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Silly girl, there's a reason why Berlin will never succeed.

It's the same reason why other Open Source projects like the HURD, GGI, and Freedows are going nowhere fast: Too much design, not enough code.

Too often, non-programmers (or worse random C newbies) will propose some absurdly difficult endevour ("Just imagine: an Open Source version of Microsoft Office 2000! On my PalmPilot!"). Usually, this will be followed by the registration of a .org domain name, a SourceForge page, and a "0.01" announcement on Freshmeat. Occasionally, one of these ideas will be taken too seriously. Web pages will be written and re-written. Mailing lists will be created. White papers will be written. Developer hierarchies will emerge. Often, one sub-groups ego will be bruised, and they will splinter off to form some equally vaporous project.

But what never happens is code being written. APIs might be formalized, but that is worthless without working code. The most succesful projects (such as GNU, the Linux kernel, the BSDs, KDE, and GNOME) were founded on the "shut up and code" model. The authors spent time hacking rather than writing press releases or yet another web site revision, or the checking the latest PDF copy of the Offical Project X Standard for Widget Frobbing into a CVS mirror. And who gives us results?

Berlin is a pipe dream. A nice dream, perhaps, but so are many others.

Some of the most amazing excuses for "software" get packaged up by commercial companies all the time and sold to an unsuspecting public.

This is not always what the companies want, not by any means, but often they feel they have no choice.

Scientific American did an article called "The Risks of Computing" a while back, I'm not sure if Neumann wrote it but it was where I found out about the Risks forum, and what it documented is that in any software system, the number of bugs steadily increases over time but the reproducibility of each individual bug goes down, so in the end you have 100,000 bugs each of which you will experience just once in your career.

There are ways to lower the upward bound of bugs, for example on Linux you can use Bounded Pointers for GCC and make great strides in a hurry - but then although you'll have fewer bugs you'll have different kinds of them.

Improving QA by using test suites is another important step, as I discuss in this article on Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel.

You think your commercial vendor uses test suites? Guess again. It's so frustrating when I have a client who I cannot convince there's a reason to actually perform QA of any sort, let alone use test suites.

Another way of lowering the upward bound is to use Unit Tests - but despite the fact that I've seen unit tests advocated in many places, and I guess they're more popular, the one time I have ever seen them put into practice on a project I've personally worked on is when yours truly used them on a consulting project last year.

Mike

That hardly applies to developers who are moving from Linux to Mac OS because of features missing from Linux. If you're not prepared to hack the source code, what's the point in having it?

"Evil" is nicely inflammatory shorthand for that.

No it's not. It's a simple expression of the fact that the core Free Software movement considers commercial software to be morally wrong. See Richard Stallman's essay on the subject.

__________________

The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.

But the only reason that copyright exists is because United States government (or any other government) said it exists. Read this.

In any case, I'm not sure copyright is a Good Thing (tm) anymore. It might have been OK when teh constitution was made, but I don't think it's nessary anymore.

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It isn't
It isn't
It itn't

Perhaps, you should read this and you will be better informed.

Look, I know this is a troll, but it's always good to have a straw man to crush:

The ultimate goal of Open Source is free software. Now this means that you don't pay anything for it.

This is but one of the freedoms that Free Software (not Open Source) brings. However, many people in this world, myself included, are delighted to pay for software even when it's free. It's called 'morality', and if an author would like a gift in exchange for his dedication, I'm happy to offer one. The greater good in this scenario is not that the individual programmer is richer, but that the whole community is enriched by the new, free software.

If this happens, there is no money to pay programmers. As a result, intelligent people such as myself, who could command 6 figure salaries in any profession will take different career paths.

That's utter tosh. Yes, I know you're a troll. However, innovative companies such as Cygnus Solutions make large profits and employ full time programmers simply to work on free software! The software is costly to initially create and maintain, but once a single copy exists, every other copy is free. Companies like Microsoft are backwards! They charge nothing to their customers for the expense of creation and maintainence, but charge full whack for the part that's completely free - making copies! Why should it cost more to have 1000 licenses of NT workstation than to have 10? It's exactly the same software on each workstation, duplicated at zero cost.

