Slashdot Mirror

Just wanted to point out that I have produced the most bug reports for pnet at the time (currently 54 bug reports in the system).

One good thing I have to say about Rhsy is that he fixes bugs quickly!

My sometimes harsh and questioning nature that brought me to free software is sometimes too much for people to take.

I bitched and moaned alot about dotgnu implementing patent-endanged code instead of following thier original plan.

My complaining got me banned from the project.

Now instead of accepting reports about this buggy software that would warn people that it is not usable on really challenging code (like libx11 or the gcc) that I was compiling with it.

The author rhys tried to *gag* me.

I complained to savannah about this here :

In the end, he of course appreciated my valid bug report and fixed them like all the other ones.

The arguments that my bugs are not valid really dont hold water if all of them are fixed. The reality is that the software was lacking major testing, and that my reporting of all these bugs reflected that unstable state.

The funny thing it the backpedling you can find in the history here, the bug is turned from invalid to fixed!
"Mon 02/16/04 at 23:41 rweather resolution_id Invalid Fixed"

So, I would really think twice before spending your time working on pnet/c, because the developers are trying to hide bugs from you! (the ones that I reported (Real bugs))

mike

• Producing text mixed with music examples (large ones between paragraphs, tiny ones in-line) is tiresome with traditional music notation packages, involving a lot of copying and pasting between notation and text processing programs. Lilypond-book makes this easy (there is only one source file that contains both text and music) An example: source and output.
• Automated production of different output files from one source file is easy (using a script or a makefile). I routinely produce a violin and a viola version of all my teaching materials. Whenever I change something, it is automatically re-done in both versions.
• Even on a simple PDA one can create a lilypond file (all you need is a text editor and a few kB of memory). I am often away from home and I do a lot of my notation this way, in trains and between rehearsals.

I want to use my MIDI keyboard for entry

Try the following:

• Hans Lub's emacs/MIDI input mode
• Nicholas Sceaux' Emacs/MIDI input mode
• RUMOR a command line monophonic MIDI/lilypond entry tool.
• LilyComp a graphic entry tool, for those that don't read music well.

I don't want to learn another syntax. Now what?

There are other options: it is possible to create the music in another format. Supported formats include

• MIDI: LilyPond includes midi2ly, a program that translates a MIDI file to LilyPond.
• ETF: LilyPond includes etf2ly, a convertor for the Finale ETF format (about ETF)
• ABC: LilyPond includes abc2ly, a convertor for the popular ABC format (about ABC)
• MusicXML. Guido Amoruso's xml2ly will convert MusicXML to LilyPond. (About MusicXML.).

GNU/HURD is begging, alright. Begging for developers, begging for users, begging to be noticed. Does anyone actually use it? Even these guys don't.

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Comparing anything to perfection is unproductive; it serves to reinforce our biases by presenting us with a false dichotomy (you can have whatever argument is being proposed or you can have perfection, which is never available). Let's look at specific claims.

As much as there are some FSF fans wish that the GPL was the only software license [...]

Please name who these people are and cite the evidence that gives you this impression.

[...] it's not the one-size-fits-all solution for everybody. That's why the LGPL exists. That's why Creative Commons exists. That's why many common open-source programs have forked the GPL to make it their own.

That explanation barely gets into why the LGPL exists. The Creative Commons doesn't recommend their licenses for software. The GNU project started over a decade before the open source movement began and the GNU project was founded to talk about software freedom, not a development methodology. I'd also be interested to learn who, besides the Affero General Public License has "forked" the GNU GPL. The Creative Commons has listed the GNU GPL, not forked it.

[...] but let's not treat the GPL like it's a religion. It's not perfect.

Who, exactly, is doing this and what, exactly, are they saying?

Comparing anything to perfection is unproductive; it serves to reinforce our biases by presenting us with a false dichotomy (you can have whatever argument is being proposed or you can have perfection, which is never available). Let's look at specific claims.

As much as there are some FSF fans wish that the GPL was the only software license [...]

Please name who these people are and cite the evidence that gives you this impression.

[...] it's not the one-size-fits-all solution for everybody. That's why the LGPL exists. That's why Creative Commons exists. That's why many common open-source programs have forked the GPL to make it their own.

