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This doesn't have anything to do with the ultra-cool ksh, but I'd thought I'd mention it: this message is the announcement of removal of support for GCC running under UWIN. This decision came direct from RMS and generated lots of discussion over the next several days concerning legal-but-not-political decisions.

This doesn't have anything to do with the ultra-cool ksh, but I'd thought I'd mention it: this message is the announcement of removal of support for GCC running under UWIN. This decision came direct from RMS and generated lots of discussion over the next several days concerning legal-but-not-political decisions.

This doesn't have anything to do with the ultra-cool ksh, but I'd thought I'd mention it: this message is the announcement of removal of support for GCC running under UWIN. This decision came direct from RMS and generated lots of discussion over the next several days concerning legal-but-not-political decisions.

No free-software game would be complete without this sound included somewhere as an easter egg or something.

I didn't really know how to program, I knew a little FORTRAN, C and Basic from doing data analysis during summer jobs, and I didn't really like it all that much. I used to really have to struggle to spend several weeks writing a 500 line program, and I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to look at the source code to those programs today.

I figured I'd program for a while because it paid the rent (I was making $20k a year doing Sun administration and writing image processing software), but when I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living I'd quit programming and get a real job.

That was in 1988. Then some consultant visited and installed GNU Emacs on our machines (two Sun 3/160's, one diskless, both with terminals and no workstation monitor, but with frame grabber cards and NTSC color monitors). He explained about the GNU manifesto.

I thought it was pretty cool but didn't see it affecting me personally in a big way. I was mostly annoyed that I had to wait up while the consultant installed the software on what was supposed to be my day off while a ladyfriend was visiting from away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who went to MIT for a while and vaguely knew Richard Stallman, spent an evening with me singing the praises of Emacs. What I really wanted was VI with macros you could program to include conditional branches, and he said it had all though and much much more.

So I learned to actually use Emacs, and soon learned that it was quite extensible, but it wasn't made too clear how to extend it. The online manual was useful mainly to people who already knew what they were doing.

So I read the source code. One thing I was interested in doing was writing C functions that were callable from Emacs lisp as lisp functions. There are many such functions built into Emacs (usually for performance) and you can add your own. There's this big DEFUN macro that even makes the C API look like Lisp.

I learned that and a lot more. I learned what an eloquent statement of software architecture Emacs is.

I learned that there really was something worth my while doing in the way of software.

I wanted to write a program like that someday. Not another big editor, but a program that would someday strike other young programmers the way Emacs struck me.

During the course of reading the source code, one day I stayed at my terminal 24 hours straight, arising only to get coffee and use the restroom, not even eating. I only realized how much time had passed when I started to fall asleep.

That was when I started to take programming seriously. I began to put serious effort into studying programming, and studying it deeply.

For example I would read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the bus on the way to work and I would stay up all night after work learning to program better on my Macintosh at home.

For many years I selected all of my jobs based mainly on what I could learn from them.

I've become a very skilled programmer. You can see this from my consulting business website, my resume (on my resume the place where I first encountered Emacs is the Programmer job at Verde Technologies) and my programming tips pages.

So in a very direct and profound way I owe it all to Richard Stallman and Emacs.

I still haven't written my great program yet. I don't even know what it will be. One project I've worked on peripherally is the ZooLib cross-platform application framework and a project I've just started up but not gotten too far with yet is the Linux Quality Database.

I did finally get my B.A. in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz, but only after being out of school working at a programmer for a number of years.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I didn't really know how to program, I knew a little FORTRAN, C and Basic from doing data analysis during summer jobs, and I didn't really like it all that much. I used to really have to struggle to spend several weeks writing a 500 line program, and I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to look at the source code to those programs today.

I figured I'd program for a while because it paid the rent (I was making $20k a year doing Sun administration and writing image processing software), but when I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living I'd quit programming and get a real job.

