Slashdot Mirror

GCC has supported many C++0x features for quite some time now.
My personal favorites are the auto keyword, particularly when used with iterators, enum classes & lambda functions.
Oh, and #include :
uint32_t, int64_t,
Many other features like regular expressions are neat but have been available with the Boost libraries for a long time anyway.

GCC has it mostly implemented (the new concurrency features remain MIA along with a few other bits) already, including the variadic templates the GP mentions.

http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html

This.

Richard Stallman's famous parable about the Right to Read, and what will happen if intellectual monopoly laws continue to grow:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

TPM enables treacherous computing. No thanks.

Once again, Richard Stallman, zany as he is, predicted all of this fourteen years ago. The Right to Read may be one of the most spot-on predictions of future technology I have ever read.

In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

Fuck stallman and his depressing tendency to be right when he's cynical.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

• Well, this one would make a good starting point, but it's only a start because it's incomplete. As usual.
• Another incomplete implementation but again it gives you a starting point.

Looks like those two are very good starting points, though, unless you've a Cray handy.

As Richard Stallman put it in The Right to Read:

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

Yes, it's a piece of dystopian writing, but what makes that so scary is how plausible it all is.

What makes you think they don't have backgrounds in this? They might be trying to push something more sinister through, like requiring all programmers to register with a government authority. Something like what is described here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Fucking faggot. Real men use Ed.

Obligatory joke for fagots who have not read it yet

Wouldn't that be Edwina (or whatever the female counterpart to the name Ed is?)

Fucking faggot. Real men use Ed.

Obligatory joke for fagots who have not read it yet

Here's the summary from the claims:

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

An embodiment of the present invention provides a method and system for ordering an item from a client system. The client system is provided with an identifier that identifies a customer. The client system displays information that identifies the item and displays an indication of an action (e.g., a single action such as clicking a mouse button) that a purchaser is to perform to order the identified item. In response to the indicated action being performed, the client system sends to a server system the provided identifier and a request to order the identified item. The server system uses the identifier to identify additional information needed to generate an order for the item and then generates the order.

The server system receives and stores the additional information for customers using various computer systems so that the server system can generate such orders. The server system stores the received additional information in association with an identifier of the customer and provides the identifier to the client system. When requested by the client system, the server system provides information describing the item to the requesting client system. When the server system receives a request from a client system, the server system combines the additional information stored in association with the identifier included in the request to effect the ordering of the item.

Here's a list of the claims. Tell me which ones are particular.

I know you're a fucking idiot... but are you Republican stupid? Can you ignore facts? Let's see.

intellectual property

What?

"Intellectual" refers to works of authorship or inventions; "property" means exclusive rights. Or are you referring to the "Seductive Mirage" article?

RMS has always been a socialist. The model of free copying, with authors funded via taxation, is in the GNU Manifesto.

According to this guy every technology used for the last 20 years violates our freedoms.

Every technology invented in the last 20 years (and more) has been used to violate our freedoms, so he was correct.

Do you really think the average consumers knows (or indeed cares) about the types of freedoms RMS talks about?

Not until it bites them in the ass.

For example, 'the ability to look at source code' .. you would have to explain what 'source code' is to a normal person firstly, let alone explain why having the code seemingly written in some foreign language would be in the least bit useful.

The Average Joe articulates this desire in the form of "I wish Quickbooks could do XYZ" or "I wish that legacy app could run on this new OS" or something like that. They want to be able to do the things open source allows but they don't say "I wish this program was under a GPL license"

I understand the point he is trying to make and it is an important one, but to put it lightly .. lighten up.

RMS' writings always seem extreme and hyper-dystopian at first. 10-20 years later, they always seem highly prophetic.

Right to Read

This is highly relevant to your proposed system, yes?

http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/trunk/annotate/head:/lisp/strokes.el

I once made a fun video demo with GNU Emacs and Strokes-Mode on an HP TouchSmart Tablet PC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw8SQqmHPbI

The source code for the gestures I made are here, along with a few tweaks to make strokes-mode behave better with a touchscreen. https://github.com/dto/emacs-gestures

Keep in mind, I used Strokes-mode to create the gestures shown in the video---no gestures are included, you can create them yourself by just drawing them into strokes-mode. My point in setting up this repository would be so that GNU Emacs users could build a library of gestures amongst ourselves, and share code to adapt GNU Emacs better to touchscreen/pen environments. Which sounds like it could fall afoul of some patent or other. Right?

