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GNU Interpreter for Java (GIJ) is a Java bytecode interpreter for the Java programming language. It is part of the free software GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ). GCJ is the compiler counterpart to GIJ.

The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) is a free software compiler for the Java programming language that is part of the GNU Compiler Collection. It can compile Java source code to either Java Virtual Machine bytecode, or directly to machine code for any of a number of CPU architectures. It can also compile class files containing bytecode or entire JARs containing such files into machine code. Almost all of the runtime libraries used by GCJ come from the GNU Classpath project. Since gcj 4.3 (currently alpha), it is integrated with ecj, the Eclipse Compiler for Java.

June 6, 2006 RMS approved the plan to use the Eclipse compiler as the new gcj front end. Work is being done on the gcj-eclipse branch; it can already build libgcj. This project will allow us to ship a 1.5 compiler in the relatively near future. The old gcjx branch and project is now dead.

Compiled applications are linked with the GCJ runtime, libgcj, which provides the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. libgcj can dynamically load and interpret class files, resulting in mixed compiled/interpreted applications. It has been merged with GNU Classpath and supports most of the 1.4 libraries plus some 1.5 additions.

Red Hat has signed Sun's OpenJDK contributor agreement and will now align the work its done on its IcedTea project, which was its own implementation of some parts of the Java SE JDK, with OpenSDK, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss. IcedTea brought together the Fedora project with key Java technologies in a Linux environment, and currently provides open-source alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project, he said.

Red Hat has launched the IcedTea project, with the goal of creating a hybrid fully free Java implementation based on OpenJDK and GNU Classpath. The project replaces binary plugs that are still non-free with code from GNU Classpath "We have been working within Red Hat to replace these binary plugs with free software based on GNU Classpath and to remove the need for bootstrapping with unfree software. This is important for a number of reasons, the most pressing being that only free software may be used to build operating systems like Fedora", said Andrew Haily on an OpenJDK newsgroup.

IcedTea replaces the binary plugins with the equivalent GNU Classpath code, compiles it all using GCJ and optionally bootstraps itself using the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and the javac Java compiler it just built.

Compiled applications are linked with the GCJ runtime, libgcj, which provides the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. libgcj can dynamically load and interpret class files, resulting in mixed compiled/interpreted applications. It has been merged with GNU Classpath and supports most of the 1.4 libraries plus some 1.5 additions.

Red Hat has signed Sun's OpenJDK contributor agreement and will now align the work its done on its IcedTea project, which was its own implementation of some parts of the Java SE JDK, with OpenSDK, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss. IcedTea brought together the Fedora project with key Java technologies in a Linux environment, and currently provides open-source alternatives for the few remaining proprietary sections in the OpenJDK project, he said.

Red Hat has launched the IcedTea project, with the goal of creating a hybrid fully free Java implementation based on OpenJDK and GNU Classpath. The project replaces binary plugs that are still non-free with code from GNU Classpath "We have been working within Red Hat to replace these binary plugs with free software based on GNU Classpath and to remove the need for bootstrapping with unfree software. This is important for a number of reasons, the most pressing being that only free software may be used to build operating systems like Fedora", said Andrew Haily on an OpenJDK newsgroup.

IcedTea replaces the binary plugins with the equivalent GNU Classpath code, compiles it all using GCJ and optionally bootstraps itself using the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and the javac Java compiler it just built.

Ever hear of Gnash?

That is weird. Opinion of FSF about STIX Fonts License is not yet in thei license list pages:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

Bullfuckingshit. RedCrap has always been the one trying to corner the market. They went with gcc 2.96 - http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html against the wishes of *EVERYONE* They tried to screw KDE over, creating that fucked up gnomeified bastardized kde. And go talk to the glibc developers about the whole glibc2 "lets push it out before it is ready" bullshit.

They have done a number of truly rotten things.

However, on the whole, they have contributed back to the community as well. If only they can stop to think - they can make money without trying to screw their customers, and the community over as well.

