've taken a few, and I tend to vary somewhat between two results: I'm always either an INTJ or an INTP, depending on the test and, I imagine, my mood and current personality traits. I score INTJ rather more often than INTP, and as such tend to occasionally refer to myself as an INTj, indicating a less strong attachment to the J than the other three letters in that label.

If you've been paying attention, you might by now have guessed that INTJ means I'm Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging, primarily (though the Judging might by some measures and at some times actually be replaced by Perceiving). The INT personality types are the analytical types, and among INTs the J-types are more the qualitative variety and P-types are more the quantitative variety. In other words, INTJs are big on analyzing for value, and INTPs are big on analyzing for details. I do quite a bit of each, but for me the details of a thing are (usually) primarily useful as a means to the end, that being evaluation.

Being an INTJ suits me well as a consultant. So, too, would INTP. While INTP is probably best suited to technology implementation once all the major decisions are made, INTJ is probably best suited to making those decisions, and in advising others on the making of such decisions. In addition to having the personality type suited to that kind of work, I'm also rather intelligent. No false modesty here: I know my limitations, and to some degree I also know my strengths, and don't feel like pretending they don't exist for humility's sake.

INTs tend to make the best programmers, and Js and Ps each have their own strengths within that. They're synthesists, good at taking a series of preexisting parts and assembling them into something new and useful. They're not, however, usually the best salesmen, and that failing is one that I suffer quite notably. This is one reason I work better for a consultancy than as a consultant on my own: I'm no extrovert, which is where real sales talent lies. I rather suspect that the best salesmen are ENTJs, and that the best chairmen of the board are ENTPs, but don't quote me on that (without including disclaimers that it's just wild speculation on my part).

There is some speculation about the actual validity of the MBTI tests, including the official MBTI test whose trademark is owned by a trust that exists for that purpose, if I'm not mistaken. There are a great many copy-cat tests out there, however, which seem to be able to get away with it by virtue of the fact that the MBTI itself is derived from the theories of Carl Jung. These copycat tests are of varying worth, and when I say that I've taken many MBTI-based tests, I don't know how many were copycats and how many were officially sanctioned derivatives of the MBTI itself (though I know that at least one was just a copycat, and am not at all sure that any were "official" MBTI tests).

Here's an MBTI-like test for you:

Human Metrics Jung Typology Test

Thanks for the test. I used to be an INTP, but now I am an INTJ. 
An intersting switch I'd say.  While I don't think the INT will
change, I am surprised by the switch from P to J.  I would guess
it is because I've become far more cynical and jaded than I was 10
years ago when I first took the test

Thanks!

Wipro is a technology consulting
firm that benefits from a "strategic alliance" with Microsoft,
including "building financial models and ROI calculators for Microsoft
product deployments" and "co-product development and engineering of
Microsoft products". They're about as deeply enmeshed with Microsoft as
a company can be without actually being owned outright. Wipro is even
engaged in "managing call center operations for Microsoft product
support" and ".NET evangelism with focus on enterprise and mobility
applications". In other words, Wipro's business model is tightly tied
to developing, maintaining, and marketing Microsoft product lines and
services. This is anything but independent. For more detail, check out
the Wipro Technologies website: Wipro ? Microsoft: a strategic relationship

Recently,
Microsoft commissioned a study of patch management costs, comparing
Windows platform patch management with open source platform patch
management. Considering the above explanation of the relationship of
Wipro to Microsoft, and the fact that Microsoft commissioned the study
and reported the results, I suspect you can guess whether or not the
study favored open source software for patch management costs. Once
again, a Microsoft-commissioned study performed by a company that is
little more than a Microsoft lackey shows Microsoft undercutting the
cost of software that can be had for free. Go figure.

The study
results, in a little more detail, indicated that the patching costs
were very competitive between the Microsoft platform and the open
source software platform. It was admitted in the study that Microsoft
systems required more patching, but this is supposedly balanced by the
fact that the per-unit cost of patching for Microsoft systems was
lower. Of course, it's also claimed that patching is easier for Windows
systems ? a subjective, qualitative statement that cannot really be
statistically demonstrated in a study, and can thus be safely spouted
without worrying about the facts disproving the claim. When pinned down
on such issues, of course, Microsofties will always fall back on the
old "Windows GUIs are better!" argument. In my own experience, a simple
shell or Perl script handling sorting and distribution of apt patching
on Debian systems (for example) is about as easy as it can possibly get.