Finally, you might want to look at this essay on motivation. I personally expect to get paid for working on proprietary customer solutions at work, but all the programming I do outside work is for Free, in all senses of the word. By doing that, I'm adding value to the software community. I also think it's fair, given how much I rely on other Free programs.

Furthermore, the evidence is that open source does not tend to produce new innovation. For example, desktops such as KDE are based on older products from Apple and MS. When open source is the only thing remaining, innovation will obviously be reduced.

Yes, I know this is still a troll, but currently with things like GNOME, most of the innovation is in the programming APIs and code implementations - the actual user interface is neglected, programmers are just happy to leave it looking like existing interfaces because they're not UI experts, and they at least want the user to be instantly familiar, even if they do just steal layouts (such as M$ does heavily, eg Start button vs Apple menu). Personally, if I were to come up an innovative compression method, the user would not care. All he would care is that my program had the same user interface as zip, otherwise he'd say "it compresses much better, but it's a bitch to use!"

It threatens a business model, nothing more. It threatens the idea that you create software with the intent of keeping it secret and selling executables.

Please don't forget our free software fundamentals. Free software is not about price. In fact, there are costs to free software. Even the GNU philosophy describes what the "Free" in free software really means. It's freedom not price that matters.

The cost of free software is the work it takes to maintain, modify improve and support it. Free software relies on the community to support it and contribute back to it. This is why it is great to see big corporations like IBM paying money to develop and improve it. So everyone who reads this, go out and pick a project you like. Then start learning how to help it. Whether that be develop documentation or write code, it's your choice.

--
Twivel

Because we won't surrender our rights to proprietary software. I'm sure the MPAA would love to collude with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs(MPAA member) to make it impossible to view DVDs except for in very controlled conditions. We're making sure that will neve happen.

Nobody falls for those stupid analogies comparing computer crimes to "breaking and entering." That is so 1997.

And personally, I have no intention of breaking any laws with LiViD. If I rent a DVD, I will watch it and return it without ripping it. If I buy a DVD, I may make a backup to my local storage.

What I have a problem with is the movie industry trying to force me to use non-free software. I won't let the MPAA lock me into proprietary schemes to take away my right to view media I've paid for in any way I choose.

Don't know about you but this article just give the creeps. It's so "yada yada yap yap what a bright future with this Gyricon thing ... greatest idea since paperback" etc. Ok, it pays the customary socially conscious non-committal carefully balanced side note. 2 sentences of it to be precise :

Digital technology and books, magazines and newspapers are certainly going to collide, just as Wolff said. And, as he also said, the results will have an enormous social and cultural impact.

And then nothing on the real problem behind e-books. Yeah sure : enormous social and cultural impact. You name it, dude! What so great with books is not that you own them like you own your car or your house. The object doesn't need to attractive or up to the latest hype. Nop.

As many posters already noticed, the good ol' paper book is completely self sufficient, durable, always on, outside the reach of any external control on whether or not you have the legal right, the appropriate license to read it, the proper kowtowing to copyright holders and authorities. Once you have it in your hands, buy, borrow, copy or steal, it's yours, inalienable, always there for you until the end of times. Barring the suit or police thug being literally over your shoulder, nobody can get in the way between you and a book.

With e-books will come software and control, no matter what. Closed DMCA protected software, of course, so publishers can entrust their precious holdings to e-books. Combine that with always-on ubiquitous wireless for permanent license checking and you and up a Brave New World that strongly smells of Big Brother and Kafka combined. You haven't paid your annual license fee : sorry but no reading tonight. A controversial author dies and his heirs want to suppress "inadequate" writings : just globally revoke the license. A court deems a book libelous : broadcast the court order and zap the book out the universe so no one can make its own opinion. Someone is indicted for "anti-social" behavior, prohibit him to access "dangerous" reading, for his own good of course. You want to lend your e-book to a friend :.no way, he must buy his own copy. Otherwise, that would be theft! The potential for control is just enormous, limitless should I say. Oh sure, it won't happen overnight and will probably take a full generation, the time necessary to slowly erode what is today considered as granted right as there won't a damn politico courageous enough to explicitly constraint copyright to its lowest evil. Sorry to be such an anally retentive neo-ludite Cassandra, but every time I hear the word "e-book", I can't help but think it's actually this wacko RMS who's right about the whole thing.
Those e-books just scare me. The latter this nightmare comes true, the better.


