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AltiVec enabled GCC patches

Before copyright artists had patrons who subsidized their work by providing a living for them. Those who had no patron didn't live well (to say the least). Your "argument" (cough) is no refutation of anything I said.

You assume that controlling data is the only way to make money off of it. The Free Software movement shows that that's not true.

In the first place Richard Stallman isn't exactly living large on the return he has made from the software he has written. In the second place you falsely assume that GPL'ed software is not controlled. It IS. The GPL is founded wholly and solely upon the legitimacy of copyright. Absent strongly enforced copyright there is NOTHING to prevent a commercial entity from sucking up all this 'free' code and creating a new and proprietary and fully binary software product under their own label and with no mention of any indebtedness to anyone else in the world.

Do you GPL your code? Would you like Microsoft or any other corporation to take your code and use it as they see fit without any regard for your wishes? If you don't care, then why not place your code in the public domain? If you do care, then quit being a hypocrite and give the musician the same right to do what he wants with his product -- even if that means selling it to those big bad record companies you loathe.

I do feel that I have a fundamental right to any piece of non-private (not personal / financial) data, yes.

What a fine and self-serving definition of "private" you have. So would you mind if I came by your house and took your car? It's not "private" by your definition.

You don't think that there are financial costs associated with the production of music? You don't think that artists should be compensated for these costs?

denying it to me is creating artificial scarcity.

You really don't understand economics, do you? Music is intrinsically a scarce good because its supply is NOT unlimited.

you must be consfusing Free software with Open Source

No, I am NOT. Why don't YOU go read this, where the FSF says (among other things) "we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." Further, I believe that if you ask Mr. Stallman you will find that he is opposed to copyright violations because he knows that the GPL stands upon this foundation ALONE. You will not find arguments for software piracy (or any other form of piracy) at www.gnu.org.

If you're going to look to Stallman for inspiration for your loony ideas about music, be sure you look at everything he writes first -- not just the parts you like.

Now if only they'd release Darwin (Mac OS 10's kernel) under [L]GPL instead of the dumb APSL, we'd have some good stuff.

And this trademark has a web site. That's where you'll find the true definition of UNIX®.

Actually, Linux-based systems are GNU systems; GNU's not Unix (NetBSD is stealing this tagline).

Mac OS 10 has a BSD-heritage public-source kernel called Darwin and can be spelled with an X; does that count?

I'd say any system with multitasking, multiuser, devices with filenames (/dev/*), full POSIX compliance (refer to the Single UNIX® Spec available from the official Unix site), etc. could be called Unix-like.

The link to the book on amazon is here

Aren't we supposed to be boycotting Amazon.com in favor of Barnes & Noble?

Read Why Software Should Not Have Owners and Why Software Should Be Free. RMS makes the argument that creators should not have any special rights to the works they create, which completely goes against the idea that creators have the right to be compensated for their work on their terms. So for him, it's actually a bit stronger than what I said. He doesn't just want to force creators to give away their work -- he denies that they even owned it to begin with.

Read Why Software Should Not Have Owners and Why Software Should Be Free. RMS makes the argument that creators should not have any special rights to the works they create, which completely goes against the idea that creators have the right to be compensated for their work on their terms. So for him, it's actually a bit stronger than what I said. He doesn't just want to force creators to give away their work -- he denies that they even owned it to begin with.

There is a project at GNU to develop a Buzz-like tracker. It's moving along well and should be usable within a few months.

check The OCTAL Home page at GNU.ORG

No, Gsynth has been dead for a few months now.

There are a few other projects attempting to do the same thing that appear to have slightly more momentum, including BEAST/BSE (sorry, don't know the URL) and GNU OCTAL (http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/octal.html - the guy behind Gsynth is involved with this project now). You might want to check those out if you're interested in this sort of thing.

As far as the piracy issue goes, the bottom line is that anywhere copyrights are acknowledged, pirated music is illegal. And in case anyone thinks I'm dancing around the issue, it is immoral as well. As far as I'm concerned, copyrighted performances of music are the intellectual property of the performer, to be sold or given away as the performer desires.