That explanation barely gets into why the LGPL exists. The Creative Commons doesn't recommend their licenses for software. The GNU project started over a decade before the open source movement began and the GNU project was founded to talk about software freedom, not a development methodology. I'd also be interested to learn who, besides the Affero General Public License has "forked" the GNU GPL. The Creative Commons has listed the GNU GPL, not forked it.

[...] but let's not treat the GPL like it's a religion. It's not perfect.

Who, exactly, is doing this and what, exactly, are they saying?

Why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of their atrocious license changes?

Some people wouldn't call a switch from LGPL to GPL "atrocious." They've been arguing for ages that the GPL is better. And since they wrote both licenses, they must know what they're talking about.

He had a point in that Linux was using an old architecture, and would have been better designed as a micro-kernel.

No, his point was absolutely wrong.

If Linux had been designed as a microkernel, it would be no more useful today than GNU Hurd is. Both Linux and Hurd are GPLed Unix-like systems with what you (wrongly) call "Bazaar" development, but only one of them is important enough to be mentioned on CNN 20 times in a day.

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

1. X10 controller
   1. SmartHome.Com
   2. web-based X10 controller
   3. Complete listing of X10 software
   4. Linux-based HomeVision
2. GNU Automaton
3. an established IPv6 tunnel with your own IPv6 address subnet (it's a whole new world out there)
4. SMS server for your cell-phone (good with X10)
   1. X10 event to your SMS phone (via paging)
   2. Control X10 from your WAP cellphone
5. Mobile IP server for your roving laptop

Coffee Maker (this one needs an Java-Dispenser SNMP agent badly)

We're almost there...

Surprise, Microsoft releases .Net for Unix, and the entire effort is null and void. Your pride and joy is now a footnote, and a deprecated one at that.

Clearly the folks at the FSF are developing much faster than the Linux kernel team, which pretty much throws the whole Cathedral and Bazaar argument out the window. With this sort of progess I'm sure we can look for a finished Hurd any day now...

Nothing compares in bug content to a Linux zealot. Linux users will often suffer from infestations of pubic lice, anal crabs, intestinal worms, and goat ticks resulting from their penchant for fucking goats.

The article pointed out that many of Edison's patents were illegally used to develop technology used by film companies. What is the parallel between that and p2p?

First off, the motion picture industry likes to conflate copyrights and trademarks into "intellectual property" in order to suppress (for example) fan fiction, and the proprietary software industry likes to conflate copyrights and patents into "intellectual property" in order to suppress competing interoperable implementations. In my mind, this tendency on the part of the copyright industries to conflate vastly different kinds of monopolies into "intellectual property" justifies using this same conflation against the industries.

The whole article talks about pirating technology, not pirating works of art.

Inventions are under a monopoly. Works of authorship are under a different monopoly. But to the industry, a monopoly is a monopoly, and infringement is infringement.

Yeah, but if you distinguish copyright infringement from patent infringement, you lose the conflatability of the term "intellectual property". The entertainment industry wants to conflate copyrights with trademarks in order to suppress fan fiction. The proprietary software industry wants to conflate copyrights with patents and trade secrets in order to suppress interoperability among products. So if we want to fight on the terms of the copyright industries who claim that "piracy is piracy," then patent infringement is just as much "piracy" as copyright infringement.

Most people here are communists, not libertarians.

(Just kidding, you commie bastards.)

README

5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
the Program or works based on it.

As a professional, I can't imagine supporting anyone without a copy of SystemRescueCd on hand for just these kinds of problems. A single linux bootable CD image with GNU software such as GNUParted, QTParted, and Partimage, all of which are excellent and FREE replacements for PQMagic or Ghost.

I've always regarded that as a failure - the use didn't supply enough information for the program to do its job (hence a failure), but the program dumps some usage information as a convenience to the user. A quick test shows that GNU 'grep' returns 2 in such a case, so that's consistent.

You could argue that it failed in that it didn't do what the program was intended to do (e.g. encode mp3s), but you could also argue that the expected behaviour of the program, when provided zero parameters, is to display usage info, and it successfully did that.

I think you'd be in the minority with your latter argument.

What if, using whatever the proper syntax of the shell is, the user requests something like "encode all wave files in this directory" and there are zero wave files, and so the program encodes zero mp3s. Was that a success or a failure? It's a success in that nothing in the program broke, but it seems like perhaps something happened that the user isn't aware of, and perhaps the user should be informed.