Interestingly, Apple publishes here an older version of Strokes-mode: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-39/emacs/lisp/strokes.el

Even more interestingly, Apple's version says "This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version."

Well, "any later version" could be GPLv3, which contains this passage:

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it."

(pasted from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html )

Anyone think this could be relevant? --dave

http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/trunk/annotate/head:/lisp/strokes.el

I once made a fun video demo with GNU Emacs and Strokes-Mode on an HP TouchSmart Tablet PC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw8SQqmHPbI

The source code for the gestures I made are here, along with a few tweaks to make strokes-mode behave better with a touchscreen. https://github.com/dto/emacs-gestures

Keep in mind, I used Strokes-mode to create the gestures shown in the video---no gestures are included, you can create them yourself by just drawing them into strokes-mode. My point in setting up this repository would be so that GNU Emacs users could build a library of gestures amongst ourselves, and share code to adapt GNU Emacs better to touchscreen/pen environments. Which sounds like it could fall afoul of some patent or other. Right?

Interestingly, Apple publishes here an older version of Strokes-mode: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-39/emacs/lisp/strokes.el

Even more interestingly, Apple's version says "This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version."

Well, "any later version" could be GPLv3, which contains this passage:

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it."

(pasted from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html )

Anyone think this could be relevant? --dave

Well...
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLHardware

You can say what you want about him, but he does have an annoying tendency to be right. This is exactly the same as his right to read article/story: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in collegeâ"when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help herâ"but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrongâ"something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPAâ"the Software Protection Authorityâ"would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishmentâ"for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Why must stalman be right so much the cynical old sod?

No one should be surprised by this, it was predicted quite a while back:

"Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkable—he lent her the computer, and **told her his password**. This way, if Lissa read his books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was still a **crime**, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it. They would only find out if Lissa reported him."

The Right to Read
Richard Stallman
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Now that the precedent is set, its a matter of the government slowly upping the punishments until no one shares any kind of information without first paying for it.

I never thought I'd feel the need to link to this.... today Netflix, tomorrow everything?

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

True, copyright needs a major overhaul---it's outlived its usefulness in its current form. Arguably, patent law is even worse—certainly in the matter of patenting software.

Trademark has its problems, too, but just think about about a marketplace where trademark didn't exist. What's that widget you're buying? Oh, it's from Foo, Inc., and they make good stuff. But how do you know it isn't from Bar Corp., which pushes trash that masks itself as Fooware? You'd need a chain of custody similar to what you see on precision instruments: ``Calibration traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology''. Except you couldn't be sure the attestation was kosher. You'd have to do a careful analysis of every object you bought more complex than, say, a spoon, to be sure you got what you paid for.

That's the scenario trademark law is written to avoid. What we have here is a baby/bathwater situation caused by blind use of the term ``IP''.

Stallman expects the rest of us to live some live of software purity

I am not so sure about that one:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware

in particular,

We don't insist that users of GNU, or contributors to GNU, have to live by this rule. It is a rule we made for ourselves. But we hope you will follow it too, for your freedom's sake.

Yes, he hopes that other people will follow in his organization's footsteps, but it is not something he insists on. Elsewhere on the GNU and FSF websites, I have seen remarks that indicate an understanding that some people may not have a choice in using proprietary software. Yes, RMS campaigns for a further expansion of free software use, and tries to make people aware of what they are forfeiting when they agree to proprietary software licenses, but that does not mean that he insists that everyone agree with him or that he has no concept that people may be forced to use proprietary software.

You set your locale/language, and the locales/languages you want to support, then as you are coding you can enter a string followed by an 'I'

Sounds like gettext so far. But:

the plugin for translations allows different services to be used.

At this point, I've never seen a translator that produces results substantially better than Engrish.

