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The world would be a better place if there were only one religion

But there is only one religion, one true religion, anyway.

Honestly - if you can't be bothered taking an interest in purely local affairs you should be dammed for all eternity.

:-)

The world would be a better place if there were only one religion

But there is only one religion, one true religion, anyway.

Honestly - if you can't be bothered taking an interest in purely local affairs you should be dammed for all eternity.

:-)

What about K-Meleon? This is IMHO one of the best *browsers* (i.e. no mail client, no news client, no blot) out there. It uses the gecko (i.e. Mozilla's) rendering engine. It's open source (GPLed). It's almost completely bug less (and the bugs are all UI, not the "I can delete your hard drive" variety). It's multi-lingual. It's secure. It's easy. And to your question it's small (3.89 mb). It kicks butt.


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SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK.
WHEN YOU SLEEP THEY EAT YOUR TOES.

NPL != Free

NPL'd software is free software. There are many free software licenses besides the GPL.

From a list of free software licenses at the GNU website:

The Netscape Public License (NPL)

This is a free software license, not a strong copyleft, and incompatible with the GNU GPL. It consists of the Mozilla Public License with an added clause that permits Netscape to use your added code even in their proprietary versions of the program. Of course, they do not give you permission to use their code in the analogous way. We urge you not to use the NPL.

Wrong. It's actual, real, hard GPL, and that's the reason it never got big... RMS even cites it in the famous anti-LGPL rant of his.

How can anyone even bother to rate this as insightful?

Don't you read the Agreements you click through when you install your software? I must admit that I often skim through the provisions of the EULA's for most of the apps I install, but I've read a few. AFAIK, I have yet to see a software provider that makes ANY claims as to the ability of the software to perform any task at any time. Most EULA's, in fact, expressly attempt to shield the authors from any liability whatsoever.

Of course, the situation may be different when you're spending a few million or so on a custom SAP job, but as far as the average (even mid size) business is concerned, you are on your own.

The GPL, of course, is no exception. Read the "No Warranty Clause" of the GPL (similar clauses appear in other Open Licenses) which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. It's pretty clear that all risks are beared by the user.

But don't think that it's just the Open Source developers. IANAL, but it would seem that any contract worth the paper it's printed on would try and get the developer out of as much liability as possible. For Microsoft's part, I haven't been able to dig up an online version of their recent EULA's for any of their products. Found a link at http://nl.linux.org/geldterug/license.html which shows the Win98 License, and wouldn't you be surprised to know they have a VERY SIMILAR CLAUSE. As far as I could tell, the only difference was that Microsoft will refund the cost of the software.

[sarcasm] Thanks. [/sarcasm]

The truth appears to be that all software vendors try to limit their liability just as every other product vendor does. It's a weird incentive built into the marketplace, since it appears that it's more economical to lobby for legislation like UCITA and it's cousins (which help shield software developers from some forms of legal liability) than it is to spend the money to develop software that really works.

I am not saying Open Source is right for every application. Clearly it has its strengths and weaknesses. But I whould never base any enterprise software decision on the "who am i gonna sue?" argument. Evaluate your apps on how well they solve your particular business needs.

Know nothing about it, but looked it up on Google. Might as well share my research:

SQL Ledger

Christopher Browne's List of Free Software for Business Accounting

Mini review of SQL Ledger

Short discussion of SQL Ledger from GNU.ORG

AllCommerce, an ecommerce and fulfillment system

GNU Enterprise

Linux-Kontor is a free ERP (enterprise resource planning) software suite.

Know nothing about it, but looked it up on Google. Might as well share my research:

SQL Ledger

Christopher Browne's List of Free Software for Business Accounting

Mini review of SQL Ledger

Short discussion of SQL Ledger from GNU.ORG

AllCommerce, an ecommerce and fulfillment system

GNU Enterprise

Linux-Kontor is a free ERP (enterprise resource planning) software suite.

...if you don't have long text parts.

Here in hhe company I work for, we often use GetText to manage internationnalisation. You will find more informations on the GNU GetText Documentation.

GetText works with C/C++, but also PHP, and I think (but I have no proof, so if anyone can confirm this ?) that it also works with PERL.

...and finaly I know what I want for christmas.

Now we have three open-source/free software doc projects: The featured project, LDP, and OSWG.

Open source and free software are not the same thing. They are very similar, but they do in fact have different points of view and differing objectives. Licenses are one of the more powerful tools these organizations can use to advance thier position.

Your point seems to be that you don't really care about all this balony, you just want the documentation. If that's all you care about, then these organizations are truly redundant. But there's more to it than that.From the preamble of the GNU Free Documentation License:

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

To some people, these things matter - a lot. There are issues to consider besides just making the documentation "available". Like ensuring that it will remain available. It makes perfect sense that groups would organize in support of these principles.

or does nobody else give a flying rats ass about GNU? GNU is a communistic propoganda started by that hairy ape Richard Stallman It's so obvious that it sucks... anything written for free use and released on open source is pretty much telling the end-user "hi, download me so i can do no good to you and fuck up your computer".. it's a waste of time to even bother documenting free software... oh and not to mention... there's only ONE developer in this project... and there will only be one developer in this project... because everyone realizes how crappy GNU is... thank you... and remember... closed source/EULA is your friend

Usually, programs are written and documented in English, and use English at execution time for interacting with users. This is true not only from within GNU, but also in a great deal of commercial and free software. Using a common language is quite handy for communication between developers, maintainers and users from all countries. On the other hand, most people are less comfortable with English than with their own native language, and would rather be using their mother tongue for day to day's work, as far as possible. Many would simply love seeing their computer screen showing a lot less of English, and far more of their own language.

GNU `gettext' is an important step for the GNU Translation Project, as it is an asset on which we may build many other steps. This package offers to programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of tools and documentation. Specifically, the GNU `gettext' utilities are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU packages produce multi-lingual messages. These tools include a set of conventions about how programs should be written to support message catalogs, a directory and file naming organization for the message catalogs themselves, a runtime library supporting the retrieval of translated messages, and a few stand-alone programs to massage in various ways the sets of translatable strings, or already translated strings. A special GNU Emacs mode also helps interested parties in preparing these sets, or bringing them up to date.