My instinct is that that would depend on how the program is used. If the user needs to supply a list of files (e.g. *.wav before expansion by the shell), then if that list is null, the program should return an error. If, OTOH, the user needs to supply a path which is searched for files, then the program should exit(EXIT_SUCCESS) as long as that path exists and is readable.

What about if the user passes a "-h" parameter, asking for help, and the program displays the help. Was this a successful run of the program or a failure? It did exactly what the user asked, but it didn't fufill its main purpose, encoding mp3s in this example.

Again, convention indicates that a program displaying help if the user explicitly asks for it is successful operation. Some applications (e.g. GUI wrappers for command line applications) use '-h' and '--help' to find out what options are supported by the application they wrap in order to present appropriate controls in the GUI.

What if the user thinks "-h" means "highquality", but in fact the program interprets it as "display help"? The help blurb may be displayed, a success returned, and the files deleted.

OK, a potentially valid point, at last. But what if I think a GUI's "trashcan" icon actually represents a printer and I drag all my files to it hoping for them to be printed? There's a limit to how much you can do to protect the user from their own stupidity or ignorance.

I'm not advocating GUIs vs CLI or vice versa (I alternate between the two, depending on what I'm trying to get done), but I have a distate for Unix's return code system.

It's true that it's a shame that POSIX doesn't appear to define the commonly-accepted conventions I've described above, but this GNU libc manual page is a good start.

I'm interested to hear what would you propose instead of exit codes!

--

I bet 99% people don't even know what the lock icon means. I bet 90%+ of Slashdotters don't really know what the lock icon means and how to interpret the meaning of the cert. What does that tell you about the quality of the user interface?

The UI is oversimplified to the point of danger. So some company that you don't know, but the guy who made your browser might know declares that the cert really belongs to who it claims to belong to. Where's the accountability? Do you know any of these signers? Do you know anything at all about their security procedures? And if you did know something about them, could you adjust how much you trust them, and have your browser use other authorities to double-check them?

That's why the cert system sucks, especially with only one signature per key. I can think of ways it might be useful, but Internet Commerce isn't one of them.

Fortunately, many many years ago, before the web even existed, someone came up with a much better way of dealing with these issues. That someone was the underrated hero Phil Zimmermann, and that something is called PGP.

Now with PGP, the user has to actually think about who they trust and deal with the concept of degrees of trust, and grandma doesn't want to have to think about crypto stuff. Boo hoo. That's too bad, because if you want accuracy, and even the capacity to be able to trust what your tools are telling you, then you have to. But some people don't care. Fine, then trust some central authority just like you do with SSL certs, and your situation is no better or no worse than it currently is now.

But at least if PGP were used, then, the applications (e.g. web browsers) would be designed with the idea in mind, that certs are of varying degrees of trustworthiness, and they would have been forced into coming up with ways of presenting this information to users. (Because just because grandma doesn't care, that doesn't mean all your users don't care. So you have to deal with the issue.) That means that problems like the one in this story, wouldn't happen, because the UI would be designed, not to tell the user if an connection were SSL, but instead to inform the user about the other side's identity and the degree of certainty of that identity. A plaintext SSL connection would say something like "0% certainty" instead of a stupid lock icon.

Now, time for a plug: the GNU TLS library. These dudes made an SSL library that can use PGP certs. It's a step in the right direction. Kick ass.

Perhaps a repository is in order to list all the apps that need replacing, and possible alternatives--if one exists, PLEASE let me know.

I'm not suggesting that Apple should have rights on the idea of a scroll wheel (although they might try, and there are patents on far more obvious things). But that's irrelevant. Industrial design law specifically covers the non-functional aesthetic. From the article and previous comments, it appears that this piece of software duplicates the iPod aesthetic pretty faithfully, and Apple have already won a lawsuit against similar efforts to duplicate the aesthetic of the iMac.

Since a recipe is merely a list of instructions, I figured that the GPL could be applied, although IANAL.

So, for Slashdot, I present Free Food :-)

[Don't go toasting my server now... :-]

If you want to argue (RIAA style) that the end-user, in requesting another machine to send the program (ftp type transfer) is copying the program and therefore "distributing" the program, then perhaps you may have a point. (but I think that is getting a bit rediculous)

I believe the GPL assumes that, once recieved, the software user is allowed to use the software however the user sees fit; much like a person having recieved a book may read the book without additional licence. (or they may stand on it, burn it, whatever...)