That was in 1988. Then some consultant visited and installed GNU Emacs on our machines (two Sun 3/160's, one diskless, both with terminals and no workstation monitor, but with frame grabber cards and NTSC color monitors). He explained about the GNU manifesto.

I thought it was pretty cool but didn't see it affecting me personally in a big way. I was mostly annoyed that I had to wait up while the consultant installed the software on what was supposed to be my day off while a ladyfriend was visiting from away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who went to MIT for a while and vaguely knew Richard Stallman, spent an evening with me singing the praises of Emacs. What I really wanted was VI with macros you could program to include conditional branches, and he said it had all though and much much more.

So I learned to actually use Emacs, and soon learned that it was quite extensible, but it wasn't made too clear how to extend it. The online manual was useful mainly to people who already knew what they were doing.

So I read the source code. One thing I was interested in doing was writing C functions that were callable from Emacs lisp as lisp functions. There are many such functions built into Emacs (usually for performance) and you can add your own. There's this big DEFUN macro that even makes the C API look like Lisp.

I learned that and a lot more. I learned what an eloquent statement of software architecture Emacs is.

I learned that there really was something worth my while doing in the way of software.

I wanted to write a program like that someday. Not another big editor, but a program that would someday strike other young programmers the way Emacs struck me.

During the course of reading the source code, one day I stayed at my terminal 24 hours straight, arising only to get coffee and use the restroom, not even eating. I only realized how much time had passed when I started to fall asleep.

That was when I started to take programming seriously. I began to put serious effort into studying programming, and studying it deeply.

For example I would read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the bus on the way to work and I would stay up all night after work learning to program better on my Macintosh at home.

For many years I selected all of my jobs based mainly on what I could learn from them.

I've become a very skilled programmer. You can see this from my consulting business website, my resume (on my resume the place where I first encountered Emacs is the Programmer job at Verde Technologies) and my programming tips pages.

So in a very direct and profound way I owe it all to Richard Stallman and Emacs.

I still haven't written my great program yet. I don't even know what it will be. One project I've worked on peripherally is the ZooLib cross-platform application framework and a project I've just started up but not gotten too far with yet is the Linux Quality Database.

I did finally get my B.A. in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz, but only after being out of school working at a programmer for a number of years.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

You could write a class in JPython, inherit from that class in Java, and debug the two together via interactive Kawa Scheme. The JVM's language independence is there regardless of whether or not Sun emphasizes it.

Languages that support continuations (e.g. Scheme) will have the same difficulties on .NET's CLR as they do on the JVM. See the recent thread on comp.lang.scheme about .NET.

--

1. BSD licenses allow you to do with the code whatever you want. Read the license. That's what it says.
   
2. If you start doing ANYTHING with GPL licenses like you just described, it will NOT be appreciated. Fear for your life if you do so. Run.
   

1. You make a game and call it your own, while you use code from other people in it. If this code is GPLed, it is given to you with a statement like "do with it what you want, but please don't be so unthankful to keep your changes to yourself". And here you are trying to construct a way around that promise --> that's silly!
   
2. It doesn't seem anything like reasonable to me to use the code of an open source project in a closes source one unless it is really how the creators of the OSS meant it to be. People develop this stuff with idealistic reasons in mind, not opportunistic reasons.
   

"... [hoevekam: the] most important rule for pages in the encyclopedia is the exclusionary rule:

If a page on the web covers subject matter that ought to be in the encyclopedia or the course library [hoevekam: an probably also in the article library], but its license is too restricted to qualify, we must not make links to it from encyclopedia articles or from courses."

Why is this the most important rule?

Let's look at a lesson learned form GPLed software. There was and still is the danger of including non-GPLed code into GPLed code (as seen lately in the discussions when QT was GPLed). I do agree with RMS, that this should be avoided right from the beginning of working on an free encyclopedia. This might look kind of paranoid today, but our kids will be grateful for that. Or aren't you thankful that our parents began writing software from scratch in order to put it into the realm of the GPL? Without starting from zero, GPLed software would not be in the position it is right now.