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

If his life is in danger and a medical team chooses to hook him up to one of their systems that runs commercial software, then RMS isn't the guy using it, is he?

If you can't find a free BIOS replacement for your motherboard, do you really think it's logical to go on a rampage and refuse to boot up that machine ever again, until it can be replaced with an open-source BIOS? I think not. A reasonable individual would say "Well, either I care enough about this to develop my own BIOS - or I don't."

Donated computers

As the GNU project's reputation grew, people began offering to donate machines running UNIX to the project. These were very useful, because the easiest way to develop components of GNU was to do it on a UNIX system, and replace the components of that system one by one. But they raised an ethical issue: whether it was right for us to have a copy of UNIX at all.

UNIX was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU project's philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But, applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing free replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package.

But, even if this was a justifiable evil, it was still an evil. Today we no longer have any copies of Unix, because we have replaced them with free operating systems. If we could not replace a machine's operating system with a free one, we replaced the machine instead.

Szulik said:

> "Open source is an intellectual property
> destroyer. I can't imagine something that
> could be worse than this for the software
> business."

He is technically right. Open Source in itself is not against the intellectual property... ask Apple. But the bulk of the software which RedHat is associated with a license whose originator has made no secret of his distaste for copyrights and patents... intellectual property in general.

Now, if you (like many academics and thinkers) think IP is bad, then great, you'll love the GNU idea. If, on the other hand, you are in a business protected only by IP rights (think software, videos, music, books, newspapers), then you just *may* believe otherwise.

Szulik said:

> "Open source is an intellectual property
> destroyer. I can't imagine something that
> could be worse than this for the software
> business."

He is technically right. Open Source in itself is not against the intellectual property... ask Apple. But the bulk of the software which RedHat is associated with a license whose originator has made no secret of his distaste for copyrights and patents... intellectual property in general.

Now, if you (like many academics and thinkers) think IP is bad, then great, you'll love the GNU idea. If, on the other hand, you are in a business protected only by IP rights (think software, videos, music, books, newspapers), then you just *may* believe otherwise.

This pretty much makes it clear.

Mr. Satchell,

I poked around the net a bit trying to do a bit of research about you (Google's cache of your page at fluent-access.com, which seems to be down right now, and the Amazon entry on your book on Linux IP stacks)

What do you think of Ralph Nader's positions on Microsoft, and his qualifications to be on this committee as well?

And what do you think of Richard Stallman's proposal for dealing with them?

Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects

just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux

I know this post is redundant/offtopic/flamebait. But somebody needs to get a clue. If all you know about GNU is what you read on linux.com.net.org.mil.gov, spend some time on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/. GNU is not "Linux". If Microsoft developed a Free version of Word, that would be awful nice. But it would have to compete with real programs, like emacs/vi/OpenOffice/abiword, programs with an established userbase, longstanding reputation, and 90% fewer NSA backdoors.

Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects

just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux

I know this post is redundant/offtopic/flamebait. But somebody needs to get a clue. If all you know about GNU is what you read on linux.com.net.org.mil.gov, spend some time on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/. GNU is not "Linux". If Microsoft developed a Free version of Word, that would be awful nice. But it would have to compete with real programs, like emacs/vi/OpenOffice/abiword, programs with an established userbase, longstanding reputation, and 90% fewer NSA backdoors.

Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects

just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux

I know this post is redundant/offtopic/flamebait. But somebody needs to get a clue. If all you know about GNU is what you read on linux.com.net.org.mil.gov, spend some time on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/. GNU is not "Linux". If Microsoft developed a Free version of Word, that would be awful nice. But it would have to compete with real programs, like emacs/vi/OpenOffice/abiword, programs with an established userbase, longstanding reputation, and 90% fewer NSA backdoors.

Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects

just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux

I know this post is redundant/offtopic/flamebait. But somebody needs to get a clue. If all you know about GNU is what you read on linux.com.net.org.mil.gov, spend some time on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/. GNU is not "Linux". If Microsoft developed a Free version of Word, that would be awful nice. But it would have to compete with real programs, like emacs/vi/OpenOffice/abiword, programs with an established userbase, longstanding reputation, and 90% fewer NSA backdoors.

But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market.

On AbiWord specifically, $15 would slow down development due to a lack of users. It's several man-years of development away from being worth that much, given the competition of 1) MS Word being installed on almost all new Windows boxes (and under $100 if it isn't there), 2) WordPad being part of Windows, and 3) KWord being installed on a lot of new Linux desktops. They might get a couple hundred dollars, and lose nearly all users and developers, because if a free GTK+ word processor project didn't exist, it would have to be invented. No offense to anyone who works on AbiWord or thinks it does what it needs to do, but the bar is set too high these days.

A word processor, like an OS or a web browser, has become a product you have to give away to get more than a handful of users, and freeing your software is the only way to afford its development if it's in one of those categories. Opera seems to be hanging on as an exception, mostly from a rabid fan base built before browsers fell into that category and a lack of diversity in the free choices.

One of the named inventors on the patent, Butler Lampson, is a famed CS person who is noted in the Jargon File. Microsoft Research has all kinds of famous computer folk working there, including the inventor of Qsort, the author of VMS, the author of Turbo Pascal (now C#), and others.

Of course, this rights-management is all useless (as any informed antivirus software user can tell you) as long as users have the right to execute whatever code they want on their PCs. No software is safe from attack from an emulator. They'd have to make VMWare and Virtual PC illegal, and make flashing your computer's BIOS to a different BIOS illegal to actually have this work and stop any but the most casual practitioners.

Of course the way the legal system is acting as of late, that may not be too unrealistic a scenario :-(

"...PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

GNU software and the GNU system

Developing a whole system is a very large project. To bring it into reach, I decided to adapt and use existing pieces of free software wherever that was possible. For example, I decided at the very beginning to use TeX as the principal text formatter; a few years later, I decided to use the X Window System rather than writing another window system for GNU.

