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0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".

Software proprietors love to frame the debate on money. This keeps software proprietors in the running for gaining, or in this case, maintaining a client. Microsoft is perfectly willing to give copies of its proprietary software to people gratis in order to keep them divided and helpless. There's plenty of money to be had with support contracts and upgrades down the road. This is why Microsoft's rep was so interested in framing Massachusetts' problems around document preservation and future reading on the argument of how much the project would cost the state. If you haven't heard the discussion for yourself, you should listen to it.

Massachusetts wasn't concerning themselves with software acquisition just yet. They made this very clear in their discussion. But it appears that PriceWaterhouseCoopers is. So, it becomes relevant to point out that framing the debate on software acquisition around the freedom to run, share, and modify computer software is a superior argument to the cost of the software. Alas, the open source movement doesn't encourage anyone to think about software freedom; that movement's message focuses on software development chiefly to businesses that develop software. Talking about software freedom to all computer users has been the long-held ground of the free software movement.

If you're going to make legal analysis, at least try to use the correct terms. It's headlines like these that confuse the public into believing that "movie internet piracy" is something one can be convicted of.

False. The claim was that socialists are more likely to contribute to something with no monetary gain, which is false LET ME FINISH BEFORE YOU REPLY TO THAT If you were meaning to say that Wikipedia fits the socialist ideology better because it is contributing to something with no monetary gain, that's false, for the reasons given before in this thread and below.

Sorry, that's not socialism. Everyone helps people and works with others in some manner with no monetary gain. Does this make everyone socialist? I like it when words have meaning.

You know, if you socialists would actually get your stories straight, you would see that, even according to the socialist Wikipedia, means of production are by definition non-human. Boy are you in for an education.

Not really. Go read the rules behind Wikipedia. A group of higher-ups (hierarchy! eek!) has full veto power over what is added. They own it. They allow modifications, and are generally loose with who is allowed to add to it. That does not change that they are the ulimate owners. It just means they use their property in an unusual way - which in no way contradicts capitalist (in the political, not wealth-acquiring sense) ideology.

Sigh, ok, you asked for it: (notice the "no" part)
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGP LRequireAvailabilityToPublic:

If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?

        No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.

Section 2b:
"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

or, more succinctly, from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWi thGPL

"You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program?

        Yes."

I did RTFGPL. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#TOC1 ...could you kindly point out in the GNU GPL exactly where it says anything about what you are talking about?

Eben Moglen has apparently offered many people/orgs the opportunity to try it in court:

... you have to be prepared to meet a call that I make reasonably often ...
"Mr. Potential Defendant, you are distributing my client's copyrighted work without permission. Please stop. And if you want to continue to distribute it, we'll help you to get back your distribution rights, which have terminated by your infringement, but you are going to have to do it the right way."
At the moment that I make that call, the potential defendant's lawyer now has a choice. He can cooperate with us, or he can fight with us. And if he goes to court and fights with us, he will have a second choice before him. We will say to the judge, "Judge, Mr. Defendant has used our copyrighted work, copied it, modified it and distributed it without permission. Please make him stop."
One thing that the defendant can say is, "You're right. I have no license." Defendants do not want to say that, because if they say that they lose. So defendants, when they envision to themselves what they will say in court, realize that what they will say is, "But Judge, I do have a license. It's this here document, the GNU GPL. General Public License," at which point, because I know the license reasonably well, and I'm aware in what respect he is breaking it, I will say, "Well, Judge, he had that license but he violated its terms and under Section 4 of it, when he violated its terms, it stopped working for him."
But notice that in order to survive moment one in a lawsuit over free software, it is the defendant who must wave the GPL. It is his permission, his master key to a lawsuit that lasts longer than a nanosecond. This, quite simply, is the reason that lies behind the statement you have heard ... that there has never been a court test of the GPL.

imho, a perfect system would never get tried ... the reason even truly guilty people take a shot at court is b/c the law is not perfect, and sometimes they can get away with something. If everyone knew that there was no possible positive personal outcome, why would anyone bother?

I think it'll be a while before Hurd comes out, since they appear to be switching from the L4 microkernel to the EROS/Coyotos model.

Why is that the open source fan boys bash EULA, claim it is not enforceable - yet tout the GPL and whine whenever a violation is perceived?