Even if we throw in a tag to make legacy javascript viable, every legacy page out there would have to be updated - meaning all of those abandoned or hardly maintained web sites with tons of useful information are going to be broken

How would you all be reacting if there was talk about re-implementing C

or heaven forbid Ruby.

Non-free software will always depend on free software? Explain DOS, Mac OS Classic, OS/2, Netware, etc. (Actually Netware probably does depend on some free software.)

Without GCC, X, and a host of other free tools, there would be no OSX. There's not much software that does not have free software roots and all software has free software alternatives that are just as old and often more reliable. Even MSDOS can be traced back to QDOS and CP/M and the concepts used by both were common and shared with Unix, which started it's life free and was followed quickly by BSD and GNU/Linux. Ideas, are not things that can be owned and they grow best in freedom.

It cannot work, because you cannot call an LGPL violation "piracy", but a violation is still possible.

There are Java compilers for creating Win32 binaries, although you would need to use JNI wrappers to use windows GUIs rather than AWT or Swing.
The GCJ (GNU compiler for Java) includes both a bytecode and binary compiler, and work with the GDB, although it only supports up to Java 1.4 (see http://gcc.gnu.org/java/)

Really now.... I get your point about the Java stack, but for the rest of the developer world, this looks pretty freaking cool. I thought that Java wasn't used in the iPhone anyway?

1) Objective C 2.0
See, another whole number! How can it not be shinier, more pretty? Lick it!

2) Gcc-4.2.2. Like 'em or leave em, Apple has the latest FSF release at the time of their new OS launch. Smart. No matter what they say about clang and LLVM, Apple keeps on tracking gcc mainline. Cool.

Previously, Apple was stuck at the unfortunate 4.0.x. Changes since then:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html

Seems pretty impressive. Thanks Apple, for not fucking us with a shitty proprietary compiler!

3) Xcode 3.0, shark. Updates seem nice, but I've not played with this yet.

Really now.... I get your point about the Java stack, but for the rest of the developer world, this looks pretty freaking cool. I thought that Java wasn't used in the iPhone anyway?

1) Objective C 2.0
See, another whole number! How can it not be shinier, more pretty? Lick it!

2) Gcc-4.2.2. Like 'em or leave em, Apple has the latest FSF release at the time of their new OS launch. Smart. No matter what they say about clang and LLVM, Apple keeps on tracking gcc mainline. Cool.

Previously, Apple was stuck at the unfortunate 4.0.x. Changes since then:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html

Seems pretty impressive. Thanks Apple, for not fucking us with a shitty proprietary compiler!

3) Xcode 3.0, shark. Updates seem nice, but I've not played with this yet.

Such funding mechanisms are evidently not needed, since other toolkits have no problem getting funded without dual licensing.

GTK development is very slow in comparison to Qt because they have far less resources. You can't claim that GTK is the equivalent of Qt, it is far less featurefull.

Furthermore, if KDE and Qt were to become the standard environments on Linux, given Troll Tech's pricing, GUI development on Linux for commercial developers would be much more expensive than on Macintosh or Windows.

Since when does Qt have anything to do with people's ability to choose between Qt, GTK, Motif, TCL, Java Swing, SWT, or any of the other ways to make applications? Using Qt saves money overall because development is much more efficient (in my experience) but it in no way prevents you from choosing anything else.

No. Stallman has laid out his criteria for how to choose a license on his web site, and if you go by them, Qt should be GPL+linking exception; GPL+commercial is a bad license choice for Qt because it hurts free software by making it less attractive for large numbers of commercial developers to support free platforms.

That is incredibly wrong. The FSF recommends against using the LGPL. It was only used in the past if libraries could not have succeeded without it. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

The Mono licenses also make it feasible to fork Mono and compete with Novell.

The same is possible with Qt. You can fork Qt and compete with Trolltech if you like. Of course that would be very difficult, but it is possible and legal.