Because of this decision, the GNU system is not the same as the collection of all GNU software. The GNU system includes programs that are not GNU software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software.

GNU software and the Linux system

Developing a whole system is a very large project. To bring it into reach, I decided to adapt and use existing pieces of free software wherever that was possible. For example, I decided to use the X Window System and the Unix-style GNU utilities rather than writing a window system and similar utilities for Linux.

Because of this decision, the Linux system is not the same as the collection of all Linux software. The Linux system includes programs that are not Linux software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software.

Check out: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
GNU.ORG Founders of Open Source

How Owners Justify Their Power

Those who benefit from the current system where programs are property offer two arguments in support of their claims to own programs: the emotional argument and the economic argument.

The emotional argument goes like this: ``I put my sweat, my heart, my soul into this program. It comes from me, it's mine!''

This argument does not require serious refutation. The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. By contrast, consider the great artists and artisans of medieval times, who didn't even sign their names to their work. To them, the name of the artist was not important. What mattered was that the work was done--and the purpose it would serve. This view prevailed for hundreds of years.

The economic argument goes like this: ``I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as `making a living'), and if you don't allow me to get rich by programming, then I won't program. Everyone else is like me, so nobody will ever program. And then you'll be stuck with no programs at all!'' This threat is usually veiled as friendly advice from the wise.

I'll explain later why this threat is a bluff. First I want to address an implicit assumption that is more visible in another formulation of the argument.

This formulation starts by comparing the social utility of a proprietary program with that of no program, and then concludes that proprietary software development is, on the whole, beneficial, and should be encouraged. The fallacy here is in comparing only two outcomes--proprietary software vs. no software--and assuming there are no other possibilities.

Given a system of intellectual property, software development is usually linked with the existence of an owner who controls the software's use. As long as this linkage exists, we are often faced with the choice of proprietary software or none. However, this linkage is not inherent or inevitable; it is a consequence of the specific social/legal policy decision that we are questioning: the decision to have owners. To formulate the choice as between proprietary software vs. no software is begging the question.

The Argument against Having Owners

The question at hand is, ``Should development of software be linked with having owners to restrict the use of it?''

In order to decide this, we have to judge the effect on society of each of those two activities independently: the effect of developing the software (regardless of its terms of distribution), and the effect of restricting its use (assuming the software has been developed). If one of these activities is helpful and the other is harmful, we would be better off dropping the linkage and doing only the helpful one.

To put it another way, if restricting the distribution of a program already developed is harmful to society overall, then an ethical software developer will reject the option of doing so.

To determine the effect of restricting sharing, we need to compare the value to society of a restricted (i.e., proprietary) program with that of the same program, available to everyone. This means comparing two possible worlds.

This analysis also addresses the simple counterargument sometimes made that ``the benefit to the neighbor of giving him or her a copy of a program is cancelled by the harm done to the owner.'' This counterargument assumes that the harm and the benefit are equal in magnitude. The analysis involves comparing these magnitudes, and shows that the benefit is much greater.

To elucidate this argument, let's apply it in another area: road construction.

It would be possible to fund the construction of all roads with tolls. This would entail having toll booths at all street corners. Such a system would provide a great incentive to improve roads. It would also have the virtue of causing the users of any given road to pay for that road. However, a toll booth is an artificial obstruction to smooth driving--artificial, because it is not a consequence of how roads or cars work.

Comparing free roads and toll roads by their usefulness, we find that (all else being equal) roads without toll booths are cheaper to construct, cheaper to run, safer, and more efficient to use.(2) In a poor country, tolls may make the roads unavailable to many citizens. The roads without toll booths thus offer more benefit to society at less cost; they are preferable for society. Therefore, society should choose to fund roads in another way, not by means of toll booths. Use of roads, once built, should be free.

When the advocates of toll booths propose them as merely a way of raising funds, they distort the choice that is available. Toll booths do raise funds, but they do something else as well: in effect, they degrade the road. The toll road is not as good as the free road; giving us more or technically superior roads may not be an improvement if this means substituting toll roads for free roads.

Of course, the construction of a free road does cost money, which the public must somehow pay. However, this does not imply the inevitability of toll booths. We who must in either case pay will get more value for our money by buying a free road.

I am not saying that a toll road is worse than no road at all. That would be true if the toll were so great that hardly anyone used the road--but this is an unlikely policy for a toll collector. However, as long as the toll booths cause significant waste and inconvenience, it is better to raise the funds in a less obstructive fashion.

To apply the same argument to software development, I will now show that having ``toll booths'' for useful software programs costs society dearly: it makes the programs more expensive to construct, more expensive to distribute, and less satisfying and efficient to use. It will follow that program construction should be encouraged in some other way. Then I will go on to explain other methods of encouraging and (to the extent actually necessary) funding software development.

The Harm Done by Obstructing Software

Consider for a moment that a program has been developed, and any necessary payments for its development have been made; now society must choose either to make it proprietary or allow free sharing and use. Assume that the existence of the program and its availability is a desirable thing.(3)

Restrictions on the distribution and modification of the program cannot facilitate its use. They can only interfere. So the effect can only be negative. But how much? And what kind?

Three different levels of material harm come from such obstruction:

* Fewer people use the program.

* None of the users can adapt or fix the program.

* Other developers cannot learn from the program, or base new work on it.

Each level of material harm has a concomitant form of psychosocial harm. This refers to the effect that people's decisions have on their subsequent feelings, attitudes and predispositions. These changes in people's ways of thinking will then have a further effect on their relationships with their fellow citizens, and can have material consequences.

The three levels of material harm waste part of the value that the program could contribute, but they cannot reduce it to zero. If they waste nearly all the value of the program, then writing the program harms society by at most the effort that went into writing the program. Arguably a program that is profitable to sell must provide some net direct material benefit.

However, taking account of the concomitant psychosocial harm, there is no limit to the harm that proprietary software development can do.

Obstructing Use of Programs

The first level of harm impedes the simple use of a program. A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost (and you can pay this cost by doing the work yourself), so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price. A license fee is a significant disincentive to use the program. If a widely-useful program is proprietary, far fewer people will use it.