Nupedia doesn't follow the exclusionary rule. This might be good for now and for gaining momentum on a short time scale, but in the long run RMS "exclusionary rule" will be the competitive edge. OK, it wouldn't take Nupedia much to adapt to this rule once the number of articles has overcome a certain thershold and they can link to other articles instead of citing to non-GFDLed articles and books.

Also, the Linux kernel _is_ GPLed, so in an indirect way the FSF has actually "produced" an OS... The Linux kernel is GNU-licensed.

Non sequitur. The licensing of software has nothing whatsoever to do with the classification of that software into projects. Not all GNU software is released under a GNU license, and not all software released under a GNU license is part of GNU. Just because I speak English does not mean that I am an Englishman.

As I understood him, the GNU system is a _specification_ of an OS, or class of POSIX-compatible OSes, not one actual implementation.

The original announcement and the GNU Manifesto called it a "system". It's description made it very clear that it was to be an implementation, and not a spec.

Later documents made it clear that the goal was an actual operating system. Quotes from "The GNU Project": "The answer was clear: what was needed first was an operating system", and "The GNU operating system would include them too".

what happens if some pages are erroneous, or even deceptive?
What happens if the title of the encyclopedia is deceptive? -- Nupedia, GNUpedia
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Most likely the license that will be used would be the GNU Free Documentation License.

I think this idea is very good. I think that most of the comments agree on one thing though : Stallman's article doesn't give enough details on the practical side to make it seem real. He (as usualy) defends the ethical side of the problem, and rightly enough describes the way the content should be free (speech) but he leaves a huge blank area in the field of the practical (and technical) implementation of GNUpedia.

I think that Internet and the Open Source community is somehow ready to start such a project (and I don't think it was the case anytime before).

What we need to make it real is a deep deep thinking on the technical/practical side of it. And while we are here, why not talk about how you would technically do it ? I mean, /. readers are probably the most qualified to talk/think about this if not to implement it themselves...

Here is how I would see it : I think that what we realy need in terms of encyclopedia is something that would sit between Shaslcode and QuestionExchange. Something where anyone could post comments, articles, pictures and all the shit, but where every willing people could also judge the pertinence of the content. Say for example that this article is a troll, this other one is "insightfull" and so on. People could also say "this article was usefull to my knowledge". So we would have two level of moderation : one on the "editorial scale" (troll/interesting), and one on the content quality/usefullness.

Why ? Because I think that Stallman is right on one point at least : it needs to be completly free (speech) to be interesting. Doing else would be doing something that has already be done (say britanica for example) and that perhaps doesn't need to be done again.

Making GNUpedia an "open to any post" system is a nice idea, but it also implies that we will have to face A LOT of content submissions. Even if we wanted to create an "editorial board" to decide what would be included and what would not (which we cannot if we want to remain free as in speech) it would be too much work for (volunteers) individuals to "separate the good from the evil".

So what we need is a system that allows anybody to feed it with his/her particular bit of knowledge, and them let the individual reader make the content "worth reading" by moderating it up or down.

Then, after a while, we might (might) have something interesting for anyone. In that case I'm sure it would be the greatest success of Open Source movment (aren't we talking about free knowledge, free information since the very beginning of Open Source ?)

Another thought I have too : why make it web (http) based ? Any rational reason for it ? I think we have now in our hands a better technical way to do it : why not build it as a peer-to-peer network (based on this or that) with a client/server program using Gecko to render the documents ? What do you think ? That was my 2 cents worth thoughts...

PS : Please forgive the english, it's not my mother tongue.

I heard LILO was starting to support Reiser, anyone know for sure?

I know for sure that there are atleast patches to LILO to get it to work with ReiserFS, however LILO I don't think is the optimal solution.

