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Given that there is some very real *piracy* occurring in the seas near Somalia, perhaps this might be a good time for this note.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy

âoePiracyâ

Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as âoepiracy.â In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)

If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word âoepiracyâ to describe it. Neutral terms such as âoeunauthorized copyingâ (or âoeprohibited copyingâ for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead.

That a load of rubbish, it is perfecty legal to use GCC to link a build in gcc library with a non GPL library, because the libraries in gcc are NOT GPL!, they are LPGL!

Otherwise GCC would be significantly less useful.

Actually, the libraries in gcc that are not GPL are not LGPL either. They are GPL with the runtime library exception. That runtime library exception states something to the effect of this: if this library is linked to the end compiled product, then this library may be distributed under any license whatsoever -- in particular, the source code distribution requirements of the GPL and LGPL do not apply. The new exception does not change this in the slightest. It only makes a difference if plugins exist, which they don't yet. Please reread http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-faq.html

What they are doing here is trying to be viral, plain and simple - use FUD to scare developers that unless they force GPL plugins, somehow everyone will get tained - this is exactly as true as making it illegal to link any non-GPL library using GCC.

Viral, yes, but FUD, no. They are being pretty clear as to what they intend. They want any distributed program compilable with a gcc with any plugin, proprietary or not, to be compilable to an identical binary with a gcc with only GPL-compatible plugins. If you don't distribute, they don't give a damn. If you do, the plugin had better not be required unless it is GPL-compatible.

GCC is organized with releases (the usual GCC compiler versions), with the future release called "trunk", and branches (experimental code which may, if accepted, be later merged in into the trunk.

There are already experimental branches for plugin.

In addition, there is the MELT branch, which provides a Lisp dialect (internally tranlated into C) to code plugins with.

Plugins could do many things, which for one reason or another, don't fit easily into the trunk. In particular, "extra compilatory" activities, i.e. any processing of internal GCC representation which is not directly related to machine code generation, fits into this scheme. Think of code refactoring tools, code style checkers, whole program static analysers, specialized code generators (e.g. generation of serialization routines from data structures), etc.

Regards.

--
Basile Starynkevitch (main author of MELT branch)

No it's not Bruce. It's exactly what has been said by legal representatives of the FSF.. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Plugins

Require all plugins to link against a small (512 byte or so?) GPL'ed blob, and check for it at load time.

The wiki article mentions this legal theory. Search for "A gcc-based scripting interpreter could by default check for a mandatory license statement". But other companies have tried this in the United States, and courts have rejected the originality (and therefore the copyright) of such magic cookies. Look up Sega v. Accolade (pre-DMCA) and Lexmark v. Static Control (post-DMCA).

Umm.. no. This is exactly why RMS is so against GCC having a plugin framework. IF (and only if) you don't distribute GPL code with the plugin THEN you are free to place your plugin under any license you like.

Reminds me of this incident.

Go to the GCC Plugins Wiki & search for "Potential use cases".

I think you misunderstand what Coreboot is. Coreboot initializes the hardware that needs to be initialized and then give the control to a payload. That payload can be the Linux kernel, SeaBIOS (that implements a legacy BIOS so you can boot systems like Windows), OpenFirmware or, if somebody did the work to make it happend, an EFI implementation like GNUFI. So what you want (an EFI loader) would just be a payload, not a part of CoreBoot. I think the reason why people are giving priority to a BIOS implementation (SeaBIOS) over EFI is how much code you can get running by adding BIOS support compared to how much you can get by adding EFI.

You should look into rdiff-backup instead of rsync for your nightly backup to the offsite location. rdiff-backup keeps a set of compressed reverse-diffs in each directory that is backed up so that you can restore a file that's lost.

... when GNUIT (previously GIT) is out there ?

Smaller, faster, compiles fine on all platforms with any C compiler and it only requires curses.
And most impportantly it doesn't crashes and it doesn't corrupsts files like MC does.

"But as someone who pulled it from the net, I did not ever get any license "assigned" to me."

That is YOUR problem, not the Copyright owner's problem. No license == no rights. You assume that you have full rights if you have no valid license. This is exactly the opposite of what Copyright law says. In the absence of a valid license, you have no rights. Exploiting a copyrighted work, with no permission is a criminal offence.

"Copyright is a publisher's right, not the artist's right."

No. Copyright is the right of the copyright owner. That means the artist/creator unless he has assigned his copyright to someone else (i.e. record label or employer). It is automatic and does not get magically reassigned to the publisher when someone publishes the work. It so happens that most artists are required to give up their copyright to the record label as part of their deal with the label.