It is easy to show that the total contribution of a program to society is reduced by assigning an owner to it. Each potential user of the program, faced with the need to pay to use it, may choose to pay, or may forego use of the program. When a user chooses to pay, this is a zero-sum transfer of wealth between two parties. But each time someone chooses to forego use of the program, this harms that person without benefitting anyone. The sum of negative numbers and zeros must be negative.

But this does not reduce the amount of work it takes to develop the program. As a result, the efficiency of the whole process, in delivered user satisfaction per hour of work, is reduced.

This reflects a crucial difference between copies of programs and cars, chairs, or sandwiches. There is no copying machine for material objects outside of science fiction. But programs are easy to copy; anyone can produce as many copies as are wanted, with very little effort. This isn't true for material objects because matter is conserved: each new copy has to be built from raw materials in the same way that the first copy was built.

With material objects, a disincentive to use them makes sense, because fewer objects bought means less raw materials and work needed to make them. It's true that there is usually also a startup cost, a development cost, which is spread over the production run. But as long as the marginal cost of production is significant, adding a share of the development cost does not make a qualitative difference. And it does not require restrictions on the freedom of ordinary users.

However, imposing a price on something that would otherwise be free is a qualitative change. A centrally-imposed fee for software distribution becomes a powerful disincentive.

What's more, central production as now practiced is inefficient even as a means of delivering copies of software. This system involves enclosing physical disks or tapes in superfluous packaging, shipping large numbers of them around the world, and storing them for sale. This cost is presented as an expense of doing business; in truth, it is part of the waste caused by having owners.

Damaging Social Cohesion

Suppose that both you and your neighbor would find it useful to run a certain program. In ethical concern for your neighbor, you should feel that proper handling of the situation will enable both of you to use it. A proposal to permit only one of you to use the program, while restraining the other, is divisive; neither you nor your neighbor should find it acceptable.

Signing a typical software license agreement means betraying your neighbor: ``I promise to deprive my neighbor of this program so that I can have a copy for myself.'' People who make such choices feel internal psychological pressure to justify them, by downgrading the importance of helping one's neighbors--thus public spirit suffers. This is psychosocial harm associated with the material harm of discouraging use of the program.

Many users unconsciously recognize the wrong of refusing to share, so they decide to ignore the licenses and laws, and share programs anyway. But they often feel guilty about doing so. They know that they must break the laws in order to be good neighbors, but they still consider the laws authoritative, and they conclude that being a good neighbor (which they are) is naughty or shameful. That is also a kind of psychosocial harm, but one can escape it by deciding that these licenses and laws have no moral force.

Programmers also suffer psychosocial harm knowing that many users will not be allowed to use their work. This leads to an attitude of cynicism or denial. A programmer may describe enthusiastically the work that he finds technically exciting; then when asked, ``Will I be permitted to use it?'', his face falls, and he admits the answer is no. To avoid feeling discouraged, he either ignores this fact most of the time or adopts a cynical stance designed to minimize the importance of it.

Since the age of Reagan, the greatest scarcity in the United States is not technical innovation, but rather the willingness to work together for the public good. It makes no sense to encourage the former at the expense of the latter.

Obstructing Custom Adaptation of Programs

The second level of material harm is the inability to adapt programs. The ease of modification of software is one of its great advantages over older technology. But most commercially available software isn't available for modification, even after you buy it. It's available for you to take it or leave it, as a black box--that is all.

A program that you can run consists of a series of numbers whose meaning is obscure. No one, not even a good programmer, can easily change the numbers to make the program do something different.

Programmers normally work with the ``source code'' for a program, which is written in a programming language such as Fortran or C. It uses names to designate the data being used and the parts of the program, and it represents operations with symbols such as `+' for addition and `-' for subtraction. It is designed to help programmers read and change programs. Here is an example; a program to calculate the distance between two points in a plane:

float
distance (p0, p1)
struct point p0, p1;
{
float xdist = p1.x - p0.x;
float ydist = p1.y - p0.y;
return sqrt (xdist * xdist + ydist * ydist);
}

Here is the same program in executable form, on the computer I normally use:

1314258944 -232267772 -231844864 1634862
1411907592 -231844736 2159150 1420296208
-234880989 -234879837 -234879966 -232295424
1644167167 -3214848 1090581031 1962942495
572518958 -803143692 1314803317

Source code is useful (at least potentially) to every user of a program. But most users are not allowed to have copies of the source code. Usually the source code for a proprietary program is kept secret by the owner, lest anybody else learn something from it. Users receive only the files of incomprehensible numbers that the computer will execute. This means that only the program's owner can change the program.

A friend once told me of working as a programmer in a bank for about six months, writing a program similar to something that was commercially available. She believed that if she could have gotten source code for that commercially available program, it could easily have been adapted to their needs. The bank was willing to pay for this, but was not permitted to--the source code was a secret. So she had to do six months of make-work, work that counts in the GNP but was actually waste.

The MIT Artificial Intelligence lab (AI lab) received a graphics printer as a gift from Xerox around 1977. It was run by free software to which we added many convenient features. For example, the software would notify a user immediately on completion of a print job. Whenever the printer had trouble, such as a paper jam or running out of paper, the software would immediately notify all users who had print jobs queued. These features facilitated smooth operation.

Later Xerox gave the AI lab a newer, faster printer, one of the first laser printers. It was driven by proprietary software that ran in a separate dedicated computer, so we couldn't add any of our favorite features. We could arrange to send a notification when a print job was sent to the dedicated computer, but not when the job was actually printed (and the delay was usually considerable). There was no way to find out when the job was actually printed; you could only guess. And no one was informed when there was a paper jam, so the printer often went for an hour without being fixed.

The system programmers at the AI lab were capable of fixing such problems, probably as capable as the original authors of the program. Xerox was uninterested in fixing them, and chose to prevent us, so we were forced to accept the problems. They were never fixed.

