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A link:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre gation

I don't know what exactly this means, but it's not at all as clear as you make it sound.

... because theft is still theft ... the type of license is immaterial at that point.

The gpl comes with obligations to the giver, which includes making the source available for 3 years from the person you got it from (NOTE: this is NOT necessarily the original developer. If you got it from Joe Blow, then Joe Blow is the one obliged, not the developer).

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The thief swipes the program, but doesn't have the source ... how is he going to comply with this clause? The short answer - he can't. So he is in breach of the gpl license, and thus cannot distribute at all.

You'd be surprised at how many busineses DON'T want the source. More than a decade ago, I was giving source with my programs, and customers would lose it - either misplace the disks, or just say "don't bother". They don't want the bother. It's just more stuff to take care of - and that's why they call you in the first place - they don't want to be bothered with the extra hassle.

GNU.

Java is not the Java Development Kit, or any other specific peice of software. To Sun, "Java" is a trademark, so they can't even use it as a noun. But the rest of us can get by with thinking of Java as a collection of specifications: the Java language, the Java class libraries, and the Java VM spec. None of these is software — software can only be a implementation of Java.

That might seem like a silly distinction, until you remember that Sun is not the only vendor for Java implementations. Not only are there commercial implementations, but there are open source implementations of all three, specs. Of course, these all lag way behind commercial implementations, as open source clones are wont to do.

Anyway, when people say "Sun should open-source Java" what they really mean is "Sun should open-source their implementation of Java."

Which brings us to:

"Open source" is not software where the source code is freely available. It software where you can obtain the source code provided you agree to a license. That license specifies that you must make any changes to that source code available to anybody else who agrees to the same license.

And here's a non-legal issue: if you're serious about making your product open-source, you don't just throw the source code over the wall and say "go crazy!" You make a serious attempt to fold contributed code back into your main source tree. That's a serious administrative cost, and a big reason so many companies are unwilling to OS their products.

The complete poem is here
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/hackersong.html

The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. The method we use is called "copyleft".(1)

The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.

For an effective copyleft, modified versions must also be free. This ensures that work based on ours becomes available to our community if it is published. When programmers who have jobs as programmers volunteer to improve GNU software, it is copyleft that prevents their employers from saying, "You can't share those changes, because we are going to use them to make our proprietary version of the program."

Furthermore, Richard Stallman still seems to take the microkernel seriously. Although Mach has fallen out of favor, the answer isn't to claim that Mach is all there is or could be to a microkernel and declare the concept an abject failure. RMS is moving on to greener pastures with L4. A bad implementation doesn't mean something is a bad idea.

I use 'screen' the terminal multiplexor.

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

that way, I can quickly go from file navigation, script writing, compilation, and web surfing, all from within the same xterm.

"I remember hearing that vi was programmed as a teco macro."

No, that was EMACS:

From http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ :

"The original Emacs implementation was written for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) as a collection of TECO macros for ITS TECO. There was a custom of giving such macro packages names ending in ``mac'' or ``macs''. A further reason for choosing this particular name was that the abbreviation ``e'' was unused at the time on ITS. ? "

To understand vi, you must first understand ed.

Ed is the standard text editor.

GNU Emacs is at version 21.4. Can we really trust such an immature editor?

According to their change log (http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/hurd/hurd-l4/ ChangeLog?rev=1.26&view=log) no updates have been made to the L4 microkernel version of Hurd for over a year.

The project is dead.

Someone had to remind slashdotters of the superior editor... Ed, man!

WTF... I thought HURD switched over to the L4 microkernel. What gives?

No, it's a separate project, and it's not released yet.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-l4.html

... Hurd lives!

Since all the source commits this year, according to commit-hurd mailing list archive, have come from a single person, it seems to me that even BSD is in better health than Hurd...

As I see it, microkernels have a single problem, almost impossible to get accross: latency.

When a program does a system call in Linux, its execution continues in the kernel mode, using the programs timeslice; when the call is done, the program returns back to user mode. In the best case, the whole call can conclude without a single task switch between entry and exit, but in any case, the kernel starts to execute the system call immediately.

