Domain: gnu.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to gnu.org.
Comments · 13,360
-
Re:What happened?
[flame]No, actually, according to Stallman's stated position, we're supposed to all work for tips as waiters and give software away. It's not clear if even charging for support is permissible in the FSF's thinking, since that would involve putting money and software in the same context, something that apparently must never be done...[/flame]
No, that is not Stallman's stated position, it is SCO's stated beliefe of Stallman's position. Stallman's stated position is that it is okay to charge for software, and in fact he gets paid to write software. What he wants people to do is share the code so everyone's software is better. That sounds good to me. Software Libre!
-
Re:What happened?
[flame]No, actually, according to Stallman's stated position, we're supposed to all work for tips as waiters and give software away. It's not clear if even charging for support is permissible in the FSF's thinking, since that would involve putting money and software in the same context, something that apparently must never be done...[/flame]
No, that is not Stallman's stated position, it is SCO's stated beliefe of Stallman's position. Stallman's stated position is that it is okay to charge for software, and in fact he gets paid to write software. What he wants people to do is share the code so everyone's software is better. That sounds good to me. Software Libre!
-
Re:Fix this at the language level?
Or just do it in m4, their input files are already in it.
-
Re:Any language?
Which C99 feature do you need to use that:
1) Isn't also a C++ feature (that covers a large chunk of C99)
2) Isn't already a vendor-specific extension
3) Doesn't have a commonly-known (and often-used) workaround?
C99 is still new enough that compiler support is very spotty (for example, GCC C99 status) anyways.
Take another look over David R. Tribble's list of C99 v. C++ incompatabilities. I find it difficult to believe that there will be anyone stymied by having a C++ compiler but not a C99 compiler. -
Re:It's "free software" not "free-ware".
If it's free beer then it's freeware.
I've never seen anyone refer to zero price beer as "freeware": "We're having a party and there will be chips, salsa, and freeware at every table" sounds confusing to me--will there be beer or computer software at every table? Perhaps you were referring to "Free as in beer"?
Software that is gratis (free+ware). Since no one has to pay to get g77, it's freeware. I wish the FSF would stop trying to redefine the English language.
--
Open source, without that fishy smell. FreeBSDIt's ironic that someone who misstates the phrase the FSF uses accuses the FSF of "trying to redefine the English language". As the link I pointed to clearly illustrates, other languages don't use the same word to mean freedom or gratis and leave it up to you to figure out which meaning is intended. The distinction the FSF makes about kinds of software is not understood by talking about price. You're right that you can get g77 without paying for it but that is a side-effect of the freedom to share. One would think someone who hawks FreeBSD in their sig would appreciate this useful distinction.
-
It's "free software" not "free-ware".
You might think that a free-ware compiler would be good for promoting the language.
Haggle over the technical merit of g77 all you want, but free software is not the same as "free-ware".
-
The term of copyright has been exploited.
From the article:
Until 1978, copyright only lasted 52 years in the U.S. -- and then only if you remembered to renew it. There were other technical lapses that could result in the inadvertent loss of copyright -- it wasn't really user-friendly.
Sure it was, once you realize that copyright was never meant to grant a copyright holder perpetual income. Copyright was meant to be an incentive to publish, part of a bargain with the public. So a limited term of copyright (which we don't have today thanks to retroactive term extension) that expires well within someone's lifetime (which we also don't have today) were both good things. Mark Twain fought this and we (as a society) are better off for his not having gotten his wish in his lifetime. If the term of copyright was then what it is now, we wouldn't have as many of his works to share (we might not have any, they might all be tightly controlled by his estate like Mitchell or Gershwin's estate handles their works). You don't spur society to publish more work by granting them everlasting power to deem how the work can be disseminated and built upon.
I think it's reasonable to say far more works would have been lost to time because nobody could legally preserve them by copying them (a time-honored means of saving knowledge for future readers). The Public Domain Enhancement Act (H.R. 2601) attempts to restore a more reasonable effective term of copyright without violating on the Bern treaty. I encourage everyone to contact their congresspeople to co-sponsor this act.