Because, in most instances, you have to break the seal on a CD or some other sort of media before you can even get to the EULA on a commercial package. Once you break that seal, you usually cannot return the software for any sort of refund or even store credit. This means that you have no opportunity to effectively read a common commercial EULA to decide whether or not you want to use a package covered by that EULA unless you commit to purchasing that package anyway.

However, anyone can go here and read the GPL in all its glory before deciding whether or not they wish to use a particular package.

Simple enough?

sorry but you cant SELL the sourcecode under the GPL, you have to give it to me freely.

Can the people posting this crap and modding it up please read the GPL ? Section 3b in particular.

Yes, it's true, you cannot sell the source code. But you can "charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution".

So until you email them and find out they are charging more than a couple of bucks or so, please refrain from assuming that any form of pricing for the source code is automatically bogus. And I say this as somebody who does actually expect to find that they are infringing.

Now we can all switch over from Linux, at least until Hurd ships.

*pummeling ensues*

GNU/Hurd!! I meant GNU/Hurd!!!

If you believe in "Intellectual property" and debate policies about IP, you are chasing something that does not exist. Patents, copyright and trademarks are radically different concepts and should never be lumped together. The term IP is designed to confuse the real issues and muddy the publics' concept of what should and should not have state protection. Blather about software cross-licensing is equally foolish and anchored in disproved development models of the early 1980s. Only the largest of incumbent businesses benefit from this kind of confusion. They use it to drive everyone else out of the market and pass the cost of complexity back to you and me.

A balanced business perspective would be closer to the informed opinion found in the vast majority of technical employers. Most people do not work for big dumb companies and have much to lose when patents cover business methods, copyright laws are used to prevent reverse engineering for compatibility, and trade mark laws are used to prevent advertising of compatibility or exchangeability. The median informed opinion is vastly different from the propaganda put out by giants like Microsoft. To present the two views together as equals is more an averaging of noise than it is a balance.

It scares me that so much of the US net worth is wrapped up in excluding others from doing things. I have little faith in the value of such things and see a rude awakening on the horizon when the rest of the world decides to give us the finger.

• People who want GPL can have GPL for open source projects, or applications that are not redistributed.
• People who want a more traditional license, with freedom to redistribute products using MySQL without opening source, can have that too.

Why do you call this doubly accommodating arrangement "crap"?

Sure, PostgreSQL's BSD license is less restrictive, but why should MySQL (or anyone else) have to use that, if they don't want to? (The GPL is framed to guarantee certain freedoms to users; the BSD license grants complete freedom to those making products from the source, but does not protect users at all. I thought everyone had figured this out by now?)

The OSI doesn't actually hold any power or significance. All the OSI does is state their opinion, just like the FSF, they tell people that something agrees with them, hardly a big deal. They don't actually have any authority over what is or isn't open source.

The FSF, unlike the OSI, has written multiple licenses of importance, most notably the GNU General Public License. They wrote the GPL well before the open source movement began (GPLv1 is dated February 1989, GPLv2 June 1991). The upcoming revision of the GPL (version 3) will be the first GPL revision any "open source" movement supporter has had a say in. Other important licenses the FSF wrote include the GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License), and the the GNU Free Documentation License.

What qualifies as an OSI-approved license is defined by the Open Source Definition. The term "open source" was coined by someone who helped start the open source movement and the Open Source Initiative in February 1998. Trying to reach back before February 1998 and define things that happened before that movement began is ahistorical; an attempt to make "open source" or the OSI come off as more important historically than it actually is. Thus the OSI has considerable claim on what is "open source" and what isn't. That most people don't understand the term "open source" only speaks to their individual (yet shared) confusion of what "open source" means.

GPL incompatibilty is a significant practical problem because the GPL is the most popular free software license (a license which is also OSI-approved).

—jbn-o posting anonymously because I've already moderated in this thread. So, any moderation applied to this post won't accrue to my /. account.

The OSI doesn't actually hold any power or significance. All the OSI does is state their opinion, just like the FSF, they tell people that something agrees with them, hardly a big deal. They don't actually have any authority over what is or isn't open source.

