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Note that in the case of Vorbis Stallman actually endorsed the BSD license

It's actually part of their general policy. For implementing things like reference implementations of unencumbered protocols and file formats, they recommend a permissive license to aid adoption:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/li...

Right now, if I had to choose to go without my home PC (actually macbook, haven't owned a desktop PC in a decade) or without my phone, I wouldn't even have to think about it; keep the phone. For work, for any type of content creation, I want a keyboard, mouse, and full size screen. But for consumption, mobile devices are ideal.

The implicit connotations of the term "content consumption" make me feel uneasy. I prefer "creating works" and "viewing works created by others". Now with that out of the way:

Having to choose between a PC and a phone, one or the other, discourages people from even attempting to create works. In fact, if someone is unable to create works for long enough, the situation frames his thoughts into a sort of Stockholm syndrome where he wouldn't even conceive of attempting to create works and becomes more willing to accept restrictions on creating works. That's why for now I carry a small laptop and a flip phone.

We need accountability and prevention. Accountability should come in the form of corporate death penalties (as in the corporation's assets are seized to pay debts and the corporation no longer exists), and prevention in the form of publishing complete corresponding source code to all cars sold in the US as a part of the car. When you buy a car, you should own the car including all software installed on that car. Other countries would be wise to follow suit to protect their citizens and the environment from apparently malevolent multi-year fraudsters who wish to dodge ecological regulations.

The Free Software Foundation was right: all published software must be free. But since this situation highlights how fraud and abuse can be hidden in nonfree software, we can defend ourselves from this with strongly copylefted free software (right now that means AGPL v3 or later). I don't want anyone taking any car in for any work and coming out with nonfree software thus reintroducing this problem. You cannot have safe computer software without software freedom. And a strong copylefted free software license plus multiple freedom-minded contributors who are willing to pursue lawsuits will help defend against proprietary derivatives (as such legal work has done for the Linux kernel). As I said in the recent VW thread on this: I don't care about upstream copyright excuses should VW claim to have built their software on nonfree upstream code. Our individual and collective safety is far too important. This, like virtually everything else we do, is a matter of political will to do the right and just thing.

When people come around to seeing how an increasing dependence on computers (namely, putting computers in everything) means risking our lives, our civil liberties, our health, our freedom to move without being tracked, and more, we can easily justify pushing for more strongly copylefted free software.

I read the "single line of code" editorial as a distraction away from what matters: accountability and prevention.

Accountability can come in the form of lawsuits from affected car owners and those who can show the subsequent environmental harm caused a problem for them. Letting VW negotiate its own fate is ridiculous and, if the government's action with GM is any guide, unlikely to result in more than a slap of the wrist.

Prevention must also be dealt with, and strongly copylefted free software licenses will help here. Whether this was the result of a mistake (VW's years-long negligence) or planning (VW's years-long fraudulence) is a detail as far as prevention goes because either way VW should be freeing the complete source code to the cars and providing complete specifications for any code it cannot provide so as to allow the easiest possible reverse engineering. Any cost of purchasing code for freeing should be borne by VW.

VW is not in a position to dicker here. I don't buy the excuse of uncooperative upstream providers VW depends on for their code and the public shouldn't either. The stakes (our health) are too high to settle for less than complete corresponding source code under a strong copylefted license so that any published improvements are also free. Keep in mind, this is code car owners should have had from day 1 under a free license so they can fully own their own cars, taking code to experts they trust just like many take their car mechanisms to garages they trust to get fixed. Trusting the market got us where we are now, the market apparently will not grant us the freedom to let us help ourselves and our air-breathing neighbors by fixing the defective VW cars already out there since 2009 (over 480,000 of them). Not buying VW reaches the same conclusion. Not recognizing software freedom for its own sake and the preservation of that protection in copyleft will increasingly become a matter of life and death as we entrust more of our daily functions to software.

I read the "single line of code" editorial as a distraction away from what matters: accountability and prevention.

Accountability can come in the form of lawsuits from affected car owners and those who can show the subsequent environmental harm caused a problem for them. Letting VW negotiate its own fate is ridiculous and, if the government's action with GM is any guide, unlikely to result in more than a slap of the wrist.

Prevention must also be dealt with, and strongly copylefted free software licenses will help here. Whether this was the result of a mistake (VW's years-long negligence) or planning (VW's years-long fraudulence) is a detail as far as prevention goes because either way VW should be freeing the complete source code to the cars and providing complete specifications for any code it cannot provide so as to allow the easiest possible reverse engineering. Any cost of purchasing code for freeing should be borne by VW.

