Slashdot Mirror

LifeForm42 writes "Java guru and ServerSide.com creator Floyd Marinescu is on Microsoft's Channel 9. From the description of the interview: 'Floyd Marinescu is truly a leader in the coding community. Besides writing some of the most influential books in the Java world, he has brought developers together in two popular online venues which he founded: TheServerSide.com and TheServerSide.net. Now Floyd is using his unique talent for building virtual societies in a new endeavor called InfoQ. Whereas TheServerSide.com catered to a Java audience, and TheServerSide.net catered to Microsoft developers, InfoQ is a venue for programmers on any platform.'"

HiveMaster writes "The BBC is carrying a report about the impact on websites as people try to get news regarding the war in Iraq. It talks of a report from Keynote Systems, which tests the reponsiveness of websites, which shows that the BBC news site has shown a fourfold increase in response times. However, Government sites in both the US and the UK are being hit, with the US Army site taking over 80 seconds to load at peak times." Also, here is a press release this. You can also read My journal where I've talked quite a bit about what Slashdot has done in preperation for traffic bursts.

MStirling asks: "OK, here's the deal. I live in the middle of nowhere. DSL is out of the question because the CO is like 27k feet away from my house. Cable is out of the question because the cable company would make me pay to run the line half a mile over the highway and after I paid this inital cost, they'd proceed to let my neighbors steal my bandwidth without having to pay the same gigantic fees. We're talking several thousand dollars just to get the line, not including the all important arm and a leg for the installation fees, monthly service, or what the one local ISP (who currently holds a monopoly on the cable modem market) charges. Right now I'm stuck on a 56k dialup, which has never seen a connection rake higher than 28.8k. What I want to know is if there is some other option I haven't looked at (Besides DirecPC because that's one way service and they charge by the hour) or something in the pipeline that will solve my problem. Any info you could come up with would be appreciated."

Wister285 writes: "The Federal Trade Commission is going after buy.com, Value America, and Office Depot for running 'misleading' free PC offers. The FTC is claiming that the advertisements don't disclose the true restrictions and costs of the PCs, which can be up to $1000. When will people learn that Big Brother is always watching? Catch the story over at ZDNet." This goes way beyond "monitor not included," too.

Wister285 writes: "Although MP3 quality is pretty damn good, the people over a Kenwood thought that it still doesn't have the edge that CDs do. MP3s don't support high frequency that regular CDs do because of the data compression. Kenwood's format, which is called 'Supreme Drive' (another dumb name for a good product ...), is boasting good results. Catch the story over at Excite." While it's cool that research is going on to improve the quality of compressed audio, it's hard to tell from this article just what is actually going on. Does it even make sense to say that this program "takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental' -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator" to achieve a more natural sound? Where does it 'take' that information from exactly?

Wister285 writes: "In a rather intersting turn of events, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark said that he would rather see Microsoft's Internet Explorer stay with the Windows software, should the company be broken up as planned, despite Microsoft's promised appeals. He says that the Microsoft-Other-Software-Company could use the software in a more harmful manner than Microsoft-Windows-Company would. Makes sense... Microsoft-Other Software-Company has a larger grasp on the market (which would most likely be all OSs)." The difficulty with directed outcomes raises its ugly little head again. Where's Harry [that's "Hari" -- mea culpa. timothy] Seldon when you need him?

Jon347 writes: "KDE 2.0 beta has been released, and looking very slick, regular files are on kde.org's servers and rpms on people.redhat.com. This one has been delayed for a while but looks worth it. This is the first of three beta releases. "

Rene S. Hollan has sent an insightful piece regarding the use of a non-GPL license that is still fair to the free software community, and might even win the approval of RMS ^[?] . Toward a Better Open Source License

With the success of GNU/ ^[?] Linux in the hacker community, and it's subsequent notice by the mainstream, there has been a rapid attempt by many businesses to "cash in" on the free (as in beer :() software phenomenon. This has led to the euphemization of free as "open source", and a plethora of so-called open source software licenses, that are almost, but not quite, as free as the GPL. With business being what it is, this should come as no surprise.

The trouble with many of these open source licenses is that they tend to be received with less than abundant enthusiasm by hackers -- the very people that business is counting on to debug, extend, and support, some latest software venture, all for free, while someone else makes a profit. If that isn't enough to discredit any semblance of inherent fairness, many of these licenses have been denounced as unfair by Richard Stallman, architect of the GPL. Many heed what he has to say.

The definition of fair in an exchange depends on both parties believing themselves better off with the exchange than without it. In theory, at least it is possible that while the above situation might be viewed as "fair" by somebody, it isn't very likely. So, the hacker community loses the opportunity to work with more software, and business loses in not having the support of this community. There must be a better way.

If the NPL were modified so that some limit was placed on what could be folded back with Netscape's proprietary code, this would be a start. But, who should decide what that limit is?

Clearly, anyone who comes up with an open source license can establish such a limit, even if only to say there is none. However, this does not make the license popular. Business will always want to "have it's cake and eat it too" and it should come as no surprise that present open source licenses suggest that the "cake" be pretty big. We can either wait for some company to come up with a fairer open source license, or we can respond with an alternative of our own, that need not be equal, but that many of us think is fair. To gain rapid acceptance, it would probably have to have Richard Stallman's approval (or at least be free of his disaproval), because of the respect he commands.

Here is one proposal, to put the ball back in the court of business, as it were:
the Transitional General Public Licens (TGPL).

The TGPL is the same as the GPL, with two important exceptions:

1. The originator may combine distributed derived works produced by others and released under TGPL with the originator's proprietary code and redistribute the result.
2. The producer of a derived work may elect to distribute it under the TGPL, or the GPL, at their discretion.

Basically, this is the NPL in spirit, except the "in perpetuity" bit is cut off at a point decided by members of the community at large, in effect letting the originator have his pound of flesh, but not one drop of blood.

Obviously, an entire class of open source licenses can be thought of, that permit release of derived works either under the existing licence, or the GPL. The fairer the license, and the greater the value of the work released, the more likely it is that the originator will be granted his "edge" by grateful people who produce derived works. Furthermore, such community support encourages even more code to be released this way. That can only be a good thing.

Opinions are welcome, and openly solicited. Send them to rhollan@flashmail.com.