I've been running ReiserFS for some time now, and during my switch to it I also switched boot loaders to GRUB which seems like an overall better bootloader. I can tell you right now that the GRUB command shell has saved me a few times already.

-- iCEBaLM

I think what we need is a truly open-source solution to the problem of printing.
Now, I know you're all saying "but what about patents?" That used to be a valid concern. Fortunately however, the printing press was invented in 1452, meaning that the patent expired in 1469 (this was back when patents lasted for 17 years - not 20 like they do now).
This means that we can LEGALLY reverse engineer the original Gutenberg press and distribute our version.
I emailed RMS about this and he's very excited. As long as we call it the Gnutenberg printing press we'll have the full support of the fsf.
Isn't it about time the linux community stopped relying on papyrus scrolls? This is a major step in making us competitive with M$ Winbloze (the 1337 h4x0r way to spell Microsoft Windows).
Of course it'll take years before we manage to get smooth fonts with the Gnutenberg printing press, but I think that's a small price to pay for freedom.
--Shoeboy

One way to learn about french is by reading things in French. All worthwhile software is usually released with French translations:

But of course if you don't know any French this won't help. You can however, check out this tutorial.

In my opinion, *GPL is a deterrent to adoption. I wouldn't touch a GPL'd codec because i don't want to have to give away my source code.

With a LGPL'd codec, you don't have to. IANAL, but it appears you just have to

• distribute your application in a form that can be re-linked with the library, and
• mirror the library's source code.

As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary (18k characters) program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software

• Get rid of /etc and replace it with something sane.
  After trying several distributions (among them SuSe, with their rc.config madness), I was so glad when I finally found Debian, with all of the configuration files still in /etc, at the exact location that the HOWTOs and the documentation of the individual programs tell you. /etc can be pretty sane, and it's actually a lot more sane than the registry.
• You find the directory structure stupid. It's so complicated that your dad can't install programs. Well, tell him to look for what he needs on packages.debian.org and then have him type "apt-get install packagename". Done. After that, the docs are in /usr/doc/packagename. And if you want, "dpkg -L packagename" tells you what was installed and where. Try that with Windows. And if you want to compile everything yourself, have a look at GNU stow, which helps you to keep the different programs separated so you can easily uninstall/upgrade them without leaving files of the last few versions lying around. You don't need to know where to put every single file, that's make install's job. I can't see how one can tolerate the windows\system32 directory "structure" and be confused by a Unix directory tree.
• Oh, nice that you mentioned how all UNIX console apps work together in a nice harmony of streams and pipes. This is the very reason I feel more comfortable with Unix when doing real work. In this thread, and in pretty much every Linux-related article in the press, there is far too much emphasis on how hard Linux is to install or configure. But there are actually people who install once and work with their machine for years. And for my style of work, a few shell windows and Emacs are the best I have found so far. And yes, I did work with DevStudio on Windows, and did not totally fall in love with it.

It's your *right* to copy software. Any software. Any Information.

Go read www.gnu.org. Especially the stuff on intellectual property.

The general points are:

1) How much money does a person have a right to make from an idea? If I come up with one vital idea a week before anyone else does, do I have the right to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of my life? I don't think so.

2) If you buy something, does the seller have any right to tell you what you may do with it?

3) Copying information is not stealing, unless you can steal potential profits. Microsoft had the same amount of money before and after I copied "their" software.

4) Enforcement of copyright eventually leads to the banning of open source [and free(dom)] software since they can be used to copy information. If you don't believe me, then just think back to the DeCSS fiasco.

Copy software. It's your right.

Ping!
Simon

Looking through the sources of GNOME and GTK is quite a trip--it *seems* well-organized, and probably is. But the language idioms used are frightening--it's C, and legal C at that, but at what cost? No one offers training in this dialect--universities use object-friendly languages when teaching object-oriented design, and businesses use object-friendly languages when they need object-oriented design.