Now think of what happens when a program makes a system call in Hurd. It sends a message to the appropriate server program and then waits for an answer. In the best case, that server program is free to begin executing the requested action immediately when it's next scheduled (whenever that will be); in the worst case, it already has several other requests queued. Worst of all, the other requests may be from lower-priority programs, which may thus block a high-priority program from executing for a long time. Or suppose that a high-priority (perhaps even realtime) task makes a system call; in a monolithic kernel, the thread keeps its priority during the system call, but in a microkernel, the server might be running at a much lower priority, causing stalling of the RT task.

Sure, you can make the servers multithreaded. So how many threads should you have waiting ? 2 ? 10 ? 100 ? A monolithic kernel automatically has a thread for each program executing a system call simultaneously: the programs own thread. A microkernel won't. If you have a multi-processor machine, the difference is going to be even more noticeable.

There are ways around this, but they aren't simple. One possibility is to make it possible for a program to set a message port in such a mode that any incoming messages will automatically spawn a new thread (if none is currently polling for messages) to handle it. This, however, won't solve the "RT task waiting for a non-RT server to do something" problem described above. For that you'd need to build a task dependency tree and make the server inherit the priority of tasks waiting for it, and that's not without problems either (suppose there are plenty of other requests queued from low-priority tasks before the one from RT tasks; should those other requests also be handled at higher priority ?).

Microkernel sounds good on paper, but trying to implement it quickly runs into a swamp of problems - just like any other software project, really. It is not a silver bullet; and even if it was, that still wouldn't mean that you couldn't shoot yourself in the foot with it.

27 April 2006

        The GNU Hurd project will participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the aegis of the GNU project.

        The following is a list of items you might want to work on. If you want to modify or extend these tasks or have your own ideas what to work on, please feel invited to contact us on the bug-hurd mailing list or the #hurd IRC channel.

                * Make GNU Mach use more up to date device drivers.
                * Work on GNU Mach's IPC / VM system.
                * Design and implement a sound system.
                * Transition the Hurd libraries and servers from cthreads to pthreads.
                * Find and implement a reasonable way to make the Hurd servers use syslog.
                * Design and implement libchannel, a library for streams.
                * Rewrite pfinet, our interface to the IPv4 world.
                * Implement and make the Hurd properly use extended attributes.
                * Design / implement / enhance support for the...
                            o Andrew File System (AFS);
                            o NFS client and NFSd;
                            o EXT3 file system;
                            o Logical Volume Manager (LVM).

        Please see the page GNU guidelines for Summer of Code projects about how to make an application and Summer of Code project ideas list for a list of tasks for various GNU projects and information about about how to submit your own ideas for tasks.

Switch to HURD!!

If only.

The name has a lot to do with it. “Apple” is friendly and inviting. Being a common, house-hold item, it is something people can identify with. On the otherhand, most people I speak to have no idea what a “Microsoft” is. Before you tell me that the latter is more successful than the former, I would submit that Apple have accomplished a lot more in shorter time, pushing new technology faster than anyone else in the industry. But I digress.

What I intended to point out was iTunes and the iPod. I do not need to quote statistics; you no doubt know how wildly successful these products have been. But if Apple Computer had adhered to the earlier ruling and refrained from entering the music business, two things would happen. First, they would either struggle to stay afloat or they would start cutting corners. I think that Apple uses iPod and iTunes to fund new development efforts. Second, portable digital music players would be a few years behind and online music offerings would be either non-existent or of inferior quality.

Again, this is largely based not only on speculation, but personal opinion as well and I apologize for that. However, if we eliminate these variables, I think we can be fairly certain that if Apple had done everthing by the books, we would have fewer products at best and inferior products at worst. Neither of these outcomes is beneficial to you and I. In some way or another, we would be worse off if the law had been obeyed.

I support that statement with other observations of our so-called Intellectual Property system at work. There are companies out there with massive patent portfolios who have absolutely no intention whatsoever of implementing those ideas. If someone comes along and does some actual work, they sue them into the ground. (I am sure you are aware of NTP v RIM.) This ultimately has a chilling effect on the industry which stifles progress.

http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/bugs.html

That way, in the future you'll be less likely to run into such problems.

... but it's real hard to get good speed with your foot caught in this damned Java trap!

Unfortunately for many, Laszlo uses the GPL-incompatible CPL

It is a really nice package, though.

If you don't mind giving your money to low lifes that might be helpful. I personally have not forgiven Amazon for what they did, unlike the FSF. Once a bad apple always a bad apple.