Napster is being used heavily, and probably primarily, as a tool to facilitate music piracy. And there are factions that want it banned. But it is the piracy that is wrong, not the tool. There are people using it legitimately, or who will soon. MP3's can serve as a promotional tool for new bands. They can be a way to put a recording of a school concert on the web for proud parents when pressing CDs would be too expensive. I could sit here dreaming up uses for them.

And if Napster is banned, if the MP3 format is banned, piracy will go deeper underground, but it will not go away. That bottle has spilled its genie. It will have two other effects. The people with legitimate uses for the technology will be denied access to it. And it will set another precedent of banning software, a worse one than DeCSS.

Richard Stallman wrote a cautionary story about some possible consequences of this road once we start down it entitled The Right to Read. I don't think it will get as bad as he described, but imagine the consequences of some of the measures that he mentioned. Imagine programmers only having access to debuggers and other programming tools if they are licensed and bonded. Free software would not be what it is today.

I have seen in various places comments that locks and contracts show us the history of the struggle between people trying to secure their property and thieves trying to take it. Rather than seeking a new technological advance or a new model for marketting music, the recording industry and many musicians are clinging to the model they have. The law is with them, and they are in the right (in general, I'm not discussing detailed cases here) morally. That won't save them without a draconian police state.

They do not have the right to impose additional obligations on me in situations that do not involve their intellectual property. Whether they like it or not the technological tide will roll in. Institutions that do not change become obsolete.

>So as long as WINE is GPL (it is, right?)

Uhhhh... no.

It's under what (I guess) is called the WINE License which is a lot closer to the BSD license than the GPL.

And no, there's no provision (as far as I can tell) that stipulates that all files you link into an original work have to be open. Derived works have to be, but not the original, as long as it's linked in, not included in the source code. So linking closed-source VBScript/JScript would be ok. Of course, this is only my interpretation and IANAL (duh).

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It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean

This, if anything, makes the prospect of buying 3e even more tantalizing, since not only would I be purchasing an incredibly cool product, I'd be rewarding a company for its openness and fair competitive spirit.

--

Plus now their mouse driver doesn't work with fifo's like /dev/gpmdata (gpm -R) or /dev/jam_ps2:0 (jam imps2) which really pisses me off, because now I'm forced to use only their drivers for mice, which are limited. I have more mice supported in the imwheel version gpm of gpm (with support for wheels/sticks) than their internal drivers, and I can update the jam or gpm programs more often than we see a release of XFree86 come out.

I'm generally disappointed in both the video support from NVidia not being there, the mouse driver being too picky about FIFOs, and the dependancy on random libs that are not included with XFree86 4.0, nor mentioned in the docs. Lucky me I knew what to do to get it working.

write me if you need or can help with mice FIFO vs. XGrabButton methods for IMWheel and gpm or jam. -=<Long Island Man>=-

Monolithic kernels are the 'everything and the kitchen sink' method. They are responsible for everything. Well, almost everything. And they do it all as one indivisible package. Monolithic kernels have advantages in some areas, particularly speed, at least when the kernel is of a resonable size. Linux is mostly monolithic, modules are micro-kernelesque.

Micro-kernels are very small (hence the name) and handle the talking which modules do with each other. This is a rather sketchy description, you might find something better by looking for stuff about HURD at the gnu project.

I hope I was of some help.

Piracy is about hijacking ships and steal from people before killing them off. You don't steal anything from anyone by copying, information is free. It's just a mindset that publishers wants to impose on us so that they can make more profits on our willingness to bend over..

For more information check out: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philoso phy.html

If you actually read some of those texts, I'm sure you'll see the insane limitations corporations and governments are trying to impose on the net and society as a whole. And do you think they'll ever stop or give up on this? Of course not, they're in for the money and power! There are no limits to greed, but we got to draw a line somewhere.

When I first heard of the word "Piracy" regarding software from "Software Houses" as they were called then, I was perhaps 10-11 years old and read it in a "Microcomputer magazine". They even had a picture of a pirate ship with pirates onboard! Nedless to say I laughed at that. Today 13 years later, the word as well as the mindset has become mainstream, and I'm not laughing anymore..