"No license, but given to anyone = Free for all."

Your arguments seem to be based upon wishful thinking and have absolutely no basis in law.

"You are mixing up downloading (what you talked about until then), and uploading (sending)."

Neither are permitted without a valid license from the copyright holder. And no, if someone sent me a file and made up a license (or didn't give me a license), that would not make it a valid license from the copyright holder.

"Sending something without a license, that you got with a license is a completely different beast, because then, as I said in my original post, you are breaking a license. (Because now there actually is something to break.)"

No. Copyright law automatically covers works of art. You do not have to be given a license for the work to be copyrighted. It is automatically copyrighted. The only way for you to have any rights at all is for the copyright owner to explicitly grant them to you in a license/contract.

The license/contract thus exists primarily to GIVE you rights to the work not to take them away (since you have none) (*).

"You forgot the little fact, that if I re-publish a work, there is a new license, which makes the uploader with the license the law-breaker, and gives the downloader his complete freedom (eg. to become another uploader)."

This is simply not a fact. A valid license can only be given by the copyright holder, unless the copyright holder explicitly have given you the rights to sub-license the work (as in the case of the GPL).

Copyright law is very explicit. Without a valid license from the copyright holder, you have no rights to download or share a copyrighted work. It is a criminal offence and you are liable for civil lawsuits. I suggest you read this and this.

The GPL exists to give you rights you would otherwise not have. The GPL acknowledges this itself in point 5 (emphasis mine):

"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"

Thus, re-distributors of GPL code are required to distribute the license note as well, so that receivers are given the same rights as the re-distributor. Otherwise the receiver has no rights.

(*) To confuse the matter, some software licenses do indeed try to take away related rights not covered by copyright, such as rights to sue if the software is defective... or take away fair use rights such as the right to 'cite' the work, benchmark it... etc..

Hi, I admin the list in question and just saw this. The list is a default installation of Mailman, and I have no idea why it would give that error. If you write to contact(at)metagovernment(dot)org, I will subscribe you manually.

Also, if you could forward that error message to the above address, I can try to debug (but again, it is a default install as provided by a standard Cpanel host).

IP Law? There is no IP Law!

Intellectual Property is a deliberately misleading term created by the media owners.
It is not recognized in the law, as trademarks, copyrights and patents are completely different under the law and have entirely different origins.

Please Read this article.

Well, your post caused a disturbing mental picture....

RMS taking over Ballmer's job at MS.

No More Flying Chairs!!11!

P.S. Though look out for the crazy greybearded man running around with a katana, frothing at the mouth and shouting:"Mobilze the HURD! Time to attack!"

Head A Splodes!

You write:

> Wikipedia articles with citations to actual peer-reviewed journal articles are rare indeed...

You know how hard it is to create links to these peer-reviewed journal articles on the internet? This is because the vast majority of these live inside the pay-to-enter walled garden of academia.

This is the reason wikipedia came into being: to address the very issue of inaccessibility.

For enlightenment, take a look at http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html.

If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?

When the Intelligence Community distributed to you software under the GNU GPL (v2), they gave you either

1. The source code;
2. A written offer to give anyone the source code (valid for at least three years); or
3. The instructions you need to get the source code [see the GPL for details].

If you want the source, you have the means. Use them, mm'kay? ;)

If the object code you got is under a non-copyleft license (such as the X11, MIT or BSD), no one is required to give you anything.

If you want to learn more, I can recommend http://www.gnu.org/philosophy, http://www.gnu.org/licenses, http://www.opensource.org/ and http://www.debian.org/social_contract among others.

Open Source doesn't mean you can point at anyone who uses it and say "give me that code". It means that they, in some cases, can point at the people who gave it to them and say "give me the code for that".

I hope I've cleared things up a bit, and keep on lovin' the open code :)

If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?

When the Intelligence Community distributed to you software under the GNU GPL (v2), they gave you either

1. The source code;
2. A written offer to give anyone the source code (valid for at least three years); or
3. The instructions you need to get the source code [see the GPL for details].

If you want the source, you have the means. Use them, mm'kay? ;)

If the object code you got is under a non-copyleft license (such as the X11, MIT or BSD), no one is required to give you anything.

If you want to learn more, I can recommend http://www.gnu.org/philosophy, http://www.gnu.org/licenses, http://www.opensource.org/ and http://www.debian.org/social_contract among others.

