Slashdot Mirror

The pessimist in me wants to say "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" - the next step to a corporation-controlled digital age.
Maybe (maybe) it will get better before it gets really bad, but reality's shaping up a lot like this.
Can anybody point a link to a list of all the countries that have so far bought into this?

• optimizations in the dynamic linker. binaries created by recent binutils versions start up quicker due to reduced time spend on relocations.

Is also out now and according to the changelog, it finally works with gcc 3.

What's next, the Emacs scratch buffer explaining why Free Software is better than Open Source? ls(1) warning about Non-GNU licensed binaries?

Although your comments are almost making me physically ill, I'm going to try to say something rational.

In no way does anyone have the "right", except in their own minds, to create a product for any reason that enables people to pirate the games and still get the full benefits of them.

You realize this makes practically every interesting computer program illegal, and essentially forbids competition?

I can use a debugger to "pirate the games". I can use a Windows emulator to "pirate the games". I can use an alternative server to "pirate the games". Heck, I can probably use a decent filesystem abstraction to "pirate the games". I can probably even use a modifiable kernel to "pirate the games".

When I first read The Right to Read, I dismissed it as a poorly-written, alarmist story from someone trying to promote an extreme view of the world. Sort of like, eg, NRA propaganda.

I still think it's poorly-written, but after following computer-related news for the last few years, I'm starting to think that perhaps Richard was being optimistic when he wrote it.

Daniel

MMORPGDK

Anarchists and Communists, confused again. It has played over and over again.

Whenever there is a revolution, there are usually two principle revolutionary sides, Anarchists and Communists.

Both have similarities, and both have sharp differences. Generally, they both have socialist ends. But they differ on the nature of government: The Communists want strong central control. The Anarchists want deeply diffused democratic control.

The Free Software / Open Source movement is a case example of working Anarchy. Free Software developers are generally anti-authoritarian, and believe that the people doing the work call the shots. It's generally socialist, in the sense of sharing (but not in the Marx dictatorship sense). Work is done by a series of agreements and shared interest. Many are motivated to get particular things done, or out of a sense of solidarity. There is no ruler that can tell you what to do. Decisions are generally based on a consensus, but there are a few Linus Torvalds, and consessions made for expediency. The work has no chain of command, rather, it works by confederation. For example, there is the overall Open Source/Free Software movement. (We can draw humerous/interesting comparisons with the CNT/FAIR, respectively; One is more practically based, the other more ideologically based.) Above the OS/FS organization (in a certain sense), there is the KDE project. Above that platform lives the KOffice project. Above that lives the KWord, KSpread, and Kivio projects. I imagine that within those projects, there are other projects. And there are documentation projects, and usability projects, and they interact between projects, and they all work together. This is an Anarchist society, with minimal rulers and ruled. It is almost unthinkable that a member of the KDE organizing team would command a member of the KSpread team to do some particular thing, and that thing be done because of "orders from above". This is not to say that people don't argue and strategise and haggle; They do. But overall, the whole thing works. The operating system is a little "poor", and has a sort of "poor man's operating system" feel to it, but this is more than made up in the fun of it.

A communist vision of OS/FS would be state control. Flip the pyramid. OpenSource/FreeSoftware as command structure.

When you hear people saying, "I don't understand, why doesn't the OpenSource community devote most of it's effort to XYZ", where XYZ is something like better graphics, or device support, or something that they see as critical (and could quite likely use a lot more work), they are assuming that the OpenSource/FreeSoftware world works according to a command structure, and that we are working on it because we feel like suplicating ourselves to some "great cause." The reality is that we are not supplicating ourselves to some "great cause". Rather, we are doing it because we want to. This is Libertarian (the 1890's version of the word, which was anarcho-socialist, rather than the modern, anarco-capitalist meaning of the word) beliefs incarnate and applied: By acting on our natural impulses, we can do good. Note that RMS and the GNU foundation has focused on the same. When people assume that we are command structured (authoritarian), but also working for the good of our fellows (socialist), they assume that we are Communist (state socialism). Rather, we are socialist libertarians. Or at least, speaking for what I see of the OS/FS movement, it is based and functions within socialist libertarian parameters. (Much has been written about the anarcho-capitalist ideas that many geeks like.)

This is not the first time that Anarchists have been confused with Communists. If you read the history of the Spanish Civil War, it's usually described as "The Facists vs. The Communists". But there was a third side, and a very powerful side at that. Several towns belonged to the Anarchists, and the Anarchists helped fight (but ultimately, defeated by the German & I believe Italy as well Fascists, commanded by Franco). The Anarchist revolution was very real, and quite extraordinary. But because the Anarchists were socialists, the war is usually just "simplified" into "The Facists vs. The Communists".