Just because publishers are reluctant to find alternative ways of distributing, doesn't mean we should support them in everything they do. I'd much rather live in a free society with slightly worse products, than in a society where just a selected few elite got to have it all. When companies or governments act badly, we should _act_ on it ourselves. Anything else is irresponsible. It's our duty to think beyond stupid laws and limitations and do what's rational according to our own morals. Teach and share with others, learn what we do badly ourselves. Diversity and information sharing is the key to evolution.

Do you really think a crippled demo along with its inevitable ads for the final release tells you everything you need to know to spend so much money on a game? That game-magazines touts informed decisions? For one thing, no game is worth over $25, and I'm tired of being disappointed over and over again. There's too much hype to wade through to ever hope finding the best titles before your money runs out.

"Don't support piracy." Why? Because someone says so with no good reasons? Well, I don't support piracy, but that's because of personal preferences. Not just because "someone told me to", or "it's hurting the bussiness". But rather because in the end it doesn't help very much.

Btw, I'm going to buy a new game in a few days, just need to make sure it's the right choice. So I'm not all Communistic, DON'T SHOOT! ;-)

- Steeltoe

What do you do to limit yourself today?

Frankly the only system of book publishing that's likely to genuinely work (without evil draconian curbs on book use freedom) is "niceware" - a license that says "do anything you like with this except distributing versions with modified text, if you like it please pay me what you think it's worth".

Anything else, even shareware, brings with it the whole scummy mess of "piracy" crackdowns, unfree usage, and most everything RMS predicted.

Note: GPL-like licenses are good for documentation, but for fiction works you'd want to keep the text constant - although allowing translation and visual redesign)

Why Slashdot would not start such movement? I mean a political/lobby group with Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda as the leader followed with hundreds of thousands of slashdotters, the Free Software Foundation preachers, all the Linux advocates, Perl scripters and DeCSS hosters.

We all can help fund such organization to polically defend our point of view and maybe see one day Linus become President and Rob his Vice-President.

You have to start this.

The GNU Manifesto declared the right of Richard Stallman and the people willing to work with him on it to share a body of what has become some of the most politically controversial software ever written. PGP attacked the idea that the masses should not have strong encryption by simply handing it to them as free software. Apache undermined proprietary web protocols.

If we want to be heard, there is an avenue for those willing to stand up and be counted. Write the code and put it out there. Embody the philosophy of freedom in working software. Use the copyleft and other free licenses to prevent anyone from locking up the code. And as a couple of people have been advocating, start patenting intellectual property embodied in free software and make plans to use those patents to enforce its freedom.

Okay, this doesn't answer the question of how to protect the designated victims from taking the heat at temperatures often comparable to conventional fusion. I don't have that answer.

We are trying new things and breaking new ground in terms of models of collaboration. Stallman was quick to point out that free software was free as in speech. But that statement is true in more ways than simply pointing out that it can be sold as well as given away. It is about freely communicating code. And it is part of a larger issue of maintaining our freedom to speak our minds. It is as deeply political as any issue today.

However, at the end they recomend four job portals: Linux.com, Linux Today, User Friendly's GeekFinder and Linux.org.au. I agree with the first two, and (since I'm in North America) have no valid opinion on Linux.org.au.

The problem with Geek Finder is that it is really just a front for Dice.com. Unlike all the other resources mentioned, dice.com charges employers for listings, instead of being community-based and advertiser-supported.

Instead, I would recomend the following additional job portals, where I have actually posted jobs:

• Superexpert.com: not great, but it does host linux jobs.
• JustLinux: a smaller Linux portal, with a nice jobs page.
• Free Software Jobs Page: This is the GNU jobs page. It is strictly for free software jobs, so only hard-core open source jobs get posted there.

Crispin
-----
Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free Hardened Linux Distribution
Jobs!

Mmm.... Oskari (the sole developer) isn't too friendly to requests to open-source Buzz or to port it to Linux, and neither is the mailing list - the topic is taboo due to a past mailing list meltdown. Buzz does run under WINE, though, quite well, but with a few significant bugs.