Open Source doesn't mean you can point at anyone who uses it and say "give me that code". It means that they, in some cases, can point at the people who gave it to them and say "give me the code for that".

I hope I've cleared things up a bit, and keep on lovin' the open code :)

What specifically are you trying to achieve? Do you know that (parts of) files you wish to recover are specifically stored in the blocks that are giving read errors? Or are you just trying to get a good copy of the whole disc? If the latter, then you might well be able to get away with using something like ddrescue which can ignore the bad sectors if they don't read correctly after a number of retries. If the former, then I imagine you'll need to look into whether the drive has an interface to the onboard controller (e.g. via RS232 like some Seagate models). As far as I can see, SpinRite is functionally equivalent to ddrescue with modern drives, but may be more useful for old RLL or MFM drives.

For too many years the GPL has been killing adoption of Qt. That's a fact. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe people should be willing to be dictated to on what license they can use for their product because they dare to use the Qt framework. Maybe that's your opinion.

Of course, now that so many people are piling on-board to use Qt thanks to the license change, I wonder how many of them have actually bothered to read the LGPL. My favourite part is section 4.

You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications,

Yeah, didn't see that did ya? Almost every boiler plate EULA includes a clause prohibiting reverse engineering and I wonder how many have not been updated to comply with the LGPL (thankfully a lot of us can just ignore these restrictions as the government in our part of the world recognizes reverse engineering as a right that cannot be contracted out of).

I'll be looking for violations.. just for shits and giggles.

What makes you think Google is somehow better than Microsoft (or IBM, or any other evil-corporate-giant-of-the-week)? Take a look at Stallman's story, "The Right to Read" and then ask yourself whose side Google is on. The reader's?

Ironically, SPSS was cloned fairly early on in the OSS wars.

http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/

I've found that making employees accountable for knowing their software is a huge benefit. Before a number of OSS shifts I've administered, nobody knew what was important. The entire workflow was undocumented. In some ways, tracking down this information is quite valuable in it's own right--and you'd never get it if you couldn't make people's jobs depend on it.

The key is to do it in responsible phases. Pick a representative set of really good people in your workflow. Make them into a "conversion team". Incentivize them to make the conversion process a success. Just doubling existing incentives works really well for sales people. They are notoriously hard to sell on OSS, but 2x-commission brings out the gambler in them. Most importantly--listen to them when they "can't do their work". If you've picked the right people, it'll be due to legitimate concerns.

Go department by department. Be tactical. Allow islands of resistance to form. If they can't be ignored, exploit existing divisions in the company to prevent them from uniting. When they're all that's left in a sea of OSS users, they're easier to deal with. Let their case be about real needs, not "everybody's doing it". Indeed, you don't even have to argue it, their arguments change on their own. It's a remarkably social phenomenon.

The legal department can be your friend. Most organizations are woefully out of compliance in licensing. If legal is made aware of this, they often just can't ignore it and will take it to the top. Ignoring it any any level can make people personally liable. The lawyers will tell them this.

Conversely, if you are in compliance, accounting is your friend. When software licenses are properly budgeted, they show up and they're ugly. It's also fairly easy to demonstrate that, once stabilized, OSS departments require less administrative labor than proprietary ones.

Most importantly, determine where there aren't OSS alternatives. In a big enough organization, you'll invariably have a few MS boxen just for interoperability or niche software. It's fine. That's what virtualization is for, and you can deal with that at your leisure. Rest assured that this is a dwindling list of software.

Be careful. Like any large IT shift, a bad roll-out can negate years of cost savings. No vendor, especially not the OSS community, should be blamed for your botched implementation.

In the end, the dream of an OSS organization is achievable. It can be worth the trouble. Rather you breathe Unix, sleep with a copy of the GPL, hate that your company is probably way out of license compliance, or just want that money in your bank instead of Redmond, there are plenty of reasons to do it.

Flash.

Dead on. Flash is a huge part of the web nowadays. Nearly all of the big video sites deliver their content using Flash. There's also Flash-based games, and when the devs have no idea what they're doing, even navigation.

Flash is the only piece of proprietary hardware on my Aspire One netbook. Without it, that thing wouldn't need x86 either. Hopefully gnash will soon become good enough to replace Flash entirely. In the meantime, better Flash than Silverlight.

I'm assuming you mention this in the context of Emacs? If you're on Windows, you can set some variables in .emacs, see here. If you're on Linux, the behaviour depends on your console and/or X11 keymap settings. In Ubuntu (for example), there's a simple GUI to select how the AltGr (compose key) should behave. See here. You should be able to keep the benefits of AltGr for inputting special characters in other apps while using it as a right Alt in Emacs.

