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It's true that they're not inconsistent or subjective. They consistently patent idiotic, obvious and redundant things. No subjectiveness or inconsistency there.

Everything you need is right here.

RMS is all against software copyrights. The GPL intends to fight fire with fire and destroy the software copyright scheme from within. He is open to copyrights and patents in other fields (see, eg, Copyright and Globalization ).

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html

Digital information technology contributes to the world by making it easier to copy and modify information. Computers promise to make this easier for all of us.

Not everyone wants it to be easier. The system of copyright gives software programs "owners", most of whom aim to withhold software's potential benefit from the rest of the public. They would like to be the only ones who can copy and modify the software that we use.

The copyright system grew up with printing--a technology for mass production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that.

Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):

* Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
* Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
* Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
* Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.

All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as "samizdat". There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness.

Owners make several kinds of arguments for giving them the power to control how we use information:

* Name calling.

Owners use smear words such as "piracy" and "theft", as well as expert terminology such as "intellectual property" and "damage", to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public--a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.

Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway.

* Exaggeration.

Owners say that they suffer "harm" or "economic loss" when users copy programs themselves. But the copying has no direct effect on the owner, and it harms no one. The owner can lose only if the person who made the copy would otherwise have paid for one from the owner.

A little thought shows that most such people would not have bought copies. Yet the owners compute their "losses" as if each and every one would have bought a copy. That is exaggeration--to put it kindly.

* The law.

Owners often describe the current state of the law, and the harsh penalties they can threaten us with

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html

There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.

But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.

First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.

This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!--a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let's look at the deeper reasons.

School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.

Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, "The knowledge you want is a secret--learning is forbidden!" Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the "priesthood of technology", which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.

The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors--to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, "If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children." Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.

Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.

There's no property tax on "IP" because there's no such thing as intellectual property.

[T]here's a clear distinction here between people who are developing open source software and engaging in non-commercial distribution on the one hand, and people who are engaging in commercial distribution and use on the other hand. With respect to the former, meaning developers and those engaged in noncommercial distribution, this new covenant not to sue, with respect to patent rights, is applicable.

On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available.

All you need to know about Free/Open Source Software is that its intended to destroy America. Please, only support pro-America companies like Microsoft.

Just read the great Vista EULA and compare to that anti-American GNU license.

What is property? Property is theft.

No! Property is imaginary. (Do try to keep up.) Basically it doesn't matter how much it cost to produce a program, a movie or a song: because it's imaginary property, you can give copies to whoever you want. All IP licences are unenforceable relics of a bygone era, so pirate away!

Judging from some of the activity here, that's probably not a serious question. But let's pretend it is. However, a lot of little Bill fans will get their feelings hurt.

Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows -- only. And it's near a few decades late in coming. A comprehensive answer could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit, CPAN and others.

However the press release does not say what the MS "tools" do or, more correctly, claim to do. Students would be more employable playing WoW. For those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're mostly open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2. None are MS.

IDEs

• Netbeans
• Eclipse
• Emacs - it's underrated
• Kdevelop - it's also underrated

Databases

• MySQL (now Sun)
• Postgresql

GUI toolkits

• Qt (now Nokia)
• GTK+
• wxWidgets

MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for either MS or MS boosters in today's economy.

Let's pretend that's a serious question. Well, the press release does not say what the "tools" do. However, for those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2.

IDEs

• Netbeans
• Eclipse
• Emacs - it's underrated

Databases

• MySQL
• Postgresql

GUI toolkits

• Qt
• GTK+
• wxWidgets

The list could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit. Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows. And it's near a few decades late in coming.

MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for them.

Ouch. Another horror story: At the school where I teach (physics), the math department has a course where the required text is only available in DRM'd digital form. You can only access the text in IE. (Spoofing the user agent string in Firefox doesn't work.) Oh yeah, and the book evaporates at the end of the semester so the student loses access to it. Obligatory link to Stallman's The Right to Read.

*Reading* should not be a crime,

Obligatory RMS link: The Right to Read. In many situations, reading is already a crime. Thank you for your attention. Carry on :)

...the Bible being? [Pre|T]eaching about the The Right to Read? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).

All right, you forced me to do it: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

...when engineers get primacy over marketing

You seem to try and imply that copyright, or more specifically, the collection of royalty payment for each copy, is the primary driver for the creation of content.

Who the hell wants "content" anyway? If I wanted "content" I'd cat /dev/random.

Real men use gnu screen. It comes preinstalled with the OS.