I didn't even read the article, yet I still know that article was argued from the GNU definition of free software, which you can read here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Your statements have nothing to do with this definition.

The article didn't make the point I thought it was going to make, given the title of the post. I thought the article was going to argue that free software needs to be easy to modify in order for it to be truly free.

One of the primary purposes of making software free (as in speech) is to make it possible for users of the software to examine the code and make changes to it. This is nominally possible with all software released under free software licenses, but some pieces of free software are easier to modify than others.

Consider GNU Emacs (or XEmacs). It's designed to be easy for users to modify it. Indeed, it was written in Emacs Lisp partly to make it easier for users to modify it. There is a tutorial to help new Emacs users learn how to write Emacs lisp. There are also websites people use to share their Emacs extensions and to talk about writing Emacs lisp code.

Or take Firefox. Mozilla has set up a website for people to share their Firefox extensions. Mozilla also provides a tutorial explaining how to start writing your own extensions. You don't need to study hundreds of kilobytes of code before you can start writing simple extensions to Firefox or to Emacs.

Isn't a free software project a better free software project if the software is designed in a way that makes extensions easy to write? Or if the developers provide a guide for people who want to write their own extensions? Or if there are wikis or mailing lists for discussion among people who aren't members of the development team but want to tweak the code?

BSD License: RTFL

GNU GPL: RTFL

Here are some other, notable good starts for yourself and your children all of which are much better than what you can get from broadcast TV, which did not work so well:

• Gynaecology
• Flutes
• Nuclear Science
• Box Girder Bridges
• Irrigation
• Sahara Desert
• Medicine

Such things are not so silly anymore, now are they? Every human discovery comes from a dedicated and well educated person or team of people. People can and do all of the above things because they believe they can. The world needs mega tellers to balance it's continuing dissasters.

The problem, exactly, is that SUN only implements its JDK on the platforms it judges as "interesting enough". Running a non-mainstream OS on some non-i386 hardware will always end up with you unable to run any SUN JDK -> simply doesn't exist. Well, Blackdown can help and hacking and going all sort of self-punishment you might end up in getting it to work, but well, compare the number of platforms GCC or Perl run on, and compare the number of platforms supported by SUN JAVA, and well, you'll see that SUN JAVA's portability is purely theorical. Now the usual answer "but nobody does this!". Some vendors, and SUN is no exception, are very smart at knowing what people want, without even asking them. Should you want to do something they didn't plan, you cease to exist.

Now it's perfectly true people have the specs, people are free to implement. Look at the efforts made by GCJ and Classpath and you'll see that even with many talented developpers involved, it's hard to catch up with SUN.

What could SUN benefit? Obviously, get many free software developpers to get interested in Java at all. Many software developped in C++ could have gone the Java way, if there had been a way to run Java programs freely, using the *latest* JDK. For now, people have to beg SUN (and possibly IBM) to port the JDK to this or that platform to get a chance to run their Java 1.5 program on *any* platform. Not to mention the fact that some people care about freedom and the right to know what they are running on their computers...

IMHO, SUN will publish Java under a Free (as in freedom) and/or Open Source licence the day the concurrent implementations (GCJ,Kaffe,Classpath...) will catch up. On that day SUN's JVM will have absolutely no added value but the stamp "this is SUN software" (which is what counts more for many). Think of Motif, it got free the day GTK and Qt/KDE where ahead of it. Same for OpenSolaris which comes at a time the Linux kernel is pretty advanced in term of features and is obviously (even if not technically fully equivalent) taking significant market shares so that, well, Solaris is dead.

Sun will "Open Source" Java the day it's dead, because another "Open Source" project took the lead. So if SUN ever publishes a free software JDK, you could interpret this as a signal that means something like "GCJ+Classpath is ready for production use".

The problem, exactly, is that SUN only implements its JDK on the platforms it judges as "interesting enough". Running a non-mainstream OS on some non-i386 hardware will always end up with you unable to run any SUN JDK -> simply doesn't exist. Well, Blackdown can help and hacking and going all sort of self-punishment you might end up in getting it to work, but well, compare the number of platforms GCC or Perl run on, and compare the number of platforms supported by SUN JAVA, and well, you'll see that SUN JAVA's portability is purely theorical. Now the usual answer "but nobody does this!". Some vendors, and SUN is no exception, are very smart at knowing what people want, without even asking them. Should you want to do something they didn't plan, you cease to exist.