VW is not in a position to dicker here. I don't buy the excuse of uncooperative upstream providers VW depends on for their code and the public shouldn't either. The stakes (our health) are too high to settle for less than complete corresponding source code under a strong copylefted license so that any published improvements are also free. Keep in mind, this is code car owners should have had from day 1 under a free license so they can fully own their own cars, taking code to experts they trust just like many take their car mechanisms to garages they trust to get fixed. Trusting the market got us where we are now, the market apparently will not grant us the freedom to let us help ourselves and our air-breathing neighbors by fixing the defective VW cars already out there since 2009 (over 480,000 of them). Not buying VW reaches the same conclusion. Not recognizing software freedom for its own sake and the preservation of that protection in copyleft will increasingly become a matter of life and death as we entrust more of our daily functions to software.

Text mode Tetris

I wonder how long until The Tetris Company uses its 2012 legal victory over Xio Software to go after Free Software Foundation for including M-x tetris in Emacs. Tetris co-founder Alexey Pajitnov is an out enemy of free software.

There is NOTHING in the GPL (v1, v2 nor v3, nor any sub license alternative) that says the source code has to compile or that an executable be supplied with source code to use the GPL. The quote you reference (and I read it too, I've read the GPL numerous times!) states that if you DO supply a binary, i.e., "executable work", you must also supply all the source files including compiler scripts used for that binary when you distribute under the GPL. There is nothing in the GPL that says the code has to be executable, has to function correctly, nor has to compile from what you distribute under the GPL. The GPL is a copyright license, not a consumer protection law. It just states that if you code it, the source is made available to anyone that wants to use it or modify it, and that the modifications stay under the ascribed GPL license. That's all, nothing else, thank you for playing. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Here's some more info for you.

And since you're obviously too lazy to bother to follow links to find information on the web, here:

I use public key cryptography to sign my code to assure its authenticity. Is it true that GPLv3 forces me to release my private signing keys?
(#GiveUpKeys)
No. The only time you would be required to release signing keys is if you conveyed GPLed software inside a User Product, and its hardware checked the software for a valid cryptographic signature before it would function. In that specific case, you would be required to provide anyone who owned the device, on demand, with the key to sign and install modified software on his device so that it will run. If each instance of the device uses a different key, then you need only give each purchaser the key for his instance.

That being said... If you're downloading stuff you shouldn't be, why are you complaining?

I know to avoid The Pirate Bay and similar sites that flagrantly disregard copyright. But not all sites are quite as obviously infringing as those, and I don't see how a non-lawyer can precisely determine what he should and shouldn't be downloading. When people purchased a download of the song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams from Amazon, Google, or iTunes, how could they know they were downloading a song that turned out to be infringing (Gaye v. Thicke)? And how can someone downloading a copy of Emacs tell whether the M-x tetris function in Emacs infringes the copyright in Tetris ? And is Nintendo planning to go after users of RomHacking.net, which contains a commentary on the program of Super Mario Bros. ?

Or in practice, does an end user have little to worry about when visiting sites that aren't bright-line infringers?

What other "operating system businesses"?

I was primarily referring to Canonical Ltd., which maintains the Ubuntu operating system.

Later on you refer to binary incompatibility for proprietary applications among different distributions of X11/Linux. This is something that Valve has been trying to solve with Steam Runtime.

There are ways other than hibernating the OS to save state:

• Firefox: Edit -> Preferences -> General, When Firefox starts: Show my windows and tabs from last time
• Emacs desktop save mode
• Edits not ready to commit (or save, huh?), you have various things like git stash or branches, or screen if you're working on a remote workstation.

AC is referring to the printer driver kerfuffle that kicked off the GNU project. Not being privy to its details, I can only guess.

My first guess is that a modified driver might operate the printer in a reduced functionality mode until the printer can be repaired. It's like inkjet printers whose official driver can't print black if the color cartridge is missing or empty. The official driver needs to spray yellow dots over the paper to make counterfeit currency trackable, but a modified driver would just ignore the color cartridge.

My second guess is that a modified driver could be made to work on a different operating system, allowing this printer to temporarily replace a broken printer connected to another system that is out for repairs.

And the official GNU Norton Commander* clone: https://www.gnu.org/software/g...