Sig . I just love nuclear bombs, gas warheads and the scent of napalm in the morning. They make people understand that technology can go wrong.

You have two options to deal with Linux here: provide gigantic static-linked binaries, which will cripple the freedom of your users and make their systems inefficient, or provide source code they can compile on their platforms (this way enabling your application to run also on other architectures like PPC, Alpha, Sparc...).

Yet, if you are willing to cripple user freedom, then just make binaries for a reference distribution (Distribution ZZZ version X.Y) and put a neon-orange sign in the shrink-wrap box "Requires ZZZ Linux X.Y". You're already taking the users' freedom in respect to the software they use, taking a little more and obligating them to use an specific version of a distro is just a step further).

If you are not willing to provide the source code for the users of your software, you'd better not be developing software, the world is better without you. Really.

Try Hurd if you are looking for a different kernel.

On the other hand, universities won't be paying list price for software of this type. Engineering departments typically get huge discounts for real high-end software, so that they produce graduates who know how to use it, who go onto to work for companies that buy it. Compare the student to professional costs of a package like MATLAB. And universities will get all the support they could want, plus access to the full, very specialized software package which, like another poster said, will contain features that wouldn't even make sense to people outside the niche market. Compare MATLAB to Octave. The core engines might be comparable, but Octave doesn't offer the specialist tools.

Another blessing is that it will force the cost of the professional version of these programs down.

Unlikely, for the reasons above.

. Especially as people start copying the features in the top end programs and add them to the GPL'd stuff.

Again, this doesn't help. Why wait for an imitation when the commercial product will deliver return on investment so quickly? (And on a separate note, why doesn't the Open Source camp innovate?).

Bah! Any true artist knows that the one true way to do POV-Ray is with Emacs and pov-mode. ;-)

they would only be required to release the source if they release a binary.

Most cracks contain executable code. (And yes, they are cracks, as they exploit vulnerabilities in the server. They don't give you root, but they do give you extra game privileges.) Distributing your crack is considered "releasing a binary" under the GNU GPL; source code must be either included with the binary patch, right next to it on the downloads page, or available on CD-R by mail to satisfy Section 3 of the License.

Cracks you write yourself for yourself, on the other hand...

But in my feeling (and Bjarne Stroustrup's opinion too) Java is not platform-independent, but a proprietary platform unto itself.

You're apparently not aware of GCJ. It compiles Java natively, so even if you consider the JVM to be a single platform, Java is still platform-independent.

something that would have been really inappropriate to do in Java, as this was meant to be a free downloadable app for which tech support costs had to be near zero, and we could not expect our users to install a Java runtime.

A free downloadable app can be written in Java without requiring a runtime - or it can be downloaded and run securely by using a runtime.

You also don't have to wait until a needed version of some targeted runtime is available on any platform to be able to run your application with cross-platform C++ libraries like Xerces - because there are no runtimes.

With GCJ you don't need to wait for a needed version of some targeted runtime - because, while there are runtimes, you don't need them. You may need to wait for the compiler, but that's the case for every language at first.

If more powerful players than you want to trip each other up with competing initiatives - well, just let them, and go on about your business by using open source like Xerces-C.

If you're going purely open-source, you're probably using GCC anyway, and 3.0 will include the ability to compile Java, so that's no reason to avoid Java.