There is currently an effort to produce a Buzz-alike for *nix called Octal. It's in its extreme infancy (first code release last weekend), but we desperately need coders. Check the project out at http://www.gnu.org/software/octal/octa l.html and contact the project maintainer or myself if you're interested in helping out.

I've never actually heard of this rule being used, but it's there. In fact, this particular department is responsible for GNU Maverik, a virtual reality modelling system. I think the rule is only there as a last resort, in the case that, say, some new software with genuine profitability was created inside the dept. Credit would be given (as far as I understand it) but the Uni would still own the rights. Daft, I know.

At some point I think they'll have to refomulate their opinions on this, but I think that'll only happen after some major dispute. For example, I f I went to work for an IT company part time and wrote some webpages, the the IT company would own them and so technically would the university. If this ever comes to a head then I think it's fair to say fireworks will ensue...

--

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

There have been various attempts at distributed operating systems in the past; some, such as amoeba and plan 9 are actually usable, to a certain point. Unix is here to stay--it's not going to disappear until someone maxes the next "big step" in computing, and maybe not even then. There are a number of projects out there that are quite interesting. On the one hand, you have OSes like QNX which were designed to be entirely distributable (for lack of a better word) from the ground up. One of K&R (I can't remember which one) once said that one of the places where unix failed to take the "everything is a file" concept to its logical conclusion was networking. (In plan9, pretty much everything, including networked stuff is a file). I don't think that distributed OSes will kill unix, but that unix will eventually become a distributed OS. For example, GNU/HURD (which is getting along very nicely BTW), while not an attempt at a distributed OS, is designed in such a way that it will be easy to transform into a distributed system.

That's funny, I thought that Unix was based on a monolithic kernel... silly semantics

I see Unix being more able to adapt in todays fast changing Information Technology world than other operating systems based on monolithic kernels.

But that's not what I really wanted to comment on.

I would love to see some of the best coders and operating systems people put together a new OS from scratch using the latest techniques.

Ideally this would create an ultra stable

working with Photoshop (etc).

Alternatives are out there. You just haven't found them.

-rt
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Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!

You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.

Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.

Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.

And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.

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

If you really want to have a hardcopy of the GNU Make manual, you can order it from the GNU folks. It's a great way to support free software (and free manuals).

Personally, at first I thought it was eyes were to tired from reading to many posts about hot grits, natalie portman, and various other things that my mother told me would make me go blind.

But upon a lengthy and closer examination, I noticed that the GIMPs eyes moved.

And after some clever deduction, I realized that it must be a GIF animation.

Then, I thought GIMP is a GIF... that's kinda interesting, considering the GNU Project's position of GIFs. Not really a big deal in my opinion. But still kinda funny.

And there is definitely something sinister behind those moving eyes...

1. The patent is only valid for a system returning HTML? I guess a system returning XML wouldn't be covered.
2. It's only valid if it outputs (partially) my id, billing and shipping address when I'm done?
3. Amazon takes my name / address / payment details, issues me a cookie and from there on in does everything automagically whenever I click / highlight / press on a button? Does this mean that if I change the cookie somebody else will get billed for and have delivered 4000 copies of the Kama Sutra?
4. I'm also a bit curious how in sections 6 and 9 the client and server systems respectivly include shopping cart components, yet section 11 (the actual method) specifically says "the item is ordered independently of a shopping cart model"

I've tried a few different audio programs under VMware, and had them either (a) crash on load, or (b) be amazingly slow because VMware is an incredible resource hog.

I've had very good luck running Buzz under WINE, though (use the native comctl32.dll, if you can), with almost-native performance (within 5% CPU usage), so it might be worth giving some other audio apps a try. I haven't done so myself, though. Well, except for Rebirth, which promptly crashed....

<plug>
There's an effort to make a very Buzz-like OSS audio app called OCTAL which needs all the help it (we) can get. So if you're interested, check it out and let us know if you can help out. Thanks!
</plug>

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philoso phy.html i encourage anyone reading this thread to also read these discussions on why patented and non-free software is bad.