The stanza you quote actually says,

5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.

Just look at the FSF license list, which includes a note for each about whether it is GPL-compatible or not.

The modders that modded the parent up to score:5 should be ashamed of themselves.

See: Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism

The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.

ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD: it's (a)live!

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD is dying community when Slashdot confirmed that *BSD death trolls have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all troll posts. Coming on the heels of a recent troll survey which plainly states that trolls are running out of *BSD ammo, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot trolls are trolling with new and better methods because trolling about BSD's falsely prophetic death is as obsolete and useless as GNU HURD.

You don't need to be Jesus to predict the Slashdot troll phenomena's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD trolls because *BSD trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD trolls. As many of us are already aware, *BSD has recently acquired several Live CDs. Red devil Live CDs multiply like fucking rabbits.

The reasons for the death of the *BSD troll are obvious. The creators of the *BSD troll post have lost 93% of their core developers due to casulties from the sudden and unpleasant battles between Trollcore and GNAA. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD trolls are dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

GNAA leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 700 active trolls on Slashdot. How many BSD death trolls are there? Let's see. The number of troll posts vs BSD death troll posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700/5 = 140 BSD death trolls. But half of those are just cheezy karma-whore spinoffs of the original troll. Therefore there are about 70 users of the real BSD death troll. These statistics, of course, reflect Slashdot before the war between Trollcore and GNAA. So we must assume that there are less than 70 people who actually believe that *BSD is still dying!

All major surveys show that *BSD trolls have steadily declined in humor level. *BSD trolls are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD trolls are to survive at all, they will be nothing but workers toiling in Slashdot trolling phenomena obscurity. *BSD death trolls continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD death trolls are dead.

Fact: *BSD: it's (a)live!

The Dangers of Software Patents is an old one.

You can listen to it here if you're interested. I highly recommend all of stallman's stuff. They are at least as interesting as reading slashdot.

While that may be true on the Linux platform, I do not believe that to be accurate on either my Windows or BSD box. MOST of the software on my BSD box is free and NOT GPL.

Over half of all free software available on the most important internet archives for the stuff is licensed under the GPL. Check the statistics found here. I didn't say that half of the software on your FreeBSD or Windows machines was GPL licensed. More than half the software on your Windows machine is surely proprietary. I'm sure that the FreeBSD base system is almost entirely BSD licensed. However, stroll over to the ports system. There you will find a convenient way to install GCC, Bash, Emacs, and an endless selection of powerful and useful GPL applications and libraries.

Does FreeBSD even come with a C compiler that isn't GCC? On my FreeBSD machine "cc --version" gives me GCC output, but the first thing I do when I install such a thing is setup a variety of useful GPL applications, so I very well may have clobbered or overlooked some anonymous BSD licensed compiler along the way.

Do you disagree? Are you saying it is OK for me to scavenge code from GPL software to make other non-GPL free software? You make it seem like GPL is the only 'free' solution.

Are you even paying attention? I did not say it was acceptable for you to scavenge code from GPL software and place it into proprietary code. However, merely looking at GPL code will not prevent you from writing your own oringinal non-derivative but possibly similar code that does similar things. Read the GPL and tell me where it says that you can't do this.

Even IBM has their own open source license.

I have said over and over again that the choice of whether to use the GPL is a strategic one. Have you read the IBM public license? Here is what the FSF has to say about it:

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.)

In other words, the GPL is not restrictive enough for IBM in some cases. Meanwhile IBM contributes to GPL projects including Linux all the time, so they are clearly not allergic to it.

However, nothing on either of those pages show anything about the "Spirit of the GPL". However, a quick search of Google OR Slashdot will show that people quite regularly complain about projectX or licenseY breaking the Spirit of the GPL.

Good grief. Do you mean to say that the hoards on slashdot and various web logs are a better arbiter of what is and is not within the spirit of the GPL than the Free Software Foundation, the organization that created it, simply becuase the latter doesn't use the exact phrase "Spirit of the GPL" on the page?

Perhaps this is an issue that would be better resolved directly with licensing@gnu.org, with whom I will email directly to get clarification.

Yes, do. I'm sure you'll be back with an out-of-context quote that you've only half understood and turned upside down to make into some nefarious thing, but at least you will have had the opportunity to see learn something.

And can that resulting application be BSD-licensed? NO! It has to be GPL'd.