Okay, this is a troll. But I'll bite anyway. You need to read the gpl. Basically, you only have to distribute the code if you distribute the software. But that has nothing to do with your question. Linux and, especially, OpenBSD, are open source, and still very secure. Just because someone modifies a program doesn't mean that I have to run it. And with open source I (along with many other coders) can go through it line by line (like the OpenBSD guys do) and verify that it's secure. So what if the Bad Guys (TM) have full access to the source? If there aren't any exploits, it doesn't help them, does it?

Reading the post article called some of Richard Stallman's writing to mind, specifically The Right to Read. This must be stopped. Now.

Argue semantics with someone else. It seems everytime one makes some argument on the GPL and distribution somebody brings up that you can always use the GPL protected code and not distribute your new creation if you don't want it under the GPL as well. I think common sense should have made obvious the fact that I was talking about code intended to be redistributed one way or another (read the parent).

Let's read from the GPL section 2b:

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

This means that linking to a GPL program or any portion of a GPL program requires that your software also be covered under the GPL (Yes, I am aware that if identifiable sections of your work are not derived from the GPL software, and can be reasonably considered independent yadda yadda yadda). This is why the LGPL was brought into existence, and this is what I maintain is an unenforceable clause. Any modifications to the original code certainly have to be released GPL, but linking is another matter. But we'll never find out until somebody has the time and interest to drag this sort of stuff through litigation.

Oh, and just so that you don't go playing semantics again, this means linking your software intended for redistribution.

I'm paying out a fair bit of money having a site hosted, which is indexing GNU software - for Windows.

I'd like to recoup some money - but I think that visitors would be turned off by even seeing a "donate-money" button.

So while I would like the cash I'm not gonna do this because:

• I'm cynical that people would donate.
• I'd hate to lose traffic - by having people go elsewhere.

Um, I never said anything about a fork with a different license.

Debian is a kernel with a whole bunch of extra stuff. The extra stuff includes shells, utilites such as ls and cp, compilers, debuggers, etc. that were written by the GNU project; a GNU environment. Richard Stallman insists that any distro that has a GNU environment should have "GNU/" in the name, and the Debian folks have chosen to do this. So, if a BSD distribution has GNU tools as well as the BSD kernel, if Debian were ever to ship a Debian based on it, I believe they would call it "Debian GNU/BSD".

If the BSD folks have their own BSD environment, and they don't use GNU shells and debuggers and compilers and such, then this obviously doesn't apply.

I can't speak for the Debian project, so I don't know whether they would try to change the license on the kernel or not. I never meant to imply that they would.

steveha

Um, I never said anything about a fork with a different license.

Debian is a kernel with a whole bunch of extra stuff. The extra stuff includes shells, utilites such as ls and cp, compilers, debuggers, etc. that were written by the GNU project; a GNU environment. Richard Stallman insists that any distro that has a GNU environment should have "GNU/" in the name, and the Debian folks have chosen to do this. So, if a BSD distribution has GNU tools as well as the BSD kernel, if Debian were ever to ship a Debian based on it, I believe they would call it "Debian GNU/BSD".

If the BSD folks have their own BSD environment, and they don't use GNU shells and debuggers and compilers and such, then this obviously doesn't apply.

I can't speak for the Debian project, so I don't know whether they would try to change the license on the kernel or not. I never meant to imply that they would.

steveha

GNU Pth is a portable non-preemptive threading library. All threads run in a single server OS process, so it can be a solution if you have resource concerns. (I know a few perverted people who enjoy programming with tens of thousands of threads, which Linux is incapable of handling).

Okay - I can't just let some broad open-ended statements like these stand.