Most good programmers have experienced this frustration. The bank could afford to solve the problem by writing a new program from scratch, but a typical user, no matter how skilled, can only give up.

Giving up causes psychosocial harm--to the spirit of self-reliance. It is demoralizing to live in a house that you cannot rearrange to suit your needs. It leads to resignation and discouragement, which can spread to affect other aspects of one's life. People who feel this way are unhappy and do not do good work.

Imagine what it would be like if recipes were hoarded in the same fashion as software. You might say, ``How do I change this recipe to take out the salt?'', and the great chef would respond, ``How dare you insult my recipe, the child of my brain and my palate, by trying to tamper with it? You don't have the judgment to change my recipe and make it work right!''

``But my doctor says I'm not supposed to eat salt! What can I do? Will you take out the salt for me?''

``I would be glad to do that; my fee is only $50,000.'' Since the owner has a monopoly on changes, the fee tends to be large. ``However, right now I don't have time. I am busy with a commission to design a new recipe for ship's biscuit for the Navy Department. I might get around to you in about two years.''

Obstructing Software Development

The third level of material harm affects software development. Software development used to be an evolutionary process, where a person would take an existing program and rewrite parts of it for one new feature, and then another person would rewrite parts to add another feature; in some cases, this continued over a period of twenty years. Meanwhile, parts of the program would be ``cannibalized'' to form the beginnings of other programs.

The existence of owners prevents this kind of evolution, making it necessary to start from scratch when developing a program. It also prevents new practitioners from studying existing programs to learn useful techniques or even how large programs can be structured.

Owners also obstruct education. I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

In any intellectual field, one can reach greater heights by standing on the shoulders of others. But that is no longer generally allowed in the software field--you can only stand on the shoulders of the other people in your own company.

The associated psychosocial harm affects the spirit of scientific cooperation, which used to be so strong that scientists would cooperate even when their countries were at war. In this spirit, Japanese oceanographers abandoning their lab on an island in the Pacific carefully preserved their work for the invading U.S. Marines, and left a note asking them to take good care of it.

Conflict for profit has destroyed what international conflict spared. Nowadays scientists in many fields don't publish enough in their papers to enable others to replicate the experiment. They publish only enough to let readers marvel at how much they were able to do. This is certainly true in computer science, where the source code for the programs reported on is usually secret.

It Does Not Matter How Sharing Is Restricted

I have been discussing the effects of preventing people from copying, changing and building on a program. I have not specified how this obstruction is carried out, because that doesn't affect the conclusion. Whether it is done by copy protection, or copyright, or licenses, or encryption, or ROM cards, or hardware serial numbers, if it succeeds in preventing use, it does harm.

Users do consider some of these methods more obnoxious than others. I suggest that the methods most hated are those that accomplish their objective.

Software Should be Free

I have shown how ownership of a program--the power to restrict changing or copying it--is obstructive. Its negative effects are widespread and important. It follows that society shouldn't have owners for programs.

Another way to understand this is that what society needs is free software, and proprietary software is a poor substitute. Encouraging the substitute is not a rational way to get what we need.

Vaclav Havel has advised us to ``Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.'' A business making proprietary software stands a chance of success in its own narrow terms, but it is not what is good for society.

Why People Will Develop Software

If we eliminate intellectual property as a means of encouraging people to develop software, at first less software will be developed, but that software will be more useful. It is not clear whether the overall delivered user satisfaction will be less; but if it is, or if we wish to increase it anyway, there are other ways to encourage development, just as there are ways besides toll booths to raise money for streets. Before I talk about how that can be done, first I want to question how much artificial encouragement is truly necessary.

Programming is Fun

There are some lines of work that few will enter except for money; road construction, for example. There are other fields of study and art in which there is little chance to become rich, which people enter for their fascination or their perceived value to society. Examples include mathematical logic, classical music, and archaeology; and political organizing among working people. People compete, more sadly than bitterly, for the few funded positions available, none of which is funded very well. They may even pay for the chance to work in the field, if they can afford to.

Such a field can transform itself overnight if it begins to offer the possibility of getting rich. When one worker gets rich, others demand the same opportunity. Soon all may demand large sums of money for doing what they used to do for pleasure. When another couple of years go by, everyone connected with the field will deride the idea that work would be done in the field without large financial returns. They will advise social planners to ensure that these returns are possible, prescribing special privileges, powers and monopolies as necessary to do so.

This change happened in the field of computer programming in the past decade. Fifteen years ago, there were articles on ``computer addiction'': users were ``onlining'' and had hundred-dollar-a-week habits. It was generally understood that people frequently loved programming enough to break up their marriages. Today, it is generally understood that no one would program except for a high rate of pay. People have forgotten what they knew fifteen years ago.

When it is true at a given time that most people will work in a certain field only for high pay, it need not remain true. The dynamic of change can run in reverse, if society provides an impetus. If we take away the possibility of great wealth, then after a while, when the people have readjusted their attitudes, they will once again be eager to work in the field for the joy of accomplishment.

The question, ``How can we pay programmers?'', becomes an easier question when we realize that it's not a matter of paying them a fortune. A mere living is easier to raise.

Funding Free Software

Institutions that pay programmers do not have to be software houses. Many other institutions already exist which can do this.

Hardware manufacturers find it essential to support software development even if they cannot control the use of the software. In 1970, much of their software was free because they did not consider restricting it. Today, their increasing willingness to join consortiums shows their realization that owning the software is not what is really important for them.

Universities conduct many programming projects. Today, they often sell the results, but in the 1970s, they did not. Is there any doubt that universities would develop free software if they were not allowed to sell software? These projects could be supported by the same government contracts and grants which now support proprietary software development.

It is common today for university researchers to get grants to develop a system, develop it nearly to the point of completion and call that ``finished'', and then start companies where they really finish the project and make it usable. Sometimes they declare the unfinished version ``free''; if they are thoroughly corrupt, they instead get an exclusive license from the university. This is not a secret; it is openly admitted by everyone concerned. Yet if the researchers were not exposed to the temptation to do these things, they would still do their research.

