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Here http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-21.3-bin-i386.tar.gz (Sorry, windows binary, but that was the only binary I could find) is a link to emacs. Where does anyone(Other then the gpl itself) grant me the right to run software?

The people running gnu.org granted you the right to run the software, by legally making it available to you.

The way the GPL comes in is how they became legally able to make it available. Granted, in this case it's because they happen to be the copyright holders, but they could have otherwise gained the right to make it available to you by themselves agreeing to the GPL.

If the fact that the file is online online and can be downloaded is enough to grant me access to run it...

...and the people offering it were authorized to do so...

...can it not then be argued, that I also have the right to run and use the ati drivers(https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/firegl/firegl_8_502_xp32_driver_only_065657.exe) without accepting the eula?

Yes, I think so. Whether my opinion is the legally-valid one is up for debate; case law has varied on that question.

This is 2 different files, and I can't see any difference other then the license. And if I reject the license, I should have the same right to use/not use both files.

I agree completely: you should have the right to use both.

By the way, here's an example for you: What gave you the right to download and read this post I've written here? It's copyrighted just like Emacs and the ATI drivers you mentioned are. I didn't give you an explicit license to download or read it. So what's to stop me from suing you for copyright infringement (and winning), other than common sense (which, as I'm sure you know, isn't valid in a court of law)?

Umm... GNU IceCat or Debian IceWeasel? Maybe Swiftfox or just compile a rebrand.

Not that I don't think this is stupid. But there are ways around this.

That was nice of him to do, but how and where exactly did he do that?

Example: Here http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-21.3-bin-i386.tar.gz (Sorry, windows binary, but that was the only binary I could find) is a link to emacs. Where does anyone(Other then the gpl itself) grant me the right to run software?

If the fact that the file is online online and can be downloaded is enough to grant me access to run it,
can it not then be argued, that I also have the right to run and use the ati drivers(https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/firegl/firegl_8_502_xp32_driver_only_065657.exe) without accepting the eula?

This is 2 different files, and I can't see any difference other then the license. And if I reject the license, I should have the same right to use/not use both files.

You are correct. A EULA is a EULA. If they want a tool to explain the license, then they should probably opt for a preamble.

A very popular example would be the preamble to gpl2.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

Sigh. If people are dumb enough to fall for Sarah Palin, the lipstick on McCain's pig, how can we hope to educate them about how this scheme would usher in the dystopia RMS warned us about in "Right to Read"?

Any book with the term "Intellectual Property" in it suspect. Copyright, trademark and patent law can make sense on their own, but all of them are about monopoly grants not real property. Something that treats GPL'd code like a "cloaked" Darth Vader should be rejected as industry propaganda without further thought.

If you want to learn about licenses and software issues, the Free Software Foundation has an excellent and free library for you online.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ sheesh! how many times to we need to link to these!

..and wrongly so, because GPL doesn't cover use, just distribution.

Well, in certain cases (see GPL 2 section 2c) displaying information about copyrights and licensing to end users is required by the GPL 2.

However there is no requirement to make an end user "agree" to the licence. Anyone who displays the information in that way is probably just copying what they are used to seeing from the proprietary world.

If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode: Copyright (C) This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto

Not only that, but as you state, no Windows user would think twice about clicking through a EULA. As a long time Ubuntu user, I myself never realized until today that there are no EULAs present.

Maybe it's a good moment to point people to Richard Stallman's story the right to read and scream "this guy warned you, did you listen?"

Mind you, the majority of the lemmings will ignore this and cheerfully follow the leader into the ocean.

