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Background reading:

• Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism
• Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library

BSD, LGPL, and GPL are all free software licences. The user gets the same four freedoms in each case (use, study, modify, redistribute). But, using the BSD licence (or the LGPL) takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.

GCC's technical advances create a big incentive for developers who are interested in compilers, and for companies with a commercial interest in a good compiler existing for their platform, to contribut to GCC - helping free software whether that's their priority or not. With a BSD-licence project, developers can choose to ignore GCC and fork LLVM instead, so neither GCC nor LLVM benefits.

LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.

It's not difficult to see which approach works best: Which OS has more contributors, *BSD or GNU/Linux?

Background reading:

• Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism
• Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library

BSD, LGPL, and GPL are all free software licences. The user gets the same four freedoms in each case (use, study, modify, redistribute). But, using the BSD licence (or the LGPL) takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.

GCC's technical advances create a big incentive for developers who are interested in compilers, and for companies with a commercial interest in a good compiler existing for their platform, to contribut to GCC - helping free software whether that's their priority or not. With a BSD-licence project, developers can choose to ignore GCC and fork LLVM instead, so neither GCC nor LLVM benefits.

LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.

It's not difficult to see which approach works best: Which OS has more contributors, *BSD or GNU/Linux?

No it is not a very old compiler and it does not seem to be in decline: 4.8.2 was release last october. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/

The first and last of these things I can do with any game I have purchased, either via a physical disk or via a persistent login/download link from e.g. shrapnel. The middle one is the only one that is at all unique and it doesnt seem important at all in context of the DRM.

Disk is useless if lost, damaged, or 1000 miles away in a cabinet while you're on a business trip. The middle one is very useful if you want to play games on a PC in a computer lab or library. Back in my college days, being able to plug an external drive into a lab PC and play counterstrike was quite handy for killing time between classes. And the steam DRM is basically: it needs to phone home about once a month. So once a month it uses about 2 megabytes of bandwidth for DRM, big friggin deal. It's akin to putting a velvet rope up to keep people from walking into unauthorized areas.

I object to bullshit pronouncements about how the Free Software community somehow is or should be grateful to Valve for this, as if they were doing us a favor.

When you put it that way (key being Free Software community) I do agree. However, as a member of the Linux community, I am grateful, because gaming is the *LAST* thing keeping Windows on my primary desktop. If Steam's entire catalog could run natively on Linux, I would only need windows for two games. And at that point, it becomes time-effective for me to investigate getting wine to work.

And if "attracting more people" is cause for diluting the mission of Debian then it will be a bad, not a good thing. The ifs in the previous sentence will be optimised out by any decent compiler.

I don't see how what Valve is doing is diluting the mission of Debian at all, at least not any more than the existence of the non-free repository. A key reason Debian is well known in the Linux community is because whatever people want/need to use can be easily used. What makes them special compared to most others is that Debian defaults to a free configuration. If Debian *didn't* play ball with binary blob distributors, I suspect it would be just as well known as these distros.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree here... my line of thinking falls closer to the "Open Source Software" camp than the "Free Software" camp...

I know I'm late to the party, but I can't let this one slip :-). So, a bit of Free Software Philosophy 101 to serve up

First off, Stallman's definitions of Software Freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Secondly the consequence: Nobody but vBulletin is allowed to patch the hole, from a legal standpoint, lacking freedom 1, and thus lacking freedoms 2 and 3. Legally, SUSE cannot modify/improve/patch the software - they can only purchase upgrades.

I leave this here, you know, just in case.

If the executable contains a valid signature, and they do not provide a means to add a valid signature, then they do not provide a means to rebuild the executable.

The signature is not required for rebuilding the executable, it is only required for installation and execution on a particular platform which the LGPLv2.1 does not specify is required. Your interpretation of the LGPLv2.1 is incorrect, that is the very reason for the additions to section 4 of the LGPLv3 that specifically call out installation and execution of the executable:

and only to the extent that such information is necessary to install and execute a modified version of the Combined Work produced by recombining or relinking the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version.

