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Changes at http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html.

Changelog here

      http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/w wwdocs/htdocs/gcc-4.1/changes.html?rev=1.10&conten t-type=text/html

Google to the rescue.

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html

I stopped reading when it was obvious that the whole argument rested on ingorance of the fact that F/OSS licenses/agreements do not take away copyrights.

It's time to destroy the concept of "Intelectual Property" as there really is no such thing, it's an oxymoron in disguise. Stallman at his best:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml

Thanks to whoever linked this originally here at Slashdot (I don't remember who you were).

Btw I have an alternative headline for the newsitem: "How dinosaurs think" :)

As I see it the people trying to use and defend the concept of "IP" in reality only have two choices (unless they just give up):
1. Continue the path they're on and cause a massive backlash that weakens any kind of regard for copyright, patents or trademarks (what we've seen so far is just the beginning unless they stop it)
2. Moderate themselves a lot so as to establish some sort of credibility for the original deals; about 20 years for a copyright, only physical patents (no abstract ideas, no business methods, no code be it biological, software, or similar), trademarks as idenfication rather than advertising/competition

They lost the fight for their vision of a "IP" future years ago, perhaps even a decade or more, but it's only slowly getting visible. It doesn't matter what laws are passed and so on, what matters is how people act and what they do: to look at the future look at the kids, it's obvious where this is all heading if they continue they way they do: the dinosaurs will make themselves extinct.

In my opinion, if it is necessary to have a term to refer to the trademark, copyright, and patent laws, Intellectual Restrictions (IR) would be more accurate.

It's a dangerous and historically a big mistake when people start treating property ownership less as a right and more as a "favor" granted by government.

"Intellectual Property" is not property.

Is it a dangerous and historically a big mistake when people start treating copyright, trademarks, trade secrets and patents less as a right and more as a "favor" granted by government? What utter tosh!

Personally, I prefer GPL because copyright exists and so, in order to protect the freedom of our code from copyright itself (being relicensed to not so free licenses), we need the GPL. If copyright didn't exist, we would not need the GPL at all, either. This is not just what I think, but the GNU/FSF, where the GPL is from, seems to think the same.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html

i'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank

...and then going home and using GNUnet

I may be a nerd, but I like to think of my page design as "clean" and "fast-loading", thank you very much.

Hang on, you're saying you believe that you would trust a FSF or OSDL-funded study to be impartial? You're saying that if the FSF funded a study comparing GNU to Windows, and the study came back saying "Windows saves you money in the long term, and Microsoft's Shared Source is as good as Free Software for 99% of users", that the FSF would then be happy to publish that study?

The FSF would never commision such a study. Their position is simply that users of software should have certain rights, not that certain licensing models "save you money in the long term." The study you mention would be more likely to come from the OSI.

Nuance's (formerly Scansoft) Omnipage

and then a number of smaller players like SimpleOCR

In the open source world, some places to start looking are:

GOCR

and GNU's OCRAD

Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.

BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.

Huh? The first 26 licences listed here (not including the GPL, LGPL, or public domain) are all GPL compatible! Probably the three most common OSS licences (GPL, LGPL, and BSD) are compatible.

That's quite a list.

I have to wonder what Sun is thinking just ignoring the conflict between their CDDL and the GPL.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

Does RedHat has some kind of magic wand that makes all of the license problems go away? Is there a way around the issue I'm not aware of?

I'm interested in knowing how this would be feasible.

Sherman is wrong. There's an enormous difference between a security hole in DRM software and standard software: normally, any software I install on my machine is running with my permission and knowledge, performing a function that I chose and doing it for my benefit. Sony were trying to get their code onto end users' computers without those users understanding exactly what is was doing, and naturally the software functioned entirely for the benefit of Sony and not the users.

Richard Stallman clearly explained the problem and explained all the issues that Sherman doesn't want us to think about in an essay called Can you trust your computer?. If Stallman had the marketing clout of the RIAA's members and vice versa, I suspect we wouldn't be in this situation today.