Of course, with Emacs keybindings (Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C to exit)

* Total Commander is a Norton Commander clone.

Stallman has no problem with binary blobs as long as they cannot be updated without the user's consent, and as long as they cannot be used to abuse the user, e.g., by providing a backdoor or otherwise altering the rest of the system. In his own words:

The phone network firmware comes preinstalled. If all it did was sit there and talk to the phone network when you wish, we could regard it as equivalent to a circuit. When we insist that the software in a computing device must be free, we can overlook preinstalled firmware that will never be upgraded, because it makes no difference to the user that it's a program rather than a circuit.

Unfortunately, in this case it would be a malicious circuit. Malicious features are unacceptable no matter how they are implemented.

On most Android devices, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some, perhaps all, models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware to overwrite the rest of the software in the device. The point of free software is that we have control of our software and our computing; a system with a back door doesn't qualify. While any computing system might have bugs, these devices can be bugs. (Craig Murray, in Murder in Samarkand, relates his involvement in an intelligence operation that remotely converted an unsuspecting target's non-Android portable phone into a listening device.)

In any case, the phone network firmware in an Android phone is not equivalent to a circuit, because the hardware allows installation of new versions and this is actually done. Since it is proprietary firmware, in practice only the manufacturer can make new versions—users can't.

Putting these points together, we can tolerate nonfree phone network firmware provided new versions of it won't be loaded, it can't take control of the main computer, and it can only communicate when and as the free operating system chooses to let it communicate. In other words, it has to be equivalent to circuitry, and that circuitry must not be malicious. There is no technical obstacle to building an Android phone which has these characteristics, but we don't know of any.

He's wrong, though. There is a technical obstacle to creating an Android phone with his desired characteristics: THERE'S NO MONEY TO DO IT; as said before, it's a damn shame Stallman never created a viable business to fund his ideas. Instead, he has always relied on fools who don't comprehend what he's saying.

I think we all agree that attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them should be prosecuted.
Please don't confound copyright infringement with piracy.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy

I thought systemd was the new emacs???

Systemd might be a rewrite of emacs from the ground up.
They just haven't gotten to the text editor and mail client parts quite yet.

It's actually more like the HURD. Except that the HURD seems to be designed somewhat coherently and works with its various daemons being decidedly less privileged and decidedly better modularized.

Maybe the idea is to infest the Linux universe so thoroughly that people will finally move over to the HURD when GNU/Linux becomes unmaintainable.

Bug in Wget passes user's real IP even with proxy use (such as Tor/TAILS)

"Just FYI, it appears there is a bug in wget while using a proxy that allows wget to be forced to use the FTP port and thereby unmask the user's IP (normal usage) or at least leak the user's network adapter IP (in TAILS)."

- Comment @ Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/c...
https://archive.is/3YYo0

- Original discovery of bug @ lists.gnu.org:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/...
https://archive.is/Ah3Pg

- Reported to TAILS project development list (tails-dev):
https://mailman.boum.org/piper...
https://archive.is/nPi5h

- First response @ tails-dev
https://mailman.boum.org/piper...
https://archive.is/derHC

- Wget: What is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes, I think that's the important point: cheap and more convenient taxis reduce drink driving. Increasing the number of taxis is also a way to boost employment, and it specifically boosts employment for people without diplomas and with a good-but-not-perfect level of the local language, which is a group with a higher risk of becoming long term unemployed.

Uber, in its current form, is problematic, but it has at least proven something.

(I don't use Uber. It requires an app that isn't free software and has all the usual privacy problems that come with modern non-free software. But I would like to see drink driving reduced.)

It does happen, although I'm not sure it happens with Ubuntu server. Canonical does allow you to turn it off, but I have no idea how hard it is to do so.

Citation

Notepad++ is pretty nice, but it does not hold a candle to several of the Linux based text editors.
For instance:
kate http://kate-editor.org/
gedit https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Ge...
vim http://www.vim.org/
emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/e...

Like I said, Notepad++ is a good editor, and I use it myself when forced to use Windows, but it does not compare to what is offered in Linux. Also, most things in Linux are well documented. Sadly there are some things that are not, but practically nothing I have ever needed documentation for in Windows has had decent documentation.

Renderman is still proprietary, it just costs nothing for a non-commercial licence. Not free software at all.