LGPL3 and GPL3 prevent tivoization. LGPL2.1 does not

What GPLv3 and LGPLv3 call "Installation Information" GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 call "scripts used to control compilation and installation". LGPLv2.1 does permit static linking of "the Library" (a covered work) with a proprietary program so long as the EULA does not rule out end user modification: "you may also combine or link a 'work that uses the Library' with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications." Option 6a lets the application publisher ship .o files of a "work that uses the Library" (that is, the proprietary parts of the application) and "any data and [specialized] utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it" along with the executable, and option 6c lets the application publisher offer to distribute a copy of said .o files and data to the owner of a lawfully made copy of a combined work. The fact that such "data" would have to include a private signing key is how even LGPLv2.1 could be read to defeat tivoization.

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

FreeBSD is free according to the definition used by the FreeBSD developers. Firmware is not loaded into the kernel so it's not concidered to be a concern, and the FreeBSD developers have no interest in saying what programs users should or should not use.

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

The linked "bug" is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19350097/pre-calculating-in-gcc-4-8-c11 - which says, "Hey, this certain optimization isn't on by default anymore?" And to which the answer is, "Yeah, due to changes in C++11, you're supposed to explicitly flag that you want that optimization in your code."

That linked "bug" appears to be an actual "bug" since a fix for it was posted to 4.8.2. See here.

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=57511

I don't understand why anyone would use GTK. It's not noticeably easier to use than other toolkits. It doesn't have a "native" look and feel on any system (if you run GIMP on Windows, you'll notice how all the dialogs are much different than what you're used to seeing in other applications). It's cross-platform, but so are Qt, WxWidgets, and probably a bunch of other GUI toolkits that don't come to mind at the moment. So what's the appeal?

Simple rms answer: it doesn't have to be good at all: it just has to be 'libre'. In other words, as he said about GNU here, even if GTK+ had no technical advantage over Qt, it would have a social advantage, allowing users to cooperate, and an ethical advantage, respecting the user's freedom.'

Of course, today, w/ even Qt licensed however one would like it - be it GPL, LGPL, QPL or commercial, even that's no longer an advantage. For this reason, GTK should have reverted to being the library for just GIMP, and let GNOME wither on the vine. As I noted elsewhere on this page, GNOME no longer has its original mission, and has forked so much that it's just a distraction for 'the community'

GNU Classpath, GCJ, GIJ. IKVM.NET, technically, too.

https://gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

Yes, no one ever talked about The Java Trap as a problem Free Software...

Apparently a bit more free for some people. From the FSF's page:
This is not a free software license. It requires you to publish the source code publicly whenever you “Deploy” the covered software, and “Deploy” is defined to include many kinds of private use.

It's more of a "there and back again" story really. Ten years ago RMS published his Java Trap and the open source community was rather weary of making anything depending on a JRE blob. In 2006 Sun announced they'd open source Java and all hearts rejoiced. Except it took a really long time, here's an article on how it might finish in 2008.

Perhaps of biggest imporance is that Java ME never got freed, Sun and later Oracle always wanted a fee if you wanted to put it on your mobile phone. Then Sun got bought by Oracle in 2009, and where Sun had been admicable about the existance of Android Oracle instead chose to sue Google in 2010, claiming patent violations and copyright to the APIs. Particularly the latter is anathema in the open source community.

Due to Android being a runaway success driving Java ME out of the market and Oracle fighting it all the way in court they got branded with "stopped innovating, started suing" and the divide between Oracle with OpenOffice and the open source community with LibreOffice didn't help either. Whatever Sun and Java might have been, a friend bought out by your enemy is now your enemy.

Not that this is what's bothered the rest of the world though. For them it's all the constant critical security exploits which has turned Java into the security bad boy. It used to be ActiveX, it used to be Flash but these days the #1 security advice seems to be "disable Java". They should have just pulled support for applets because it's tar and feathering the whole brand, even for software that doesn't suffer from remote exploits.