Their commercial software pipelines frames into their wrapper ; they are separate processes, not linked, and thus their use does not violate GPL

Well, if they don't distribute, then the GPL indeed doesn't apply. But if it they do, then an argument could definitely be made that the GPL would apply if the GPL code were an essential part of the software as a whole (ie. it couldn't be replaced), and they were distributing both sets of code together as a single software suite. The GPL license doesn't say anything about code running in a different process being automatically excluded from the licensing requirements, it only talks about "derivative work", without specifying exactly what that means. The same argument exists over the question of closed source kernel modules - many prominent kernel developers believe that they're illegal. The GPL FAQ says:

"I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. Can I do this by putting a 'wrapper' module, under a GPL-compatible lax permissive license (such as the X11 license) in between the GPL-covered part and the proprietary part?

No. The X11 license is compatible with the GPL, so you can add a module to the GPL-covered program and put it under the X11 license. But if you were to incorporate them both in a larger program, that whole would include the GPL-covered part, so it would have to be licensed as a whole under the GNU GPL.

The fact that proprietary module A communicates with GPL-covered module C only through X11-licensed module B is legally irrelevant; what matters is the fact that module C is included in the whole."

This is done by having an extremely simple open-source wrapper which is statically linked to x264; the raw frames to be encoded are passed to it over a pipe by the main program. This completely bypasses the limitations of the GPL without violating the spirit of it, since anyone who wants to can still read the source code of the wrapper, modify it, and recompile it as necessary and still use it with the main application.

Moreso, that is exactly how proprietary software is supposed to interact with GPL software. See Mere Aggregation, especially the last paragraph:

By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.

Gnash your teeth. Gnash doesn't work for web sites that test for and require the absolute latest Flash release, but it seems to work well enough for YouTube. It's what I'm using at home with Firefox on Ubuntu Hardy.

I have been an Apple customer from time to time and they annoy the absolute crap out of me. They deny problems, use proprietary software

Don't blame Apple for using proprietary software; Windows is just as proprietary as Mac OS X. The only way I can see to get away completely from proprietary software is to use coreboot + gNewSense.

Perhaps I should have been more specific - I was referring to (for example) the lock-in of ipod+itunes+quicktime, which can only be circumvented using a hack (e.g. Winamp 5 does a reasonable job of this).

In comparison, there are Windows-based hardware/software music combinations which allow you to use whatever you want as your music software and don't require you to install bundled media player software.

I have been an Apple customer from time to time and they annoy the absolute crap out of me. They deny problems, use proprietary software

Don't blame Apple for using proprietary software; Windows is just as proprietary as Mac OS X. The only way I can see to get away completely from proprietary software is to use coreboot + gNewSense.

And if the original compiler was gcc, and trojaned in the way the paper describes, then the triple compilation wouldn't catch it. Why? Step 1: the existing compiler builds binary 1 and inserts the backdoor. Step 2: Binary 1 builds binary 2 and inserts the backdoor. Step 3: Binary 2 builds binary 3 and inserts the backdoor. Step 4: binary 2 and binary 3 are compared, and if they are different, then there is an error. However, since all versions have the backdoor, there is no difference, and no error will be flagged. Try reading the linked article again.

The triple compilation is not for detecting trojans, but "because the compiler will be tested more completely and could also have better performance."

That's really odd. I found this old archived gcc post, saying it shouldn't be a problem anymore with egcs. So yeah, the post is from 1998. I'm guessing that all of those weird differences have been smoothed out by now.

Yes, but GSM is a different standard. ISO 216 doesn't say anything about that. As far as ISO 216 is concerned, I could make a sheet that's 210mm × 297mm x 3000mm, in effect a _pillar_ with an A4 cross-section, and it would still count as ISO/DIN A4.

As for C99, exactly who implemented a C99 compiler faithfully or at all?

- GCC's own Status of C99 features in GCC page lists a _lot_ of C99 features as missing or broken.

- Visual C++ at least as of 2005 did _not_ support C99. Some 6 years after the standard had been passed. A quick search on MSDN leads me to believe that VS 2008 doesn't either.

- Borland AFAIK never did.