The clearest book on C++ I've read comes in near 1000 pages. If I want to contribute to most GNU projects, I have to generate the knowledge of their equally complicated pidgin OOP-C for myself by staring at reams of barely-commented source code. If written in C++, the code would be identically fast and have 25% the footprint, and probably fewer bugs too. But RMS says no, so they don't do it that way.

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

You are speaking from a UNIX perspective. I, however, speak from a free software perspective. Apple has done nothing to help the free software community, in fact with its licensing of the 1-Click Patent it has done much to harm freedom. Apple has used no Linux technology in its new OS, which is BSD based. Most importantly none of it, even Darwin is free..

Face it, does anyone think that Apple would behave much different if they had the monopoly (bear in mind their treatment of clone makers)? Nope, neither do I.

--

Some Additional Linux Distribution Suggestions

• Caldera Systems
• Turbo Linux
• SuSE
• Mandrake

• Sun/Open Office
• Applix/Applixware Office
• Oracle
• HP
• Compaq
• Dell
• GNU

• Osborne/McGraw-Hill
• O'Reilly
• Sybex

#ifdef GENERAL_COMMENT

Too many arguments about software licensing are made in ignorance. If you're going to make a comment on RMS's position on anything, make sure you understand it. It's not hard. Think what you like about the man, he has a talent for expressing himself clearly, logically, and succinctly.

#endif

The GNU GPL implements copyleft, an attempt to keep the software in the free software community so as to maximize its utility. The GPL doesn't infect anything. RMS may give you that impression, when he brags that "At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline." Maybe that developer "saw the light," or maybe he was just lazy, but he made a choice: release under GPL or rewrite Readline. That's a much better deal than you'll get if you pilfer code from a proprietary program.

Public domain (or BSD-licensed) software may be incorporated into a proprietary program. If your goal is more users, then that may be acceptable. An API or reference implementation of an open standard should probably be public domain (see, e.g., SAX).

Fundamentally, it comes down to the freedoms you want to give your users. If you buy into copyleft, use a GPL-compatible license.

The GNU GPL implements copyleft, an attempt to keep the software in the free software community so as to maximize its utility. The GPL doesn't infect anything. RMS may give you that impression, when he brags that "At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline." Maybe that developer "saw the light," or maybe he was just lazy, but he made a choice: release under GPL or rewrite Readline. That's a much better deal than you'll get if you pilfer code from a proprietary program.

Public domain (or BSD-licensed) software may be incorporated into a proprietary program. If your goal is more users, then that may be acceptable. An API or reference implementation of an open standard should probably be public domain (see, e.g., SAX).

Fundamentally, it comes down to the freedoms you want to give your users. If you buy into copyleft, use a GPL-compatible license.

Distros update their versions for lots of different reasons, often because a number of new user programs are available, a new XFree86 version is available that is needed for new video cards, or sometimes for purely marketing reasons, as when Slackware jumped from 4.0 to 7.0 in order to reach marketing parity with Red Hat - Slackware generally used a conservative numbering scheme, but Red Hat advanced the numbers rapidly, even though all the distros are based on the same stuff, but lots of people gave the Slackware folks the message they didn't want software they perceived as out of date.

So no, it's fine to use the 2.4.0 kernel with Mandrake 7.1. The version of the kernel bears no explicit relation to the version of the distribution.

By the way, if you wonder where most of the rest of the programs on your distro come from, you have the fine folks at The Free Software Foundation to thank. Richard Stallman takes pains to point out the system is more properly called "GNU/Linux", because what Linus developed was a kernel that the already-existing GNU programs could run on.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

So just yesterday I wrote:

• Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel

It's got some helpful, practical tips on downloading and building a kernel from sources as well as providing feedback to the kernel developers. All of the information in the article is available somewhere, but when I first began testing with 2.4.0-test1, I found some things difficult to figure out, so I felt that it would be nice to put what I learned all down in one place.