1. As others have mentioned, if you don't think that it's worth $20, don't buy it and don't listen to it. Stealing it (and that's what the law says you're doing regardless of how you feel about it morally) only serves to make that artist more popular which in the end stuffs the pockets of the RIAA even more.
2. Distribution methods outside the RIAA exist. Have you heard about this little web site called mp3.com? I've never seen an artist there charge more than $10 for an album. This has the added advantage of pissing off the RIAA even more than stealing their music.
3. Another alternative, if you've just got to have that CD, is buy it used. It's completely legal under the doctorine of first purchace (or whatever it's called exactly) and the money all goes to your local music vendor.
4. While the mass produced artists like Britney Spears or n'sync certainly fit the description that you've given here, most artists are actually very talented and hard working, but they just aren't hyped the same way these "teen heartthob" artists are, so their album sales are much lower. Here's why that's important: of that $20, artists see less than a dollar, and typically less than $.25. By that model, an artist needs to sell 4 billion albums before they can become a billionare like you claim. I have yet to hear of that happening. More importantly, many of these small name artists will spend months and hundreds of dollars producing an album (studio time ain't cheap) that only sells 10 000 copies. What do they get in return? $2500. They're lucky if they break even. This tends to be the norm for most artists.
5. So why do they go broke doing this? Here's a newsflash for you: artists actually do something for humanity. We listen to music because we enjoy it and humans have a need to be entertained. It's not as important to us as food & shelter, but given the basic necessities for life, we will tend to seek out entertainment. This is why even the most primitive native tribes around the world play music. So if you don't think that music is important enough to pay for, I'd like to see you live without it.

For the record, I'm not a musician myself but I have a lot of friends that are. I find it amusing that RMS says, "Programming has an irresistible fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it. There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way," as most of the professional musicians I know spend their nights & weekends doing music, but they program durring the day to pay the bills.

My 2 bits,

-"Zow"

Apple sued Microsoft, unsuccessfully, in the late 1980s for Microsoft's alleged copying of its look and feel. We are lucky this lawsuit failed, otherwise the legal ground for lawsuits against KDE and GNOME for 'copying' Windows and Mac look and feel. The Apple/Microsoft lawsuit was mentioned in the GNU newsletter in 1988

Lotus did something similar, suing companies who copied the command structure of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Microsoft, for all its faults, has never pursued look and feel lawsuits.

The Apple and Lotus cases are summarised here - interestingly, Microsoft licensed the Macintosh user interface in 1985, and Apple still sued them.

About encrypted source fulfilling the GPL.
It seems to me, although ianal, that this isn't an actual loophole. From the text of the GPL:

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

And for some reason, encrypted source seems to not be the preferred form for modification purposes. :)
Of course, you're obviously not serious.

You don't seem to be terribly familiar with the Free Software movement. For many people, the choice to use free software is as much a moral choice as anything else.

Personally, I use linux because it doesn't crash and I can get under the hood and tinker with the OS and all my apps. But a lot of people use it because it's free.

Check out the GNU homepage for more info.

Oh, and to respond to you about 'killing the Linux movement'.

I AM the Linux movement.
As long as I continue to use and support Linux-supporting organizations (Debian, FSF), there will ALWAYS be Free (I include BSD licensing in my view of Free) operating systems.

I defeat Microsoft everytime I say "No." to one of their products or file formats, or show another person the value of freedom.

--

The one part of the article which turned my head was Moore's statement that "If the voluntary ideals of the open source movement are further corrupted by a subculture of intellectual property theft, then the whole movement will be tainted. The owners of intellectual property will continue to fight the movement rather than cooperate with it." It kinda makes me think that even after this documentary (which I may never see unless it gets aired on Discovery Channel someday), J.T.S. Moore just doesn't get it. The whole point of the Free Software movement is not so much voluntary programming for fun as it is to get away from these notions of intellectual property, once and for all. There is a very large and very vocal segment of the Free Software movement which indeed laughs at all notions of "intellectual property" and whose spirit is the very antithesis of the owning of information: The Free Software Foundation. The fact that this was the organization that spearheaded the revolution should not have escaped Moore, and that this undercurrent of hostility to the concept of "intellectual property" pervades the hacker subculture now more than ever (a brief look at some of the articles and comments that appear here on /. should convince anyone beyond doubt). If Moore had decided to read some of the texts on the philosophy of the GNU project, the GNU Public License, or even recent /. articles (and their attendant comments) on intellectual property issues (such as DeCSS) he would be convinced that the very idea of "intellectual property" and the ownership of information of any kind is fundamentally incompatible with and repugnant to the ideals of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is not just about free software, but free exchange of ideas. The owners of intellectual property are concerned with restricting such an exchange of ideas for their personal gain. Both sides are obviously mutually and diametrically opposed, though Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have managed to negotiate an uneasy peace under the banner of "Open Source." It remains to be seen whether this compromise will last, but it is my belief that this war of ideology will continue until one side's power is broken for good.