For giggles, here's my .screenrc file:

shell /bin/bash
autodetach on
startup_message off
defwrap on
scrollback 100000
msgwait 8
nethack on

screen -t tomcat 0
screen -t tail 1
screen -t bin 2

# xterm understands both im/ic and doesn't have a status line.
# Note: Do not specify im and ic in the real termcap/info file as
# some programs (e.g. vi) will not work anymore.

hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "

"The Free Software Foundation has a transparent agenda: GPL at all costs."

Don't spread FUD about the FSF. Their agenda is not the GPL at all costs, it is to promote free software, and those are two different things.

Counterexamples to your claim of "GPL at all costs":

- The FSF plainly says that free software does not require using the GPL [0]

- The FSF plainly says that releasing software under the modified BSD license (or another non-copyleft license) is not wrong [1]

- The FSF does not use the GPL for all of its software, because it hopes that by doing so it will promote free software [2]

[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

"The Free Software Foundation has a transparent agenda: GPL at all costs."

Don't spread FUD about the FSF. Their agenda is not the GPL at all costs, it is to promote free software, and those are two different things.

Counterexamples to your claim of "GPL at all costs":

- The FSF plainly says that free software does not require using the GPL [0]

- The FSF plainly says that releasing software under the modified BSD license (or another non-copyleft license) is not wrong [1]

- The FSF does not use the GPL for all of its software, because it hopes that by doing so it will promote free software [2]

[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

"The Free Software Foundation has a transparent agenda: GPL at all costs."

Don't spread FUD about the FSF. Their agenda is not the GPL at all costs, it is to promote free software, and those are two different things.

Counterexamples to your claim of "GPL at all costs":

- The FSF plainly says that free software does not require using the GPL [0]

- The FSF plainly says that releasing software under the modified BSD license (or another non-copyleft license) is not wrong [1]

- The FSF does not use the GPL for all of its software, because it hopes that by doing so it will promote free software [2]

[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

While Touretzky prefaces his page on the subject with "Computer professionals who have examined these mechanisms have found them easy to defeat", I miss something able to decrypt or print the latest crop -- where APDFPR says

APDFPR Error
The document was created with 'eBook Exchange (EBX_HANDLER) 128-bit security v.3' encryption handler. This protection method is not supported.

Having the eBook and the etx.etd file I guess that should in principle be possible, but how's that done in practice?

I don't think you quite follow. Free Software follows the 4 Freedoms http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html BSD and MIT stuff is as perfectly Free as something under the GPL - the difference is that they can be unFreed, while public GPL stuff must remain GPL. Open Source is a superset of Free Software. Everything Free is Open Source, but not vice versa; to repeat, Open Source can be less Free than Free. This is why I describe it as dubious, because a corporation can easily open source their stuff in a useless way and thereby mislead people into thinking they support Free stuff. To quote Wikipedia again in this thread: "An open source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and redistribution without having to pay the original author. Such licenses may have additional restrictions such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and the copyright statement within the code." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Open_source_license So, it can have all sorts of noxious terms (did you hear the one about the license which forbade military use? or the one like MAME's that "forbids commercial use and redistribution"?), and still be open source. Open Source is less Free than Free Software.

The Right to Read. If you haven't read it yet, read it now, while there is no filter preventing it.

A binary blob that is sent to the card/chip and executed on it? They are cheapskates for not putting a flash ROM in, but to me it's OK... after all, a bunch of the wireless cards that RMS would say are AOK also have proprietary software on them, it's just in a ROM instead of being sent from the main system.

In other words, RMS has a consistent view of software freedom: as long as its your computer, you deserve to control it. It matters not which processor is running a program. Immutable code in ROMs is different precisely because that's not software. That could just as easily be a different kind of hardware doing the same job. But here the wireless hardware is programmable, the firmware sent to it is software. And all the logic of software freedom applies.

I know of no wireless hardware he thinks is "AOK" which uses proprietary firmware. I own an ASUS wireless device that has no firmware on a gNewSense GNU/Linux machine, so I dodge the issue entirely. The device may be buggy but one will have to work around those bugs in a driver or live with them. RMS will use proprietary firmware devices when there's no alternative (see his IBM Thinkpad) but he'll use it to pursue freedom switching to free hardware when he can (changing to the XO), just as he initially developed GNU software on proprietary OSes and switched to a completely free software OS when he could. This is reasonable, the goal is to achieve and defend software freedom. To demand using a free software OS back in 1984 would have meant never getting started at all.

Finally, he wouldn't refer to proprietary software as "closed". The term "closed" denotes a reference to the open source movement of which RMS is not a member (an older essay on the same topic is also available). The open source movement reaches radically different conclusions about proprietary software than the free software movement. It seems fair and reasonable to me that if you're going to talk about his perspective on these issues you should at least say why you're not framing the issue in the way that makes his perspective understandable.