This is part of an overall effort to improve the quality of Free Software. Another part of the effort is the just-founded Linux Quality Database, so far just a proposal - contact me at crawford@goingware.com if you want to help.

And finally, some interesting trivia for you:

After a long beta testing period and many delays, Windows 2000 shipped with 64000 documented bugs of which 25000 were considered serious by Microsoft itself (the figures are quoted from memory, I might be a bit off). The Windows trade press reported that the opinion was widely held by IT managers that one should not install Windows 2000 on any machine until a few service packs had been released, with Windows 2000 server not being considered ready for use until much later than the desktop user version.

The BSD/Mach based Mac OS X, derived from the NeXT operating system and now in beta testing, is Apple's first operating system to support protected memory that is expected to be widely used. (Another was A/UX, Apple's Unix port, but it served only a niche market).

Apple has been trying for ten years, longer than Linux has been in existence, to write a modern operating system. The first was Pink, renamed Taligent when Apple collaborated with IBM on it. In the end all that came of it was a little-used object-oriented programming framework.

The next was Copland, and I don't know why it was never completed exactly, but I was offerred a job as a performance engineer on the Copland project when I worked at Apple, but I turned it down - I didn't tell them this but I had the sense that Copland was a project that would never ship.

And Linus wrote Linux when he was a college student, which combined with the GNU utilities forms the operating system we know and love today.

These huge, well-funded corporations can't get it together to program their way out of a wet paper bag but a bunch of freaks on the Net have written the fastest growing operating system in use today.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Also, it might be worth noting that only the copyright holder can enforce the GPL. So, we try to help when we can (and that address is the best way to request help), but our hands are tied if the copyright holder doesn't want to take action.

Also, it might be worth noting that only the copyright holder can enforce the GPL. So, we try to help when we can (and that address is the best way to request help), but our hands are tied if the copyright holder doesn't want to take action.

The Free Software Foundation has a very respected attorney for dealing with violations of the GPL but it can only enforce the GPL if the copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation.

The authors of Everybuddy are very fortunate in this case that the infringers cooperated. What if they hadn't? What would you do? Sue in an Indian court?

Please see what to do if you think you see a violation of the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL and note what they say:

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

To make the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder of your package, please see the FSF's info on legal matters and how to apply the GPL license terms to your new programs.

I don't see it in the FSF's pages, but I read that when those folks cracked that censorware program and released it under GPL, that they thought they were off the hook after they settled with Mattel because the code was copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, so it wasn't their code to withdraw from circulation. But the problem was that they had not sent the FSF a legal written document transferring the copyright. I read in "Legal Care for Your Software" that copyright can only be transferred in writing, I think it may be insufficient to simply state the copyright holder in the source files if it is someone other than yourself.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The Free Software Foundation has a very respected attorney for dealing with violations of the GPL but it can only enforce the GPL if the copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation.

The authors of Everybuddy are very fortunate in this case that the infringers cooperated. What if they hadn't? What would you do? Sue in an Indian court?

Please see what to do if you think you see a violation of the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL and note what they say:

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

To make the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder of your package, please see the FSF's info on legal matters and how to apply the GPL license terms to your new programs.

I don't see it in the FSF's pages, but I read that when those folks cracked that censorware program and released it under GPL, that they thought they were off the hook after they settled with Mattel because the code was copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, so it wasn't their code to withdraw from circulation. But the problem was that they had not sent the FSF a legal written document transferring the copyright. I read in "Legal Care for Your Software" that copyright can only be transferred in writing, I think it may be insufficient to simply state the copyright holder in the source files if it is someone other than yourself.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The Free Software Foundation has a very respected attorney for dealing with violations of the GPL but it can only enforce the GPL if the copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation.

The authors of Everybuddy are very fortunate in this case that the infringers cooperated. What if they hadn't? What would you do? Sue in an Indian court?