And your point is what exactly? What I said was that the GPL gives you an incentive to make your work free software, and it does that.

However, if the code was Public Domain, then NO ONE would question that everyone could use it without reinventing the wheel. GPL does not add this capability -- since Public Domain (BSD, etc) all have been around with that sa

At least one of the books being reviewed is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. Also, some are released in LaTeX which is also open-source.

Apache fork? Why? The old Apache licences weren't GPL-compatible either. If that bothers you, you need to write a new webserver from scratch, not fork.

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Sure, reinventing is a waste of my time and their money, but wouldn't it be better for the community (and even what they claim to be encouraging) if I were to make their product better for the whole community?

You've said this before, and I've already addressed the loss of your potential input and fixes. Plenty of people much smarter than you are not troubled by the GPL and are more than happy to contribute improvements. Obviously the programmers who chose the GPL believe that losing the few people who think the way you do is more than made up for by those who will be encouraged by the GPL to make their applications free software. You are welcome to disagree, but there is a vast body of widely used GPL software out there that you need to explain. Why is over half (and that's a conservative estimate) of all free software covered by the GPL if that license harms the community?

The developers and companies would be willing to spend their time and money giving back to the community, but can't because they can't use GPLd software.

This is complete nonsense. Almost every Fortune 500 company is using GPL licensed software in one form or another today and many contribute improvements to the community. For instance, IBM contributes to the Linux kernel even though they also sell a variety proprietary operating system kernels. Companies that "can't" use GPL licensed software in general are simply those who have been misled by ignorant statements of the sort you are making.

If I am writing a Grep utility, and I download (and thus possibly browse the source for) a GPLd version, I am breaking the spirit of the license, even if not the letter of the license, by using GPL ideas to write non-GPL code. [...] You can correct me if I am wrong there.

You are wrong there. In the first place, copyright covers expression and not ideas, the dreamy hopes of proprietary software companies notwithstanding. Furthermore, one of the four fundamental kinds of freedom required for free software is to allow people to study source code and learn from it. You violate neither the letter nor the spirit of the GPL by downloading code, studying it and using ideas to inspire your own independent and original work. Go to the FSF philosophy pages and do some reading before making comments on the spirit of the license.

What incentive? Even as an independant developer, I don't see that part of it.

First, if you make your application free software using a GPL compatible license (such as the BSD license without advertising clause) you can link with that vast body of GPL licensed code I mentioned. That means fewer wheels reinvented and more time to focus on other aspects of the application. Second, if you actually use the GPL you need not fear that your competitors will take your application, improve upon it and use your own work against you in the marketplace without making their changes available in turn.

I accept that this sort of thing is beyond your understanding and I don't expect to penetrate your closed mind on the matter. Still, if this incentive is so inscrutable, how do you explain the preponderance of GPL licensed code out there?

Yes, I agree. However, the "Open Source Community" these days seems to be more GPL vs. Non-GPL. It should not be that way.

Actually, it is not that way -- except perhaps in the minds of a few people like yourself. People who like and advocate the GPL usually don't object to non-GPL licenses. Even the Free Software Foundation, which is surely the most avid of GPL proponents, does not suggest using the GPL for all software and considers non-GPL licensed free software to be perfectly acceptable.

I'm sorry. I am not familiar with BSDi.

BSDi is a company that made a proprietary version of FreeBSD. They didn't succeed in overshadowing FreeBSD. This fact is often used by BSD license advocates to demonstrate that

No, but the assumption is that [Sun] would have to OpenSource the core libraries as well as the VM itself.

Certainly. But the assumption that the libraries must be released under the same license as the virtual machine doesn't follow from that. Even the Free Software Foundation notes that the GPL is not the best license for all software. They recommend a BSD-style license sometimes, as for the Vorbis libraries. More to the point, the FSF already distributes GNU Classpath, which implements much of the Java standard library, under an LGPL-like license.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that retroactively revoking the freedom to create non-GPL licensed Java libraries and applications (even if such a thing could be done, which seems improbable to me) would be quite impolite and not especially clever. People who wish that Sun would release the virtual machine under the GPL or some other free software license most likely do not mean anything of that sort. I certainly don't.

Since many companies have made me rewrite things because the current implementations were GPL (ie: reinvent the wheel), I claim this hurts the open source movement.