The FSF, unlike the OSI, has written multiple licenses of importance, most notably the GNU General Public License. They wrote the GPL well before the open source movement began (GPLv1 is dated February 1989, GPLv2 June 1991). The upcoming revision of the GPL (version 3) will be the first GPL revision any "open source" movement supporter has had a say in. Other important licenses the FSF wrote include the GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License), and the the GNU Free Documentation License.

What qualifies as an OSI-approved license is defined by the Open Source Definition. The term "open source" was coined by someone who helped start the open source movement and the Open Source Initiative in February 1998. Trying to reach back before February 1998 and define things that happened before that movement began is ahistorical; an attempt to make "open source" or the OSI come off as more important historically than it actually is. Thus the OSI has considerable claim on what is "open source" and what isn't. That most people don't understand the term "open source" only speaks to their individual (yet shared) confusion of what "open source" means.

GPL incompatibilty is a significant practical problem because the GPL is the most popular free software license (a license which is also OSI-approved).

—jbn-o posting anonymously because I've already moderated in this thread. So, any moderation applied to this post won't accrue to my /. account.

Here's my problem: if I have to start editing a makefile to point to the right libraries (assuming my distro has the libraries) to get a compilation going, and depending on which distro I use the bits I need aren't all in the same place. Make isn't a standard unless there is a standard way of writing a makefile - and if there is, it isn't transparent to me, based on my experience.

You shouldn't need to edit the makefile to point to the libraries manually. The configure script should be able to do that automatically. And autoconf writes the configure script automatically.

It is a tool that one has to spend a little time learning to understand and use, but it solves the problems you're talking about very neatly and elegantly, and is a truly enormous timesaver in the long run.

Well, since I guess we disagree on philosophy: From a practical point of view, won't it be better to support something cross platform, like GNU's stuff (gcc, gdb...) and a cross platform toolkit (Gtk, Qt...)?

It's not just business method and software patents. You have people---excuse me, coporate entities---patenting strains of bacteria and lines of mice. How good for scientific research can it be when the animals your studying come with a license agreement that require you not to breed them? I don't think you're going to be able to specify "no software patents", and then find out the patent system works. The role of the patent system, I would argue, is not one which fosters ingenuity. Take for example the article "Patent Reform is Not Enough": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/patent-reform-is-not -enough.html from the free software foundation. When you read it, it's easy to be struck by how much what they're saying doesn't just apply to software. So much of what gets patented is going to be developed regardless of whether or not there's a patent on the other side of the tunnel. In fact, I think that the state of intellectual property in medicine is easily more outrageous than its state in software (because of its effects). Since the 80s, companies and universities can patent and profit from research carried out with federal funds. Even though the government funds most new drug research, the drug companies still rake in the profits at the end of the day. The argument that the pharmaceutical industry model is the most efficient way to conduct medical research is among the poorest I've heard in support of a gross aspect of our society. Does mathematics not progress because researchers don't profit off their results? Does only research with clear profit-driven goals in mind get persued by academics in physics, chemistry, or biology? No, of course not. On the other hand, only research with clear profit-driven goals gets carried out by the drug companies, which is why, as government heads make ominous speeches about the possibilities of an Avian Flu epidemic, the most prosperous nations in the world don't have sufficient stockpiles of influenza medications---the government can't convince the drug manufacturers to produce them.

Just use this to create an empty vmdk-file. Boot virtual machine from CD-ROM and install OS.

QuickTime Pro 7 isn't worth $30 ?!?

Ok, using only $30 worth of your time,
write a better application, from scratch!

(Oh, and then do us all a favor and Copyleft/GPL it,
  here is the link if you need a reminder:
    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html )

If you really can do that, let me know
- I know some people who want to hire you. (@ $10 an hour!!!)

Therefore, Trademark is Copyright.

Now you know part of why Mr. Stallman doesn't like the term "intellectual property".

A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work.

Actually, it does. Clause 2(a).

Damn, I wish all the software I use were closed source, that'd be so cool and unrestrictive. Or not. GPL means freedom for users, so I don't really understand what's so restrictive about it. Here's a reading.

because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

WRONG! Please mod parent flamebait.

You're confusing paid versions with proprietary versions. You can make money selling paid versions of Free and Open Source Software.