The one part of the article which turned my head was Moore's statement that "If the voluntary ideals of the open source movement are further corrupted by a subculture of intellectual property theft, then the whole movement will be tainted. The owners of intellectual property will continue to fight the movement rather than cooperate with it." It kinda makes me think that even after this documentary (which I may never see unless it gets aired on Discovery Channel someday), J.T.S. Moore just doesn't get it. The whole point of the Free Software movement is not so much voluntary programming for fun as it is to get away from these notions of intellectual property, once and for all. There is a very large and very vocal segment of the Free Software movement which indeed laughs at all notions of "intellectual property" and whose spirit is the very antithesis of the owning of information: The Free Software Foundation. The fact that this was the organization that spearheaded the revolution should not have escaped Moore, and that this undercurrent of hostility to the concept of "intellectual property" pervades the hacker subculture now more than ever (a brief look at some of the articles and comments that appear here on /. should convince anyone beyond doubt). If Moore had decided to read some of the texts on the philosophy of the GNU project, the GNU Public License, or even recent /. articles (and their attendant comments) on intellectual property issues (such as DeCSS) he would be convinced that the very idea of "intellectual property" and the ownership of information of any kind is fundamentally incompatible with and repugnant to the ideals of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is not just about free software, but free exchange of ideas. The owners of intellectual property are concerned with restricting such an exchange of ideas for their personal gain. Both sides are obviously mutually and diametrically opposed, though Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have managed to negotiate an uneasy peace under the banner of "Open Source." It remains to be seen whether this compromise will last, but it is my belief that this war of ideology will continue until one side's power is broken for good.

GNU has a large list of projects 'needing doing', the GNU Task List. There are a number of different categories, so the range of tasks is quite diverse.

Help out GNU, it's the right thing to do.(TM) :)

-----

That's interesting. I was thinking the other day about making a movie set in a future where there were no intellectual property rights.

There is a gang of criminals who sell binaries to people that need things done NOW. The legal alternative is to wait for your request to be handled by a government-run Sourceforge style collective, which costs nothing but takes forever. In one scene, a man is programming and there is a knock on the door: "Open up! We're here to set you free". Police burst in and take his computer while singing The Free Software Song. He spends a year in jail. When he gets out, his daughter asks him to tell her about when "free" used to mean you could do what you want. It would be just like in Fahrenheit 451 where the role of the fireman had changed.

• With all the bugfixes we have now, 2.96 is more stable than 2.95.3. Almost all of the compiler "bugs" reported in the last couple of months were actually buggy code that older gccs accepted because they are not standards compliant.

But according to the gcc website 2.95.2 is the lastest stable release NOT 2.95.3. Why is RH shipping any unstable code in the mainstream installs?

And quite apart from the question of whether Linux is better value for money, Miller is introducing a fallacy into the argument here anyway: describing software as Free does not imply anything about costs. I hope Miller's merely misinformed, and not maliciously misrepresenting.

M

It looks to me like the logo is a merge of:

1. The Linux Penguin, Tux: note the black feathers and beak.
2. The BSD Daemon: note the fork. (Officially it has no name according to the copyright holder Marshall Kirk McKusick. But some call it Beastie -- 'bsd'.)
3. The Free Software Foundation mascot, GNU: note the horns.
4. The GNOME "G": note the feet.

Cheers,
Andrew

OPEN SOURCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FREE SOFTWARE

first of all, it is obvious to everyone that the bind problem affects more than just linux boxen. Anyway any good linux admin, being like they are, would have upgraded just as fast as he could type apt-get update bindXXXXXX, or what ever packaging scheme their distro uses.