Now, what is the FSF model of making money from writing documentation?

Consider this: Many companies (I don't think I need to name Red Hat here) pay people to write code that's to be released under the GPL. It doesn't seem too unreasonable to me to assume that they would pay people to write the free documentation (under the FDL) the same way that they pay people to write free software. It's rather complementary, IMO.

Something else: What about documentation that's been languishing for several revisions of the software? If this license becomes widely used (which I suspect it will, eventually, because of the reputation of RMS), then it would be no problem to just hire somebody to modify the documentation, much the same way as, say, ESR became the maintainer of popclient. (In fact, you wouldn't need any permission; ESR sought this from popclient's previous maintainer out of tact.) This could also simplify matters for the LDP if they decide to standardize on this license (much as they standardize on the file formats they accept).

You give the documentation away, and you make money by...? By what? Support of the documentation? That is, you get paid for adapting, modifying, and or re-writing the documentation? I don't think this works.

However, I don't know how this will fare up against other free-documentation licenses, such as the OPL. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

--

But if you do the above, the online documentation gets maintained and the dead tree version does not. At some point you need to re-synch. But what pair of licenses allows that?

Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses. IOW O'Reilly or anyone else can come out with clearly differentiated books, but the information contained in such has to be available as free documentation.

PS: No updates on GNU's Boycott Amazon page yet...

Has something changed? Richard Stallman has argued that the MPL is not GPL compliant. Has his position changed? I think not. Last week Miguel of Gnome fame mentioned (no url) that Mozilla couldn't be included in Gnome because it is non-GPL compliant. -Unless I'm mistaken, Debian still doesn't allow non-GPL compliant code into their distribution.

Now native aborigines can finally hear Richard Stallman sing! I'd say this is a real win for everyone involved.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless

Erhm, GNU has been around for about 15 years. And RMS was writing free software for about another 5 years before that. So it's been around for a bit more than 5 years.

And how many did RMS write himself? None? I thought so. I use them because I *paid* Red Hat for them. You see, in a market economy that's how things work. Clever, no?

Where did you get the idea that red hat wrote the GNU tools?? The GNU shell, fileutils, and textutils were written long before redhat, possibly by RMS himself, although I don't know who specifically at FSF wrote them.

You seem to have ignored the fact that the BSD utilities predate GNU by *years* AND they're more free. You can use them without bying into Stallman's "Slavery is Freedom" (ie, the GPV) philosophy.

No, the BSDs used GNU fileutils and textutils until very recently (98 or 99).

"RMS: Whatever I say is free is good for you" BSD is free, but he regularly attacks it, its users and its developers. Why? I don't know. Jealousy, most likely.

RMS:

[the BSD license] is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license with no particular problem

That's what I do. That's why I can make money. I can't do that with Deviant GNU/Linux because they make you sign away your code to RMS or put it under his license. And you can't make money doing that.

You realize, of course, that RMS gives you way more freedom than anything you buy from microsoft. All that's really going on here is that RMS is saying he dosen't want you to take his code and resell it without the code. The BSD ppl are saying they don't care what you do with it. And the proprietary developers are saying they don't want you doing anything with it unless you pay them, and they don't want you changing anything unless you pay them a lot of money.

I find your arguments to be rather hypocritical, since obviously you are interested in creating proprietary software. So isn't your argument much like Microsoft calling Red Hat proprietary? :o

Hey, I'm kinda getting on a roll here.
What's the problem? It's really disgusting how, in spite of the fact that a large segment of the community has very serious and valid reservations about Stallman's leadership, nevertheless their voices are essentially banned on Slashdot.
I don't know the guy any more than I know you. What have you given OSS?
The GPL is viral. It restricts freedom. This is not only a justifiable view (and IMHO correct), but a rather common one.
Yes, GPL is viral. A creates OSS software, B adds to it; it remains OSS. C adds to that, it's still OSS. That's a Good Thing.
In what way CAN it restrict freedom? It restricts your freedom to rip off someone else's source and claim it as your own. Have you *READ* www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html?
What IS IT that you want? Other people to write software for you to claim your own?

