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The Java Desktop probably (technically) does not violate the GPL

there is no "technically" or "probably". jds does not violate the gpl. sun does what it is permitted to do. that's what licenses are for. they tell you want you are allowed to do. where is your damn point?

And you're wrong about Red Hat. They devote a lot of resources to developing, supporting, and promoting Linux, Free Software, and Open Source software.

you might want to change your way of speaking. "open source" should not appear in your dictionary.

I can program, yes. I have a bit of code in the scripting layer of GLAME, some code in Guile (I rewrote format to be reentrant and submitted a fix or two for the slib module), and I maintain Bobot++.

I am not especially amazing at programming but I can do what I have to to get around. Perhaps you should read the Philosophy of the Free Software Foundation in order to understand why I say the ability to use a hardware gadget is convinience and not freedom.

I can program, yes. I have a bit of code in the scripting layer of GLAME, some code in Guile (I rewrote format to be reentrant and submitted a fix or two for the slib module), and I maintain Bobot++.

I am not especially amazing at programming but I can do what I have to to get around. Perhaps you should read the Philosophy of the Free Software Foundation in order to understand why I say the ability to use a hardware gadget is convinience and not freedom.

RIAA using the Copyright is a BAD idea because they don't offer their product for free. When it comes to Copyright being put to GOOD use, it's done by those who license with the GPL, especially the Linux people. The RIAA is made of hypocrites.

You're missing the point. The point is not that there isn't a licensed player for linux, the point is that people need a licensed player to be able to play dvd's. Copyright is the right to have a copy. Once you have the copy, you should be able to use it any which way you want that doesn't involve redistributing another copy. By restricting dvd's to licensed players through the new artificial construct called the dmca they have taken away ability from end users. You can't take screenshots from dvd's (so you are limited to the movie-company distributed shots if you're trying to write a review), you can't skip past commercials on a lot of dvd's (thereby making you pay twice for the same product), if it wasn't for multi-region players (which technically aren't allowed by the dvd licensing body dvd-cca) you wouldn't even be able to buy rare dvd's from across the world and view them at home.

Basically, the essential point is that once you start limiting content to licensed players, you give control over how people interact with popular culture to them, and because of the clear incentives for the entrenched copyright owners to restrict your abilities ever further (making you pay multiple times for the same content) sooner or later you end up with the right to read.

That's the real issue. The dvd player on linux thing is just the angle to interviewer took to approach the issue because valenti's views are so far removed from reality you have to reel him in before you start trying to throw a net around him.

RMS is not wrong. He is well aware that lots of people use the term "intellectual property". He says so explicitly here. His point is that it is a cover term for a number of different things (copyright, patent, trademark, etc.) that in his opinion it is wrong to generalize about and that it is misleading to think of these things in the same terms as other things that we call "property". You can agree with him or not, the parent is a misleading presentation of RMS' position.

Maybe he is referring to the software approach.

That's not the point. The point is that we're breaking the law if we watch something we legally rented because we chose to use a different Operating System. And it still doesn't change the fact that Valenti thinks that we're horrible immoral thieves for wanting to watch his crappy movies.

Read this and think about it. What's more important, privacy, rights and freedom, or making sure multimillionaires stay multimillionaires.

Note to the MPAA: Valenti is a dinosaur who thinks that it's amazing that we can have sound it movies. Get rid of him, and maybe we'll respect your laws.

How about actually listing some real complaints with the CC instead of some vague deragatory remarks. A creative commons licence depends on the terms you select, and does indeed meet Debians and FSF's definition of free for many of these options. In fact the free software foundation recomends that you use a Creative Common licence for works other than software and documentation. Furthermore, I have talked to Richard Stallman about this and he agrees that different types of works need different types and amounts protection and that when he started the FSF he did was only concidering software, and does not project his moral beliefs of software copyright and patents onto all copyright and patent.

The creative commons creates a common set of licences that simplify things for the creator, distributer, and consumer. It also creates a single umbrella movement for encouraging more open licencing of works. It is a valuable work.

Yes, C# and the CLR are ECMA standards but that standard is controlled exclusively by Microsoft. May I freely implement C# or the CLR? Of course. May I do anything to try and change that standard? Only if I go to work for Micrsoft or give Microsoft a lot of money.

On the flip side. Java is standardized by the Java Community Process. IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Apache, BEA and of course Sun are all members of the JCP and decide on the Java standards. To say Java is not a standard is absolute ignorance. The JCP is just as much of a standards body as the W3C. Any individual can join the JCP for free and corporations can join for a nominal fee. Can you get more open than that?

Is Sun's *implementation* of Java open? No. Is the Java standard open. Yes. Are there open implentations of Java? Yes.