Once you recognize that nobody makes ideas in a vacuum and we all base everything we think and do on the work of others, you get to a point where you begin to question the underlying assumptions of copyright and anyone who pitches copyright as property (a prejudicial term, at the least). I wonder about a far shorter term of copyright and whether society would benefit from not allowing certain expressions to not have copyright power at all (such as non-free software which remains non-free even after it would enter the public domain because the source code for the program is never revealed).
-
Re:Here's the REAL answer.
Yeah, no one reads articles -- let alone moderates them -- on slashdot older than about an hour I'm afraid.
Thanks to the AC for the "REAL answer". My guess then is that it adds some special Apple features, but still has all the same C++ bugs as 3.2 (and Dec02 "3.3") since it's not based on any real 3.3 releases (first one was in May; this one still has the February date).
reed
-
Re:Here's the REAL answer.
Yeah, no one reads articles -- let alone moderates them -- on slashdot older than about an hour I'm afraid.
Thanks to the AC for the "REAL answer". My guess then is that it adds some special Apple features, but still has all the same C++ bugs as 3.2 (and Dec02 "3.3") since it's not based on any real 3.3 releases (first one was in May; this one still has the February date).
reed
-
Re:All Employees
Manufacturing companies perhaps. The key appears to lie in the "unlimited right to use for all Intranet and Internet deployments." See http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-09/sun
f lash.20030916.2.htmlLet's say you're a bank implementing extranet account access, with 1700 employees but maybe 5 million customer accounts. Admittedly, paying $170K per year or whatever for internal portals and that sort of stuff seems like a lot.
But imagine that after signing up to buy a bunch of hardware the cost under the old licensing model was $0.10 account for directory entries, the portal software, etc. Maybe this is something on the order of 90% discount over list price (hoping that's a conservative estimate, but I don't have a lot of experience as a customer for order of that size). So for the 5 million customer accounts, you were agreeing to pay $500K, plus whatever all the hardware to run the software cost.
If you expect the service to grow, then this sort of pricing starts to look interesting... unless you find can do it all with GNU Enterprise and cheap PC hardware.
-
Re:They'll come crying back
How would you propose that I tell my clients that they must not don't sell me heavily macroed MS Office documents that I cannot open with "open office" because I'm a cheapskate who can't bother to buy and install MS Office to do business with them?
-
GC costsOne thing you didn't mention is that GC is deemed to have pretty high processor cache-miss costs. The obvious part is that the GC run itself is basically pointer chasing, i.e. pretty much the worst thing you can do cache-wise. And after the GC run, the cache is clobbered with stuff useless for continuing the work.
There is another indirect cost pointed out by Linus Torvalds in a lengthy post to the gcc mailining list. The executive summary is that (he thinks that) memory that is not to be used anymore should be freed immediately. Otherwise, the data in there will keep lying around in the data cache. Also, he claims that explicit ref-counting gives you advantages for optimization: Assume you have to make some modifications to a data structure, but you don't want other parts of the program to see the modifications. Without ref-counting, you have to copy all the data structure before modifying it. With ref-couting, you can omit the copying if you are the only one with access to the data structure.
And finally, he thinks that GC makes it too easy to write pointer-chasing-heavy code---as that kind of code is bad for cache behaviour all the time.
It is an ongoing discussion whether GC really has that bad effects on performance of GCC. But Linus Torvalds seems to have very good points. (And some of them certainly cannot be taken into account in a "GC cost is less than hand-written memory management"-paper.)
-
Re:We already HAVE the different language.
But of course you can write a kernel in LISP. After all, there is an entire operating system!
:) -
Try our Gnu/Friends
-
Free Software answers these points well.
So long as it is non-free you'll never know the complete story on what it's doing on your computer. For all we really know, it could have spyware that goes undetected by the masses for a long time. Proprietary encryption is inhererently untrustworthy. Yet again, on practical grounds and on freedom grounds you want Free Software.
But I would not be surprised to learn that reporters are uninterested in talking about free replacements for this. They appear to be uninterested in talking about the groundbreaking GNU Radio project which has been doing interesting things for a while now. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too), I wouldn't wait for mainstream news to catch up to it.
-
Buy the book and point out how wrong the DMCA is.