Please see what to do if you think you see a violation of the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL and note what they say:

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

To make the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder of your package, please see the FSF's info on legal matters and how to apply the GPL license terms to your new programs.

I don't see it in the FSF's pages, but I read that when those folks cracked that censorware program and released it under GPL, that they thought they were off the hook after they settled with Mattel because the code was copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, so it wasn't their code to withdraw from circulation. But the problem was that they had not sent the FSF a legal written document transferring the copyright. I read in "Legal Care for Your Software" that copyright can only be transferred in writing, I think it may be insufficient to simply state the copyright holder in the source files if it is someone other than yourself.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The Free Software Foundation has a very respected attorney for dealing with violations of the GPL but it can only enforce the GPL if the copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation.

The authors of Everybuddy are very fortunate in this case that the infringers cooperated. What if they hadn't? What would you do? Sue in an Indian court?

Please see what to do if you think you see a violation of the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL and note what they say:

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

To make the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder of your package, please see the FSF's info on legal matters and how to apply the GPL license terms to your new programs.

I don't see it in the FSF's pages, but I read that when those folks cracked that censorware program and released it under GPL, that they thought they were off the hook after they settled with Mattel because the code was copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, so it wasn't their code to withdraw from circulation. But the problem was that they had not sent the FSF a legal written document transferring the copyright. I read in "Legal Care for Your Software" that copyright can only be transferred in writing, I think it may be insufficient to simply state the copyright holder in the source files if it is someone other than yourself.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

And you should use GNUS, the Free mail/newsreader that comes with EMACS. :-)

The idea of the GPL is that nobody should run code that they don't have source code to. So if the NSA wants to rewrite Linux and only use it internally, they have the source code to their modifications, and it's find both legally and in the spirit of the GPL. But if they try to give it to the general public without source, then the public is being asked to run code for which they don't have the source, and that IS a GPL violation.

If you're genuinely curious about this, you might want to check out the various documents that the FSF has on their Web page, in particular the GNU Manifesto and the GPL itself.

everyone talks about how Linux is open source and free. If Linux is so free then why do I have to pay Debain, Red Hat, LinuxPPC for a free program?

"Free" is the free as in "free speech", "free citizen" or "free country". It doesn't refer to price. (The usual way of explaining the distinction is by contrasting free speech with free beer .

However, since Red Hat, Debian and so on are free (as in "not enslaved"), you don't have to pay anyone for them. Go and find a friend who has a copy, and take a copy from them. Give it to all your other friends! Read the code so you can find the problems; improve it if you can, and pass it on! This is what the freedom of software's about.

1. Competition is often a Good Thing. Look at the KDE/Gnome split.
2. One of them is free software, the other isn't (or, at least, wasn't). Note that this was originally a cause of the KDE/Gnome split.
3. They might do the same thing in different ways. Consider:
   • ease of use for novices vs. speed of use for experts
   • looking or working more like like this, that or the other existing client
   • eye candy vs. uncluttered
   • more features vs. more speed and less disk space
4. And if they were both GPLd, they could borrow code from one another anyway-- theoretically, at least.

1. Competition is often a Good Thing. Look at the KDE/Gnome split.
2. One of them is free software, the other isn't (or, at least, wasn't). Note that this was originally a cause of the KDE/Gnome split.
3. They might do the same thing in different ways. Consider:
   • ease of use for novices vs. speed of use for experts
   • looking or working more like like this, that or the other existing client
   • eye candy vs. uncluttered
   • more features vs. more speed and less disk space
4. And if they were both GPLd, they could borrow code from one another anyway-- theoretically, at least.

Are the developers of Everybuddy likely
to file a suit in India for violations of
their license agreement?