I would believe you if said this hurt you or the company that paid you to rewrite things, but I don't see how this hurts the free software movement (sorry, but I don't particularly care about the open source movement). Reinventing the wheel is the price one pays for not cooperating with the community.

Had those library been LGPL, for example, those companies would have allowed me to use and even improve upon (and return to the community) those libraries. Since they were GPL, we were not even allowed to download them.

Why did you put "return to the community" in parenthesis? This is the *only* germane part of your argument. No amount of harm to you or your company counts when asking whether the GPL harms the free software community, of which a company that forbids even *downloading* anything licensed under the GPL (an idiotic policy, by the way) is clearly not a part. Also, you are failing to distinguish between GPL applications and GPL libraries. Anyone willing to return improvements to the community should have no problem with the former. Do you admit that what you really despise is the use of the GPL for libraries and not the license itself?

As far as libraries go, even the FSF notes that whether the GPL or LGPL is preferable depends on strategic concerns. When there are competing proprietary libraries they prefer the LGPL for exactly the reason you mentioned. Only when a library is unique and innovative do they recommend the GPL. In such cases the loss of your potential improvements is probably made up for by the incentive this gives to more sane organizations to make their application free software. Remember that helping people to create proprietary applications is not the goal of the free software community.

Even if a court chose to say otherwise, doesn't the whole concept that EVERYTHING extends Object (even if you don't do it explicitely) require GPL, by the Spirit of the GPL?

Not really, no. The GPL was created in order to prevent companies from improving free software and releasing the result under restricive proprietary licenses instead of giving those improvements back to the community, essentially tempting users away from free software using the efforts of free software developers themselves. This is essentially the situation economists call the Tragedy of the Commons. Public domain software and software that is licensed under BSD-style terms is regularly treated this way.

(In practice free software development has turned out to be so effective that proprietary companies have trouble keeping up. BSDi isn't as successful as FreeBSD, for example. Still, that isn't the case for every project and there are other good reasons for using the GPL in many cases. For example, I don't want soft

I'll assume the first, and attempt to educate you. I've already pissed off a bunch of people who instead provided the usual whiny /. repsonse to your (possibly unintiontional) troll, so I figure I better piss off the rest. wheee!

So what if the drivers are closed source?

ATI cant [sic] and wont [sic] expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

HTH HAND

or not

Check out the Gnu Know your System Administrator field guide and Top 100 things you don't want the sysadmin to say ...

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

I wasn't sure whether to believe you at first, so I looked it up and it turns out you weren't kidding! This is just too fucking funny.

Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group
(This section is by Richard Stallman.)

Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

Typical RMS.

The goal of the EULA is to give MS total control - so it's drafted to give the user as few rights as possible, making sure that grey areas will fall in MS's favour if a court case arises, and be completely unreadable to the layman. The EULA is so different to the GPL & BSD that they would share very little in terms of enforcement.

As for the lack of the GPL court case, read Eben Moglens (very good, short) essay Enforcing the GNU GPL.

Also remember that as of W32-XP, you're relationship with MS is not over once you leave the shop - you register either by phone or online when you install the system. The registration number you send to MS is a unique ID for your computer which is generated from a combination of various hardware serial numbers. Every time you use MS Windows Update, a list of all programs (by all vendors) that you have installed on your system is sent to MS. Two backdoor accounts have been found in MS IIS, both have "NSA" in the username. (and those are just the proven sneaky activities of MS software.) Your relationship with the shopkeeper is over - but your relationship with MS is just beginning ;-)

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD: it's (a)live!

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD is dying community when Slashdot confirmed that *BSD death trolls have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all troll posts. Coming on the heels of a recent troll survey which plainly states that trolls are running out of *BSD ammo, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot trolls are trolling with new and better methods because trolling about BSD's falsely prophetic death is as obsolete and useless as GNU HURD.

You don't need to be Jesus to predict the Slashdot troll phenomena's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD trolls because *BSD trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD trolls. As many of us are already aware, *BSD has recently acquired several Live CDs. Red devil Live CDs multiply like fucking rabbits.

The reasons for the death of the *BSD troll are obvious. The creators of the *BSD troll post have lost 93% of their core developers due to casulties from the sudden and unpleasant battles between Trollcore and GNAA. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD trolls are dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

GNAA leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 700 active trolls on Slashdot. How many BSD death trolls are there? Let's see. The number of troll posts vs BSD death troll posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700/5 = 140 BSD death trolls. But half of those are just cheezy karma-whore spinoffs of the original troll. Therefore there are about 70 users of the real BSD death troll. These statistics, of course, reflect Slashdot before the war between Trollcore and GNAA. So we must assume that there are less than 70 people who actually believe that *BSD is still dying!