First let's get the terminology straight so we don't end up talking past each other. To me, "consumption" means either A. an old name for tuberculosis or B. using something up. When you view a work of authorship created by someone else, you don't "consume" it; the work is still there.

Now the real problem here is one of upward mobility when one who currently views works decides to start creating them. Someone who already owns a PC, which is useful for both viewing works and creating them, can switch from viewing to creating with very little up-front cost. But someone who owns only a tablet that runs a locked-down mobile operating system must first buy a PC. This sticker shock could end up discouraging people from even starting to create.

the inflated market must shrink back to its previous levels before the sales numbers will stop falling.

With reduced economies of scale by selling PCs only to people who work for a living, prices are likely to rise to meet the previous prices, with a decade of inflation on top of that. This only makes the sticker shock of a viewer-to-author transition even worse.

Define "engaging". FSF has set one boundary for "engaging" at whether the non-free software runs on one's own computer, as described in the article The JavaScript Trap. Or are you referring to the "Service as a Software Substitute" phenomenon described in the article Who does that server really serve?

Define "engaging". FSF has set one boundary for "engaging" at whether the non-free software runs on one's own computer, as described in the article The JavaScript Trap. Or are you referring to the "Service as a Software Substitute" phenomenon described in the article Who does that server really serve?

It's not that there are no opportunities left: there's plenty of inefficiency all around. For example, this recent email details a floating-point formatter that is 4-6 times faster than glibc printf: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/libstdc++/2014-01/msg00017.html Yes, that's right, it's that much faster than the C printf function that everyone has been using for decades.

Just because its Opensource has never declared "when" the source and through what channels it must be made available.

I agree with most of what you've said, I just have this little nitpick:

The GPL is very clear about the when and what channels: you MUST make the source available (or include an explicit offer to make it available) to someone when you make the binaries available to them. That said, you can choose to make the source available earlier than the binaries, as you suggest.

As for the "what channels", the GPL (section 6 of GPLv3, section 3 of GPLv2) specifically identifies what channels are appropriate if you are providing binaries. Again, you may use other channels in *addition* to those, which may include directly providing source via direct communication in advance or instead of binaries. However, if you provide binaries to a person, there are explicit rules on how you must provide corresponding sources.

Just because its Opensource has never declared "when" the source and through what channels it must be made available.

I agree with most of what you've said, I just have this little nitpick:

The GPL is very clear about the when and what channels: you MUST make the source available (or include an explicit offer to make it available) to someone when you make the binaries available to them. That said, you can choose to make the source available earlier than the binaries, as you suggest.

As for the "what channels", the GPL (section 6 of GPLv3, section 3 of GPLv2) specifically identifies what channels are appropriate if you are providing binaries. Again, you may use other channels in *addition* to those, which may include directly providing source via direct communication in advance or instead of binaries. However, if you provide binaries to a person, there are explicit rules on how you must provide corresponding sources.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/rectium.html

I am confused - isn't this exactly the sort of thing the GCC Runtime Library Exception exists for?

Does that make it the first compiler with full draft C++14 support? GCC is making progress but not there yet.

> I wonder how younger generations do appreciate Emacs

Someone said that to me in 2002. I was a new Emacs user then, and I'm still using it now.

Debian's package install stats suggest the Emacs user base is steadily growing:

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common

And the developer mailing list is very active and high-quality:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/

However, Hip-Hop's future is looking less certain:

http://www.theonion.com/video/there-are-people-in-world-who-are-concerned-about,32163/

ESR's original posting does not mention Github at all.

how about Shakers

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

You mean like practically everyone?

Not quite like everyone, stupid.

The government wants to track you, and record your calls, and your cell phone makes that easy.
Why would they decide to kill that when it is worth so much more to them when its working?