Programmers writing free software can make their living by selling services related to the software. I have been hired to port the GNU C compiler to new hardware, and to make user-interface extensions to GNU Emacs. (I offer these improvements to the public once they are done.) I also teach classes for which I am paid.

I am not alone in working this way; there is now a successful, growing corporation which does no other kind of work. Several other companies also provide commercial support for the free software of the GNU system. This is the beginning of the independent software support industry--an industry that could become quite large if free software becomes prevalent. It provides users with an option generally unavailable for proprietary software, except to the very wealthy.

New institutions such as the Free Software Foundation can also fund programmers. Most of the foundation's funds come from users buying tapes through the mail. The software on the tapes is free, which means that every user has the freedom to copy it and change it, but many nonetheless pay to get copies. (Recall that ``free software'' refers to freedom, not to price.) Some users order tapes who already have a copy, as a way of making a contribution they feel we deserve. The Foundation also receives sizable donations from computer manufacturers.

The Free Software Foundation is a charity, and its income is spent on hiring as many programmers as possible. If it had been set up as a business, distributing the same free software to the public for the same fee, it would now provide a very good living for its founder.

Because the Foundation is a charity, programmers often work for the Foundation for half of what they could make elsewhere. They do this because we are free of bureaucracy, and because they feel satisfaction in knowing that their work will not be obstructed from use. Most of all, they do it because programming is fun. In addition, volunteers have written many useful programs for us. (Recently even technical writers have begun to volunteer.)

This confirms that programming is among the most fascinating of all fields, along with music and art. We don't have to fear that no one will want to program.

What Do Users Owe to Developers?

There is a good reason for users of software to feel a moral obligation to contribute to its support. Developers of free software are contributing to the users' activities, and it is both fair and in the long term interest of the users to give them funds to continue.

However, this does not apply to proprietary software developers, since obstructionism deserves a punishment rather than a reward.

We thus have a paradox: the developer of useful software is entitled to the support of the users, but any attempt to turn this moral obligation into a requirement destroys the basis for the obligation. A developer can either deserve a reward or demand it, but not both.

I believe that an ethical developer faced with this paradox must act so as to deserve the reward, but should also entreat the users for voluntary donations. Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

What Is Software Productivity?

If software were free, there would still be programmers, but perhaps fewer of them. Would this be bad for society?

Not necessarily. Today the advanced nations have fewer farmers than in 1900, but we do not think this is bad for society, because the few deliver more food to the consumers than the many used to do. We call this improved productivity. Free software would require far fewer programmers to satisfy the demand, because of increased software productivity at all levels:

* Wider use of each program that is developed.

* The ability to adapt existing programs for customization instead of starting from scratch.

* Better education of programmers.

* The elimination of duplicate development effort.

Those who object to cooperation because it would result in the employment of fewer programmers, are actually objecting to increased productivity. Yet these people usually accept the widely-held belief that the software industry needs increased productivity. How is this?

``Software productivity'' can mean two different things: the overall productivity of all software development, or the productivity of individual projects. Overall productivity is what society would like to improve, and the most straightforward way to do this is to eliminate the artificial obstacles to cooperation which reduce it. But researchers who study the field of ``software productivity'' focus only on the second, limited, sense of the term, where improvement requires difficult technological advances.

Is Competition Inevitable?

Is it inevitable that people will try to compete, to surpass their rivals in society? Perhaps it is. But competition itself is not harmful; the harmful thing is combat.

There are many ways to compete. Competition can consist of trying to achieve ever more, to outdo what others have done. For example, in the old days, there was competition among programming wizards--competition for who could make the computer do the most amazing thing, or for who could make the shortest or fastest program for a given task. This kind of competition can benefit everyone, as long as the spirit of good sportsmanship is maintained.

Constructive competition is enough competition to motivate people to great efforts. A number of people are competing to be the first to have visited all the countries on Earth; some even spend fortunes trying to do this. But they do not bribe ship captains to strand their rivals on desert islands. They are content to let the best person win.

Competition becomes combat when the competitors begin trying to impede each other instead of advancing themselves--when ``Let the best person win'' gives way to ``Let me win, best or not.'' Proprietary software is harmful, not because it is a form of competition, but because it is a form of combat among the citizens of our society.

Competition in business is not necessarily combat. For example, when two grocery stores compete, their entire effort is to improve their own operations, not to sabotage the rival. But this does not demonstrate a special commitment to business ethics; rather, there is little scope for combat in this line of business short of physical violence. Not all areas of business share this characteristic. Withholding information that could help everyone advance is a form of combat.

Business ideology does not prepare people to resist the temptation to combat the competition. Some forms of combat have been made banned with anti-trust laws, truth in advertising laws, and so on, but rather than generalizing this to a principled rejection of combat in general, executives invent other forms of combat which are not specifically prohibited. Society's resources are squandered on the economic equivalent of factional civil war.

``Why Don't You Move to Russia?''

In the United States, any advocate of other than the most extreme form of laissez-faire selfishness has often heard this accusation. For example, it is leveled against the supporters of a national health care system, such as is found in all the other industrialized nations of the free world. It is leveled against the advocates of public support for the arts, also universal in advanced nations. The idea that citizens have any obligation to the public good is identified in America with Communism. But how similar are these ideas?

Communism as was practiced in the Soviet Union was a system of central control where all activity was regimented, supposedly for the common good, but actually for the sake of the members of the Communist party. And where copying equipment was closely guarded to prevent illegal copying.

The American system of intellectual property exercises central control over distribution of a program, and guards copying equipment with automatic copying protection schemes to prevent illegal copying.

By contrast, I am working to build a system where people are free to decide their own actions; in particular, free to help their neighbors, and free to alter and improve the tools which they use in their daily lives. A system based on voluntary cooperation, and decentralization.

Thus, if we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists.

The Question of Premises

I make the assumption in this paper that a user of software is no less important than an author, or even an author's employer. In other words, their interests and needs have equal weight, when we decide which course of action is best.

This premise is not universally accepted. Many maintain that an author's employer is fundamentally more important than anyone else. They say, for example, that the purpose of having owners of software is to give the author's employer the advantage he deserves--regardless of how this may affect the public.