- a quick googling on Sun's site leads me to believe that their implementation is also not quite complete and compliant

- a quick googling on IBM's site, produced "Not all run-time functions and facilities required by the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 International Standard are supported on all the operating system levels that can run this version of the compiler." in the relevant section of IBM C for AIX v6.0. I wouldn't know if newer versions even exist, or how that was updated.

Sorry, if I don't have the time for the full research that this deserves. But so far it looks like, basically, if I could be arsed to, I could probably write some standard-compliant C99 code which doesn't even compile on _any_ major C compiler. Does that sound like the OOXML situation yet? :P

Follow the link to the Gnu main page. There is a picture of him and the Gnu logo.

Intel and AMD both do a fair amount of contributing to GCC and go to some lengths to be sure it optimizes for their processors well. In the past, VIA/Centaur haven't been too participative in GCC or forthcoming with relevant information; among the results is, as the gcc documentation says,

c3-2: Via C3-2 CPU with MMX and SSE instruction set support. (No scheduling is implemented for this chip.)

Will detailed specifications dealing with the Isaiah/Nano pipeline etc be released? How will VIA/Centaur be working with GCC developers in the future?

But it is not free (as in libre) software. The APSL is a non-free license, albeit it does meet the OSI definition and hence is Open Source, but not Free Software.

Really? Even RMS seems to disagree.

"The Apple Public Source License (APSL) version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license."

Stallman is the man behind the GNU operating system, the operating system typically used with the Linux kernel in Linux distributions. He makes a claim on Linux because it is, in part, his operating system.

"Firstly Linux is not 25 years old, but it is 25 years since the inception of the GNU project (NOT 25 years since we had a Free operating system)."

I'm not the one who said "the GNU OS is 25 years old". I'm the one who criticized that mischaracterization. You're welcome.

"the GNU project is still going strong"

Who said otherwise? Sounds like you have some insecurities to work out.

"have a read at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html where the issue is presented rationally and without any whining."

So in hunting down unbiased sources, I should (1) take the word of someone who calls one side of the debate a "toe-rag", and (2) go to a website owned/operated by the other side of the debate?

I've read the GNU take on the issue, and it hasn't convinced me why GNU should claim credit for a non-GNU project.

Firstly Linux is not 25 years old, but it is 25 years since the inception of the GNU project (NOT 25 years since we had a Free operating system).
No matter what some jumped up little apolitical toe-rag wants to call his kernel the GNU project is still going strong.

Oh, and if you don't understand why the system should be called GNU/Linux then have a read at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html where the issue is presented rationally and without any whining.

If you don't value your freedom then you stand to lose it.

The striking resemblance between Stephen Fry and the Gnu logo. On the Gnu main page they have pictured him from an angle that maximises this resemblance.

When I read "The GNU operating system" I thought it meant Hurd. In fact Hurd is only 24 years old, and is evidently still not ready for production use. When will this baby grow up!

The BSD license has a advertising clause which is fully incompatible with the GPL. There is also a "simplified BSD" license approved by the OSI that is used by projects like FreeBSD which works similar to MIT licensing.

Right, I was thinking of the latter, the 3-clause version without the advert clause. BSD with that clause is incompatible with the GPL.

Additionally because both licenses require that their BSD-centric copyright notice be reproduced with every copy, this adds additional restrictions

No, the BSD has no "extra" restrictions, thats what makes it "more permissive" than the GPL. See GNU's license list, where the 3 clause BSD is listed as the "modified BSD".

preventing the code from mixing with GPL

As long as you abide by the BSD license (which isn't hard since it *is* so permissive), you can always include it (including a copy of the BSD license itself + plus the author's copyright notice) into a GPL'd project and use a statement like "portions of this code are copyright ...".

The reason it doesn't work the other way is because the GPL's additional restrictions are incompatible with BSD license since the latter says nothing about derivatives/modifications of the software. This is why GNU lists this license as "compatible" in their list above, it can be used with GPL'd code without either license being violated.

>So, Free by way of the (L)GPL isn't exactly free.