I've yet to see a single focused Open Source project even approach products such as VMWare. [...] What quality products has OSS rapidly developed?

The GNU tools, such as the file utilities, grep, sed, and so on, have long been better than the tools supplied with most vendors' Unices. Tests show that they simply work better. (In fact, those particular tests, in which various vendors' utilities crashed when fed random input, have been mentioned before on Slashdot.)

I now consider Linux to be better than proprietary Unix simply because it comes with the GNU tools. For example, we recently acquired a Sun box which was essentially unusable until we wasted a large amount of time replacing many of the utilities with their GNU equivalents.

On the issue of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, RMS wrote an article that had an interesting spin on the tax it imposes on digital recording systems. He advocated distributing the money to artists (not the record companies) based on a result of a survey and removing any restrictions on copying. This solution makes sense to me, as under the current law, legal users are made to pay for copying they don't do. If we're going to pay for copying, we might as well have the right to do it.

Please be careful about the use of the word free in this context.

OSS is largely free, as in free speech (or better, freedom). What Microsoft and Sun are doing with IE and StarOffice are gratis, like free beer.

For a refresher on what "free software" means, see RMS's essay on the subject.

Do you plan to release a new version of gzip anytime soon? Or are you going to pass maintainer duties off to someone else?

I know that many folks here already know the issue. For everyone else....

www.gnu.org/philosophy/ucita.html

From the article: "You see, UCITA says that by default a software developer or distributor is completely liable for flaws in a program; but it also allows a shrink-wrap license to override the default. Sophisticated software companies that make proprietary software will use shrink-wrap licenses to avoid liability entirely. But amateurs, and self-employed contractors who develop software for others, will be often be shafted because they didn't know about this problem. And we free software developers won't have any reliable way to avoid the problem"

Here's a summary of the point: Free software can't avoid the increased, default, liability because a shrink-wrapped licence can't be applied to something that isn't shrink-wrapped!

That means that if you write something, and include a licence in a text file that says "no warranty", the "no warranty" licence doesn't apply -- you're still liable even if you never make a cent!

There are numerous other reasons why this -- to grab a quote from Ghostbusters -- is "A bad thing" for free software.

Come to think of it, the UCITA probably applies to Shareware, "free" programs from various web sites, and other non-shrink-wrapped commercial software, too. There's another angle...

Another option is something like Axel Boldt's Free Software Bazaar, although that concept has a few well-discussed problems of its own.

Debian is certainly a worthy cause, as mentioned, but they don't take donations--rather, they relegate them to Software in the Public Interest.

The hardware idea is certainly a good one.

This from the Gnu web site should be a candidate. You'd need to take a few links out to get it under the limit, but it shows what can be done in limited space.

Share and Enjoy.

Yes, the Artistic License by itself is probably not a good idea. The GNU people don't reckon it counts as a free software licence:

We cannot say that this is a free software license because it is too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear. We urge you to avoid using it, except as part of the disjunctive license of Perl.

Between DOS and windows that company we all love to hate decided to change character sets. Suddenly three letters in the swedish alphabet have a new character code. One and a half decades later (count that in internet time...) we are still struggling with documents with mixed encoding.

That means every damn application has to provide a way to recode OEM to Ansi. AND deal with users who tries to do this conversion on files already converted.

This looks fairly nice, I haven't tried it personally but if its as close to VC++ as they say it is then its probably a decent interface to program in. I won't use it though. No matter how nice they make the editors/class browsers/project managers all these ides seem to slack on the debugger. They always have what looks like just a little arrow in the source window that follows the output of gdb, maybe a table of variables, maybe breakpoints. Nothing else. No real use of the power an integrated environment like this COULD give them. The best debugger I have ever used (on any platform) is the Data Display Debugger. I've made a few converts to unix just by showing people what this thing could do. And no I'm not affiliated with the developers of this in any way, I just like the thing. So for me it's still going to be vim/xemacs (depending on my mood) ddd and a makefile for my devel environment.