From the interview, Bunnie Huang said:
"I'm just waiting for someone to scan the book in and put the book on the Net in free electronic form. The book is Creative Commons Licensed, so you're free to do that. I'm not releasing the book on my own in an electronic format, at least for now, because I get better legal protections shipping real paper books than selling electronic books."
We should encourage people to buy the book in addition to getting their copy electronically (for those that haven't read the article, the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license that will allow scanning the book in and distributing electronic copies). This is a great chance not only to show how the DMCA stifles free speech but to point out the hypocrisy of thinking of electronic distribution of information is somehow less worthy of free speech protection than traditional paper books. Huang is probably right that paper books enjoy more free speech protection than electronic distribution and that is sad.
In an effort to make this book easier to find and buy, visit this site and support presses that help society freely distribute information. If you have objections to buying from Amazon (who is listed on isbn.nu's price index), there are other places with better prices and availability. Buying direct from the press gives the press the most money.
-
Re:Oh the irony.
Ah, but here's an interesting experiment that comes to mind.
First, take note of the size of the "doc" file you made in emacs. Then open said file in any version of Word, and immediately resave the file (while making no changes). What happens to the size of the file?
"or even from edlin (remember that miserable monster from mickey-soft?)."
Mock not edlin, for it is an extremely accurate DOS port of the Almighty Ed, the One True Text Editor! It is not wise to draw ed's ire with your mockery of its bretheren. -
Cross-licensing and the patent scare factor.
I don't like software patents, either. But had MS ever actually sued another company over one of their software patents?
No large patent holder has to actually do this. IBM holds the most patents and they said in their "Think" magazine that they get 10X the value from cross-licensing that they do from licensing patents. Considering suing for infringement involves spending money, not necessarily making money, it stands to reason that cross-licensing would still be far more valuable than winning patent infringement lawsuits too.
Also, consider the scare factor.
RMS happened to browse the weekly patent column in the New York Times when he came across a listing for a patent that appeared to cover a data compression method that the GNU project was going to use in a compressor they were about to release. That patent, and the implicit threat of losing an infringement lawsuit, killed this program before it was released. Nobody had to sue the FSF to get this result. Later the GNU project released gzip which went on to become a defacto standard, but it would have been nice if we could compete (as you say) "on actually making and selling software" instead of locking up ideas in an artificial economy so as to kill competition before it has a chance to benefit the end-user. RMS describes the experience and explodes the myth of patents benefitting software developers in his talk (or if you prefer, read the transcript).
Bill Gates once said:"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Patents push people into an arms race of sorts--as Gates obliquely illustrates, the patent system makes people react out of fear, not what's in the best interests of community or consumers. By creating this system and issuing software patents, the US Government has abdicated any desire to allow consumers to benefit by picking from a healthy competitive marketplace. After hearing what RMS has to say, I don't see how anyone can come away thinking those who don't sue for infringement are substantially better than those who do.
-
Re:A topic for discussionBSD zealots are quick to deny the "death" of BSD nowadays by pointing to the existence of OS X, which has supposedly given BSD "thousands" of users. In fact this is a myth propagated by Apple, eager to tout the "Industrial Strength Unix Foundations" of their new "Darwin" OS.
The kernel of Darwin is not the BSD kernel, but rather the Mach kernel, In fact, the core of Darwin is of a totally different design to BSD, being of an elegant microkernel structure rather than the monolithic structure that BSD still retains. It is strange that Apple would choose to tout that their OS is based on 4.4BSD, which even by BSD standards is obsolete by over 10 years.
Darwin includes totally rewritten filesystem and network support and does not use the BSD code here either. In fact, BSD code is only used in the OS as a "skin" to wrap the underlying OS in order to provide a virtual Unix-like environment, in much the same way as Cygwin wraps Windows.
Higher up in userland, adapted versions of the BSD tools are used for the Unix command line, an odd choice, considering the GNU utilities are superior. Files are kept in odd places and in many cases manpages are out of date. Many basic system services such as user authentication are provided by Apple's own proprietary system rather than the traditional Unix methods. In general, the OS X command line is a lackluster and messy ordeal, and certainly radically unlike any BSD system.