Now you know, and... {:)}=

involving castrated rams is just going way too far!

Actually, considering the gnu logo and the dire predictions in the editorial, it seems strangely appropriate.

You ask what makes Gnome different from MS Windows? It is software libre.

Distributing copies of the game is clearly copyright infringement.

Not if the game has been released as free software (or even free as in beer). Nintendo's titles aren't free, but mine are. I put my proofs of concept and short utilities under the Expat license and my full games under the GNU GPL. It's only copyright infringement to redistribute binaries of GPL'd software if you neglect make an offer to distribute machine-readable source code at cost.

Developing and using free software constitutes a substantial non-infringing use of the Visoly Flash Advance Pro cartridges.

GBA flash cards are considered illegal

How are GBA flash cards any more illegal than SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards?. If I load only free software onto a Visoly flash card for Game Boy Advance, whose copyright am I infringing? Yes, free software for GBA does exist, and copying the Nintendo boot logo is legal under Sega v. Accolade. (Read More...)

<gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
In an effort to cut down on our spam intake, we block
email that is listed by certain open-relay tracking
services.Unfortunately you may have just discovered the
hard way that sometimes non-spam mail gets caught
accidentally.

In most cases you can clear this up by an upgrade to
your mail server or sometimes by getting an erroneous
listing removed.

For more information about our use of these lists, see
http://gcc.gnu.org/l ists.html

The IP number that I'm denying mail from is
[CENSORED]
The list that you're on is ORBL. See:
http://search.orbl.o rg/cgi-bin/search2.cgi
for more information about this list and why you are
on it.

Here is a very interesting article Richard Stallman published some time ago.

Wine is going to switch to an LGPL-style licence, not a GPL-style.

Wine is going to switch to an LGPL-style licence, not a GPL-style.

Fortunately the GPL has never been upheld in a court of law, and never will be. How on earth can unzipping a tarfile possibly commit me to a legal contract ? Answer - It cannot. The GPL is really little more than RMS's Communist fantasy.

It is not EULA, the end-user doesn't have to accept the license to be able to use the software. But when you want to redistribute the software, you have to accept the license, because you have nothing else which would allow you to redistribute it (you may have heard about the copyright law).

You are probably not the only one who doesn't know that, so let me quote the GPL, Section 3, emphasis is mine:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

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

(...)

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

Far better to simply use the BSD license. After all since the GPL has no legal standing, by using the GPL you are effectively using the BSD license anyway.

Fortunately the GPL has never been upheld in a court of law, and never will be. How on earth can unzipping a tarfile possibly commit me to a legal contract ? Answer - It cannot. The GPL is really little more than RMS's Communist fantasy.

It is not EULA, the end-user doesn't have to accept the license to be able to use the software. But when you want to redistribute the software, you have to accept the license, because you have nothing else which would allow you to redistribute it (you may have heard about the copyright law).

You are probably not the only one who doesn't know that, so let me quote the GPL, Section 3, emphasis is mine:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

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

(...)

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

Far better to simply use the BSD license. After all since the GPL has no legal standing, by using the GPL you are effectively using the BSD license anyway.

Fortunately the GPL has never been upheld in a court of law, and never will be. How on earth can unzipping a tarfile possibly commit me to a legal contract ? Answer - It cannot. The GPL is really little more than RMS's Communist fantasy.

It is not EULA, the end-user doesn't have to accept the license to be able to use the software. But when you want to redistribute the software, you have to accept the license, because you have nothing else which would allow you to redistribute it (you may have heard about the copyright law).

You are probably not the only one who doesn't know that, so let me quote the GPL, Section 3, emphasis is mine:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

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

(...)

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

Far better to simply use the BSD license. After all since the GPL has no legal standing, by using the GPL you are effectively using the BSD license anyway.

Fortunately the GPL has never been upheld in a court of law, and never will be. How on earth can unzipping a tarfile possibly commit me to a legal contract ? Answer - It cannot. The GPL is really little more than RMS's Communist fantasy.

It is not EULA, the end-user doesn't have to accept the license to be able to use the software. But when you want to redistribute the software, you have to accept the license, because you have nothing else which would allow you to redistribute it (you may have heard about the copyright law).

You are probably not the only one who doesn't know that, so let me quote the GPL, Section 3, emphasis is mine:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

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

(...)

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

Far better to simply use the BSD license. After all since the GPL has no legal standing, by using the GPL you are effectively using the BSD license anyway.

by extension, all non-gpl-compatible software is a "danger" if that's true, then why isn't RMS "attacking" FreeBSD

You apparantly do not understand the difference between "GPL compatable" and "free".

The view RMS is taking is that all software must be "attacked" if it's non-gpl-compatible

Horseshit. RMS recognizes that non-GPLed software can still be free:

We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.