To form a hypothesis, simply group similar unknowns with knowns then form the explanation that matches the collection most:

Why would the government want and get an Internet Kill Switch?
Why would Intel's chips need Kill Switches -- You know, the chips that have the random number generator we don't trust? Yeah, those.
Why would ISP/Telcos be pushing to eliminate wired telephone services?

Why would increasing disapproval among the citizens in response to prolonged government spying actions against them correlate strongly with communication services and devices capable of accessing said services having remote kill switches installed?

Perhaps the forces that be are preparing for the capability to kill devices for the express purpose of disrupting communication of dissenters. Encryption and Blacklisting of stolen phones would work far better and be more economical than sending out pings for remote kill switches. Wouldn't the Libyans have just killed to be able to not just cut off the Internet and Cell towers, but to also brick the devices so that "rebels" couldn't use them to restore access and get the word out?

It's a good thing they don't know about today's always online DRM -- Whew! That would be a terrible thing to apply to hardware: Just change the "kill switch" to default enabled, and require a periodic ping with your federal unique ID card to enable the device to function. So glad they don't have that infrastructure in place, eh? Good thing they're not moving in that direction, huh? I'm glad the cold war ended, other wise we wouldn't have been able to decommission the expensive government spying agencies so they didn't try to remain in existence by targeting their own people in the name of anti-terrorism. It's reassuring that no one saw this coming. -- Must mean it'll all work out, eh? I mean, we'll never let them have the ability to destroy or update books remotely, Orwell would be laughing maniacally in his evil freedom-hating pedophilic terrorist grave.

Oh, calm down citizen. Everything is doubleplus good, this post is just a work of fiction, a flitting of fancy to perturb your panties; I can see from your reaction on Kinect's blood senors that you're still a good patriot -- 'Twas just a test, nothing to go War of the Worlds over.

I wonder if ackthpt is trying to mention the script trap (see previous Slashdot discussion). Most graphical web browsers default to automatically downloading and running non-free programs inside web pages.

Debian's Social Contract states the goal of making Debian entirely free software, and Debian conscientiously keeps nonfree software out of the official Debian system. However, Debian also provides a repository of nonfree software. According to the project, this software is “not part of the Debian system,” but the repository is hosted on many of the project's main servers, and people can readily learn about these nonfree packages by browsing Debian's online package database.

There is also a “contrib” repository; its packages are free, but some of them exist to load separately distributed proprietary programs. This too is not thoroughly separated from the main Debian distribution.

Previous releases of Debian included nonfree blobs with Linux, the kernel. With the release of Debian 6.0 (“squeeze”) in February 2011, these blobs have been moved out of the main distribution to separate packages in the nonfree repository. However, the problem partly remains: the installer in some cases recommends these nonfree firmware files for the peripherals on the machine.

You see, in the church of St iGNUcius, even offering polluted un-liberated software to members of the flock who want it is the equivalent of offering softdrinks to school kids in CA who want them: Debian is supposed to deny them that choice b'cos it's not good for them. Since they don't, and give the lowly users a choice (gasp!) of using polluted un-liberated software, they are blasphemers who don't deserve to be supported by the FSF. Even if the distros like Trisquel are ultimately based on their product (and the much hated Ubuntu).

Did you know that a certain someone warned everyone about this issue a few decades ago. It amazes me that people who do read this ignore its moral and then act indignant when it happens to them.

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

We live in the world that RMS predicted in 1997.

The Right to Read

Welcome to the bad future. It's a shame that we don't even have moon colonies yet.

It appears we've already run headfirst into Layne's Law, arguing over definitions. I'd recommend abandoning "consumption" and "content". But by your definition of "consumption", how many people engage in "creation" at home? And if too few people engage in "creation" to warrant continued production of affordable home PCs, how many people will just skip trying "creation" because of the cost?

You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it -- through your web browser.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

So RMS wants the same thing as everyone else in the Crypto-Currency community. Good for him (If only he would contribute something other than a desire...). I only know of one design that gives both anonymity and decentralization, and thats ZeroCoin which has major performance problems (it is not currently scaleable in any practical sense). In my opinion bitcoin does not scale well either, but at least it scales drastically further than ZeroCoin.