This
study, of course, actually compared corporations that use third-party
patch management software for organization and distribution of software
patches. These third-party solutions cost money to use, of course.
Interestingly, the per-unit per-patch cost that showed Microsoft's
stuff being cheaper used the same back-ends as the open source
software. Why is the per-patch per-unit cost lower? Simple: more
Windows systems were required for performing to similar standards.
Since the back-end cost was for the network, and not for the individual
units, where Windows systems require more computers in place the
per-unit cost involves a smaller division of the total cost over the
larger number of units, leading to a lower "per-unit" component of the
cost. Add to that the fact that patches are more numerous for Windows
systems than for Linux systems, and the "per-patch" component of your
cost is lower as well, because of similar division of cost between
instances. Considering that the per-patch cost division occurs on each
individual unit, that means that your total manipulation of cost
figures to produce "per-patch per-unit" costs involves dividing the
total cost by a number reached by multiplying the number of units by
the number of patches. Thus, the total cost of your solution is likely
more because of greater labor overhead (longer hours spent in
patch-management), but since that total cost for your network is
divided into such small numbers when divided by number of patches and
number of units, your per-patch per-unit cost can be significantly
lower. Thus, cleverly massaged statistics prove the sky is orange.

This would be why such
Microsoft-sponsored studies always examine per-unit costs for
distributed bulk services: multi-unit
services that only cost once can be whittled down when you split them
up over a larger number of systems, since a larger number is often
needed to achieve the same end results. Go figure. This turns the
real-world increase in financial and management resource expenditure
for a full-network solution into a decrease in resource expenditure for
each individual unit. So much the better for your study results if you
have to perform the same tasks over and over again, allowing a decrease
in expenditure for each iteration, though the total cost climbs.

Ultimately, none of this is all that
relevant to real-world costs. Real-world costs for actual patch
management and deployment are almost nothing for a knowledgeable
admin, regardless of the platform. What costs money and man-hours is
pre-deployment patch testing and post-deployment rollbacks and recovery
when patching goes awry ? and, of course, downtime from both
patch-related complications and the patching procedure itself. These
are, to the people who run these studies on the Microsoft paycheck,
irrelevant ephemera, but for those of us in the IT trenches they are
the meat and potatoes of the almighty TCO (total cost of ownership) and
administrative overhead (how much work and stress is involved in being
a system or network administrator).

Microsoft's track record in
post-deployment complications for new patches is legendary, and not
positive. The fact that most statistical analyses of system failures
during XP Service Pack 2 deployments performed by IT professionals were
in the range of 10-15% is just astounding. This sort of astronomically
high system failure rate after a patch purported to increase system
security and stability is simply unacceptable for most production
environments, and drives post-deployment recovery costs through the
roof for many administrators. Smart admins see a resulting increase in
pre-deployment patch testing because it simply becomes that much more
critical that patches are fully tested for potential problems before
deployment.

Then, of course, there's the matter of planned
downtime. Unplanned downtime is of course an incredible, and often
disastrous, addition to total cost of ownership for a given platform.
Planned downtime doesn't compare in terms of cost increases in most
environments. There's still an associated cost, though: even if
business isn't damaged overtly by planned downtime on the revenue side,
downtime of any kind tend to involve increased costs where such
concerns as the salaries of admins and contractors are concerned.

Almost
every single important patch applied to a Windows system requires a
system restart. The only time a system restart is required for a unix
system (such as Linux) patch is applied is when it's a kernel patch.
One of the major reasons for this is the system configuration scheme of
Windows, where all services are configured through a single flat-file
database. This is, to say the least, suboptimal for system uptime.

Time for some anecdotal evidence:

I've
never, in all my work as a consultant, had to recover from a Linux
system patch. Not once. All Linux system patches and upgrades worked
flawlessly for me. On the other hand, I literally paid my bills for a
while on Windows patch recovery when clients started applying SP2 to
their Windows XP systems. Linux systems used by the same clients hummed
along, undisturbed.

While I didn't service the Server 2003
systems that developed major problems with the deployment of SP1, I
know that similarly impressive spikes in the consultancy's revenue
stream occurred with that patch as well.

On top of all that, I'm
still waiting to hear about a number of patches for things that have
been languishing on Microsoft's back burner for far too long. I haven't
heard of a needed patch for the Linux systems I support that has yet
taken more than a few days to appear after the need was discovered. I
can only thank my lucky stars that my duties with the consultancy are
moving more and more into Linux and web development, and farther from
Windows system support. The stress levels have dropped considerably. I
get to design and implement, and spend less time fixing.

With
all of that in mind, and casting a scornful glance back at the
chicanery of Microsoft and Wipro Technologies, I have to ask:



Is anyone buying this?