Having written quite a few assundry Free Software projects myself, I actually came up with my own list through trial-and-error. It goes like this:

Basicaly, there are three levels of needs:

1. I want the entire program to keep my license when modified
2. I want my facility to keep my license when modified and distributed, but I don't want to restrict programs that use my facility to any particular license
3. I don't want any restrictions on the license that modified copies of my code have to use

For 1: use the full on GPL. For 2: use the GPL with linking and inclusion exceptions. Expat's license is an example, but many many libraries do this. Typically, this is just GPL with something like the following tacked on:

As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public License. However the source code for this file must still be made available in accordance with section (3) of the GNU General Public License

For 3: use Public Domain (preferably via CC0).

These are all the licenses a person really ever needs to use for software.

This isn't just a general list of licenses. They already have that here (where in fact several different flavors of BSD are mentioned). This is their reccomended list of licenses to use for any given goal, and thus will only list one license for each need.

They don't mention BSD for a fairly simple reason: BSD licenses weren't designed to interact well with GPL licenses, and thus tend not to. If you are liable to end up needing software with different licenses to interact, and some of it is using a FSF license (as is likely if you are going to the FSF for advice in the first place), then using a BSDish license is liable to complicate things.

They have another page which gets into details of compatibily of various licenses.

If you aren't at all interested in using any FSF licenses (I gather in your case for idealogical reasons), then you are the one being "rediculous" for going to a FSF page discussing licenses in the first place. Go to your BSD-ish reccomended licenses page (wherever that is), and leave the rest of us alone, please. We are trying to get stuff done here.

The FSF points out that the use of the (original) BSD license is not advisable because of the existence of two version of it: the original with the advertising clause, and the modified without it. Because the modified version is equivalent to the MIT (or X11) license, you should use the MIT license instead to avoid confusion.

Where the heel did you find that quote. Certainly not in the linked recommendation.

He probably found it here.

No he isn't. It's on GNU License List about Creative Commons license, like the topic says.

I wonder if this rise in internet vigilante-ism is going to birth a corporate funded internet version of the Pinkertons. I.E. a group of black hat hackers paid by big corporations to hunt down and ruin groups like Anonymous through less than legal means.

I wouldn't put it past the entrenched powers to use whatever means necessary to get this done (ie, either digital brown-shirts, or burning down the commons through excessive and unconstitutional legislation that's been "purchased"). I'm guessing it'll be a combination of both, but in the short term, expect more of the "internet death sentence" type of reaction.

I do posit this is going to get much worse. Every day, it feels like the seemingly paranoid rants by RMS seem more like the prophetic prognostications of a Cassandra who's seen the future hoping to help us avoid it.

I guess they must have high traffic on their site right now too: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/

These two projects are so tightly coupled...

As to the cost, try octave - mostly matlab-ish, but GPL.

Xerox can [trademark] a shortening of the term Xerography ("dry printing").

But where did the second X come from? That's a big part of what makes it a coined term.

Apple has been using the term and suffix .app since it bought NeXT.

As have distributors of warez, in the "appz" section. Compare the refrain of "The Warez Song" by Test of Time, released on MP3.com in either 1999 or 2000: "One more game, one more app, one more serial, one more crack, warez are the only thing for me."

So if Windows can bar Lindows

Microsoft settled with Lindows because Lindows had too much of a chance to win the lawsuit and prove "windows" generic or descriptive at most. Small-w windows had been part of operating systems since the X Window System if not Mac OS before it.

Go ask Yahoo if Yahoo is copyrighted.

No, it's trademarked. The term was invented by Jonathan Swift to refer to a fictional human society lacking in effective hygiene, found on the island of the Houyhnhnms in the 1726 satiric novel Travels into Several Remote Nations. Like Apple and Amazon, the Yahoo! mark is arbitrary, which one step below an original coinage. But "app" was used generically for computer programs long before iOS 2, and the dispute here is whether "app store" has acquired a strong enough secondary meaning associated with Apple Inc. A jury will probably have to decide that.

http://www.libreoffice.org/features/calc/
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
http://www.scilab.org/
http://www.scicoslab.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language

Fuck desktop calculators. Fuck nostalgia from 70s engineers and programmers who think RPN is the shite because it works like a computer stack. Repeating anything if you get even the slightest thing wrong, or heck, even checking it is a time consuming nightmare on any desktop calculator. Spreadsheets and programmable math environments have FAR superceded dinky desktop calculators.