When people talk of distributing software (selling, transferring, giving away, etc) they are talking about a software license, not ownership of the software itself. Even in the case of the FSF's idea of free software it is still a license to the software. It is free in the most common sense of the word: 'free entry' or 'free movie rental'. Nobody interprets that in terms of 'freedom' so maybe to be more clear you should define it to be 'freedom' software. I know you think it to be appropriate to use it as though it is 'free of restriction' however this is untrue which is precisely the reason it is still licensed, you dont own it because it still enforces restrictions (what they are is irrelevant).

I'm pretty sure that's what the AGPL is for.

It sure is nice for you that you can make billions of dollars by exploiting a Linux kernel made for free by volunteers and rebrand it Android

Nothing wrong with making money from free software. And so long as the changes are contributed back Linus himself is in favor of Tivoization with respect to the Linux kernel.

but where's my Bash shell, Google?

Right here.

Why do you have to use Free Software to deny me my Freedom, Google? Hey!! FUCK YOU, Google.

Here is your freedom, go nuts.

https://igurublog.wordpress.co...
http://techrights.org/2015/06/...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...

When we call software "free", we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of "free speech", not "free beer".

"K&R C worked great, the source was available and it was available on most of the mainstream platforms and took off on PCs"
c did not take off on the PC for a while and when it did it was Turbo C that was the first really popular compiler.
Sorry but when you are specing anything a government project you really needed to have a hard spec and not one bases on a book by two guys at AT&T. Also the source to c was not open you had to pay AT&T for it. At the time Ada seemed like a great idea since the DOD had software projects in over 100 different languages. Just as most companies will have requirements to use x language for a projects and even coding standards it is logical that the DOD would do the same. The Ada requirement was limited to mission critical systems. You did not have to write every word processor or spreadsheet in Ada for the DOD. If you where writing weapons control software for a 688 class sub then yes.
BTW even today Ada meets your original requirements It is open and it is still widely used. You can get a free Ada compiler http://www.gnu.org/software/gn...

You seem to think that granting additional freedoms conditional on preserving them to others is a restriction merely because it is not unconditional, or because it is less that you hoped.

You are intent on arguing a strawman, probably because your argument falls apart otherwise. Again, I'm discussing the Free Software Definition irrespective of copyright law, whereas you are talking about the GPL in a state of copyright law.

If it is a strawman, you provided it. it shouldn't be this hard to find out what you are arguing.

You were actually discussing the conditional transference of a car that was your property.

I explicitly linked to the Free Software Definition in my first post. The discussion of the car analogy is in that context.

You certainly failed to make it clear what you were arguing, and your car analogy did not help.

Rubbish, copyright was being excercised to his detriment, not undermined

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...

An excerpt:

"The bullying of the copyright industry in Sweden inspired the launch of the first political party whose platform is to reduce copyright restrictions: the Pirate Party. Its platform includes the prohibition of Digital Restrictions Management, legalization of noncommercial sharing of published works, and shortening of copyright for commercial use to a five-year period. Five years after publication, any published work would go into the public domain.

I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software. I'm sure that they did not intend to hurt free software, but that's what would happen.

The GNU General Public License and other copyleft licenses use copyright law to defend freedom for every user. The GPL permits everyone to publish modified works, but only under the same license. Redistribution of the unmodified work must also preserve the license. And all redistributors must give users access to the software's source code."

In my remark about copyright working to his detriment, I thought you were talking about his original proposals behind the GPL and FSF based on the Xerox printer incident.

But certainly in your extract here, he is not arguing for any particular laws or losses of freedom, only stating the conditions required to preserve freedom for all people. He even states that he supports these changes in general. I don't know how that could lead you to argue that he is dishonest and in fact wanting less freedom!

You seem to think that granting additional freedoms conditional on preserving them to others is a restriction merely because it is not unconditional, or because it is less that you hoped.

You are intent on arguing a strawman, probably because your argument falls apart otherwise. Again, I'm discussing the Free Software Definition irrespective of copyright law, whereas you are talking about the GPL in a state of copyright law.

You were actually discussing the conditional transference of a car that was your property.

I explicitly linked to the Free Software Definition in my first post. The discussion of the car analogy is in that context.

Rubbish, copyright was being excercised to his detriment, not undermined

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...

An excerpt:

"The bullying of the copyright industry in Sweden inspired the launch of the first political party whose platform is to reduce copyright restrictions: the Pirate Party. Its platform includes the prohibition of Digital Restrictions Management, legalization of noncommercial sharing of published works, and shortening of copyright for commercial use to a five-year period. Five years after publication, any published work would go into the public domain.