Second, i'm not sure exactly which "free" the article was talking about. From the way the quotes were phrased i think they were implying that "free beer" free is what the linux business model is based on and not "free speech" free.

It really bothers me when people base their arguments on things in which they choose to ignore whole chunks of evidence that is against their point of view.

As for all of that crap about linux not having the right kind of applications to operate in a bussiness environment, might i point out that M$ has had a whole lot longer to produce stuff than linux has. AND linux has only started real growth in the last few years. If you take into account how much really cool stuff linuz has accomplished in the amount of time that it has existed, versus how much M$ has accomplished in it's existence. Then it is obvious that linux has been growing much faster than M$. That is what they are afraid of.
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The licenses we see today on software are ludicrous, dishonest, and there is no excuse for a society to put up with "contracts that aren't negotiated"

Copyright owners have always tried to take more than what was given to them under law. If you look at old 78's on the label you would think that you were reading a software license (later defeated in court - I don't have time to look up the cases).

Why is it that we have a legal system that is willing to break up monopolies, but when it comes to "copyright monopolies" it looks the other way?? Why does copyright terms need to last longer than patent terms?? (And don't give me the half ass "because the copyright owner deserves it" I don't blame people for pirating stuff left and right. With copyright terms extending to infinity (the DMCA now makes that a reality, not that the century and a half now possible with the CTEA isn't like infinity), the public domain is not getting is due.

Scholars in the know (Patterson - GA univeristy) have reached the conclusion that copyright has reached the point that it needs to be defined in the political arena not legal. Which means that we sit our politicians down before an election and ask specifically 'Where do you stand on copyright issues?" Chances are they don't know themselves, or they'll let campaign contributors decide for them.

The mere thought of book licenses should be abhorred unconditionally. With the advent of electronic books on the horizon, the scenario of Richard Stallman's right to read becomes a very real possibility.

Every generation has it battles, and I'm convinced this is ours.

At the time, digital audiotape was The New Technology That Threatened To End Copyright As We Know It; Congress required digital-recording devices to incorporate a certain kind of copy protection, and imposed a tax on digital recording media that would compensate musicians and studios for their lost revenue. Stallman proposed that the law be revised to (a) drop the copy-protection requirement and (b) distribute revenue from that tax to musicians alone, in proportion to their popularity.
--

Patents accomplish this. Even the US Gov't knows that monopolies are bad and that anticompetitive moves hurt the consumer (well sometimes they know..), but patents are simply monopolies on ideas aimed at stifling the competition.

Copyleft is a way to work with the system to stop the abuses. Basically you can copyright an idea, but not charge anyone for using, thus keeping anyone else from creating a monopoly on your idea.

Food for thought.

What, you think only software under the GPL can be legally used?

No, but only the GPL (and other Free licenses like *BSD, etc) allow true freedom. One of those freedoms is the freedom to distribute binaries, but Bernstein's license won't allow me to do that if my system isn't up to his standards.

Is there any relationship between Nupedia and GNUPedia? Are these simply two independent implementations of an idea whose time has come? If they are independent, will they merge or continue separately serving different goals?

Microsoft makes a big deal out of the universality of their runtime, but it isn't significantly more universal than the JVM. They claim they compile C++ into their runtime, but it isn't C++, it's a "safe subset" (full C++ is compiled into native code and linked in--useful, but not a feature of their runtime). In fact, more than 100 languages have been implemented on top of the JVM, including C; there are also semi-automatic translators for C++.

.NET is about not just C# and the runtime, but also about XML. Of course, that's a big thing with Java as well, with several excellent XML projects in Java, perhaps most notably the Apache efforts.

I wouldn't actually care much about whether Java or C# ultimately "wins" in the market, if it weren't for the fact that C# is years behind and has the wrong motivations behind it. Java is, by now, fairly mature and it has an excellent set of APIs and libraries behind it, both from Sun and from other sources. There are numerous compilers to the JVM for languages like Python and Smalltalk. And there are several third party implementations. Java's implementation isn't particularly tied to any one platform, and it actually runs better on Windows than on Sun's own Solaris. And it will take a C#/.NET implementation at least as long to mature as the JVMs--building these kinds of runtimes is hard and requires a lot of benchmarking and user feedback to get the bugs and performance bottlenecks out.