Where is that Flash plugin for my PPC system?

Um, here?

Debian package search tells me that the Gnash Flash plugin for Mozilla is available for alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc, at least for Debian users. So it at least compiles and does something on all those platforms.

It's not the official Adobe plugin, but they claim it supports at least Flash 7 and can handle YouTube.

RMS doesn't use Debian because it's not free enough, as in it allows you to add the non-free repository.

RMS pushes a thoroughly non-free license (GFDL) with invariant parts which are uneditable, non-removable. They keep you from doing a lot of things like, say, printing a reference card or... using GFDLed snippets in GPL code!

So nyah, in comparison with Debian (not having any non-free code in Debian proper), what RMS gives you is less free (bad core documentation). He violates the Four Software Freedoms he made himself -- to be exact, freedom 0 and freedom 3.

> Besides, how can one accept the click-thru EULA prior to downloading?

Sounds a lot like UCITA, trying to legitimize contracts that you 'agree to' by breaking the shrink-wrap on a box.

I confess, the posted article does sound like the company is charging for a 'subscription to OpenOffice 3.0', rather than the downloading service I originally thought. If so, then the 'return within 14 days' might well apply.

But to take advantage of that, you would probably want to have whatever the German equivalent of a notary public come in and witness your removal, "effecting your return of the product", to provide argument if the opportunists decide to resort to the courts. ... Assuming that window hasn't already expired.

I know what your point is, but I think your example is a bit confusing. When I read your post I thought that I had to provide something physical, or extra material.

What you mean is what GNU says here.

Strictly speaking, "selling" means trading goods for money. Selling a copy of a free program is legitimate, and we encourage it.

However, when people think of "selling software", they usually imagine doing it the way most companies do it: making the software proprietary rather than free.

So unless you're going to draw distinctions carefully, the way this article does, we suggest it is better to avoid using the term "selling software" and choose some other wording instead. For example, you could say "distributing free software for a fee" - that is unambiguous.

If OO.o says in its license that other companies cannot charge for it, then other companies cannot charge for it. You can "agree" to pay for it, but they cannot enforce payment.

OpenOffice is GPL software

The GPL allows open source software to be sold for ANY price, even a billion bucks a copy

" High or low fees, and the GNU GPL

Except for one special situation, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.

The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code. Those who do this are required by the GNU GPL to provide source code on subsequent request. Without a limit on the fee for the source code, they would be able set a fee too large for anyone to pay--such as a billion dollars--and thus pretend to release source code while in truth concealing it. So in this case we have to limit the fee for source, to ensure the user's freedom. In ordinary situations, however, there is no such justification for limiting distribution fees, so we do not limit them. "

8. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. [emphasis added]

Selling a copy of the software—with an up-front price, like you said—would be one thing, but it appears that they are trying to impose a secondary license agreement (the EULA) on top of the LGPL that contractually binds the user to some payment after the fact. The license, and all other versions of the GPL and LGPL, forbid that outright. In fact, that company may now be forbidden from distributing OpenOffice.org to anyone at all, since they voided the entire license for themselves. (Not a lawyer.)

It's legal anywhere the GPL is recognized, including the US. The GPL explicitly allows you to charge a fee for distributing copies to users:

You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.

Distribution is never completely free and in some rare cases can be quite expensive, so the GPL allows you to recoup your costs without attempting to dictate a fixed price. The idea is that since anyone can be a distributor, commodity pricing will be the norm even when distribution is expensive.

The problem comes when individuals have incomplete information about the going rate for distribution, but that's a general problem of market systems. This woman could have just as easily overpaid for a car or home repairs or any number of other things.

You should visit GNU and read up a bit.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

Reference

You should visit GNU and read up a bit.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

Reference

Selling (L)GPLed software is authorized by the license (and even encouraged apparently). See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

However in your case the price was probably not apparent at the time of sale (or else you would'nt complain now I assume), and thus the sale is illegal under European law. So don't pay.

Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else?

First of all, it's the general public that doesn't understand open source that need protection--highly unlikely a 'fan' would buy OpenOffice.org or even download it from a third party.

Second, your friend is boned.

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

Unless she downloaded it without being notified upfront of the cost, she ain't going to win this one. If they even host a binary distribution from their site they can claim the bandwidth you used was worth whatever you have to pay. If they aren't also offering you the source code or haven't given it to you of that distribution, you could maybe send the EFF after them and try to escape via that route ... although I've seen lawyers work their magic & you could still end up paying.