Now it's perfectly true people have the specs, people are free to implement. Look at the efforts made by GCJ and Classpath and you'll see that even with many talented developpers involved, it's hard to catch up with SUN.

What could SUN benefit? Obviously, get many free software developpers to get interested in Java at all. Many software developped in C++ could have gone the Java way, if there had been a way to run Java programs freely, using the *latest* JDK. For now, people have to beg SUN (and possibly IBM) to port the JDK to this or that platform to get a chance to run their Java 1.5 program on *any* platform. Not to mention the fact that some people care about freedom and the right to know what they are running on their computers...

IMHO, SUN will publish Java under a Free (as in freedom) and/or Open Source licence the day the concurrent implementations (GCJ,Kaffe,Classpath...) will catch up. On that day SUN's JVM will have absolutely no added value but the stamp "this is SUN software" (which is what counts more for many). Think of Motif, it got free the day GTK and Qt/KDE where ahead of it. Same for OpenSolaris which comes at a time the Linux kernel is pretty advanced in term of features and is obviously (even if not technically fully equivalent) taking significant market shares so that, well, Solaris is dead.

Sun will "Open Source" Java the day it's dead, because another "Open Source" project took the lead. So if SUN ever publishes a free software JDK, you could interpret this as a signal that means something like "GCJ+Classpath is ready for production use".

...making a GPL'd program that uses a picture of Stallman and merges a gif...

All your answers here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

All your answers here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

RMS argues that he's mainly concerned with Free as in Freedom, not at no cost.

I see no philisophical argment against selling signatures or photo-ops.

Poster sayeth:

yet charging for software is wrong, wrong, wrong.

You ought to read the GPL. You can charge whatever price you want for any GPL'd software. That's one of the freedoms. You're also free to dual-license it if you're the creator - another freedom. It works for Trolltech (Qt), MySQL, etc.

GPL:

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)

He've been doing it for some time. As soon as Free Software, Free Society hit the shelves you could order a signed copy and in fact, I did. That way you support the FSF and you get something neet in return. Remember kids, members of the FSF get, among other things, a 20% discount on all GNU Merchandise. That include the impressive GNU Age t-shirt! So waste no time and join the FSF as an Associate Member so I can get my voice mail message by Richard Stallman.

Can be found by clicking here.

no offence, but Scheme is not an easy language for your average teenager to pick up.

Yes, I know Scheme isn't the easiest to pick up. That's why I had originally envisioned a "visual" programming interface for GNU Robots, one where you could create a robot program by dropping into place icons that represent the robot's actions. There would be one icon to tell the robot to move forward, another to have him turn to the left or right, and another to have him pick up things or fire his little gun.

A visual programming interface would help teach/reinforce the concepts of programming without making you get into the dirty details. As you become more comfortable with programming concepts, you can look at the generated Scheme source code and modify it on your own. We were planning to use tail-recursion, so it shouldn't have been too difficult to pick up, if you know what your robot is already supposed to do (and you should, since you created the robot.)

it's your lucky day. rtorrent is written around a very nice C++ library (hence the site name), so you can even hack your own client pretty easily if you don't like that one. and it's really easy on the resources a vast improvement over all the python crazyness (i won't even mention azureus' java `magic'). highly recommended for console junkies. combine that with screen and you have yourself a fucking textual party. also for quick and dirty jobs i've had good experiences with ctorrent.

disclaimer: yes i am a rtorrent fanboi, but on Windows uTorrent remains king.

In part, Azureus and the BitTorrent programs are attractive because they are free software—users are free to run, share, and modify the software. By contrast, uTorrent is non-free software—users can't be sure what they're really running because they can't inspect the program or get others they trust to inspect the software for them. If uTorrent doesn't do what a user wants, changes are difficult to implement (if not effectively impossible) and are not legally allowed besides. Don't think about helping your community by improving uTorrent and distributing the improved version, users can't legally do that either. Despite these restrictions, the uTorrent refers to the situation uTorrent users face as "support" in the uTorrent FAQ which frames the issue not from the perspective that users deserve software freedom, but the more narrow developmental goals of the Open Source movement which merely shrugs slightly disappointedly at proprietary software.

Apparently it takes so little to get some to give up their software freedom, even in circumstances where there are perfectly capable free software programs to do the same job.