If Slashdot readers care about open source and open standards, rather than complaining about Microsoft, there is a much more effective thing you can do: support open source Java efforts like Kaffe, Intel's Intel's Open Runtime, GNU GCJ (now part of GCC), and GNU Classpath. By "support" I mean: use them, consider them for your next open source project, submit bug reports, and maybe contribute code. GNU GCJ, in particular, should be a good basis for you to write Linux applications: it compiles to executables that start up quickly, it lets you use native code almost as if it were written in Java, and you can even write native Gtk/Gnome applications in it.

But perhaps most importantly, educate yourself about Java rather than complaining about it; Java is really a pretty decent engineering effort. Give it the benefit of the doubt, and wher it needs improvement, help it along. C/C++ will not make it in the long run. It's Java or C# or something else similar to those languages.

... obviously the pages were fast when compared to Java servlets.

Not obvious. Servlets are among the fastest way to get dynamic content, capable of hundreds or even thousands of page generations per second from a single uniprocessor. Please prove your claim.

and also C# can use classes written in other languages which i found very interesting.(and java has yet to find a way to do it).

Incorrect. First, there exist compilers for numerous languages that translate to bytecode. Second there are interpreters like JPython and Jacl, if you want to marry scripts to your Java classes. Third, projects like gcj offer an alternative to pure Java that lets you easily marry Java/C++ code.

Protozilla is NOT a new idea. Just look at how w3m gets things done! w3m uses a local CGI to do bookmarks and other things. This setup is nice because the browser executable is very small, and all the peripheral functionality is implemented in separate executables.

I have used an NFS capable variation of /s from the UW Madison CS department.

At one of my sites I setup A set of tools not unlike stow and graft that would build sets of software for anyone to use. The set of tools would automaticly reconfigure users enviroment like encap (can't remeber were that is from). It would however do it in the filesystem so that you could appropreately control the revisions or toolset that a scritpt was coded to use. A.K.A. #!/home/gulfie/u/project_uts/bin/perl -w

It is not a packaging system as such, it is more of a software installation system, but a packaging system on top of this would be almost trivial... I like trivial it is more likly to be gotten correct.

He can't do that by himself, there's too many people using this thing.
And if he quit, we'll all be OK as long as GNU doesn't get wiped from the face of the earth.

--------

To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, gcc-announce at gcc dot gnu dot org
Subject: Removal of support for GCC hosted on UWIN
From: Mark Mitchell mark at codesourcery dot com
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 00:39:17 -0800

We've learned that the usage of GCC on U/WIN involves a violation of the GNU GPL, linking GCC with a non-free third-party support library; therefore, we have removed the support for such usage.

Note that GCC is merely a special case: it is a violation of the GPL to link *any* GPL'd program with the U/WIN support library.

--
Mark Mitchell
mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC
http://www.codesourcery.com

Could you tell us more about this issue?

--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>

To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, gcc-announce at gcc dot gnu dot org
Subject: Removal of support for GCC hosted on UWIN
From: Mark Mitchell mark at codesourcery dot com
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 00:39:17 -0800

We've learned that the usage of GCC on U/WIN involves a violation of the GNU GPL, linking GCC with a non-free third-party support library; therefore, we have removed the support for such usage.

Note that GCC is merely a special case: it is a violation of the GPL to link *any* GPL'd program with the U/WIN support library.

--
Mark Mitchell
mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC
http://www.codesourcery.com

Could you tell us more about this issue?

--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>

Don't we need copyright to defend copyleft? What is to prevent Evil Software Co., Inc. from picking up the code to a piece of GPL'ed software, improving on it, and then selling binaries based on the modified code, keeping the source code to itself? Also, think about this part of the GPL:
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.