A binary blob that is sent to the card/chip and executed on it? They are cheapskates for not putting a flash ROM in, but to me it's OK... after all, a bunch of the wireless cards that RMS would say are AOK also have proprietary software on them, it's just in a ROM instead of being sent from the main system.

In other words, RMS has a consistent view of software freedom: as long as its your computer, you deserve to control it. It matters not which processor is running a program. Immutable code in ROMs is different precisely because that's not software. That could just as easily be a different kind of hardware doing the same job. But here the wireless hardware is programmable, the firmware sent to it is software. And all the logic of software freedom applies.

I know of no wireless hardware he thinks is "AOK" which uses proprietary firmware. I own an ASUS wireless device that has no firmware on a gNewSense GNU/Linux machine, so I dodge the issue entirely. The device may be buggy but one will have to work around those bugs in a driver or live with them. RMS will use proprietary firmware devices when there's no alternative (see his IBM Thinkpad) but he'll use it to pursue freedom switching to free hardware when he can (changing to the XO), just as he initially developed GNU software on proprietary OSes and switched to a completely free software OS when he could. This is reasonable, the goal is to achieve and defend software freedom. To demand using a free software OS back in 1984 would have meant never getting started at all.

Finally, he wouldn't refer to proprietary software as "closed". The term "closed" denotes a reference to the open source movement of which RMS is not a member (an older essay on the same topic is also available). The open source movement reaches radically different conclusions about proprietary software than the free software movement. It seems fair and reasonable to me that if you're going to talk about his perspective on these issues you should at least say why you're not framing the issue in the way that makes his perspective understandable.

A binary blob that is sent to the card/chip and executed on it? They are cheapskates for not putting a flash ROM in, but to me it's OK... after all, a bunch of the wireless cards that RMS would say are AOK also have proprietary software on them, it's just in a ROM instead of being sent from the main system.

In other words, RMS has a consistent view of software freedom: as long as its your computer, you deserve to control it. It matters not which processor is running a program. Immutable code in ROMs is different precisely because that's not software. That could just as easily be a different kind of hardware doing the same job. But here the wireless hardware is programmable, the firmware sent to it is software. And all the logic of software freedom applies.

I know of no wireless hardware he thinks is "AOK" which uses proprietary firmware. I own an ASUS wireless device that has no firmware on a gNewSense GNU/Linux machine, so I dodge the issue entirely. The device may be buggy but one will have to work around those bugs in a driver or live with them. RMS will use proprietary firmware devices when there's no alternative (see his IBM Thinkpad) but he'll use it to pursue freedom switching to free hardware when he can (changing to the XO), just as he initially developed GNU software on proprietary OSes and switched to a completely free software OS when he could. This is reasonable, the goal is to achieve and defend software freedom. To demand using a free software OS back in 1984 would have meant never getting started at all.

Finally, he wouldn't refer to proprietary software as "closed". The term "closed" denotes a reference to the open source movement of which RMS is not a member (an older essay on the same topic is also available). The open source movement reaches radically different conclusions about proprietary software than the free software movement. It seems fair and reasonable to me that if you're going to talk about his perspective on these issues you should at least say why you're not framing the issue in the way that makes his perspective understandable.

True, BSD was around before GNU, but the GNU project didn't touch BSD code for a long time (not for 16 years at least) due to two problems. First, the BSD code was in a legal limbo, thanks to copyright problems with AT&T. Using it would be dangerous.

Second, the original BSD license had an annoying advertising clause making it incompatable with the GPL. This clause wasn't removed until 1999, after Richard Stallman convinced Berkeley to remove it. This finally allowed GPL and BSD code to be mixed. The GNU project was already well established by then.

So, no, the GNU project wrote their software from scratch. They didn't just hack the BSD tools.

I think you misunderstand him. I quote from Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software:

"For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software "better"--in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution."

I suppose it's O.K. if you don't think freedom is the most important thing—everyone has an opinion and you have every right to disagree. But you should understand that free software has never been about making a good reliable program (although that is often a by-product)—it is about the freedom itself.

As for not using GPLv3, I don't think rms himself would hold that against anybody. As a matter of course, GNU projects will be under GPLv3, but rms has repeatedly said, for example, in the case of Linux, the kernel, it is entirely up to the kernel developers (the strongest statement you have from him is that he hopes that they will decide to upgrade to GPLv3), and as you can see in the list of free licenses (well, some not), he never held being not copyleft against any license—it's just that when one values freedom, GPL (and admittedly, it's latest version, in FSF's opinion) does the best job of protecting that freedom for everyone (or, the most number of people).