Personally I respect the contributions of RMS very much and appreciate that if in 1983 he did not apply his endeavour towards what he believed[1] is right, I would not have the OS I am typing this comment on.
His vision of a free operating system has been realised but is most well known by the name of it's kernel.
His vision of free software has been realised but is most well known by a name chosen to appeal to business.[2]
Despite names it does not change who was first to conceive of and then apply themselves to what they considered to be a better alternative to what existed at the time.
It appears that he is doing the same thing as in 1983.

oh yes, he also co-authored my most used command :-) [3]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html
[2] http://freshmeat.net/stats/
[3] $ man ls

--This comment is placed in the Public Domain--

Personally, I like "The Right to Read: a Dystopian Short Story" -- it really illustrates the consequences of our current trend towards expanded copyright and Digital Restrictions Management.

"Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage "

Umm,
http://www.stallman.org/RMS_13_bendicindo.jpg
http://www.gnu.org/award/1998/RichardStallman-3.jp g
THAT met heads of state. Quite the image to be projecting.

Have you seen his personal webpage? I suppose CSS is too "new"

Being stuck in your ways no matter what isn't a good trait.

Funny you should say that, because the GNU foundation has credited the CDDL, which open-source Solaris is licensed under, with being a free (but GPL-incompatible) software license.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLI ncompatibleLicenses

As to formatting in a coding standard ... this is usually a religious issue with developers, and in my experience, it's best to let them do what they feel they're most comfortable with. When *you* - as someone who does the same - want to look at *their* code, you run it through something like 'indent' (http://www.gnu.org/software/indent/indent.html) - i.e., so that you see it how you want it - and so do they. I'm sure it's even possible to shell apps like indent as source is checked out of your repository.

You should also read some books - for example, if you're writing in C or C++ read stuff like 'Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets' (although it's a bit old, it's still a pretty good read!) - then you'll perhaps mandate that fgets() is always used in preference to gets() etc. You'll also probably build an input file to grep or sed etc - so that you can scan source code for things like gets() - it's easy to forget to use fgets etc - esp. when such functions require extra args - that in turn, require extra time consuming keystrokes ;-)

Some folks will also say 'only use standard functions' (I'm talking mainly about C here again of course). Anyway, IMHO, that's 'potentially pants' ... IF - you have the source code for the non-standard functions/libraries AND IF they can be compiled by an ISO compiler AND IF they don't do anything platform specific (i.e., stuff that won't/can't port) - well, I say, if they agree with all these IF and BUTS, use them. If portability isn't an issue, well, you just use them - what's the point of not?!

Lastly, you might also want a lint-ing strategy, e.g., come up with 'stuff' that's to be corrected if it appears in lint's (flint, ...) output - so, no one can check-in their code if it fails the lint check.

Then check out either Vim or Emacs. I know Vim has C# and other .Net syntax highlighting scripts readily available, and since Emacs has more programs/functionality than KDE and GNOME combined, I'd assume it does as well.

I've found my knowledge of ed quite useful at least once (some corrupted filesystem, was unable to load shared libraries, and the only editor available was the good ol' standard editor), where not even vi was available.

My point is that it impractical to require closed source programs to allow libraries to be user replaceable, to the point that if this requirement is indeed in LGPL, it makes LGPL completely useless.

Additionally, my reading of the LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html) doesn't exactly coincide with what you are saying, although to be honest I cannot claim that I understand it well. It says:

"If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)"

God only knows what it means ...

the GPL is a contract

No it isn't. The FSF says:

Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the license permits.

you are breaking it

You haven't broken it; you haven't been granted the privileges that the GPL can grant you. And if you don't have those privileges, then when you copy the software, you are committing copyright infringement. No "GPL violation"; the GPL doesn't come into it because it is not granting you anything.

How about this: violating copyright law on gpled code? A little longwinded, no?

Yes, both longwinded and unnecessary. The term "copyright infringement" covers the offence entirely, no need to bring the GPL into it whatsoever.

The problem here is that your IT department is full of cowboys like the GP, who think it's "cool" to change production systems while they're in use.

On the Linux side, I simply rsync software to all our of workstations. I can even upgrade software people are using right at that moment (like rsyncing the newest thunderbird to /usr/local/thunderbird-1.0.7 while they use the thunderbird in /usr/local/thunderbird-1.0.6, and then moving the /usr/local/bin/thunderbird symbolic link to point to the new version).

Now, comparing that to a service pack upgrade isn't really fair. In that case, the old version of Thunderbird is still there, and will continue being used until they restart. When you install a service pack, all sorts of system files are swapped out. Linux will let you upgrade glibc while the system is up (thanks to how you can delete a file and it won't go away until all references are gone) but it can be a bit dangerous on a system that's being used -- for example, if there's updated libraries that depend on other updated libraries, then there will be a small window where one library is updated and not the other, so any new processes spawned during that period that use both will probably crash.