It is no use trying to prove or disprove these premises. Proof requires shared premises. So most of what I have to say is addressed only to those who share the premises I use, or at least are interested in what their consequences are. For those who believe that the owners are more important than everyone else, this paper is simply irrelevant.

But why would a large number of Americans accept a premise which elevates certain people in importance above everyone else? Partly because of the belief that this premise is part of the legal traditions of American society. Some people feel that doubting the premise means challenging the basis of society.

It is important for these people to know that this premise is not part of our legal tradition. It never has been.

Thus, the Constitution says that the purpose of copyright is to ``promote the progress of science and the useful arts.'' The Supreme Court has elaborated on this, stating in `Fox Film vs. Doyal' that ``The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.''

We are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. (At one time, they both condoned slavery.) So their positions do not disprove the owner supremacy premise. But I hope that the awareness that this is a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one will weaken its appeal.

Conclusion

We like to think that our society encourages helping your neighbor; but each time we reward someone for obstructionism, or admire them for the wealth they have gained in this way, we are sending the opposite message.

Software hoarding is one form of our general willingness to disregard the welfare of society for personal gain. We can trace this disregard from Ronald Reagan to Jim Bakker, from Ivan Boesky to Exxon, from failing banks to failing schools. We can measure it with the size of the homeless population and the prison population. The antisocial spirit feeds on itself, because the more we see that other people will not help us, the more it seems futile to help them. Thus society decays into a jungle.

If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others. I hope that the free software movement will contribute to this: at least in one area, we will replace the jungle with a more efficient system which encourages and runs on voluntary cooperation.

First, you cannot expect a 'self-unfolding' project to provide food for you, or heat for your house, or schooling for your kids. You can only dedicate time to these projects when your basic needs have been met...

That's where the robots come in. Quoth Stallman:
"The waste inherent in owning information will become more and more important and will ultimately make the difference between the utopia in which nobody really has to work for a living because it's all done by robots and a world just like ours where everyone spends much time replicating what the next fellow is doing."

The only way I can have a better chance is if I can offer some incentive to the teacher
Perhaps you should live in Lake Woebegone where the children are all above average. What is it that makes you think you couldn't find a good teacher in a society not based on money? What about all the people who would like to teach but end up working for corporations because teacher's pay is so shitty? What about the reduced overhead for the creation and distribution of textbooks in a copyright-free economy?

Third, there will always bee a huge horde of people who ONLY take
Exclusive ownership of information benefits these people. The GPL society as described can handle freeloaders, what it has a hard time with is exlusivity.

If all needs are provided for, luxuries become paramount and exploitation is EASIER
Hence the flood of immigrants away from the relatively wealthy US to the relatively poor Mexico to avoid the exploitation, right?. I thought you were a capitalist?!

I don't think it's quite as correct to say that greed breaks the GPL as that the GPL accomadates greed and demands an end to information-envy. It is the conrol, rather than the hoarding, of information that makes the GPL society difficult to realize.

Advantages of the Hurd

The Hurd is not the most advanced kernel known to the planet (yet), but it does have a number of enticing features:

It's free software

Anybody can use, modify, and redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).it's compatible The Hurd provides a familiar programming and user environment. For all intents and purposes, the Hurd is a modern Unix-like kernel. The Hurd uses the GNU C Library, whose development closely tracks standards such as ANSI/ISO, BSD, POSIX, Single Unix, SVID, and X/Open.

It's built to survive

Unlike other popular kernel software, the Hurd has an object-oriented structure that allows it to evolve without compromising its design. This structure will help the Hurd undergo major redesign and modifications without having to be entirely rewritten.

It's scalable

The Hurd implementation is aggressively multithreaded so that it runs efficiently on both single processors and symmetric multiprocessors. The Hurd interfaces are designed to allow transparent network clusters (collectives), although this feature has not yet been implemented.

It's extensible

The Hurd is an attractive platform for learning how to become a kernel hacker or for implementing new ideas in kernel technology. Every part of the system is designed to be modified and extended.

It's stable

It is possible to develop and test new Hurd kernel components without rebooting the machine (not even accidentally). Running your own kernel components doesn't interfere with other users, and so no special system privileges are required. The mechanism for kernel extensions is secure by design: it is impossible to impose your changes upon other users unless they authorize them or you are the system administrator.

It exists

The Hurd is real software that works Right Now. It is not a research project or a proposal. You don't have to wait at all before you can start using and developing it.

One possibility is to use

GNU stow
.

I believe we shall have to agree to disagree. Sinking to the level of people who are unethical to "outdo" them is not the answer.

As far as Microsoft wanting security problems on the Internet, I think you are attributing to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

This isn't some William Gibson novel, or Bubblegum Crisis. Microsoft is not some dark megacorp that needs legions of stalwart brave men and women to give their lives to bring about its downfall. It's just a software company that's perpetually running scared, and acting vicious like cornered dogs, because they know they can go from boom to bust in less than 2 years, as they've done to Novell and other victims. And with enough labor on the part of those who are "giving it away for free", we can achieve our dream:

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

A darned good idea (imho) would be to force Microsoft to publish their APIs, and restrict them from anti-competitive practices. IBM was doing this 20 years ago in the mainframe world and the European Union slapped them down hard for it.

It's mentioned in this article on gnu.org, but one of the links to the settlement details (the most important part) is broken, the new location for ibm1984ec.html is here.

Symbolics is actually extremely relevant as one of the organizations indirectly responsible for the creation of the Free Software Foundation; Richard Stallman points to Symbolics hiring away nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab , this being one of the events that led to RMS' later actions.

A number of projects have since tried to build environments with tightly-integrated Lisps; none have been much more than curiosities.

The other major linkage is that the bulk of the members of the Unix Haters "cabal" were folks that hated Unix not simply in abstract, but rather in comparison to Lisp environments like Symbolics/Genera.

I'm not sure how this all would connect to the "Anti-Lisp" notions of the Anonymous Coward. Just as the Unix Haters Handbook presents very little about what they would propose as a preferable alternative to Unix, the AC doesn't present any information as to what he would prefer to Lisp.