The project has been idle for a while now, but GNU Robots is a great way to introduce kids to the basic of programming. You have a little robot that you can set loose in a maze to explore, pick up prizes, eat energy pellets, and shoot little baddies. To "teach" your robot what to do, you have to write a program in Scheme. It doesn't need to be a difficult program - and we were working on a GUI-environment where you could use "logic blocks" to "build" a program (for example, a block for "move forward" could be wired to another block for "scan the space in front of me".)

Disclaimer: I am the original author of this program, although I haven't worked on it since 2000.

It's an operating system.

With drivers.

And GUI.

And emacs. ;)

Richard Stallman encourages seeking payment for software.

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer''.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes......

Stallman's philosophy stands in opposition to unbundling the various legal rights: Sell or don't sell. One or the other. Don't try to join the rentier class by selling a limited licence. Charge a fee for a service, like a doctor or a lawyer.

It is not that hard to grasp that Stallman encourages people to charge money for software. Other worldly Buddhist monks can reject the GNU GPL because it permits resale. I expect posters on slashdot to have at least this minimum grasp of the financial side of software licensing.

Is this a new attempt at including Digital Restrictions Management in Linux? I've read posts on here that have discussed the DRM inclusions in GNOME's GStreamer. Could KDE be next? Real, Fluendo, and other copyright trolls are a threat to watch out for, similar to the looming threat of binary kernel modules. We as Linux users must be on guard against the copyright mafia's incessant attempts to neuter our computers.

Bullshit. It wasn't true when RMS wrote the GNU Manifesto, and it isn't true now.

since it would all be freely available.

Again, that is a steaming pile of non sequitur crap. Reality dictates that people are paid to work on free software. Deal with it.

Bullshit. It wasn't true when RMS wrote the GNU Manifesto, and it isn't true now.

since it would all be freely available.

Again, that is a steaming pile of non sequitur crap. Reality dictates that people are paid to work on free software. Deal with it.

Also, for what it's worth:

The Cleversafe devs internally use the Windows binaries quite a bit (our current build process uses the CodeBlocks IDE--see the CodeBlocks project/.cbp file in the repo; we haven't yet totally ported the gnu-make-based process to mingw/msys yet, in part due to problems with mingw/msys gnu make); we might even have more test-usage history with the Windows client than we do the Linux client.

However, the reason we chose not to release the Windows binary had little to do with the technical issues, and much more to do with legal ones. Our open-source project is released under the GPL v2. The code uses OpenSSL and Xerces-C (and XML parser) libraries. We can not distributed neither OpenSSL nor Xerces-C source or binaries in our binary or source distributions because their respective licenses are GPL incompatible, even though we can distribute them separately (although our current windows-mingw builds statically link openssl libs in the the executable, which is an additional hurdle to overcome). The packaging and installation for Windows binaries made it more difficult to handle this separate then it did on the Linux (and other future Unix/BSD systems), so we just decided to get the release out there sooner rather then later and not wait for our Windows package/installation management to get done.

Bottom line: we are fully "plugged in" to Windows systems, and you should see a Windows binary release in the near future.

-Matt

i hold notepad in the highest regard as a text editor

ACK
Notepad is terrible!!! I mean:

• No syntax hilight
• No completion
• Size limitations
• No line/column numbers
• No code folding
• No incremental search
• And the worst: it has bugs!! Even simple as it is!!

Use emacs, gedit, kate, or even notepad+ for a while and you will never use notepad again!

GNU/Linux distributions are based on the Linux kernel. BSD distributions are based on the BSD kernel. For completeness, GNU/Hurd distributions are based on the GNU Hurd kernel.

Even though you mentioned terrorism as (half?)-joke, a fast FFT processor would probably be regualated by the govt., what that would mean is that people could just program in software a soffisticated and fast signal decoder that would normally cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy as hardware. In a second it could all be reprogrammed into something else. So imagine having a police scanner, an HDTV, FM radio, etc etc all in just a laptop with some kind of a simple RF antenna input and amplifier. That would be quite insane -- decoding algorithms could just be downloaded from the Internet. Check out the GNU Radio project here here

A fast FFT processor, for example, would make the life easier for a lot of Photoshop filters users (with the help of special drivers and plugins), it would also help the GNU Radio quite a bit, as well as other multimedia/signal/data processing applications.