I'm going to do Something Different here. I'm going to try to be
informative. I'll probably be mostly informative about stuff relating
to Linux in some way. Since a lot of people, even among IT
professionals, don't know a lot of the fundamentals that comprise a
good basis for understanding Linux-related stuff, I figure I should
probably start with some of those fundamentals. See how helpful I am?

First off, Linux is unix, but not UNIX, or even Unix. At least,
that's how I refer to the various states of unix-compatibility. See,
UNIX is a trademark that is assigned to a unix when it passes certain
qualifications and when someone pays for the privilege of using the
UNIX name; Unix is basically a non-term that I usually don't use, but
when I do differentiate between Unix and either UNIX or unix, what I
mean is that Unix has certain characteristics relating to a family of
related OSes that are all descended from the same ancestor, and contain
(some of) the same code as that ancestor, but isn't necessarily UNIX
because nobody bothered to get it certified. The various *BSD unices
(that's plural for unix) qualify as Unix by this standard, because
almost every single unix in existence has a core of *BSD-based code in
it. Even the original UNIX line, developed initially at Bell Labs,
contains a lot of *BSD code because *BSD code is open source but not
copyleft, meaning that anyone can see the source code but it can be
incorporated in closed-source software without any legal issues. I'll
address the various terms of software licensing in a moment, but first
I'll finally mention what makes an OS qualify as unix.

Linux (pronounced "linn-ucks" or "leen-ooks") is a unix. It is not,
however, a Unix or a UNIX. It contains original code unrelated to the
core *BSD code, and though I'm pretty sure it would qualify, nobody has
ever gotten it certified as UNIX. It is a unix, however, because it
looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and even smells like a duck. It
conforms to POSIX standards, it does everything UNIX and/or Unix does
that makes them unices as well, and it is very nearly indistinguishable
from other unices to the casual user. Linux was created entirely from
scratch, programmatically, and was basically created by observing the
behavior of other unices and figuring out how to write code that will
do the same stuff.

Linux and *BSD are both "open source" OS families. Such proprietary
unices as SysV, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and so on, are not. Linux is
"copyleft", whereas *BSD is not. Here's why:

Linux is licensed under the GPL (General Public License). The
General Public License requires that when distributing binaries
(compiled, executable programs), you have to provide the source code as
well. It requires that you do not restrict others from further
distributing and modifying that code. It also requires that later
modifications and distributions of that code are released under the GPL
as well.

The various *BSD kernels are licensed under the BSD license (thus
the name). This includes FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, among other
(less well-known) BSD OSes. The BSD license allows you to redistribute
both binaries and source code as you see fit. It also requires that you
do not restrict others from further distributing and modifying that
code. It does not require distribution of source code, though it does
(as already noted) allow it. It does not require that later
modifications and distributions of that code are released under the BSD
license, either.

Software such as the proprietary UNIXes and Microsoft Windows are
released under standard copyright, as modified by EULAs (End User
License Agreements). Copyrighted software that is not released under
other licenses is restricted from being copied or distributed in any
form at all except in accordance with "fair use" provisions, which
pretty much state that if it's useless to you without duplicating it
you're allowed to duplicate it, but only for purposes of such use.
Other than that, everything's restricted, by and large.

Before I touch on one more licensing scheme, I'll explain how the
various open source buzzwords fit into all this. First, there's
"copyleft": if an open source license is "copyleft", that means that it
is automatically inherited by derivative works and copies. This means
that if you modify and redistribute something issued under a copyleft
license, that modified version is also distributed under the same
copyleft license.

The term "open source" refers to software for which the source code
is open for viewing, modifiable, and redistributable. A similarly
applied term, "free software", refers to source code wherein it is
required that the source code be made available to anyone that has
access to the binaries. There's another, far less used term, that
refers to software that is all about allowing you things without
requiring anything: it allows distribution and modification of binaries
and source code without requiring it, in essence. This term is
"software libre". There's some dispute over what these terms actually
mean, but the general consensus and understanding of the terms seems to
be precisely what I've relayed here. Both "software libre" and "free
software" are "open source software", but "software libre" is not "free
software", and "free software" is not "software libre".

The GPL is a free software license, an open source software license,
and it is copyleft. The BSD license is a software libre license,
an open source license, and not copyleft. The CCD CopyWrite is a
software libre license, an open source license, and it is
copyleft.