But in any event, the Thunderbird upgrade done like this is perfectly safe. Most people don't do it that way (I do, but not most) but done that way is very nice. stow is a very simple and yet very convenient program for maintaing /usr/local like that.

I have a suggestion:
Use existing standards that other people have thought long and hard about... Innovate/modify once those ideas are understood... Feel free to GPL your code...

...........int..something;
..........void.*some thingElse;
longobjectname..theThirdThing;

doh. somebody obviously made a error putting up these pages as the have forgotten to include the really big news from 2005, that emacs now supports images

So I don't see why Sony is violating the LGPL here. As you can download the LGPLed library from sourceforge, its freely accesssible, no?

1) They don't attach a copy of the LGPL and they erased the copyright notice on the libraries in question. This is unconditionally a violation of copyright law.

2) Lame ist not attached verbatim, but in parts. That constitutes a "work based on the library", therfore has to be licensed under the LGPL or GPL, and machine readable source code or a written offer to provide it has to be included, neither of which has been done. This is a violation of the LGPL.

3) Two libraries have been statically linked into an OCX. While the OCX could be considered a shared library, the OCX itself must be LGPL'd, and source must be included and so on. Again, this is a violation of the LGPL.

4) Whether source code is freely available somewhere, is of no importance. You are allowed to link with a verbatim copy of the library (has not been done here) without providing source. In all other cases you are required to provide the source code at least on request. Pointing to someone who already does this, doesn't count.

On a side note, have you heard about that amazing ability called reading? You might try it sometime at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html.

4. You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you 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.

If distribution of object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place satisfies the requirement to distribute the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

For those of you who think I am wrong because I am quoting from the GPL faq and not an LGPL faq, read the LGPL:

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

clause 4 of the LGPL contains the requirements I described.

Sam

"to a website" WRONG WRONG WRONG.

If Sony don't provide the source they must make THE source available to all third parties for at least 3 years.
This is an obligation they must fulfil.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Distribut eWithSourceOnInternet
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCSource AndBinaryOnDifferentSites
Merely pointing to "a website" or "the website we got it from" is not enough.
You have to make-sure-it-stays-there. And thats not enough.
You also have to let people request it by mail charging only a minimal fee.

You have to track your releases and make sure you keep the source of each release seperately so you can give people the source to the version they had.

Too many people consider only casually the obligation that the GPL puts on them. GPL is not an easy way out.

It's easy to receive GPL software because the burden is on the distributor, but you must understand and fulfil the burden when you are the distributor.
With most commercial software you pay some money before you receive it but you still have to follow the license guidelines.

Is it too often for me to say again that too many people distibute binary packages to open source software and distribute the source they compile to make the binary package but do not distribute the source to making the binary package; i.e. the .spec file, or the dev-src equivalant.

Sam

"to a website" WRONG WRONG WRONG.

If Sony don't provide the source they must make THE source available to all third parties for at least 3 years.
This is an obligation they must fulfil.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Distribut eWithSourceOnInternet
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCSource AndBinaryOnDifferentSites
Merely pointing to "a website" or "the website we got it from" is not enough.
You have to make-sure-it-stays-there. And thats not enough.
You also have to let people request it by mail charging only a minimal fee.

You have to track your releases and make sure you keep the source of each release seperately so you can give people the source to the version they had.

Too many people consider only casually the obligation that the GPL puts on them. GPL is not an easy way out.

It's easy to receive GPL software because the burden is on the distributor, but you must understand and fulfil the burden when you are the distributor.
With most commercial software you pay some money before you receive it but you still have to follow the license guidelines.

Is it too often for me to say again that too many people distibute binary packages to open source software and distribute the source they compile to make the binary package but do not distribute the source to making the binary package; i.e. the .spec file, or the dev-src equivalant.

Sam

No you are the moron.

<sarcasm>Thus explaining why every single open source project includes the full GCC source tree with it?</sarcasm>

The GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License have an operating system exemption. The exact wording of the exemption in both licenses is as follows:

However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

True, the corner cases of this exemption have not been tested in a court of law, especially in conjunction with the "mere aggregation" exemption.