Another thing is that there are layers of abstraction over the raw terminal emulator interface, like readline or curses. The first tries to make editing a command a smaller pain, the other one's role is essentially to turn the terminal emulator running on top of a grid of character cells... back into a grid of character cells.

You have very good ideas... They've been around for a LONG time. Great minds think alike. Ncurses let's you do all of what you're talking about, but you have to write some code to achieve the effects -- the terminal(emulator) just displays text/color/styles, it's up to the application (in this case the command shell, BASH?) to provide the features you're looking for....

With ncurses you can create movable, overlapping windows with "drop shadows" (darken background of bottom & right bordering text), independent scrolling areas, progress bars, animations, simple-music/sound effects, Space Invaders, Brickout, Tetris, etc. all able to interface with the keyboard & mouse (if the terminal supports it: see terminfo). In fact, text based GUIs, and even ANSI art were the norm just prior to the Internet/HTML explosion... For my late 80's / early 90's era BBS I coded up just such a windowed interface (sans mouse input) for "high speed" 14.4Kbps users -- It had features today's Web2.0 sites are just now catching up to (I still have CP437 committed to memory as a result).

Don't worry, you're not the only one who wanted to re-design the system... I wrote half of a terminfo parser (to detect which escapes to use for the features the terminal supports) to achieve similar ideas myself before I discovered ncurses -- Hey, I didn't know any better; I was a newly converted *nix user / MS DOS hold out & reluctant Win user at the time... Now, I've learned that the biggest part of being a "unix geek" is communicating with & hanging out with other "geeks" (esp. online) -- Sometimes the geek network is much better than any other search engine (New-fangled "social networks" have just recently begun to capitalize on these effects).

Well, the idea is to take our 80x25 grid of characters and provide a completely raw, low-level API to it. API like, "put glyph 0x41 in position 0,0". curses can do that, but it's two unnecessary layers of abstraction, so better just take an X terminal emulator, rip out all the terminal emulation code, and provide THAT api over it. Now, the second step is to let a library manage this area - if you want to emulate a VT100, just put a VT100 widget in there. If you want to run a curses-based program, it would make sense to port ncurses to use this backend. But the most interesting thing (IMHO) is the new (old) text user interface that I've conceived.

Well... Get to Coding! (just kidding, you actually don't have to). However, if you did start out on such a project (as I did) you would realize why there are so many messed up layers -- it's for backwards / forwards / cross-terminal compatibility. I was a die-hard DOS coder, I feel your pain -- My DOS text GUI applications had access to the text memory buffer: Every other byte was a FG/BGcolor&blink byte, with character bytes interleaved (ASCII +cp437), and it was simple. A breeze to work with, but it wasn't very cross platform.

Perhaps you would like to check out GNU Screen? (Since it does just about everything you mentioned).

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple charact

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
how sad is it?

Seriously.... and the worse thing is that if this is tried often enough, eventually some imbecile will hammer it on, making it a precedent
From Right to Read by Richard M. Stallman
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow
another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for
many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school
that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each
book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch
reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as
computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment—for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a
middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He
understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (Ten percent of those fees went to the researchers who
wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in
enough to repay this loan.)

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Your joke has a point. Any Free application that isn't digitally signed with Authenticode will get flagged by IE's "SmartScreen application reputation" filter. And as I understand it, existing Authenticode CAs sell certificates only to businesses, not to individuals.

Sanctioning this and allowing it to exist on their servers is pretty extreme:

http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html

I have to agree. Where's my Gnu Call software to replace Skype now that there's a massive impetus to move away from MS-owned Skype? We already have all the components in place and it's a "high priority" thing for the FSF apparently but yet - nothing. SIPWitch has been around since 2008 in 0.0000000.0.000.001 releases and there's no sight of how it will replace a Windows binary, how it will become as ubiquitous as they want it to, how well it actually works when scaled up, there's no push to use it or test it or hack on it etc.

I've always considered the FSF "the petition kid". They like to stand up and shout whenever they see an injustice but, overall, they don't get much done towards showing a better way. Most GNU projects, with the exception of a handful of "huge" projects like gcc, are on the backburners most of the time - hell, the one that pretty much started it all (HURD) "is still some way from being ready for daily use". I always worry when a project I need is on http://savannah.gnu.org/ because my experience is that most things on there tend to die quicker than they would elsewhere.