QT is licenced under the GPL, which is a Free and Open Source Software license. It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

Anyone (ranging from independent programmers to multibllion dollar companies) can create Free and Open Source Software built on QT and can sell the resultant software without giving a penny to Trolltech. Just look at Novell SUSE Linux, Linspire, RedHat and any other commercial distro that ships with KDE. These companies (and anyone else for that matter, including you!) can sell the binaries -- all they have to do is provide the source code to the user, so that the user can customize the software for his/her needs.

If you want to keep your source code secret and build proprietary applications that lock in users, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, take away control of their computers, then naturally you need to pay royalties. In the world of spyware, DRM-infestation, and Treacherous Computing no proprietary software should be trusted.

In other words: If a company does the moral thing for the users and society, the company gets a freebie. If they're unscrupulous, then they better pay up.

because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

WRONG! Please mod parent flamebait.

You're confusing paid versions with proprietary versions. You can make money selling paid versions of Free and Open Source Software.

QT is licenced under the GPL, which is a Free and Open Source Software license. It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

Anyone (ranging from independent programmers to multibllion dollar companies) can create Free and Open Source Software built on QT and can sell the resultant software without giving a penny to Trolltech. Just look at Novell SUSE Linux, Linspire, RedHat and any other commercial distro that ships with KDE. These companies (and anyone else for that matter, including you!) can sell the binaries -- all they have to do is provide the source code to the user, so that the user can customize the software for his/her needs.

If you want to keep your source code secret and build proprietary applications that lock in users, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, take away control of their computers, then naturally you need to pay royalties. In the world of spyware, DRM-infestation, and Treacherous Computing no proprietary software should be trusted.

In other words: If a company does the moral thing for the users and society, the company gets a freebie. If they're unscrupulous, then they better pay up.

Come on folks, be creative, this can be fun!!

I mean, all 'WE' have to do to make the Fcc scumbags quit, is to make them VERY borde at their jobs!

And we do that by making the imbicles realize that they lack the ability to control even a small fraction of the 6.5 billion of us!

And we do that by taking the shielding off different appliances around the home!!

Meanwhile, the 'white hats' over at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html

will be working hard on ways for ALL of us to use the (our) airwaves LIKE IT CAN BE & LIKE IT SHOULD BE!!

LOL!!

--
Slashdot's 'Moderation System' is NOT broke..
It is simply: 'Set Up'.

There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

The FCC need not be abolished; its policies just need to change drastically. Whatever you may think of the censorship policies, spectrum usage rules will always be needed. It should be noted that while some radio technology is becoming more sophisticated (so that it can tolerate interference better, spacially direct transmissions, and cooperate with other devices), we can expect that certain technologies (e.g. analog radio on emergency frequencies) will have good reason not to change, and thus might continue to need the kind of protection that the FCC provides. Also, protection against jamming, excessive power use, and bad receivers (and non-radio devices) that cause interference, are still good things.

It seems to me that the author of TFA has confused a lot of things. Open source per se is not a threat to established broadcasters, but many new technologies (both open and closed, hardware and software) are eliminating the need for the traditional broadcasting model.

Contrary to the article, both developers and users can charge money for GPL software.

The Gnu kernel is being actively developed, and has bla bla bla...

Why aren't you just extending Guile, which has been declared the official GNU scripting langauge by none other than RMS himself.

Tom Lord discusses the history of Guile, in the context of the great TCL war, which happened just before Java came onto the scene.

Ian Bicking discusses some of the reasons why Guile failed to gain any traction.

-Don

We classify a license according to certain key questions:
* Whether it qualifies as a free software license.
* Whether it is a copyleft license.
* Whether it is compatible with the GNU GPL. (This means you can combine a module which was released under that license with a GPL-covered module to make one larger program.)
* Whether it causes any particular practical problems.

Here's a little story that will make you realize how great emacs and vi(m) really are. http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

If mentioned, it's right to link to Right to Read.

And this has absolutely nothing to do with free software versus non-free software. There's nothing preventing someone from developing this stable extra hardware, documenting it, and allowing any programmer to write software to talk to it.

Also, you're confused about the term "commercial". Free software (a matter of liberty not price) is commercial software too the moment anyone uses it in commercial activity (distributing a copy of it for a fee, modifying it for a fee, building services on top of it for a fee, etc.). Commercial and non-free software do not mean the same thing. If one is disallowed from distributing copies of the program for a fee, that program is not free software for that person.