People repeatedly argue that C# and the CLR are more open than Java. This is asinine. The entire Java stack from the language to the JVM to J2EE are all open standards by the JCP. I can implement any part or the whole thing without paying a red cent to anyone. Only a very small portion of .NET is an open standard.

Seems that intellectual property and copyright laws are something that Linspire still doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of.

What "proper acknowledgements" would those be?

Last I checked GNU/RMS were hell-bent on making sure no one ever got "acknowledgement" for anything they ever create, that somehow it's "evil". Hell, the same /. "community" that's freaking out about such lack of acknowledgement now was mad as hell at XFree86 for daring to fight for exactly such acknowledgement.

GNU/Hypocrites

Free download was never a GPL requirement to begin with. Legend has it that RMS used to sell Emacs at $150 per tape, you can currently pay $345 for a pair of CDs full of GPL source code from the FSF.

If you are really interested, I suggest you read the GPL. To speed things up, Sections 2 and 3 answer your question (note, 2b "no charge for the license" doesn't preclude charging for the download, the CD, or whatever method of giving the person the software you care to do, it's the license that is Free, not the media).

That, and as a prior poster indicated, the Media Player stuff isn't GPL'ed by a long shot.

Free download was never a GPL requirement to begin with. Legend has it that RMS used to sell Emacs at $150 per tape, you can currently pay $345 for a pair of CDs full of GPL source code from the FSF.

If you are really interested, I suggest you read the GPL. To speed things up, Sections 2 and 3 answer your question (note, 2b "no charge for the license" doesn't preclude charging for the download, the CD, or whatever method of giving the person the software you care to do, it's the license that is Free, not the media).

That, and as a prior poster indicated, the Media Player stuff isn't GPL'ed by a long shot.

I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun, and pretend like Java it's an Open/Free technology? it's not.

AFAIK most people in the Open Source community critizices Sun and says Java is a proprietary Language. Most are crazy enough to say it is as proprietary as Visual Basic, for example.

Is it a good, elegant language? Yes.
I agree with you. There are many who disagree however.

Is it Open? No. You are wrong. Java is an open language. Java is a Language. You are confusing the Java language with Sun's implementation.
The Java language specification literally says: "Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUN) hereby grants you a fully-paid, nonexclusive, nontransferable, perpetual, worldwide limited license (without the right to sublicense) under SUN's intellectual property rights that are essential to practice this specification. This license allows and is limited to the creation and distribution of clean room implementations of this specification...".

This is an open language.
The fact that an specific implementation is proprietary does not make the language proprietary (although, as you point out, Sun's implementation is free as in beer and you can see the source code).
If you want a high quality open source implementation, check out GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java). It is truly great, and it is not based on a JVM, but compiled to native code,(many Java critics might like this). It is complete enough to fully compile large applications like the Eclipse IDE.
The only more or less important library it misses is AWT and Swing, but you can use SWT (the eclipse toolkit), which provides better performance than Swing. And AWT/Swing are coming.
You can use a huge library of open source Java libraries with it. GCJ has great features like the ability to compile java libraries (normally JAR files) as shared libraries, with full support for dynamic class loading (very useful for things like application servers). GCJ also supports the same object model as C++, so you can interoperate with C and C++ very easily.

I recommend you to check it out. It is a very good implementaiton of the Java specification and is constantly improving and it is as free as can be.

Actually, yes there is. You can't publish an incomplete implementation if you read the spec. GNU are working on the java problem anyway via GCJ and Classpath.

Stallman explains the low/nil value of the trademark in this essay.

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Not quite, the idea is that people have the freedom to copy, improve, and distribute. All bets are off if you can't get to the information. Both the GNU project and the GPLdon't say anything about any God given right to access free data if you don't have the means.

In fact, the GPL states that any action beyond the Triad of Freedoms is "outside it's scope".

Not quite, the idea is that people have the freedom to copy, improve, and distribute. All bets are off if you can't get to the information. Both the GNU project and the GPLdon't say anything about any God given right to access free data if you don't have the means.

In fact, the GPL states that any action beyond the Triad of Freedoms is "outside it's scope".

They weren't campaiging against publicity but against the need to acknowledge every contributer to derivatives of the software in question. They felt it was too "onerous" because it would make advertisments too unwieldy. If anything, GNU were promoting publicity by encouraging copyright declarations to be succinct and to the point.

This essay clarifies GNU's position.

I always finds comments like this interesting. One of the GPL complaints regarding the original BSD license was the "advertising clause." A similar clause in GPL would prevent Sun from doing this.

The real issue seems to be - are people bound by the legal requirements of the GPL or by the moral requirements of giving due credit.