CCD CopyWrite is a license I created specifically because I saw the
need for a true software libre license that was also copyleft. In
essence, "software libre" is the state of licensing that replicates the
conditions of the public domain (absent outside influences). You can do
anything you like with your libre licensed software, and so can anyone
to whom you give it: there are no legal restrictions on modification
and distribution of the content. Only laws relating to tangential
matters apply to software libre, such as laws relating to fraud (no
lying about the performance or attribution characteristics of a piece
of software). By creating a copyleft libre license, I've set aside a
"protected public domain", wherein licensed works can be treated as
though they are within the public domain, but unlike the actual status
of public domain works they cannot be re-copyrighted and "removed" from
the public domain after modification to produce a derivative work.

There you have it. I've made some generalized statements about what
UNIX, Unix, and unix are, how Linux and *BSD fit the picture, what the
various open source software categorization buzzwords are, and some
licensing examples to fit the different categories.

Note 1: Despite spurious claims to the contrary, no Windows was
ever really POSIX compliant. Some components of the Windows NT system
have, in various versions, been POSIX compliant to one degree or
another, but it has never been a POSIX compliant OS. NTFS was at one
time POSIX compliant: whether or not it still is compliant is something
of which I'm not really sure. NTFS has undergone so many changes over
the years that it's almost unrecognizable as being related to the
filesystem that originally bore that name.

Note 2: I stated that Unixes come from a common ancestor. I did not
identify that ancestor, though I hinted at both AT&T UNIX and BSD
Unix. I made reference to BSD code in UNIXes, but did not specify how
much of the OS is traceable to BSD. This was intentional. While the
facts I've related are essentially indisputable, the opinions that can
be derived from those facts are often in reasonable dispute. Since
my purpose here isn't to address that dispute, I avoided it.


UNIX
Linux
*BSD
GNU General Public License
BSD License
CCD CopyWrite license

There's a term being bandied about in the media, and being used
improperly, with dismaying regularity. This term is one that relates to
IT professionals and enthusiasts and their shared culture. It is a term
that helps to set us apart from the rest of the world's population by
our appreciation of a certain ethic, a certain aesthetic, and a certain
metasociety that cannot be understood without exposure to, and (perhaps
more importantly) enjoyment of, the computer geek's world.

The term I'm talking about, of course, is "hacker". In the news
media, in the press releases of corporations like Microsoft, and in
mainstream cinema, the term "hacker" is divested of its real meaning
and granted instead only the sinister characteristics of the computer
criminal. This has, I think, come to pass because those outside of
hacker culture probably never bother to notice any hacking going on
around them unless it affects them directly and, once in a while, that
hacking might consist of someone testing and even penetrating the
security of computers and computer networks. To assign the term
"hacking" only to such activities, though, is the same as assigning the
term "pilot" only to terrorists who fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers,
"golfer" only to those who cheat at the game of golf, "driver" only to
those who drive while intoxicated and end up killing pedestrians, or
"parent" only to those who molest their children.

It's worse than that, actually. Not all child molesters are parents,
not all killers are drivers, not all cheaters are golfers, not all
terrorists are pilots, and not all who crack security on computers and
computer networks are hackers. Many, in fact, are script kiddies whose
closest brush with actual hackers is using a network security auditing
script some hacker wrote eight years ago. Remember that little problem
with Newsweek inaccurately reporting the contents of an FBI memo,
sparking a riot that killed 16 people? They're just as wrong, and far
more often, in the way they report computer crime.

The term "hacker" is used at times to refer to people outside of
computer system enthusiasts, and that's fine. I've yet to see a
non-computer-person misuse the term when referring to what they do.
I've even seen people refer to themselves as hackers of "reality",
meaning of course that they're screwing with the common perceptions of
the dominant paradigm. Good for them. Let's comfort the disturbed and
disturb the comfortable, and call ourselves saints and hackers for
having done so. It's pretty difficult to find any true hacker culture
outside of enthusiastic computer users, though.

The term arose with the tech model railroad club (TMRC) at MIT in
the 1960s, particularly amongst a group of members of the club who were
also involved in the goings-on of the MIT AI (artificial intelligence)
lab. From there, it began to be applied to other computing enthusiasts
unrelated to TMRC, and a vast culture of hacking arose, including its
own jargon, ethics, value system, and worldviews. As RFC 1392 ,
the Internet Users' Glossary, defines it, a hacker is "A person who
delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings
of a system, computers and computer networks in particular. The term is
often misused in a pejorative context, where 'cracker' would be the
correct term." There's also a reference to the term "cracker" in RFC
1392, not to be confused with the racist insult usage of the term, nor
with that usage of the term that denotes a snack food.