-
Re:Ah, the memories...BSD zealots are quick to deny the "death" of BSD nowadays by pointing to the existence of OS X, which has supposedly given BSD "thousands" of users. In fact this is a myth propagated by Apple, eager to tout the "Industrial Strength Unix Foundations" of their new "Darwin" OS.
The kernel of Darwin is not the BSD kernel, but rather the Mach kernel, In fact, the core of Darwin is of a totally different design to BSD, being of an elegant microkernel structure rather than the monolithic structure that BSD still retains. It is strange that Apple would choose to tout that their OS is based on 4.4BSD, which even by BSD standards is obsolete by over 10 years.
Darwin includes totally rewritten filesystem and network support and does not use the BSD code here either. In fact, BSD code is only used in the OS as a "skin" to wrap the underlying OS in order to provide a virtual Unix-like environment, in much the same way as Cygwin wraps Windows.
Higher up in userland, adapted versions of the BSD tools are used for the Unix command line, an odd choice, considering the GNU utilities are superior. Files are kept in odd places and in many cases manpages are out of date. Many basic system services such as user authentication are provided by Apple's own proprietary system rather than the traditional Unix methods. In general, the OS X command line is a lackluster and messy ordeal, and certainly radically unlike any BSD system.
-
Re:I think
The problem with this logic though is that this is a legal issue. It's demonstrated clearly that they are being incredibly childish, but that they have put this in a court makes anyone somehow connected with open source obligated to respond in kind. It could be GNU responding to SCO in some way, ESR's no secrets page, or even writing your own letters and await responses like I did. Hell, even those guys who sent $699 in monopoly money responded by showing what the SCO runtime license was worth.
-
Re:Good riddance.BSD zealots are quick to deny the "death" of BSD nowadays by pointing to the existence of OS X, which has supposedly given BSD "thousands" of users. In fact this is a myth propagated by Apple, eager to tout the "Industrial Strength Unix Foundations" of their new "Darwin" OS.
The kernel of Darwin is not the BSD kernel, but rather the Mach kernel, In fact, the core of Darwin is of a totally different design to BSD, being of an elegant microkernel structure rather than the monolithic structure that BSD still retains. It is strange that Apple would choose to tout that their OS is based on 4.4BSD, which even by BSD standards is obsolete by over 10 years.
Darwin includes totally rewritten filesystem and network support and does not use the BSD code here either. In fact, BSD code is only used in the OS as a "skin" to wrap the underlying OS in order to provide a virtual Unix-like environment, in much the same way as Cygwin wraps Windows.
Higher up in userland, adapted versions of the BSD tools are used for the Unix command line, an odd choice, considering the GNU utilities are superior. Files are kept in odd places and in many cases manpages are out of date. Many basic system services such as user authentication are provided by Apple's own proprietary system rather than the traditional Unix methods. In general, the OS X command line is a lackluster and messy ordeal, and certainly radically unlike any BSD system.
-
Re:Good riddance.BSD zealots are quick to deny the "death" of BSD nowadays by pointing to the existence of OS X, which has supposedly given BSD "thousands" of users. Infact this is a myth propagated by Apple, eager to tout the "Industrial Strength Unix Foundations" of their new "Darwin" OS.
The kernel of Darwin is not the BSD kernel, but rather the Mach kernel, Infact, the core of Darwin is of a totally different design to BSD, being of an elegant microkernel structure rather than the monolithic structure that BSD still retains. It is strange that Apple would choose to tout that their OS is based on 4.4BSD, which even by BSD standards is obsolete by over 10 years.
Darwin includes totally rewritten filesystem and network support and does not use the BSD code here either. Infact, BSD code is only used in the OS as a "skin" to wrap the underlying OS in order to provide a virtual Unix-like environment, in much the same way as Cygwin wraps Windows.
Higher up in userland, adapted versions of the BSD tools are used for the Unix command line, an odd choice, considering the GNU utilities are superior. Files are kept in odd places and in many cases manpages are out of date. Many basic system services such as user authentication are provided by Apple's own proprietary system rather than the traditional Unix methods. In general, the OS X command line is a lackluster and messy ordeal, and certainly radically unlike any BSD system.