• GNU emacs for win32
• Perl for Win32
• Core GNU unix utils for Win32 (sorry, cygwin is just too much hard work to keep it all working)
• Visual Studio v.whatever for VB, C++ etc. (whatever "the job" is)
• WinZip to unpack stuff above, and then to regularly curse how crap it is in so many ways
• All the SysInternals stuff, RegMon, FileMon, etc.
• Personal copy of Perforce to keep track of stuff I write from day one.

Stallman's masterpiece, right here I'm surprised nobody posted it yet.

I love my laptop because it's *MY* laptop and I have a right to all the data on it. It is not at all clear that these laptops belong to the students, and in particular what their rights to the content are. The laptops are running an MS OS (see the Vital Source Technologies website). Vital Source's web site doesn't (at least easily) display their licensing terms.

The economics of books provide a certain protection of liberties. Unfortunately, laptops do not.

The Right to Read

I install these programs first on new Windows machines.

• firefox
• cygwin (including emacs, ncftp, wget, openssh, grep, sed, and other favorites)
• putty
• ntfilemon/ntregmon
• Java2 SDK
• winamp
• VideoLAN Client
• wget
• WinPT/gpg
• Filzip

VNC, Emacs for Windows, VMWare, CDEx, Vorbis Tools, DaemonTools follow. I like Photoshop but as long as it's crippled (currency watermarks) and activated I'll never buy another license for it.

1. pico for quick editing before I've got X up and running.
   
2. NEdit the best programmers' text editor ever!
   
3. fvwm2 a good, fast, customizable window manager (I suffer through twm until this is in place)
   
4. ddd a simply wonderful front-end to gdb.
   
5. mozilla my browser of choice, warts and all (though konquerer is giving me second thoughts)
   
6. xscreensaver nothing makes me happier than xmatrix.
   
7. xpdf simple PDF viewer, no frills.
   
8. ROX-filer a fast and simple file system browser (though I've been leaning towards konquerer for about a year)
   
9. unclutter makes the mouse cursor disappear after several second of inactivity.
   
10. xv in case I need to fiddle with image files.
    
11. xine in case I need to watch a movie.
    

On top of this I have a set of configuration files archived for several of the above programs (i.e. fvwm2 and NEdit) and general system setup (fstab, XFree86, and bash/sh profile).

Since /. decided to post this story, I guess they really badly want to know what software I use. So here goes.

I only use operating systems that will run the bulk of software developed for Linux and/or *BSD. I'm assuming that compiler toolchain (cc, make, ld, etc.), net utils (ping, ftp, etc.), ssh are installed.

screen (terminal multiplexer)
netcat (tcp and udp from the command line)
elvis (lightweight vi clone*)
Some X11 implementation (usually XFree86)
WindowMaker (window manager with efficiency)
Mozilla Firefox (great web browser)
mutt (fast and versatile mail client)
Gaim (multi-protocol instant messenger)
wget (download over http or ftp)

* I personally think vi is a prime example of horrible interface design, but it proved hard to find a text editor that is similarly efficient and powerful as elvis. I only with they would get rid of the HTML (and Latex?) view mode and just show me the source so I can edit it.

Since /. decided to post this story, I guess they really badly want to know what software I use. So here goes.

I only use operating systems that will run the bulk of software developed for Linux and/or *BSD. I'm assuming that compiler toolchain (cc, make, ld, etc.), net utils (ping, ftp, etc.), ssh are installed.

screen (terminal multiplexer)
netcat (tcp and udp from the command line)
elvis (lightweight vi clone*)
Some X11 implementation (usually XFree86)
WindowMaker (window manager with efficiency)
Mozilla Firefox (great web browser)
mutt (fast and versatile mail client)
Gaim (multi-protocol instant messenger)
wget (download over http or ftp)

* I personally think vi is a prime example of horrible interface design, but it proved hard to find a text editor that is similarly efficient and powerful as elvis. I only with they would get rid of the HTML (and Latex?) view mode and just show me the source so I can edit it.

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

The correct link for GNU internationalization coding standards is here.

It's A 380K Tar file! with over 2000 lines of C code.

The first time I thought it was a parody, but it's really an insightful look at Internationalization, cross-platform build environments, and other things important to free software. I didn't RTFB that was reviewed, but I hope it goes into these important topics as well. I think this emphasis on coding standards that value the less visible aspects of software such as build environments, internationalization, etc is one of the big advantages of open source.

It's A 380K Tar file! with over 2000 lines of C code.

The first time I thought it was a parody, but it's really an insightful look at Internationalization, cross-platform build environments, and other things important to free software. I didn't RTFB that was reviewed, but I hope it goes into these important topics as well. I think this emphasis on coding standards that value the less visible aspects of software such as build environments, internationalization, etc is one of the big advantages of open source.

It's A 380K Tar file! with over 2000 lines of C code.

