Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Der Herbst kommt! Heute mussten wir zum ersten mal das Licht beim Fr[florin]hst[florin]ck einschalten. Dre Sommer geht. Daf[florin]r war es mir Neal am Rhein auf der Fahrt zu Frau Dombrowa sehr nebelig-romantisch. 9:13 # G!

The age of Sourcecode Dear Prof. Lessing, at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/cooper.html I read: "I don't have much code on my box that's been unmodified for more than 10 years. I certainly don't know of any I can buy from the original software developer. Thus, it doesn't seem that there's a huge market out there of developers depending on selling 10 year old code. And thus, it doesn't seem plausible that there are many developers who would decide not to code just because they couldn't sell their unmodified code for more than 10 years." A few weeks ago I spent time on a long flight researching this topic. I used Darwin, the OpenSource foundation of MacOS X, for my research. Darwin is based on NeXTstep which is based on the BSD Unix variant. NeXTstep was forked of the main BSD trunk ca. 1986 (NeXTstep was first commercially available 1988) and I have no information if they later synced new features from BSD into NeXTstep. The FreeBSD Project can be seen as a successor of original BSD and took the code from BSD between 1992-1994. I have a CVS tree of FreeBSD dating back until 1994, so I can reconstruct all changes done to FreeBSD in the last 8 years. I went comparing source from the up-to date Darwin Tree with 1994 FreeBSD. To my astonishment there were a lot of Unix tools which seemed nearly identical. So these tools where unmodified in Darwin/NeXTstep for at least 8 years; might be even 16 if NeXTstep was not synced with BSD in 1986-1994. This tool programs are doing jobs like showing directory contents, setting the IP address of a computer, converting text etc. Maybe Darwin is a special case, since NeXTstep development stopped for some time in the nineties but I have been told that Microsoft Windows contains some tools ('ping' etc.) in near unmodified form since the early nineties. But still that is no counter argument against 10 years of copyright/escrow because this old components don't give the modern MacOS its character as a product - all the stuff Apple has added in the last years like whiz-bang graphics do. And none of this unmodified Software is available commercially as a seperate product, but is more or less infrastructure to the "real" product by Apple (a flashy Desktop). Hope you enjoyed my little field research on age of sourcecode, best regards Max Dornseif 6:48 # G!

Chines Dissidents and the Internet. RAND reports that chinese dissidents don't profit from using the internet and everybody talks about it: RAND report - You've Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of he Internet and Beijing's Counter-Strategies. by Michael S. Chase, James C. Mulvenon $20.00, (paperback, 130 pp.)     ISBN: 0-8330-3179-1     MR-1543, © 2002 All materials are available as free, downloadable PDF files. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them [Privacy Digest] Political News from Wired News - China Dissidents Thwarted on Net. Chinese dissidents are doing their best to use the Internet to bring democratic change to their society, but government crackdowns and the nation's rural demographics mean that more freedoms are unlikely to come soon, says a private study. Released by RAND, the report, "You've Got Dissent," said that while dissidents use the Internet for liberation, the Chinese government uses the same tools to keep an eye on activists. "There was a lot of very loose talk about how the Internet was going to bring down all the authoritarian regimes," said James Mulvenon, one of the authors of the report released this week. However, he said, "the Chinese government has proven surprisingly nimble over the past five or six years in surpassing the technological challenges the dissidents have presented them." [Privacy Digest] ap: China Dissidents Thwarted on Net. A Rand report claims Chinese dissidents have been relatively unsuccesful in using the internet to avoid government censorship. "There was a lot of very loose talk about how the Internet was going to bring down all the authoritarian regimes," said James Mulvenon, one of the authors of the report released this week. However, he said, "the Chinese government has proven surprisingly nimble over the past five or six years in surpassing the technological challenges the... [bplog] 0:00 # G!