-
My stupid opinion
In SCO's letter they make it sound like it's an "Open Source Community" thing to use copyrighted code. If someone at SGI did this, why does SCO think that they wouldn't put copyright-protected code into closed, proprietary code? What makes them think that other closed-source corporations don't do this? (I suppose to answer my own question, those corporations would be more directly liable for such copyright violations, so they care more about preventing it, obfuscating it, or hiding it).
Open-source development cares a lot about copyright stuff. The GNU license list notes which licenses are compatible with the GPL. It's not like they think that any code can be and becomes GPL licensed, regardless of where it came from, regardless of what previous licenses may have applied.
So, copyright violation occurs in other software development models. What's weird is that SCO is going after individual users. When someone sues MS over something stolen, they sue the company, they don't tell users of MS products that they have to pay additional licensing fees.
-
Re:and vi
I think ed, as hilariously parodied in a fake manual page, is inferior to vi.
-
Windows *is* cheaper...
... when Micosoft is donating millions of $$$ to your organisation to keep you from going to the side of the horned goat
;-). -
GNU Hurd
It seems the time is right to move to the Hurd...
-
Re:Splitting the user base!Ever since Red Hat bought Cygnus, GCC is in effect a Red Hat Linux product. Most of the significant development on GCC is performed by Red Hat Linux employees. Therefore BSD is a [possibly illegitimate] offspring of Red Hat. And of course, GCC is under copyright by our good friends at Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation (home of GNU).
It is interesting to note that everyBSD software, including FreeBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.
-
The FSF takes GNU GPL violations seriously.
From the parent poster's quote of the older SkyOs so-called End User License Agreement ("EULA"):
SkyOs includes ported software that is GPL'd this means that it is open source, these binaries/drivers/libraries are widely available on the internet, and as such you should not harass SkyOs Inc. or any contributor for the Source code of these ported apps, also these GPL'd binaries/drivers/libraries do not in anyway affect the SkyOs Kernel or SkyGI and as such you have no right as a user, developer or other party to demand to view the Source Code of SkyOs.
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) does not allow anyone distributing the covered software to withhold the complete corresponding source code of the program or to point somewhere else and essentially say "get it from them, not us". Perhaps Andrew Youll should spend some time reading the GNU GPL FAQ, if the license's text isn't sufficiently clear. Distributing binaries alone is insufficient for compliance with the GNU GPL. It doesn't matter if SkyOs comes with only a port of the applications or changes the software's feature set.
Youll's EULA demonstrates Youll is trying to place more restrictive terms on GPL-covered software than the GPL allows. His EULA suggests he is quite unclear on what the GNU GPL's terms are and how to work within them. But overall, it's sad that someone who draws value from the GNU project's contribution to their own work is being dealt with in such a manner. Leveraging one's rights is never "harass[ment]". The GNU GPL does not aim to make SkyOs free software (although SkyOs would do their users a favor by making the entire operating system free). Proprietors have successfully used and distributed GCC as their main compiler for years.
-
The FSF takes GNU GPL violations seriously.
From the parent poster's quote of the older SkyOs so-called End User License Agreement ("EULA"):
SkyOs includes ported software that is GPL'd this means that it is open source, these binaries/drivers/libraries are widely available on the internet, and as such you should not harass SkyOs Inc. or any contributor for the Source code of these ported apps, also these GPL'd binaries/drivers/libraries do not in anyway affect the SkyOs Kernel or SkyGI and as such you have no right as a user, developer or other party to demand to view the Source Code of SkyOs.
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) does not allow anyone distributing the covered software to withhold the complete corresponding source code of the program or to point somewhere else and essentially say "get it from them, not us". Perhaps Andrew Youll should spend some time reading the GNU GPL FAQ, if the license's text isn't sufficiently clear. Distributing binaries alone is insufficient for compliance with the GNU GPL. It doesn't matter if SkyOs comes with only a port of the applications or changes the software's feature set.