When you use autoconf for instance, you can define the installation prefix of your software, which means that everything gets under /usr/local. This is IMHO a good thing, as it allows to install programs in a limited area and use tools like Stow to manage it...

I said it is a work in progress. It partially implements APIs introduced in every major Java release (including 1.4) but doesn't fully implement all APIs for any release (perhaps not even 1.0). Check the status of package implementations on the status page or cvs. It's a free software project, people work on what they want to work on. Actually it has picked up some momentum recently with contributions from Red Hat, which is merging gcj library work with classpath.

I said it is a work in progress. It partially implements APIs introduced in every major Java release (including 1.4) but doesn't fully implement all APIs for any release (perhaps not even 1.0). Check the status of package implementations on the status page or cvs. It's a free software project, people work on what they want to work on. Actually it has picked up some momentum recently with contributions from Red Hat, which is merging gcj library work with classpath.

I said it is a work in progress. It partially implements APIs introduced in every major Java release (including 1.4) but doesn't fully implement all APIs for any release (perhaps not even 1.0). Check the status of package implementations on the status page or cvs. It's a free software project, people work on what they want to work on. Actually it has picked up some momentum recently with contributions from Red Hat, which is merging gcj library work with classpath.

1. They can henceforth change the terms without notice, just by posting the new terms on the website. (Currently they are obliged to give 15 days notice by email, a period that we are currently in for this change.)

Translation:We can change the rules anytime, for any reason, and we don't have to tell you or give you any good reasons.

2. They can henceforth remove user accounts without giving a reason. (Currently they are obliged to have a reason, though the set of acceptable reasons is open-ended.)

Translation: We can remove the accounts of every blue-eyed account holder and we don't have to tell you - or even warn you.

3. They're no longer obliged to make the contents of a deleted account available to its owner. (There was previously a "reasonable effort" clause to that effect.)

Translation: If you lose everything you've worked on for the last six years, it's not our fault - don't come crying to us. We don't want you, go away.

4. They're no longer obliged to provide notice of changes to the privacy policy, unless the changes are "substantive". (Currently they are obliged to provide notice of any change.)

Translation: We can change the rules and we don't have to tell you...

Now....

Tell me if it still seems like it's not a big deal.... I'm not saying SourceForge will do any of these things; the problem is that they've made it possible for themselves to do these things later and say we told you so....

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to grab the Savannah code and set up your own project site....

It seems to be a religious debate at this point. Either you support the idea that people should be able to share books, musics and other entertainment or you don't.

At the moment it appears that any alternative will require developers to fork up money to help pay for the bandwidth.

Is your project a Free (in both senses) Software project? If so, perhaps you could move it onto the FSF's savannah system. This is a site based on Sourceforge but a) run by the FSF so is less likely to do things to harm free software and b) supported by a well-established foundation which is unlikely to sell it off.

Disclaimer: It is possible you wont read this line.

If you don't like the new sourceforge.net agreement, you can use always savannah.gnu.org instead. Or you can run your own sourceforge type site by entering apt-get install sourceforge on just about any Debian GNU/Linux machine.

Sourceforge is a service. You're confusing the free as in beer versus free as in speech issue. You may wish to read the Free Software Definition.

Anyone have comments about the maturity of Savannah? I know of several projects that have moved from SF to Savannah recently and wondered how comparable the two services are.

While I don't really think sourceforge will be going down soon, savanna is a good alternative. It is based on sourceforge source code, (it was GPL after all), and should have most facilities sourceforge users are used to. It is also garantueed to stay Free.

You might want to check out the GNU Savannah project. It's based on the Sourceforge codebase, but it has a nice distributed architecture, so that the main site for your project is mirrored in a read-only format on other servers. It seems like a good solution to me.

You get what you pay for after all.

Amazing. Now I understand why the slashdot editors really appear to not "get" a lot of fundamental things, like the ongoing, direct harm the Copyright Cartels (Hollywood and the music industry in particular) are doing to free software.

"You get what you pay for," is demonstrably a myth. (c.f. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, non-paid sex, love be it familial or romantic, and as a counter example underscoring the very same point, Windows vis-a-vis quality, used cars, enron stock, and so on ad nauseum.). Air is the most valuable substance to any living, breathing human. Don't believe me? Try going ten minutes without it. Yet it costs nothing.

With free software you don't "get what you pay for," you get what many thousands have contributed to a public commons to give themselves and you, with a resulting value far greater than any single enterprise could possibly offer. These contributions are often completely unrelated to any economic value as defined in the traditional market sense, and are only very indirectly related to any sort of free market or monetary value at all.