Early hacker history is loaded with the stories of giants who walked
the earth. Somewhere in the middle, there was a distinct paradigm shift
coinciding with the move from OSes and computers that were wedded to
each other to unix, the first really modular, portable separation of
the OS from the hardware ? or, at least, the first one that really
caught on. This can be blamed, of course, on the concurrent creation,
or synchrogenesis (to coin a term), of the C programming
language and the Unix operating system. While the Internet was already
underway before unix began to play a substantial role in it, it was
unix that gave it the first major push toward being a public
environment. The various unices have been the primary OS of choice for
hackers in general ever since. There are those few true hackers that
simply don't use the unix environment, of course, but they are an
exceedingly rare breed. Most people that work with computers outside of
the realm of unix are professionals or end-users without the real
essence of the hacker, or are strictly hardware hackers, a strange
breed indeed. Even those hackers that have created their own OSes along
the way generally came from unix and eventually came back to it, too.

In the late '70s and early '80s, the growth of the PC industry began
to see the independent and convergent evolution of a new class of
computer users. They weren't a culture, yet, though. They had terribly
underpowered little "toys" that didn't even have the ability to
effectively communicate with each other over the Internet. This is one
reason many people don't realize just how old the Internet is: if they
know anything about the history of computer networking with PCs, they
probably think back to the bad ol' days of dial-in BBSes before PCs
could touch the Internet. It was the ISPs like Prodigy and AOL that
ultimately brought the Internet to the masses (thank goodness we've
moved on to better options now), by giving PCs something to dial into
that would then connect them to all the wide world of the Internet, and
it was the web browser and email that made it something worth doing.
Then, in the early '90s, just before the release of Windows 3.11,
hacker culture met the scattered PC enthusiasts, and that convergent
evolution finally came to its merging point. Linux and BSD for the 386
were created, almost simultaneously. Both were made open source, as
well, which suited the hacker ethic perfectly. The hacker's home OS was
born, and it was twins.

Generally, one does not decide to become a hacker and pursue any set
of required tasks to get there. It's not a profession with certifying
authorities, though there is a certain amount of semi-official
recognition that cements one's place in the culture. It's not a skill
set that one acquires at school or on the job, though one is never a
hacker without skill. It's not an attitude, though without the right
attitude all you'll ever be is a programmer, or a script kiddie, or a
network administrator, or an end user, or a wannabe, or perhaps worst
of all a suit . Hacker culture is something of a meritocracy,
but mere ability isn't everything: there's also the ethic and the
aesthetic sense, for instance. It's all something you can't just study
and understand. You have to grok it.

That's not to say that hackers never disagree. They not only
disagree, but can do so very noisily, obstinately, at great length.
They even disagree regularly on subjects as fundamental as what exactly
it is to be a hacker. Find two hackers and ask them what being a hacker
means: if they don't just quote RFC 1392 or the Jargon File at you,
you'll get two different answers. You might even get three. Put them in
a room together, and they may argue it to death, and they may both end
up with different opinions than those they had when they started, but
they'll still probably disagree on some fundamental points. If both are
real hackers, though, they'll surely recognize each other as such by
the time a truce has been called and the dust has settled.

For my part, I've been called a hacker by several people who know
what the term really means, independently and without prompting. These
are people who recognize that I have some skill, and that I grok the
hacker life ? and I really do understand it on that visceral level.
It's commonly accepted (if usually unspoken) tradition in hacker culture that it's better to
be identified as a hacker by someone else, someone that knows what he
or she is talking about, and among my credentials is recognition by a
bona fide rocket scientist who's been as much a real hacker as anyone
I've met for longer than I've known there was such a thing as Linux
(and she has been using Slackware since version 1.x). Guess what: I
dispute their claims. I'm not sure I qualify. It's that pesky skill
thing, you see. I have the enthusiasm and the interest and all the rest
of it, but somehow I've just never really gotten immersed enough in
certain key activities (programming, foremost among them) to develop
more skill than that of a dabbler in hacking. I mean, really, there's
an assumption in the term "hacker" that, to be one, you have to "hack".
I've had some close brushes with activities that carry that name, and
I'm even the recent founder of a very small hacking club, of sorts, but
as for real experience in hackish activity ? well, it's a little sparse.

Some of these people who have thusly granted me title certainly know
more than I do about the matter. Perhaps I should defer to wiser heads
than mine. I know I don't want to be the wannabe that self-identifies
without proper justification, though. I'm not comfortable accepting
that apellation at this time. I may never be.

I know I get annoyed when some idiot reporter or Microsoft marketing
executive uses the term to describe something lower than the scum on
the soles of my 14-hole Doc Marten boots, though.

You know you're a real hacker if you don't want to be called one. Anyone claiming to be a hacker is a script kiddie with delusions of grandeur.