But the GPL isn't the Free Software Definition, the GPL is just one of many Free Software licenses! And i can't find anything in the Free Software definition which doesn't fit any rational definition of the word.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
do you have read all of these stuff, guys?

I want the code I write to remain free, but the code other people write around it, they can do whatever they want with.

Perhaps you should license your code under the GPL with the "Classpath" exception: a specific exception that linking your code with other code does not require releasing the source code for the combined work. Thus, your code cannot be modified and distributed without sharing the modifications, but people are free to incorporate your code into proprietary systems without releasing the proprietary source code.

http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

steveha

... and now tremendous projects like Emacs have to move ahead without him.Fixed that for you... Still, kudos for RMS, he made much for free software.

But what about those of us who don't have the disk space for a 5.89824e37 byte executable?

I suppose it would possible to dissect license agreements into numerous 'attributes' (e.g. freedom to copy, freedom to modify, freedom to use for any purpose, etc.) which can be compared and where two licenses do not have any conflicting attributes, they could be considered compatible.

The FSF already discuss computability with GPL and licenses that are compatible and incompatible with the GNU GPL so they must have done this already.

I suppose it would possible to dissect license agreements into numerous 'attributes' (e.g. freedom to copy, freedom to modify, freedom to use for any purpose, etc.) which can be compared and where two licenses do not have any conflicting attributes, they could be considered compatible.

The FSF already discuss computability with GPL and licenses that are compatible and incompatible with the GNU GPL so they must have done this already.

I suppose it would possible to dissect license agreements into numerous 'attributes' (e.g. freedom to copy, freedom to modify, freedom to use for any purpose, etc.) which can be compared and where two licenses do not have any conflicting attributes, they could be considered compatible.

The FSF already discuss computability with GPL and licenses that are compatible and incompatible with the GNU GPL so they must have done this already.

Hmmm....I didn't quite get the distinction across that I meant to. Distributing copies to other people does not affect your copies of the software. When you distribute to other people, those copies are someone else's copies of the software.

This is what copyright law regulates, the creation and distribution of copies. If the copies of the software remain yours, you can do whatever you want to them.

It is when you try to do something normally prohibited by copyright - create new copies and distribute them to someone else - that the GPL starts to apply. Clause 9 of the GPL3 (clause 5 of the GPL2) explains this quite well.

(Although, looking at it those clauses now, it does appear to prevent you from modifying private copies. This is odd, as copyright does not prevent you from modifying personal copies of other copyrighted works - you are allowed to tear pages out of a book, or deface artwork that you own. Odd. I'd never noticed that before.)

Is that clearer?

Hmmm....I didn't quite get the distinction across that I meant to. Distributing copies to other people does not affect your copies of the software. When you distribute to other people, those copies are someone else's copies of the software.

This is what copyright law regulates, the creation and distribution of copies. If the copies of the software remain yours, you can do whatever you want to them.

It is when you try to do something normally prohibited by copyright - create new copies and distribute them to someone else - that the GPL starts to apply. Clause 9 of the GPL3 (clause 5 of the GPL2) explains this quite well.

(Although, looking at it those clauses now, it does appear to prevent you from modifying private copies. This is odd, as copyright does not prevent you from modifying personal copies of other copyrighted works - you are allowed to tear pages out of a book, or deface artwork that you own. Odd. I'd never noticed that before.)

Is that clearer?

>Now that the FSF put together a distribution

It is not the FSF who put the distribution together. It is a distribution like every other distribution just that they do it in a way that the FSF can endorse it. But GnewSense ist not the only Distribution the FSF endorse: see here

They just sponsor gnewsense.That means that they can host their mailinglist at gnu.org and such thinks but it's not the FSFs distribution like Debian wasn't the FSFs distribution at the time the FSF sponsored Debian

>the FSF for understanding now what people expect you to do if you want to put your name on a software distribution.