Want to impress me, FSF? Stop faffing about moaning about idiots who voluntarily sign away their lives without checking, and concentrate on a couple of your main core and high-priority projects that are sadly neglected (or even in some cases non-existent).

Are we also supposed to write WebGL games with notepad?

No.

I'm going to start tracking GNU Free Call. Open AND decentralized. The world needs something like this.

In summary, the only way to avoid being required to give source to any third party under GPL2 is by distributing source with the binaries, or by compiling from unmodified source available elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem entirely clear what "any third party" means in this context. It could mean "anyone who has received a binary directly or indirectly" or "anyone in the entire world."

According to this FAQ, "If you choose to provide source through a written offer, then anybody who requests the source from you is entitled to receive it." This seems to support the "anyone in the entire world" definition.

However, this FAQ says: "And (outside of one special case), even if someone does decide to redistribute the program sometimes, the GPL doesn't say he has to distribute a copy to you in particular, or any other person in particular." This seems to support the "anyone who has received a binary directly or indirectly" definition. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a description of that one special case.

In summary, the only way to avoid being required to give source to any third party under GPL2 is by distributing source with the binaries, or by compiling from unmodified source available elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem entirely clear what "any third party" means in this context. It could mean "anyone who has received a binary directly or indirectly" or "anyone in the entire world."

According to this FAQ, "If you choose to provide source through a written offer, then anybody who requests the source from you is entitled to receive it." This seems to support the "anyone in the entire world" definition.

However, this FAQ says: "And (outside of one special case), even if someone does decide to redistribute the program sometimes, the GPL doesn't say he has to distribute a copy to you in particular, or any other person in particular." This seems to support the "anyone who has received a binary directly or indirectly" definition. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a description of that one special case.

SIP is a technology, not a service. You need a service provider to connect between landline/cell phones and a SIP client. This is basically what Skype has done, and much more in the way of integration and unification. Then there are practical problems with firewalls, for example. Also, Skype has a single namespace of users, whereas SIP is more like user@server, but this is not really a problem as people can generally remember/bookmark email addresses as well.

There is a GNU project that might provide a good replacement in many ways.

On a side note, my mobile operator has provided a SIP service for many years. It has a landline number to integrate with the phone network (just like skypein/skypeout), with cheaper than normal phone rates, and works with standard SIP clients. Perhaps this is the direction SIP could take more generally, instead of trying to unify everything with one network/provider. Then after a critical mass of users has SIP accounts, they can start calling each other for free.

I'm waiting for GNU Free Call.

In fact, it's always been perfectly acceptable to run proprietary programs on GNU/Linux systems, linked with GlibC, which is under the LGPL and communicating with Linux, which is under the GPL.

That's because the kernel has an explicit copyright notice stating that calls from userspace code via public APIs is not constituted as forming derived work.

Whether it is "perfectly acceptable" or not in general is hard to tell, because GPL is murky on this point. It boils down to the definition of "derived work" in copyright, and that is also non-trivial. Heck, it is still an open question if linking to a shared library (within a single process) produces a derived work, for example - even RMS himself admitted that it may not in some circumstances, despite him claiming otherwise for some time.

Userspace programs running on Linux (or any other kernel) are not derived works of the kernel. This is not because of anything Linus says, but is based on US copyright case precedents such as Baystate Technologies, Inc. v. Bentley Systems, Inc. Linus put a note at the top of Linux's COPYING file above the GPL just to clarify things, though it wasn't legally required. As another example, GPL programs like the GIMP can be distributed for Windows without having license compatibility problems, just as proprietary programs can be distributed for Linux.

GlibC is under the LGPL, which is specifically designed to allow linked programs to be under any license, even if it is incompatible wit the LPGL. There is little controversy that a program which dynamically loads an LGPL library is not a derivative work of the library and can therefore be distributed under any license. It is even possible to statically link the incompatibly-licensed program with an LGPL library if done correctly.

So, to sum it up, I'll again say that it has never been hard to tell that it's perfectly acceptable to distribute proprietary userspace programs that run on GNU/Linux systems, linking with GlibC and using Linux system calls. There has been plenty of FUD from the likes of Microsoft implying that any software running on GNU/Linux becomes "infected" with the "GPL virus," but let's not give it any credence.