Well, the GNU Free Documentation License is probably closer to what you're looking for as a starting point.

if you want to help the free sourceforge effort, lend a hand with Debian-SF... let's really get this codebase cranking! 2.5 installs great on woody, 2.6 (the last ever public snapshot) on its way...

If e-paper ever becomes standard, only people with computers or access to a computer will be able to write books and letters. If books are distributed digitally, then printed on e-paper, poor people may not be able to afford to read.

The document about the right to read really applies here whether you agree with it or not.

E-paper should go the way of E-toilet paper....
flush it down the toilet.

Security consultant NSS Group tested 16 IDS products from big vendors including Cisco, ISS, Computer Associates and Symantec, along with one freeware open source product called Snort.

3: Recognize the role of antivirus firms such as McAfee and Symantec in protecting users. They should be unrestricted in their efforts to make and sell software that can protect computer users from harmful files, regardless of the source.

Poorly worded and based in unsound ethics. Government should not be encouraging the creation or use of proprietary software. Government should be encouraging the creation and use of free software (but all the philosophical essays on GNU's website are worth reading). Also, nothing in your statement says why Magic Lantern is harmful (I'm sure the FBI would not consider Magic Lantern to be harmful, therefore it's okay to adjust the proprietary software robot guards to cooperate with the FBI by not alerting the user of Magic Lantern or stop Magic Lantern from executing). Viruses, trojan horses, etc. become a lot less of a problem when one runs a free software operating system and only free software on top of that. It's the freedom that keeps you safe, not the proprietary robot guard software.

3: Recognize the role of antivirus firms such as McAfee and Symantec in protecting users. They should be unrestricted in their efforts to make and sell software that can protect computer users from harmful files, regardless of the source.

Poorly worded and based in unsound ethics. Government should not be encouraging the creation or use of proprietary software. Government should be encouraging the creation and use of free software (but all the philosophical essays on GNU's website are worth reading). Also, nothing in your statement says why Magic Lantern is harmful (I'm sure the FBI would not consider Magic Lantern to be harmful, therefore it's okay to adjust the proprietary software robot guards to cooperate with the FBI by not alerting the user of Magic Lantern or stop Magic Lantern from executing). Viruses, trojan horses, etc. become a lot less of a problem when one runs a free software operating system and only free software on top of that. It's the freedom that keeps you safe, not the proprietary robot guard software.

Check out the Bayonne project if you want to create the system yourself. It doesn't support a whole bunch of hardware, and to be honest this will be your biggest problem. Find hardware that is supported by linux and you'll probably find software/libs/apps for free.

Dialogic cards are probably your best bet, but they're not cheap, and you'll have to be careful in regards to which models work (well) under Linux. Some can be a nightmare. You might want to check out Pika cards too. I haven't used them, but I've heard they do the job.

If you're looking for a relatively cheap box that does all this for you, take a look at Ostel's IVR100B. Around $2k for a 4 port box.

I do. Please contact me - perhaps we could get together and eat a couple of them wonderful turds?

Your freedom should matter more to you. Read the essays and hear the lectures on GNU's philosophy page for reasons why your freedom should matter most. By definition people are not free to implement closed protocols. Nobody can legally rewrite Sorenson's codec, Microsoft's codec and others. Learn to value your freedom.

I think it is great that there will be a cygwin-w32 architecture available through the Debian packaging system. However, what I would really like to see are native ports of GNU & other freeware packages. I've used Emacs, Vim, and MiKTeX on windows, as well as many file-utils and devel-utils have been ported, partially listed here or here (compiled primarily the MinGW or DJGPP compilers), but they are not centrally available or managed. I would also argue that the Debian branch for cygwin programs should be called w32-cygwin, and the native programs be under w32.

Just some more thoughts to fuel the fire.

I think it is great that there will be a cygwin-w32 architecture available through the Debian packaging system. However, what I would really like to see are native ports of GNU & other freeware packages. I've used Emacs, Vim, and MiKTeX on windows, as well as many file-utils and devel-utils have been ported, partially listed here or here (compiled primarily the MinGW or DJGPP compilers), but they are not centrally available or managed. I would also argue that the Debian branch for cygwin programs should be called w32-cygwin, and the native programs be under w32.

Just some more thoughts to fuel the fire.

By installing a version that's been compiled to native code using a tool like the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ)? Truth is, I haven't tried this, but it has the potential to work, since it provides a libgcj which implements the runtime, which could presumably be statically linked if you really cared about one file more or less.

How do you install a C app without first installing libc?

By installing a version that's been statically linked to a version of libc? Besides, libc is present on "all" systems, and is only a single file, so doesn't quite present the issues that installing a JRE does. A JRE is an independent program that has to be configured correctly in order to be able to run, it's not simply a file that has to be present.

You can't reasonably deny that requiring a JRE to run on top of does create extra distribution hassle which can translate to a barrier to entry for users.

This is a nice feature of the Java API, but you can achieve the same result using the UNIX (tm) libiconv implementation. If your UNIX (tm) doesn't have one (or you use Linux, BSD, etc), then there is a Free Version. It will do all the conversions for you, for many character sets. Most current *nix distributions include this as a package.

Part of the problem is that there is no agreed-upon implementation. The POSIX group could not choose between X/Open's catgets implementation and GNU's gettext, and as such, left it out of the standard entirely. Another problem with both toolsets is that neither presents a truly extensible strings database format. If you need to add additional storage fields to the strings database for a language other than C, you're out of luck if you plan to use the library and tools on the same files. Very short-sighted IMHO.

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as "piracy." In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.

If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word "piracy" to describe it...

Quoted from

That perception, Microsoft says, is precisely why everyone on the development team of its Talisker embedded operating system now logs hours every week, chatting about the OS in news groups, checking out "bug reports" on a dedicated Web site and meeting with users face-to-face at "plugfests," where they discuss Talisker programming experiences.

Congrats to Microsoft for inventing web based bug tracking. Truly this is a great day for software.