The tickets for his visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sold out quickly too. But his talk was remarkably dull, the questioners were inarticulate (even the one person who tried to raise a FLOSS argument against Gates), and the hall was nowhere near filled. After asking around, I learned that Gates basically told the University he wanted to address the students; he essentially invited himself over. UIUC, being a large source of Microsoft employees, was perfectly willing to continue their relationship with Microsoft and promote his talk heavily. The local media didn't ask any questions (such as how he became so wealthy), nor did they refrain from expressing their unexamined adulation of money.

What would have been far more interesting (particularly considering these are ostensibly educational facilities) would have been to have a response talk from someone at the FSF that was promoted with equal vigor and University backing, and broadcast on University television just as Gates' talk was. When Brad Kuhn came to visit not that long after Gates' visit, Kuhn's talk was also sparsely attended nor was it carried on University television. But thanks to a UIUC group (Free Software Society) you can download it and hear what he had to say (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#FS S04). Kuhn's talk was far more substantive than Gates' graphics demo.

Perhaps Gates will take the opportunity to again call free software "unamerican" or a "cancer" as Microsoft reps have done on previous visits to campuses and in other tours. Then the follow-the-leader coverage of his visit will have something interesting to quote and an excuse to ask why free software matters. But I'm not holding my breath for the local media or the Universities that let him give his job pitch to supply a more thorough examination of how we got where we are.

My theory is that as open source software improves, it will become harder and harder to make money from it, since it will require less expensive customization and support.

There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

I use bitlbee, an IRCd that talks to the major IM networks in text format. Access this in irssi (any tty irc client will do). Leave it running 24/7 on a server in a dtach (or screen) instance. Attach to it from anywhere on earth. See in the logs the time your buddies came and went, and any messages you missed. Chat from one machine, move to another and continue the conversation. At home on my LAN, I run the trigger script, and have it play sounds on all my PCs in the house when I get a message.

at least your contact/buddy list is stored server side. anyway, heres an answer,

http://thekonst.net/centericq

ssh home when you want it.

if you want to keep it running, see http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html

also see http://gaim.sf.net/
gaims chat logs can simply be copied into eachother since each "conversation" is a seperate file.
its probably runs on all the platforms you need (the latest always compiles out of the box on os x with fink)

there are a few remote file shares you can use, some of which work over ssh, and thus your prefs/logs etc
can be kept with them. or you can simply script your client to sync whenever it starts / stops / whenever,
which would thus be transparent (and probably faster with something like rsync)

so anyway, yea, its sad that in this day and age, we dont have software working together much, but at least
you can work around it. centericq is a pretty simple way to not have to worry about any of it, all you need
is ssh. thus the beuty of remote apps. if you dont like centericqs interface, check out http://bitlbee.org/
to use an irc client instead.

I'm not sure. I don't recall saying they should, so I'll give my opinions on two possible interpretations of your post.

GNU/Linux has enough users that it's either feature-complete or has enough users that it can become feature complete in the not-too-distant future for most people (even if not for everyone), so from the perspective of benefit to the operating systems, more users aren't necessary (IMHO). I think it would be much better if 100 per cent of users switched to a free operating system, but I'd be as happy for that to occur by Microsoft (and Apple, et al.) changing their licensing terms and conditions than by them changing from Windows (Mac OS, etc.) to GNU/Linux. Or they could also switch to FreeBSD, or one of those operating systems based on non-GNU tools (etc.) but a Linux kernel.

As to why users should switch to a Free operating system, that can't be answered in terms of features of an operating system, even though this is why I would suggest you use GNU/Linux. If you're interested in that, you could read the GNU Project's Philosophy pages, but seeing as you're a Slashdotter, I imagine you already know the arguments (even if you disagree with them).

See also my response to Adam Weeden.

Better do it while you still can.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

If you're a do-it-yourselfer like me, those days are quickly coming to an end in the US. They don't want a producer society, they want a consumer society. It's good for their pockets. But they are not going to be able to stop people with the intelligence to be able to do this stuff on their own. The GNU Radio Project is a perfect example. It might eventually be "illegal" but for no good reason other than the supposed protection of intellectual property which is also a crock. I plan to be experimenting with this stuff myself since... science is not a crime.