Third, they aren't going to limit or restrict selling their software because this could turn into a scary thing for companies. I write proprietary software for my job. I use code licensed as open source. I make available the source to my customer and they pay my company quite well so that we can adopt and add to that code to specifically suite their needs. It's fairly close to 'software as a service.' Now, assuming I used some library (I can't think of anything off of OO.o that I would use) but my company's law-talkin' guys would be scared as hell if it said I couldn't charge money for it ... because maybe it's an integral part of our product?

Do your friend a favor: sit down with her and talk with her. Explain to her that not every piece of software requires you pay out your ass to use it. In the United States, I would call the Better Business Bureau and let them know about this company you speak of. I don't know a lot about your rights or organizations that will help you in Germany but I wish you the best of luck.

Bottom line: For the sake of and proliferation of open source, please don't argue for a fork of the GPL or even for stipulations on charging to be worked into it.

Totally wrong. The current BSD license is completely compatible with the GPL. The FSF has a page detailing the many licenses that are GPL compatible.

Dear state department

I'm sorry to hear about your recent trouble

There is a brand new invention on the internet which have the ability to ease the strain on your mailservers. it is called maillist managers. one is called mailman and can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman

There are several others, some free, and some non free, but they exist for most server platforms. If you don't have the expertice in house to set it up corrctly, you can get any number of consultancy companies to help you out.

Yours faithfull
Almost anonymous coward

This would only be complete if we referenced the GNU Lawyer Jokes page.

Ed, Man! Ed!

OpenDX is good. is also popular, leading to some nice packages like MayaVi2. ChomboVis is no longer under development but may also prove useful. GGobi is another very nice toolkit. For a more mathematical visualization, there's also always Octave.

``The problem with Stallman's approach is the assumption that most people want the free software ideal.''

Not at all. It's not about what people want. It's about establishing users' rights. Copyright reserves certain rights to the copyright holder of the software. It forbids you, as a user, from doing certain things without obtaining prior permission from the rights holder. Free software is software where you do get permission to do four things: run the software for any purpose, study how the software works and adapt it to your needs, redistribute the software, and improve the software and share your improvements.

Clearly, the four freedoms of Free software benefit you, as a user. How much you value these benefits is, of course, your consideration to make. If you, for whatever reason, prefer software that doesn't give you those freedoms, that is your choice. The Free Software Foundation is there to give you the other choice: to use software that gives you the four freedoms. And, in the end, that's what it's all about to me: your and my ability to choose the software we prefer, for whatever our reasons are.

Now, the thing to remember about Stallman and Free software is that this all started in an era when people were used to sharing, adapting and improving software, but with companies aggressively using intellectual property laws to restrict people's freedom, so that the companies could profit. Software was turning from something that came with computers and something that students and professors wrote as part of their research to a product and a multi-million dollar business. And the multi-million dollar businesses weren't afraid to flex their legal muscle if you did something they didn't like, or to take code that you had written, make it their own, and _then_ flex their legal muscle at you.

Users' rights weren't just second to profit, they actually got in the way of it, and so they were crushed. This is where pieces such as The Right to Read and the idea that all software on your system must be Free come from. If there is any software on your computer that you cannot study, your computer is doing things without you knowing it. If there is any software on your computer that you cannot change, you are powerless to stop this. Companies and governments alike can and do use software on your computer to monitor you and restrict your actions. Many people are ok with this. But if you are not, you can thank Stallman et al. that you have an alternative. They saw it coming and made sure there was a way out: Free software.

"Perhaps the parent's POV on what Stallman thinks of doc files might be a bit extreme to some people but he has a point."

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

I really was not kidding: Stallman does believe that you should demand free media if you are sent entangled or proprietary media.

That's not the problem at all. The problem is that he doesn't deliver what he promises. True software freedom would allow you to do anything you like with the software, and wouldn't be restricted to only people who carry on making it free.

Hang on ... you're confusing "freedom in software" with "free software". By "true software freedom", I assume you mean "end users being able to do whatever they like with software". That isn't his mission.

His mission is "free software". You say that true free software "wouldn't be restricted to only people who carry on making it free". Well there you go -- you said it yourself -- free software is, by definition restricted to the set of software which people continue to make free. Otherwise, it stops being free software.

If you want to go into the exact wording of what Stallman has always promised, look at the Four Freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Nowhere in his mission statement does he say users should be totally unrestricted in what they can do with the software.