<sarcasm>Thus explaining why every single open source project includes the full GCC source tree with it?</sarcasm>

The GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License have an operating system exemption. The exact wording of the exemption in both licenses is as follows:

However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

True, the corner cases of this exemption have not been tested in a court of law, especially in conjunction with the "mere aggregation" exemption.

Technically, they have every right to prevent others from examining their software.

Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well

Of course he has ulterior motives. In fact, I've been led to all-but believe it's pratically illegal for the CEO of a publically-traded company not to have ulterior motives.

but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source

I don't really think that you can maintain the claim that Aqua/the OS X gooey is not a part of the core of Mac OS X. It mightn't be the kernel, but it is Mac OS X.

Anyway, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source shows a certain level of fore-sight and wisdom that most people lack. This is precisely the time that free software is most required, and precisely the time that the temptations of restrictive software are hardest to resist. (If you want my justifications, you'll find most in the GNU Project's philosophy section. Also, I just noticed an earlier poster with the sig "-- No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. --Theodore Roosevelt", which I think is most appropriate to this thread.)

Three cheers to the Project!

Running the software for any reason is only a part of software freedom. In fact, it's the first part of the Free Software definition. It's the part that is supplied by just about all programs (but some programs even cut this off after a certain amount of time). What you don't get is the freedom to inspect the program, to learn how it works, or to share copies of the program, to help your neighbors, or to modify the program, to make the program suit your needs. In short, you miss out on all of the other parts of what makes a program Free Software. You could have used a different program to do that job, or written one yourself, or hired someone to write the program for you, then you would have software freedom. But with proprietary software, the proprietor is purposefully denying you your software freedom.

Doesn't it seem like pro-proprietary software zealotry to think that refusing an opportunity to lose one's software freedom is pitched as "zealotry"? No, framing this issue as zealotry won't help you understand what is really going on.

Ease of use is not freedom. Ease of use is a subjective assessment (everything is probably roughly equally hard to learn when you have no experience with computers) that doesn't address educational goals to the degree software freedom does. Any software can be made easier to use and people don't need to rely on proprietors to do it for us. We can and should do it for ourselves and share the results with people (particularly those who will share their improvements with us). This is part of the spirit that got us the free software OSes we enjoy today.

What Apple is offering here is a gratis opportunity to put on some handcuffs and choose between a set of masters. Some of MacOS X is free software but not all of it. Why subject the kids to a computer they can't control completely? Why help them grow an addiction to proprietary software that will be hard to break? I realize that /. readers tend to think this way only of Microsoft, but Apple is offering a comparable deal here: no software freedom, more like "the first bite is free".

For more on this, I recommend reading Why schools should use exclusively free software.

Go learn something. The original poster properly referenced his metaphor and never likened it to a disease. If you truly needed clarification and were so intelligent you would have found the initial source and understood the poster first.

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

Maybe you should read This to see what the GNU project really thinks.

"However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom."

So if I spend months writing a fantastic program, I should be foreced to give it away for free? Yeah, right

And sorry, calling l.i.n.u.x vs GNU/linux was a battle that was lost a long time ago.

In the 1960s, imprisoning a half million people for smoking pot in the USA would have seemed laughable. Forty years later, that is roughly the number of people in prison for non-violent drug offenses, many of them for marijuana.
    http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/409/toohigh.sh tml

Many other prisoners are also there for things like theft related to a drug habit (despite that addiction is often more a medical problem, or sometimes also from an economic problem leading to depression which our society refuses to deal with).

One major reason pot was pushed to be illegal is because hemp is such a versatile product and threatened timber and paper monopolies (although there were other factors as well).
    http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/ whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html
    http://www.cannabis.com/faqs/hemp2.shtml
    http://www.theagitator.com/archives/002065.php

So, will it be any surprise if copyright laws go the same way -- towards Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" cautionary tale?
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Will there be a half million kids in prison for using file sharing software in a couple of decades? Or just even using GNU/Linux? :-)

Comments like these just go to show how effect the powers that be (e.g., corporations, government) have been at confusing the issue of so-called “intellectual property” with people. This fundamentally makes people less informed and more vulnerable to abuses of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. For example, this reality distortion could easily cause a lay-person to think that if something is patented, they cannot copy it (which is entirely false).

Better writings exist on this particular topic than I could hope to produce here, so I'll leave further exploration as an exercise to the reader.

That is correct, but there are some conditions.

For starters, you have to indicate you are using a LGPLed library and you have to give the sources to the library or make these available by some other means.