Would it have been hard to go after them just because this company's based outside the West? The same problem's happened before, except it was a Chinese company that time; Bruce Perens commented at the time:

Not that I am holding forth any hope about suing in China, but suing a Chinese company that does business in other nations is certainly possible. (comment #77-- I can't link to it :( )

On quite a separate point, the idea of a "GPL insurance" reminds me of RMS's idea for a "software tax", which would fund the development of free software... perhaps, in the end, it would need to be used both for attack and for defence.

See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all

If you feel guilty, you could

• Write software for the GNU/Linux system.
• Write documentation for the GNU/Linux system, especially if you speak human languages other than American.
• Buy a boxed GNU/Linux distribution. This funds development of the GNU/Linux system.
• Donate to Free Software Foundation. This funds development of GNU, the POSIX layer that runs on Linux (and on HURD). You can even specify FSF on your United Way "specific request."
• Buy a computer from VA Linux Systems or Penguin Computing. This supports hardware manufacturers who are not in bed with Microsoft <cough>winmodems</cough>.

See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all

If you feel guilty, you could

• Write software for the GNU/Linux system.
• Write documentation for the GNU/Linux system, especially if you speak human languages other than American.
• Buy a boxed GNU/Linux distribution. This funds development of the GNU/Linux system.
• Donate to Free Software Foundation. This funds development of GNU, the POSIX layer that runs on Linux (and on HURD). You can even specify FSF on your United Way "specific request."
• Buy a computer from VA Linux Systems or Penguin Computing. This supports hardware manufacturers who are not in bed with Microsoft <cough>winmodems</cough>.

See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all

If you feel guilty, you could

• Write software for the GNU/Linux system.
• Write documentation for the GNU/Linux system, especially if you speak human languages other than American.
• Buy a boxed GNU/Linux distribution. This funds development of the GNU/Linux system.
• Donate to Free Software Foundation. This funds development of GNU, the POSIX layer that runs on Linux (and on HURD). You can even specify FSF on your United Way "specific request."
• Buy a computer from VA Linux Systems or Penguin Computing. This supports hardware manufacturers who are not in bed with Microsoft <cough>winmodems</cough>.

MP3s are an open standard.

Warning: Open does not necessarily imply free; for instance, the Apple Public Source License is not a Free Software license.

Anyone can download CDex w/ LAME for free and roll their own MP3s.

And infringe several United States patents (and foreign counterparts) in the process.

If anything, the comment could have been re-phrased better as Linus+Minix+(gnu tools)=Linux, but (apologies to Andy Tannebaum) I don't believe Linus ever used any of the minix source on his development path, since he says just that in the initial announcement of his plans.

aem

I'm sure Linus Torvalds probably heard some comments like this when he was originally working on building the first Linux kernel.

Anyway, there's a big fallacy in this whole discussion. Everybody seems to think that LT woke up one day and said "Eureka! (My kernel work) + (GNU Project) = A NEW OS !" That's not what happened. For one thing, GNU always had their own kernel (althougth they've taken their sweet time finishing it!). For another thing, LT was never a big fan of most of the GNU software (in this article he expresses admiration for GCC, but attitudes ranging from indifference to absolute disgust with everything else).

The simple fact is that LT wrote a simple POSIX-compliant kernel for his own private purposes -- mainly self-education. It was the viral marketing that he unintentionally started by giving the source to his friends that established Linux+GNU as a new OS. I once heard him say he was more shocked by the 100th copy of Linux than the 1 millionth!

That being said, it might well be interesting and useful to create a new "OS" based on the Linux kernel. "Completely complying with free software's philosophy" strikes me as a rather silly motivation, but Tonneau does seem to have done some interesting work that bears further discussion. Is anyone going to comment on FullPliant's unique features, or is everybody stuck on Religious Flamewar mode?

__________________

Richard M. Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation Inc., wrote a dystopian piece about pay-per-view eBooks called The Right to Read.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Did you know that when you write a review on their site, it becomes their property?

In much the same way that the Free Software Foundation requires that the ownership any code submission to gcc be turned over to the FSF before they will incorporate that submission into the official gcc distribution.