All major surveys show that *BSD trolls have steadily declined in humor level. *BSD trolls are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD trolls are to survive at all, they will be nothing but workers toiling in Slashdot trolling phenomena obscurity. *BSD death trolls continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD death trolls are dead.

Fact: *BSD: it's (a)live!

Worth rehashing, because this story looks more and more normal every day, until we're going to discard it with a "naturally! and what are you complaining about ?"

Excerpt from the "The Right to Read" article:

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.

... Read the rest here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

There is already stow [gnu.org].

Maybe someone with coding skill -- unlike myself -- could run with it.

There is already stow.

Ever try installing a current SRPM of openssh onto an older Redhat release? It's a nightmare! The RPM requires a current version of openssl, but the KDE libraries all require openssl 0.9.5 (or some such). You just cannot get it to work.

Without upgrading you mean, ok fair enough. Although I'm not sure why I'd care about what version openssh is (unless it's a security errata -- in which case it's coming from my vendor anyway). But using a better example of evolution or whatever...

So you may now be thinking to yourself, "Okay, that's kinda useful. But when you have hundreds (or thousands) of apps, your PATH would be insanely long. This just won't work."

That's a good point -- but there's a solution. Use the "lndir" command from within /mfs, to link your desired package into the root /mfs directory

Ta-da you've now got the same problem plus a billion symlinks. You could argue that putting a serious amount of crack in the PATH and/or LD_LIBRARY_PATH could save you ... I'd disagree, openssl is pretty notorius of breaking backward compat. on library upgrades. So you are likely to end up with something that installs but doesn't work. And the deps. won't be half as good as any of the major distros, as you are basically doing download tarball type ./configure -- see what fails -- then, eventually, run and see what fails.

But another great benefit is that you can change the stable version on the fly, on a live system, simply by pointing that stable link to the version you wish it to now point to (yes, sometimes between versions you gain or lose files, so this is not perfect).

Understatement of the century. Be very affraid of any "package management" system that hand waves away problems like this (and god help you if you are doing anything like "obsoletes" markings ... which again all the major package management solutions have).

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted
(Term 0 of the GNU GPL)

Does this mean we have to use it? All my old MP3s will work just fine.

One word: patents. They can start enforcing them whenever they want. (See www.mp3licensing.com.) Remember Unisys patent on LZW compression? All my old GIFs was working just fine too, which didn't mean I could keep using them. Fortunately, now with zlib, PNG and Ogg Vorbis, this is not an issue this time.

Does anyone understand logic here? If you're lzw compressed gifs can't be displayed anymore, it's because no one thought it was worth paying the royalty.

Two words: free software.

If you have a licensed player to play an mp3 file, you can play any file, no matter how old. See the difference? Why does this shit get modded up?

Nine words: You haven't read this and this, have you?

They release a whole slew of free software. For instance there is a version of Windows Media player for Windows, Mac OS, and even Solaris.

Can you get source? Can you make changes? Can you make your own software that creates and plays Windows Media format files? No? Then it's not free software.

Speaking of Microsoft turning up in the background, SCO's new licensee, an ISP nobody ever heard of, can be found on Microsoft's website, held up as a case study, dated September 2003, of a company that thought they wanted to go to Linux and then switched back:

"EV1Servers.net Leading Hosted Service Provider Deploys Windows-based Hosting Solutions Faster than Linux-based Solutions "Business managers at EV1 Servers.net knew that there was a demand for a Microsoft Windows-based hosted service offering, but they did not think they could deploy Windows-based servers with the same speed or level of automation that they had achieved in their deployment of their traditional Linux-based systems. Yet with the introduction of the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 2.0, which can take advantage of Automated Deployment Services (ADS)--a powerful new server purposing tool in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition--EV1 Servers.net is finding that it can deploy a Windows-based hosting service in less than half the time it takes to deploy a similarly configured Linux system. And they can do it with much less hands-on involvement than their Linux deployments demand."

So they need a SCO IP license to run Microsoft "solutions"? Or is this another Microsoft solution for SCO? EV1's customers aren't so happy.

4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.