The first time I thought it was a parody, but it's really an insightful look at Internationalization, cross-platform build environments, and other things important to free software. I didn't RTFB that was reviewed, but I hope it goes into these important topics as well. I think this emphasis on coding standards that value the less visible aspects of software such as build environments, internationalization, etc is one of the big advantages of open source.

So, you hope others have the same poor morals as you, and don't know enough about the history of free software to realize that the GPL was created because the firmware and drivers to a printer were proprietary.

I am going to give a try to Joe 3.0 now.

Files created by a "make install" usually don't have any way to cleanly remove or upgrade them

You can use GNU Stow

Even in sue happy America this case would be dismissed. It's like suing a library because I went to look for say McDonalds and found that Burger King also sells hamburgers. McDonalds is mad wanting to bundle library with a default configuration whereby McDonald's information is installed in the library and cannot be removed once installed nor can it be collocated with other Hamburger joints. Now that McDonalds has the market captured it can now be the dominate player in the hamburger field (reminiscent of a browser pun everyone). So now that McDonalds has the default configuration of libraries setup, McDonalds can now expand to, say, French Fires - you now must eat vegetable fried fries with fake beef flavoring. Did this court also award any damages from Amazons one click shopping scheme? This is crazy I'll stop now...

Do not give in! Listen to the mighty ed!

You're just sick! That's why we like you.

There's a cool library called GNU Lightning which will generate machine code at runtime, which is good for JITs and such. It isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it illustrates that having a standard assembly language (or, much more likely, several standard assembly languages!) isn't all that far off.

Therefore, I propose this naming scheme: the GNU stuff will be called "GNU", the kernel will be called "Linux" or "the Linux kernel", and the OS will be called "insert distro name here". RMS's foo/bar naming system gets too complicated if you really try for accuracy, and people will make fun of you if you use it, so perhaps we can appease him by throwing random links to the GNU project in our discussions of what OS we're running.

If we really wanted .Net functionality on Linux, we would make peace with Sun and pull Java into the OSS world.

As far as I can tell, the fact that Linux is a viable platform for running Java applications is one of the things keeping Java in the running.

So what exactly does the Linux community have to "make peace" with Sun over?

Is it the fact that the Java platform is "non-free" according to Richard Stallman? That's not something we did to Sun; some recent Slashdot articles have covered IBM's offer to help Sun open-source Java. Although talks may still be going on, Scott McNealy has said there will be no open-source Java -- at least, not one coming from Sun.

Any issues with "pulling Java into the OSS world" are Sun's issues, not the Linux community's.

Jay (=

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

Why would I want to run win32 programs? I can't think of one Windows program that doesn't have a better equivalent for Linux.

OpenOffice, LaTeX + emacs, eclipse, blender, gimp, mozilla, maple, mathematica, ut2004, etc. What do _you_ need Windows for?

IBM Public License, Version 1.0

This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL. The IBM Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL. For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

By the way, that same FSF page says the same about IBM's other open source license, the Common Public License, used in Eclipse.

I hope that a future version of the GPL will allow LGPL-style linking with code covered by GPL-incompatible "free software" licenses in cases where no proprietary software is linked in or perhaps that a future version of the GPL will address software patent problems in a way that is compatible with the IBM Public License and the Apache 2 License.

In the meantime, to me, the advantages of Postfix are less than the disadvantages of the obstacles to future code recycling. If the incompatabilities could be fixed by a change to either the GPL or the IPL, and if enough of the hype about postfix proved to be real, I would probably switch to postfix.

I know I am a statistically insignificant sample, but there are others, mostly developers, who care about being able to copy code between free software projects in general and GPL compatability in particular. So, Postfix gain that much more usage and support if and when this incompatability is resolved, such as, for the short term, by adding some exceptions for the GPL, as the CUPS project did.

If someone would just port EDLIN to it I'd be happy. :)

But surely this is the ultimate open source program.

who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of "Free Software's Killer Applications"

Oh yes yes sure... but when will they learn? the *only* free software killer application is here. And I should know, it very nearly killed me.

Oh and by the way, I'm sure it can do desktop publishing too some way or another...

The Crypto api is implemented in C (for obvious reasons) and plugged into the engine. It should only have a slight degradation in performance due to the dynamic lookup of these methods. MD5's just about the same speed as one written in C (ok, maybe 97% is not 100 ... but it's damn near enough for me).

For the non believers have a look at MD5 Code Or Ripemd160 Or Sha512

Looking over the DeDRM code , there doesn't seem to be any places where a performance hit due to array bounds checks are there . (that's coz he's using BlockCopy).

I'd have run this on DotGNU by now (ie it builds and runs, and no todo's around the things it uses) , but I don't have something to deDRM :)