And when will Linus Torvalds understand that he have to create his own distribution if he wants to put his name on a software distribution? *SCNR*

You know.... just to get back at all the pedantry that RMS has thrown at Linus, Linus should insist that the distro be named "gNewSense/Linux"

Also note the distinction. RMS is solely focused on ideology and punditry these days. Linus still writes code, and manages the development of the kernel.

The original phrase was "Copyleft: All rights reversed". The "reversed" means that the rights of the end user are protected more so than the rights of the developer (the more natural beneficiary of copyright) - to wit, the end user is preserved the rights to run the program for any reason, share the program, examine and learn from the source code, and build and distribute derivatives.

Berkeley et. al. focus on protecting the rights of the developer more than the end user - to wit, the developer can create proprietary products from such code and deny the above freedoms to their end users.

Since libertarian principles focus on individual liberty over corporate or state interests, I firmly believe that copyleft is clearly the more libertarian license, and choose it over the alternatives for my own modest endeavors. Its popularity indicates that I am not alone.

Oddly enough, I've been called "right-wing" on several occasions, but never "left-wing" (though it truth I'm neither). Go figure.

Your opinion may (and almost certainly will ;-) differ.

I must be mentally ill, but, as much as I gripe about C++ and now C++0x, (even calling it C++#), I have to know, does anyone know when GNU targets the compiler to be due? I mean, I can't imagine them chasing a moving target but with the standard evolving I'm sure there's some stuff that they could work on.

I looked at their C++0x implementation web site, and it looks like they have a way to go:

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

I like C++, even though I hate it, and this next incarnation has me tremendously excited.

And that's why non-indented languages use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prettyprint like http://www.gnu.org/software/indent/indent.html

I use gawk (Gnu Awk) for that job. It's the best tool I've found for rapidly re-writing hundreds of source code files on a running production system.

Arnold Robbins: "AWK is a language similar to PERL, only considerably more elegant."
Larry Wall, from audience: "Hey!"

find \corp\perl -type f -name \*.pl -exec fixbug.awk {} \;

Better be sure you know what you're doing before you press the button, though! I recommend building a cloned test environment.

Sounds like someone in the open source community should step up and start a project to replace flash and silver light for that matter. Mozilla are you listening?

FOSS flash player (incomplete): http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
FOSS silverlight (also incomplete): http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

It seems that you don't know what GNASH is!

If I am right, GNASH is a GNU Flash player under GPL, whose base is gameswf, which was originally created for the interface of a game on XBOX.

I mainly know gameswf for having worked with it, it is nice and very promising, but lacked some important functions and need (in my opinion) a code redesign.

The issue isn't whether or not someone has the right to keep "rented" bits, the issue is wether or not someone who doesn't own your computer has the right to any control over your computer. The desire of copyright holders to enforce their copyrights and licenses and people's control over their own computers is conflicting. If preserving the later means the death of copyright, as you put it, then I'm all for copyright dying as quickly as possible. And I say this as a copyright holder. I'll take a world without copyright than this world any day.

Bourne Again Shell, not Borne.

Do we need to issue an ultimatum concerning this betrayal? The supremacy of that identity is vital, and I'll sanction anyone disrespecting its legacy.

Apparently, even while in POSIX mode, bash isn't quite POSIX-compliant: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-POSIX-Mode.html

Bourne Again Shell, not Borne.

OSSD (Open Source Spaceship Design) anyone? Could throw up a solid, reusable ship for 1/100 the cost AND on time! (There's plenty of concepts around the net if you look, surely). Except that would be way too economically viable.

Yeah, I'd trust my ass to "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE".

They must believe that it's a copyright violation

It's possible that they believe wrong. The use of the term "intellectual property" has confused people as to the difference between copyright and patent and between copyright and trademark.

because they swore, under penalty of perjury, that they are the copyright holder.

It's possible that they committed perjury, knowingly or not. They might be confused, as above, or they might feel that amateurs lack the finances to sue the IOC or its national committees.