If you don't understand this (because of your libertarian bent of capitalism ueber alles, perhaps ... and I can relate, as I have some libertarian leanings myself), then I suggest you consider, with an open mind, the implications of applying one set of assumptions (scarcity and greed driving a free, self-organizing market) vs. the actual conditions (a fundamental lack of scarcity in the electronic world) which may well make those assumptions invalid in the context in which you are trying to apply them.

In this particular case the area is more gray ... we are dealing with an area that interfaces the (cyber)world of virtually unlimited abundance (virtually zero-cost copying) and the physical world of scarcity. It is along this interface that the most interesting problems and opportunities are going to arise (and the area the copyright cartels would be concentrating on if they had any intelligence, rather than trying to use authoritarian laws to impose their business model on a world which lacks the scarcity they require).

I should point out that the Free Software Foundation's GNU project offers a similar service to sourceforge called Savannah, which I highly recommend. Will the laws of supply and demand as created out of scarcity apply, or are there enough willing donars, and enough inexpensive (or free) resources available that the laws of plenty will apply? In this gray area the answer is probably both yes, and no, depending on local circumstances and conditions.

In any event, the notion that "you get what you pay for" has been disproven numerous times in the physical world of scarcity-driven capitalism (ask any number of people who have purchased property or used automobiles, only to have their worth drop to zero, or climb insanely, in no relation to "what they paid for"), and in the abundant sphere of free software is demonstrably inapplicable in nearly every case.

Check out savannah...here. Download the software its run on. Put that on your computer. Then you have the project on your own server. That's the idea of free software.

The Windows box is still a necessity. I have a 4 year old who likes educational games and without Windows, they simply don't run.

• Debian Jr. Project
• GNU and Education
• Schoolforge
• Linux For Kids
• KDE Edutainment Project
• Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching
• SEUL/edu

When I was a kid I used my father's computers, but he didn't know much about OSes, he was just buying what they told him in the computer store.

As a resuld, when I was still a kid, I used to know the most important functions of MS-DOS interrupts 10h and 21h by heart. When I was about 12, we were writing programs for computers class, some simple calculations. It was boring, so I wrote a TSR, which after taking over the clock interrupt, and after few minutes from ending, was starting some virus-like visual effects on the screen. My teacher phoned my home that night, asking how to turn it of.

My point is that I really mastered the MS-DOS, and everything I had was a DOS box and lots of free time. I often wonder, what if I had Linux when I was 10 years old, instead of DOS? Would I know Bash and Perl, like I knew Command.com and QBasic? Would I know low level Unix system calls, like I new the DOS interrupts? Would I master Emacs and GCC, like I mastered Borland IDE? Unfortunately, I will never know that. But I would have much easier start as a Unix sysadmin, that's for sure.

Is MS hurting the consumer? Probably not, especially if you ask the majority of conusmers.

No, again, you're totally wrong
I referenced your statement: "Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software" - which is in fact wrong, even for gnu standards: ``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not *price*. And you ("even 1/100 of cent...") are talking about the price.

GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:

0. (...) Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

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

So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.

GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:

0. (...) Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

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

So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.

GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:

0. (...) Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

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

So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.

GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:

0. (...) Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

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

So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.

GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:

0. (...) Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

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

So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.

No one is ever going to use Ogg anything except for uber-geek OSS zealots. I know I sure as hell am not converting 1000 MP3s into .oggs anytime soon. Nor am I going to use their slow-ass encoder to encode new music.

The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that they can have MP3 files and Ogg Vorbis files.

I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about JPEG, I didn't say "it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to convert them". I just started saving the new pictures in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG, because of problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.

We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said:

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

If free like free beer, you're right.
If free like free speech, you're not.

If the program is gratis (like free beer) but it's not a free software, it can be possible to control how many people are using it, so you can control how much money you have to pay to MPEG people. But if it's a free software, you can't control how many people are using it.

So I suppose, you wanted to say:

If free like free speech, you're right.
If free like free beer, you're not.

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

If free like free beer, you're right.
If free like free speech, you're not.

If the program is gratis (like free beer) but it's not a free software, it can be possible to control how many people are using it, so you can control how much money you have to pay to MPEG people. But if it's a free software, you can't control how many people are using it.

So I suppose, you wanted to say:

If free like free speech, you're right.
If free like free beer, you're not.

Sounds a bit like Thomas Bushnell's Hurd design paper with the technicalities stripped out and made buzword compliant.

Right. Thanks for reminding me. Interesting note... when I read this in 1997 I laughed. Loudly. Clearly it was RMS over-the-deep-end, right?

And whilst you're at it read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html.

Stephen

--

I would go with Java. It is really object-oriented and clear structured, there are many implementations out there (Sun's Official, gcj, IBMs), it is cross-platform and if you tweal it a little it can be fast.