I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software. I'm sure that they did not intend to hurt free software, but that's what would happen.

The GNU General Public License and other copyleft licenses use copyright law to defend freedom for every user. The GPL permits everyone to publish modified works, but only under the same license. Redistribution of the unmodified work must also preserve the license. And all redistributors must give users access to the software's source code."

You must be new around here. Free as in the four freedoms.

"Free" as in speech.

Programs and services are different kinds of entities. A program is a work that you can execute; a service is an activity that you might interact with.

> Regarding FOSS, what message(s) is/are the most vital

Asking rms about "FOSS" is likely to result in his explanation about the different focuses of the "Free Software" movement (freedom) and the "Open Source" movement (technical advantages). rms is not an open source advocate; he is a free software activist. Best to ask him about the importance of free software rather than the watered-down "FOSS". He's against the open source folks, and the middle two letters of FOSS spell out open source right there. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html, including the section "FLOSS and FOSS".

Do you feel that creators of web applications should be obliged to make their source code available?

Yes, web applications should be free. You are a bad person if you are employed as a web application developer AND that the published web app doesn't adequately respect the users' freedom.

Do you feel that creators of web applications should be obliged to make their source code available?

Yes, web applications should be free. You are a bad person if you are employed as a web application developer AND that the published web app doesn't adequately respect the users' freedom.

Do you feel that creators of web applications should be obliged to make their source code available?

Yes, web applications should be free. You are a bad person if you are employed as a web application developer AND that the published web app doesn't adequately respect the users' freedom.

You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the /. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the /. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.

You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the /. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the /. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.

You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the /. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the /. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.

The The Free Software Definition states as one of the "four essential freedoms": "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this." (bold mine)

Let's say I gave somebody a car out of charity, but I didn't give them the owner's manual. Are they now less free because they will have a harder time fixing the car than before I gave them the car? If I was compelled to give the person the owner's manual with the car, or not give the car at all, am I not less free?

My point is this. The Free Software Definition conflates freedom with capability, and does so at the cost of what freedom really means. It's nice for propaganda purposes, but it's Orwellian in nature.

It could be argued honestly that in the name of consumer protection we limit freedoms for the greater good, such as requiring a list of ingredients in packaged food. However, it would be dishonest to argue for such laws in the name of "freedom".

I know you don't like Software as a Service: article

However, there are some web applications that really only work as a web application. Slashdot is an example of this.

Do you feel that creators of web applications should be obliged to make their source code available?

Also, if I am employed as web application developer, am I a bad person?

"Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" by Richard Stallman: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

I found your piece on selling free software to be pretty logical on paper. However, has it ever worked in the wild? Can you name companies or revenues that currently operate on this idea (and I'm not talking about services or support of the software)? I simply can't come up with a widely used monetized piece of software licensed under the GNU GPL whereby the original software was sold at a single price and shipped with the source code -- free for the original purchaser to distribute by the license's clauses. Can you list any revenue generation from that? I must admit I'm not exactly enamored with paying for free software (as in your definition of free) before it's written yet I cannot think of any other way this would fairly compensate the developer.

I'll try to buck the trend here by skipping the derision and offering constructive advice. ;-)

A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.

In this case, the closest match I can come up with off the top of my head is to apply the Microsoft Reference Source License to the source code.

This is not a Free/Libre or Open source license, because the constraints you are looking for are in direct conflict with the Open Source Definition, clauses 1 and 3; the Copyfree Standard Definition, clauses 1 and 3; and the Free Software Definition, freedoms 2 and 3.

Do you expect that if you were to permit redistribution of the core and modifications to it that others in the community would completely take over the project and continue its development without your business's involvement (a 'fork', in development jargon)? That would be the primary reason I can think of for such a restriction.

But GPL means,"If you use my stuff, you can't charge for your stuff

I could explain everything that's false about that statement, but I'll let the FSF explain in the essay titled "Selling Free Software".

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

You must feel so smart listing all those UNIX operating systems. You know so many!

The GPL is fine if it accomplishes what you want in a license, but really,
there isn't anything particularly good about the GPL. It isn't bad (usually),
it just isn't that great. And it's definitely overrated.

It doesn't prevent proprietary forks.

It violates KISS, a cherished engineering principle. Licensing is complicated
and technical (from a legal standpoint), but at least licenses like the BSD and
MIT can be read and understood quickly by laypersons.