I think you misunderstand him. I quote from Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software:

"For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software "better"--in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution."

I suppose it's O.K. if you don't think freedom is the most important thing—everyone has an opinion and you have every right to disagree. But you should understand that free software has never been about making a good reliable program (although that is often a by-product)—it is about the freedom itself.

As for not using GPLv3, I don't think rms himself would hold that against anybody. As a matter of course, GNU projects will be under GPLv3, but rms has repeatedly said, for example, in the case of Linux, the kernel, it is entirely up to the kernel developers (the strongest statement you have from him is that he hopes that they will decide to upgrade to GPLv3), and as you can see in the list of free licenses (well, some not), he never held being not copyleft against any license—it's just that when one values freedom, GPL (and admittedly, it's latest version, in FSF's opinion) does the best job of protecting that freedom for everyone (or, the most number of people).

Hurd doesn't virtualize hardware so it can not host a foreign OS.

Immaterial. The kernel just needs to trap on privileged instructions, and send messages to the hosted kernel's fault manager(s), which translates the trap codes into native kernel calls. See L4Linux.

As far as I know there is no software that does virtualization available for Hurd.

Which is a very different statement than the original "it cannot be done". Now we're mostly in agreement. Hurd is being ported to L4, and L4 already hosts Linux, so you're only half right.

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

• Yahoo! servers use Free BSD
• Flickr servers use Linux/Apache
• del.icio.us servers use Free BSD

Is this kind of merger a good argument for releasing server side software under the GNU Affero GPL ? If these services were using software licensed under something like the GNU Affero GPL, then a company like Microsoft wouldn't be able to go near them.

I know the argument against this form of license is that large players like IBM, Sun and Google would not want to use them, so the projects would find it difficult to get sponsorship. But both Flickr and del.icio.us started as small start-up teams with a cool idea, and became valuable because of the user base they attracted. When they started out they weren't looking to be bought out by a large company, they just wanted to try out their idea and share it with their friends.

If the next cool idea is started by a team who used tools licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, what happens when it gets discovered and attracts a huge user base ? It would be interesting to see which of the big players would be prepared to become involved. A potentially disruptive technology.

DeCSS was ruled illegal thus making it illegal to publish an open source DVD player. You don't take issue with that? In fact it is illegal to make any open source media player that can play DRM'd material.

Hollywood has been lobbying for laws that would

1. Require all video cameras to stop recording when a certain watermark comes into view.
2. Require ISPs to monitor all traffic and block anything that looks like copyrighted material.
3. Force internet radio stations to pay higher royalties on music--retroactively! This one actually passed and became law.
4. Prohibit VCRs from recording anything with a "don't copy" bit set.
5. Require all VCRs to support a proprietary, patented copy protection standard (passed and became law in 1998).
6. And a lot more. Take a look at The Right to Read for some older and similarily egregious examples.

Copyright is supposed to provide authors with a short-term (for limited times) benefit with the goal of enriching the public domain. Material that is effectively protected by DRM can never enter the public domain which defeats the whole point of copyright.

Is Linus or Steve the new Lex Luthor?

I know this article is old, but can we agree to this?

First, a couple of background questions... Andy, you believe wholeheartedly in microkernels, right? Do you believe in them more than Minix, or is this merely a shameless plug for your product, Minix?

Based on those two responses, here is my proposal.... Assuming you believe in microkernels more than Minix, why not take a leadership role in GNU/Hurd and get that project going, again? http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

Perhaps, you can get assistance from the Xen people, too. http://www.xensource.com/

That's my modest proposal....

I'm interested in experiences /. readers have had with The Hurd. Have you installed or run this system? What did you think?

What is wrong? That the LGPL isn't non-free according to RMS and the FSF? A post by RMS from last month suggests otherwise:

Quoting you:

Releasing a library under the LGPL can help preserve people's freedom, if it means that substantially more software vendors/providers will use that library instead of a proprietary alternative. Quoting the FSF:

There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.

This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for them, only for us.

4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program 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.

Richard Stallman proposed a scheme like this in 1992.
The controversy at the time was Digital Audio Tape (DAT),
but the issues are the same. See The Right Way to Tax DAT, at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html

GTK+ is not "less free" according to the FSF's definition. It just allows "less free" software to link against it, which might provide less of an economic incentive for people to release their software that uses it as free software.

Let's review the Free Software Definition:

1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. 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.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Name one of those freedoms that GTK+ doesn't provide, or provides to a lesser extent than Qt does.