It sounds like you are unable to build the complete system and run it, since you're missing functionality. This removes the possibility of using runtime tracing tools.

The first thing I would do is run something like Doxygen over it to generate a cross-referenced description of the structures. It won't give you a global view of things, but it will give you a decent browsable view of the code itself. Another response mentioned GNU GLOBAL which may work better for you. Yet another possibility is LXR, though it may not work as well in C++. Regardless, a nice thing about Doxygen is that, when used with GraphViz, you can get useful diagrams generated showing class containment and file inclusion graphs.

After you have that, get out your paper and pencil, and start drawing and manually tracing things. That's how I go about coming up to speed on new code I can't execute and step through. Eventually transfer that knowledge into a text file (or, nowadays, a wiki) so that others can benefit from it.

Graphviz and GNU GLOBAL used in combination give a graphical and web-accessible view of a large, unknown software system. This will give your team a high-level view of the modules and how they interact. This will make it easier to discern the system design.

>We have most of the source, but no clue of how to approach a task of this magnitude.

Reverse engineering is generally thought of as a "cleanroom" technique that involves having the binary and/or specification but not the source. If you have the source, then you're just reading/rewriting it (or perhaps just copying it and doing s/Old Name/Our Cool New Game That's Nothing Like Old Name/).

>Anyone have suggestions of programs, or techniques we could use to understand the structure of the game?

If it's mostly C, then you definitely need to get cscope, but that won't tell you where to start reading because it cannot resolve calls to function pointers. To get that information, you might also try running gprof.

Another neat trick is to compile the program and use nm to help map out object file dependencies. You'll want to use perl or something to create a database of where the symbols are defined and where they're imported. This can help you establish which files are the meat and which ones are the potatoes.

At the same time, does Linux *claim* to innovate? No, it doesn't..

The GNU manifesto ( http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html ) clearly says in the very first line that the point was:
"Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it."
Stallman did not intend to innovate in software, he intended to make a good operating system that people could use.

The same goes for Linus, who in fact didn't even intend that much out of Linux. From an archive thingie I found on google ( http://www.li.org/linuxhistory.php ) with some early posts by Linus about Linux:

"Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

So.. it's unfair to criticize Linux or GNU for not being innovative, because that wasn't the point.

And, in fairness to everybody, innovation is a lot harder than refining an innovation once it is made.

On the other hand, I think it's also more honest to say that Microsoft is much better at presenting innovations (whether their own or other people's) than they are at coming up with innovations in the first place. Whatever else you criticize about Microsoft, you have to admire their marketing.

No distros can resize NTFS. Its a patented, proprietary file system. See here for what can be resized: GNU Parted.

On the other hand, he is a recipient of the MacArthur Award (aka The Genius Grant) and the Takeda Award which means he has a nice chunk of change socked away somewhere.

Read this article on FSF philosophy to understand it: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

This was answered several times in threads above this, but it got modded informative so I'll bite. The original poster wasn't questioning whether the owner of the code could relicense, it was whether the project managers actually owned the code. If I contribute a patch to someone else's GPL software, that owner can't relicense that code without getting my permission, getting me to sign over the copyright of my patch, or removing my patch and rewriting it. That's why it would be impossible for many active OSS projects to suddenly relicense, because of the long long list of people from all over the world who own copyright on little bits and pieces of the software. If you are managing GPL software and want to keep control over the codebase, have everyone agree to signing over the copyright for any contributions they make.

According to the GNU Enterprise on this page: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue/community/copylef t.html both parties have to sign a dead tree document. This seems like a huge hassle, but if you're serious here is an example of a copyright assignment form from the OpenOffice project: http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/jca.pdf

Please don't use "commercial" as a synonym for "non-free." That confuses two entirely different issues.

A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity. A commercial program can be free or non-free, depending on its license. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual can be free or non-free, depending on its license. The two questions, what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its users have, are independent.

In the first decade of the Free Software Movement, free software packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or by nonprofit organizations such as the FSF and universities. Later, in the 90s, free commercial software started to appear.

Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so we should encourage it. But people who think that "commercial" means "non-free" will tend to think that the "free commercial" combination is self-contradictory, and dismiss the possibility. Let's be careful not to use the word "commercial" in that way.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# Commercial