Youll's EULA demonstrates Youll is trying to place more restrictive terms on GPL-covered software than the GPL allows. His EULA suggests he is quite unclear on what the GNU GPL's terms are and how to work within them. But overall, it's sad that someone who draws value from the GNU project's contribution to their own work is being dealt with in such a manner. Leveraging one's rights is never "harass[ment]". The GNU GPL does not aim to make SkyOs free software (although SkyOs would do their users a favor by making the entire operating system free). Proprietors have successfully used and distributed GCC as their main compiler for years.
-
Red Hat Linux owns GCCEver since Red Hat bought Cygnus, GCC is in effect a Red Hat Linux product. Most of the significant development on GCC is performed by Red Hat Linux employees. Therefore NetBSD is a [possibly illegitimate] offspring of Red Hat. And of course, GCC is under copyright by our good friends at Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation (home of GNU).
It is interesting to note that every NetBSD software, including NetBSD itself, requires a Red Hat product, in fact owes its practical existence to Red Hat GCC.
-
Think about your diminishing freedoms.
Notice how cleverly Apple sneaks in how it will not assist in transferring the song's ownership.
Notice how we all gain a very important reason for telling people to not do business with Apple, iTunes, and any DRM-encumbered technology. Apple wants it both ways here, they want to get you into a system that somewhat mimics what you could otherwise do with CDs but leaves out some of your rights. This reminds me of Adobe's eBooks--the eBook license on many eBooks prohibits things you expect to be able to do with a physical book: reading the book aloud, or copying more than the prescribed amount of data from the book, to name a couple things. The system Adobe created for reading eBooks enforces some of their prohibitions. I think it's time to reread "The Right to Read".
-
Is SkyOS free software?
It's clear from their description that SkyOS is getting a considerable amount of help from the free software community--the list of features includes support for POSIX so GNU software can be used including the GNU compiler collection, GNU binutils, and GNU shell tools. But is SkyOS free software too? I looked around the website and could not find any clear indication SkyOS is free software.
I found Google cache of a license page clearly indicating this is proprietary software, but that page isn't being published on SkyOS' webserver anymore, so I'm not sure if it still applies. In light of this and because I could not find links for SkyOS' source code, I'm inclined to not recommend SkyOS (or any other non-free software).
-
Re:A New Movement
Lest anyone forget, this was the same Homebrew Computer Club where a certain Bill Gates got a little upset by the way some people were sharing software. RMS was just 23 years old then and hadn't had his Vision by then. That would take another nine years
.....
I wonder what would have happened if the others at the HCC had decided to beat the whining nerd senseless with suitably-sized pieces of constructional timber instead of capitulating to his ridiculous assertions of ownership? -
Re:This is stupid
Three important words: GNU's Not Unix.
-
Re:Uhhh, perl or python?
To demangle, use c++filt.
-
ATTN Trolls
Before you post something about them not abiding by the GPL by charging for their software, I suggest you read the GPL FAQ.
-
Scream Your Geeky Little Head Off
Send Phoenix abusive email. Tell them you will never buy their products EVER AGAIN. Intuit recently deployed DRM and their customers screamed so loud that the CEO nearly shit himself and the company backpedalled like mad.
If this happens enough times, DRM will die in the ass as it should.
If there is one thing I have always admired about the U.S. it's that people speak their mind.
Complacency now by those of you who are too pathetic and lazy to complain will cause great suffering later for you later. So be smart because now is the time to get ANGRY. Not later.
The great danger though is if DRM ends up being widely deployed enough that only or two major PC makers isn't using it. Then all of a sudden the idea of legislating DRM-only PCs is a plausible prospect. Something the media cartels would dearly love. They would probably lose the first time but there would inevitably be some comprimise. Then they would try again in the typical relentless fashion and more rights would go away. Stallman's prescience is amazing. -
It's a Free Software license
From FSFs license list:
This license is used by most of PHP4. It is a non-copyleft free software license which is incompatible with the GNU GPL.
We recommend that you not use this license for anything except PHP add-ons.
Ciaran O'Riordan -
gtypist, tuxtype
-
Remembrance Agent.
I organise my documents in the usual hierarchy, and then use the rememberance agent and emacs and it shows me a list of documents that most relate to the stuff I'm currently working on.