David Chaum's Digital Cash provides anonymity without decentralization, and bitcoin provides decentralization without anonymity.

Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG, but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself. RMS is good at taking positions on issues, and does a good job representing his particular viewpoint, but I wouldn't expect much more out of him.

When I write code for personal reasons, I always release it under the Affero GPL v3+.
It saves me the time and effort of attempting to monetize or control every little snippet of code that I write just for fun or just to learn something.
It also ensures that nobody can commercially exploit the code without A) paying me for a non-GPL license, or B) contributing back to the community.

As a side effect, it makes a great way to show off my coding skills to potential employers.
They can look me up on GitHub and evaluate my code and skills, but they still have to pay to play.

I'm not a libre software zealot. I don't believe that everyone is under a moral obligation to release their source code.
However, I do find the Affero GPL effective at protecting my non-commercial interests and providing an assist on my commercial interests.
That is why I use the license, and encourage other software developers to do the same.

> I like the BSD personally but would like to see more take off as well.

Please don't use the BSD license. As Stallman has explained at length, its original version had the obnoxious advertising clause that made compliance very difficult for large projects. Even though there now is the "new style BSD" license, it is easy to confuse the two and mistakenly promote the old one. The MIT/X license is equivalent to the new BSD license and does not suffer from the confusion of multiple versions, so please use it instead of the BSD license.

Thanks. I've made a page on the libreplanet.org wiki and added Disconnect:

http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Privacy_addons_for_web_browsers

And I've emailed the gnuzilla folks asking them to add it to their list of free addons:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/addons.html

The concept that "Free software" (as in copyleft) is more free than more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, etc. just to name two) is contradictory from step 1.

The FSF considers permissive license to be free software. They do not consider copyleft licenses to be "more free" than permissive licenses. Please stop spreading false propaganda.

How about notifying us when it's actually there?

Oh wait, a large amount of it is:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/changes.html

Why not wait until they've actually released the new version and we have something to test?

It's released under something called the GPL, by an organisation called the FSF. You may have heard of them. They have things called "repositories" running a system called "SVN" which runs over the "internet".

Apparently you can "download" stuff from these repositories, compile it and run it right now.

It's not a commercial compiler and doesn't do press releases. This is all cutting edge stuff which is being worked on now, much of which is scheduled to be merged into the mainline before release.

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#CyanogenMod

http://www.gnu.org/fun/fun.html#Guidelines

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

The most concrete detail I could find anywhere on his web about it was his repeated characterization of the language as "knowledge-based".

Now, unless he has some whole new meaning in mind, that isn't a totally new concept in languages. We generally call such languages "AI languages" (or more technically, Inference Engines or Reasoning Engines or whatever.

The general idea is that the programmer's job is to write rules. Then you feed the engine your rules and a set of facts (or an operating environment it can go get "facts" from), and it will follow what rules it needs to. The language/system of this kind that programmers here will probably be most familiar with is make

It sounds cool, but I think a lot of folks here might find the concept of something like make being the answer to all their programming difficulties a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

That requirement reminds me of the QPL. However, though FSF agrees that such a requirement "causes major practical inconvenience", FSF doesn't claim that it makes the software non-free. Were there other objectionable terms in the POV-Ray 3.6 license?

I found the license for POV-Ray 3.6, but the usual page for software license teardowns doesn't mention POV-Ray.

This would seem to prevent this bandwidth saving for things that just don't need encryption. This would be any public site that is largely consumable content.

Please define what you mean by "consumable content". If a user is logged in, the user needs to be on HTTPS so that other users cannot copy the session cookie that identifies him. This danger of copying the session cookie is why Facebook and Twitter have switched to all HTTPS all the time. Even sites that allow viewing everything without logging in often have social recommendation buttons that connect to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other services that may have an ongoing session.