Sigh... I'm giving up my moderations for this...

The FSF has published a fairly straight forward article describing their thoughts on whether software should be released under the GPL or a more permissive license such as the LGPL.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

The exceptions in the Qt license are all free software licenses. Some of them are already compatible with the GPL, but some are not.

This makes the Qt license less restrictive than the GPL, but more restrictive than the LGPL (all of those licenses and more would be acceptable under the LGPL).

The FSF's stated position is that a less restrictive license should be chosen when the library in question doesn't offer advantages that would sway people away from proprietary projects. But the overriding consideration is that the choice of license should try to increase the number of free software contributors.

In the case of Qt, I think it is clear that the exceptions are geared towards allowing people to choose a different free license. The reason (AFAICT) is that otherwise they might go with a different (probably proprietary) option. Thus the exception in the case of Qt is unquestionably good.

In fact, I did a quick google search and found no criticism from the FSF on this subject. Whether you agree with RMS or not, I think we can all agree that he has been very outspoken about his opinion of Qt licensing in the past. Thus, I am sure that the FSF is quite happy with the license as it is.

Hope that helps!

http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/non-gnu/rdiff-backup/

Great solution for off-site incremental backups...

Now in 2009, a year by which there are three incredible consoles on the market that easily make 80%+ of PC gaming irrelevant, we hear a call to action for more Linux games?

How is it possible for anyone to release a free game for any of the "three incredible consoles"? All three consoles verify digital signatures to reject software developed by parties without an existing business relationship with the console maker, which is incompatible with free software licenses that include something similar to the "Installation Information" requirement of GPLv3. The console makers also have some fairly strict standards for who is allowed to develop on the console. In fact, Nintendo explicitly states on warioworld.com that all authorized developers must be established businesses, preferably with a previous commercial title on another platform, with office space separate from any residence.

As a brief addendum to my earlier comment, the most powerful reason to reject proprietary software isn't technical it's ethical; it's the most prominent dividing line between the philosophies of the free software and open source movements: how we treat one another matters. Social solidarity matters. Keeping users helpless to aid their fellows and themselves is unethical, and that's what proprietary software does because nobody but the proprietor can tell you how that proprietary program really works or grant you permission to change that program. The open source movement was defined to not raise any ethical challenge to business because that movement's proponents wish to speak to businesses, including those which make and distribute proprietary software. They want to end the conversation at software development methodology and convenience. So when faced with powerful reliable proprietary software, open source proponents will ultimately accept the software and lose their software freedom while a free software activist will reject the program and work toward making a free replacement for that program so nobody is tempted in the future: (from the aforelinked essay)

The main initial motivation for the term "open source software" is that the ethical ideas of "free software" make some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these things.

However, that is what the leaders of "open source" decided to do. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to "sell" the software more effectively to certain users, especially business.

This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use, and even develop, free software, which has extended our community--but only at the superficial, practical level. The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it. That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, some even offering copies gratis. Why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, to value freedom as such rather than the technical and practical convenience of specific free software. To spread this idea, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the "keep quiet" approach to business can be useful for the community, but it is dangerous if it becomes so common that the love of freedom comes to seem like an eccentricity.

That dangerous situation is exactly what we have. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be "more acceptable to business." Software distributors especially show this pattern. Nearly all GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.

Proprietary add-on software and partially non-free GNU/Linux distributions find fertile ground because most of our community does not insist on freedom with its software. This is no coincidence. Most GNU/Linux users were introduced to the system by "

It's so fugly it should be classified malware! Also,

"Why GNU/Linux Viruses are fairly uncommon" from Charlie Harvey
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/evilmalware.html

I really want them to implement this business model, because it would be a great push for greater GNU/Linux adoption.

I am among many open-source supporters who think Richard Stallman is generally too far out on the fringe, but I think the opinions illustrated in his sci-fi story "The Right to Read" are a pretty dead-on assessment of what is going on here. Basically this is what happens when software vendors are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that software is not a tangible good and can't really be sold or rented out for a unit price, no matter how profitable it may be, and they redouble their efforts to force that business model into existence, to hell with the consumers.

If you use Microsoft Office, do yourself a favor and switch to OpenOffice as soon as possible. The sooner you do it, the fewer of your files you'll need to convert/jailbreak some day. (Plus you might help to stave off some big dystopian-future scenario, which is nice.)

Yes, that program would be free but see "Free But Shackled - The Java Trap" for more on why this situation is not desirable.