-
What was the technical issue?
I'm interested to know what this technical issue was, because the PHP license 3.0 is listed on the FSF site as a free software license already (and the page hasn't been modified since August 16). Free software licenses are automatically open source as well, aren't they? I suppose the FSF could have just approved the new version faster, but then I'd expect to see some sort of note indicating that the old version was not free software. No such note exists.
-
God writes comments! (and uses 3-space tabs)
As Matthew Murphy found out through carefule reverse engineering, DNA is actually C code written by god, and the 60% of genes that seem to serve no function are actually comments! Read a sample of the code here
-
KbarcodeTry this great kde 3.0 application: KBarcode. It can work with three different barcode engines: Maybe you want to use the barcode engines directly.
-
I seek software freedom.
What do you care what operating system people run?
Of course, I don't speak for the poster you're responding to but I care about making freedom available to people. You have more software freedom on a Free Software OS (such as GNU/Linux) than you do on a proprietary system (such as Microsoft Windows). I have no interest in giving people more reason to stay with non-free software. But if you're approaching this from the Open Source movement's mentality of merely delivering faster, cheaper, better programs, I can see why you might reach the conclusions you do. I approach this from the desire to make self-determination possible for more people using their computers. Only the freedoms of Free Software helps me do this. Free Software and Open Source don't speak to the same concerns.
And if you're so bent on having people move from Windows to Linux, why don't you concentrate on making Linux as easy to use and as comfortable as Windows is these days [...]
I don't care which operating system people run as long as it is a free OS. People have been working on making free OSes more user-friendly for a long time and there is much progress to show for the effort. But this is a difficult task (made artifically harder by oppressive copyright and patent law) and so this requires a lot of effort. But for those who are committed to freedom, not mere practical convenience, the sacrifice and the fight are worth it.
-
Re:Other kernels
I know it's common belittle HURD without knowing much about it, but HURD does have some solid ideas behind it, things that have not been done before, and things that are interesting. If completed, HURD _WILL_ offer things that Linux, BSD, and traditional Unix don't, so I don't think "a day late and dollar short" is fair to say at all. Perhaps the reason it hasn't quite gotten its feet off the ground is because it has high ambitions. Whether or not they produce a full-featured, usable sytem anytime soon, surely HURD is a great thing to tinker with, and something to watch.
And hey, if more people contribute to HURD as one poster suggests, then it will fix that "almost ready" problem, won't it? Or at least, that's the theory...
Check out this page for more philosophical information about HURD. Some of the ideas really do speak for themselves, debunking the "Hurd is just linux--" myths. Whether they actually get this working well and ready to go is another question, but we should all hope that they do.
Who knows? Maybe with your help, they will. I'm sure there is room for the next Linus or Alan Cox of GNU kernel development. :P -
Re:I'm nitpicking, but..
It really appears like it's you who haven't read it.
And how about reading this (which says that the BSD-license is a free software license) and this, which argues for using a copyleft free software license like the GPL rather than a non-copyleft free software license like the BSD license)? (Emphasis mine.)
And how come that both the GPL and the BSD license is on the OSI's list of approved licenses?
It's because free software and open source are meant to describe the same thing. The two terms are used by two groups, one who openly values freedom for it's own sake, and another who, well, don't like to speak about it that much. -
Re:I'm nitpicking, but..
It really appears like it's you who haven't read it.
And how about reading this (which says that the BSD-license is a free software license) and this, which argues for using a copyleft free software license like the GPL rather than a non-copyleft free software license like the BSD license)? (Emphasis mine.)
And how come that both the GPL and the BSD license is on the OSI's list of approved licenses?
It's because free software and open source are meant to describe the same thing. The two terms are used by two groups, one who openly values freedom for it's own sake, and another who, well, don't like to speak about it that much. -
Re:I'm nitpicking, but..
Why don't you read this and get back to me.
-
Re:Lussarn is rude and illiterate, but correctThanks for the correction -- you are absolutely right.
Obviously I was confusing this with the case of the Darwin kernel/OS and other projects, where (I believe!) they are indeed releasing more code than they really have to.
I also agree with your other comments.