Beside that, you have to make sure anyone can re-link the software with a newer version of the LGPLed library. In the case of dlls, this is no problem. In the case of static linking, which is the case here, you have to provide object code of your program, so anyone can re-link the program with a newer version of the LGPLed library.

Alse see:

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

"For example, if you distribute copies of the library, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that we gave you. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. If you link other code with the library, you must provide complete object files to the recipients, so that they can relink them with the library after making changes to the library and recompiling it. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights."

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

I know the fsf did stop their official call to boycott amazon but I for one have never bought a thing from them. Maybe they aren't attacking everyone with their patents, but for me just giving the US Patents Office the filing fees for this rubbish is enough to keep me saying no.

If Joseph McCarthy was still alive, he would have personally seen to it that you were declared a commy.

On a serious note: sad to see that there are still people who take the same rhetoric as McCarthy to ban open source to the realm of Evil, while at the same time most likely profiting from its innovations.
Money is probably the only thing that this person cares for, next to the knowledge that he has the power to control his IPs.
I'd much rather be called a commy, socialist or IP-vandal than defending the remarks these people make.
But, as pro-IP lobbyists are using open-source, open-source lobbyists are using IP (albeit on a scale restricted to IP for those using IP themselves) and creating IP-related technologies.

For us to actually get any further without intellectual property, is to ban it altogether from the open-source movement.

Its sad to say, but that is most unlikely to happen in the polarized (software) world we find ourselves in today.

But before we even get there, basic economics would have that software is just not a market which lends itself to natural monopoly. Think infrastructure and startup cost:

The cost of a freely-downloadable compiler from Microsoft or GNU, for Windows or *nix, respectively?

The cost of a new, off-the-shelf desktop box is now down around $200, last I checked. Even a high school kid can afford those startup costs!

The software industry has one of the lowest startup costs of any I can think of; that's one of the things that attracted me to it (I can experiment in software, break things, etc. without costing me a dime, but the same is not true in the physical world of, say, mechanical engineering).

Now this is absurd, uncalled for, and a total cheap shot. It's obvious you know nothing about anarchism, or you'd realize that the definition of anarchism is irrelevant to violence.

Anarchism != violence, you are correct. One does not *necessarily* cause the other.

But in every instance of anarchism I'm aware of, violence has been a part of that instance. That creates an awfully-strong correlation factor.

It may have been a bit of a cheap shot, but given the then-parent's promotion of an-cap philosophy in their sig, and given the post's tendency towards that philosophy, it really wasn't much of a stretch.

Anarchism simply means the lack of a "right" to initiate force as a means to an end (i.e. government): that "right" is voluntarily banned from society.

True.

Are you really going to claim with a straight face that it is "impossible" for a group of human beings to live peacefully without some of them posessing the "right" to coercion over others?

There is no such natural right to coercion, that is true. The right of coercion is an artificial one.

But in order to impose a certain amount of order, a certain amount of coercion is necessary.

Consider, for example, the case of an infectious disease outbreak -- avian flu, to be timely. What do you do if such a disease starts spreading rapidly throughout a city? Let the disease run its course and kill thousands or millions, or quarantine those affected such that perhaps only a few hundred die?

Assuming we care about human life, the reasonable response, based on the simple cost-benefit analysis with the goal of minimizing deaths, is to quarantine those people, perhaps against their will -- as un-free a response as that is. But it is a case in which if that action is not undertaken, more people die.

It should be a strictly-limited procedure, of course, and the ability to implement such procedures should be dictated by the public, i.e. via a democracy or republic. But that is already the case in the U.S. and most developed nations around the world.

Another example is that of air pollution. Do we allow people to pollute as they please and wait for the lawsuits to show up at everybody's doorsteps demanding compensation for each given day's worth of inhaled smog? That is grossly economically-inefficient: one person mailing every other person on the roadway at their time of driving -- even assuming that one person could record and look up everybody they were driving near -- and iterating that person's experience over every other person in the city, is algorithmically-retarded; it is a many-to-many operation; an n^2 algorithm, in fact (if you have never studied computer science, then understand at least that n^2 algorithms are the worst-performing class of *common* algorithms there are). And, as a society, we certainly don't want our courts choked with such cases.

No, instead, we require catalytic converters on automobiles, and we require emissions checks.

"But that's force!" you cry... Yes, it is. Bu