The GPL is wrought with complicated incompatibilities with other reasonable
open source licenses and with other versions of itself. In this case, the GPL
really is kind of bad.

It tries to solve a problem that doesn't really exist; many companies actively
contribute to non-copyleft projects without needing a mandate from RMS.

It doesn't even support the ideals of the Four Freedoms any better than other
licenses. A company that owns the copyright of a GPL project can make it
closed-source just as easily as if it had any other license, and a non-GPL
project can be forked just as easily as a GPL project if that happens.

The GPL often gets credit for the success of a few great open source projects,
especially the Linux kernel. However, the role of the GPL in those projects'
success is far from clear, and it certainly discounts those projects; the
kernel really is a quality project regardless of licensing terms. It could
also be said that those projects were successful despite the GPL. It
would be difficult to prove either way.

I'm glad for RMS. He has done a lot of good with GNU software, especially
GCC. The GPL just really isn't one of his better accomplishments.

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

Besides devKitARM, there is the collection of toolchains mentioned here. I am getting most of my clues from the Emcraft toolchain, which is the only one for the SmartFusion. And we're great friends with Emcraft, but I want something a bit newer and a different build-tree style.

My last approach to the libstdc++ mailing list, here, was left unanswered. I figured out the problem behind that one, but it would have been nice to get some advice.

Autoconf doesn't have a --synclines flag, but I might be able to pass it in the M4 environment variable. I'll give it a try.

Perhaps you could demonstrate the difficulty of building a cross-GCC by phrasing your rant in the form of a good Stack Overflow question. Explain what you are trying to do, what web search queries you used, what you tried, what you expected, and what each failure looked like. If they are in fact "beginner problems", getting the question onto SO should eventually help future web searchers find the answer more easily. Or if Stack Overflow scares you, you might try looking at how it was done in devkitARM.

For line numbers in an M4 script, have you tried adding --synclines ?

If error messages from some compiler or interpreter are unhelpful, have you tried filing bugs against said compiler or interpreter to improve the usefulness of its error messages?

Ugh. Visual Studio 2015 requires Windows 8.1. No thanks.

* https://www.visualstudio.com/e...

Here is the list of bugs fixed in

* GCC 5.2 compiler issues
* MSVC 2015 compiler issues

Additional MSVC 2015 bug fixes ...

* MSVC 2015 Features
* MSVC 2015 (C++11/14/17)
* MSVC 2015 STL part 1
* MSVC 2015 STL part 2

It goes further than that. It's the difference between "free" (as in speech) and "free" (as in beer). Its been increasingly the case that you don't own software you paid for, you merely license it.

That's the same with Free Software, it is licensed to you.

At least with Linux you are free to do whatever you want with it.

Within the terms of the Gnu Public License v2.0.

It goes further than that. It's the difference between "free" (as in speech) and "free" (as in beer). Its been increasingly the case that you don't own software you paid for, you merely license it.

That's the same with Free Software, it is licensed to you.

At least with Linux you are free to do whatever you want with it.

Within the terms of the Gnu Public License v2.0.

I'm not encouraged when I see "x86 GCC 2".

x86?! Jesus Christ, that platform was obsolete back in 2005! We've had x86-64 for well over a decade now, and it has been the standard even for shitty consumer-grade hardware for just about as long.

GCC 2?! That's even worse than x86! My God, the latest release of GCC 2 was on March 16, 2001! GCC 2.0 was first released on February 22, 1992! Even GCC 3, which has long been considered obsolete, saw its latest release almost a decade ago, on March 06, 2006. GCC 5 was released earlier this year.

I know you'll give "compatibility" as the justification for why it's still targeting a long-obsolete platform, and using a long-obsolete compiler system. But that's just a failed excuse at this point.

If Haiku is to be a relevant operating system in 2015, then it needs to get its shit together. It needs to target the CPU architecture that has been in use for the past decade. It needs to use a compiler system released this century. This "x86 GCC 2" bullshit needs to end. We need to see "x86-64 GCC 5" or even "x86-64 LLVM/Clang".

Well, fine, take the 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... or the 64-bit 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... They just won't be able to run BeOS binaries, as the ABI changed from gcc 2 to gcc 4. I'm sure 5.0 binaries will come eventually, but gcc 5 is relatively new, so it will take some time, as new gcc releases have and cause tons of bugs.