Yes, and the same thing is not possible with Qt; if I fork Qt and build up a big developer base around it, I can't possibly compete with Troll Tech because my version, no matter how good it may be, wouldn't be usable by commercial developers.

Firstly, commercial developers can use GPL. Commercial is not proprietary. I have made money writing GPL software (using Qt) myself. And secondly, why is it a problem that you can't realistically screw over Trolltech with their own product? That would be an incredibly malicious move against a company that has done so much for open source and linux.

Troll Tech makes decisions that are in their best business interest, not decisions that are in the best interests of users or developers. For example, for mobile GUIs, Troll Tech ditched X11 and created an embedded version of Qt that takes over the entire screen, thereby ensuring that no toolkit can compete with them.

They ditched X11 because it isn't suited to low performance devices like phones. X11 is just now barely starting to become a feasible option, with relatively beefy hardware like the Nokia n800. Trolltech depends on its customers to stay in business, so decisions in their business interest are the same as the ones that benefit their customers. After all, if that was not the case, no one would buy Qt.

I hope my company sends a few members of its legal team to find out more. We use Linux a lot, and many key Linux system pieces (such as GCC) are moving to GPL v3. An email broadcast went out at work, telling us specifically:

Please do not bring software into [company] under the GNU Public License version 3.0 (GPL v. 3.0) without review by the [company] attorney who supports your business unit.

GPL v. 3.0 has been finalized by the Free Software Foundation. It contains some provisions that are at odds with generally accepted practices among high tech companies, and [company] in particular.

It goes on to enumerate those fears. One of the more alarmist-sounding points brought up in the email is: "Ambiguous language that could grant patent rights to other companies, even if [company] only uses the software internally."

I really hope the FSF clarifies the points our lawyers have raised. (I hope and imagine our lawyers have taken it up w/ the FSF.) I can totally see our company not releasing software under GPL v3, nor incorporating GPL v3 software into our products. But banning the use of GPL v3 software entirely? Hopefully these sorts of kinks work their way out. In the meantime, I won't be updating my compiler right away. *sigh*

--Joe

I agree with your overall analysis, but you seem to miss, or willfully ignore the one thing Lyons gets right. I hope this doesn't come off as a defense of Lyons, but rather as an illustration of an often overlooked or soft-pedaled or acquiesced (especially by the Slashdot readership) point. Lyons wrote, as you quote:

"... maybe, as some suggest, the foundation wants GPL-covered code to creep into commercial products so it can use GPL to force open those products."

Do they? That may be tough to claim, but it is certainly clear that Richard Stallman wants exactly that. Have you read his writings? He writes repeatedly and clearly that he wants (and predicts) the end of commercial software, everywhere. He is an idealist, and additionally a fanatic. Many of his writings appear on gnu.org under the subject, and subdirectory "philosophy". Read his stuff before you size him up as innocuous.

Do you understand WHY he included in his GNU Public License the conditions he did? It's considered one of the greatest "hacks" ever precisely because it is constructed such that the base of software it governs tends only to grow and never to shrink, thus very effectively becoming more widespread in use and in mindshare and begetting a self-enhancing vicious cycle. To quote RMS himself (from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html/):
"The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy."
You have got to read that essay if you haven't already. In it, Stallman crosses the line from mostly harmless crank-zealotry to insidious zealotry. Richard Stallman really does want to tell impose restrictions on software use. The people who agree with his goals and their requisite restrictions conveniently turn a blind eye to his use of copyright law to tell other people what they can do with software. From above: "When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism." No, the concept he's talking about is Altruism (from a vigorous, rigorous, and centuries-long discussion in philosophy). He attempts to conflate his particular altruism into Idealism. Coming from the one who so correctly and deftly apprehends the conflation of concepts of "copyright", "trademark" and "patent" law, I don't think his attempt at conflation is accidental. I think it's propaganda. He's smart enough to know better, and fanatic enough to turn around and use the same tactic's effectiveness for his own ends.

Do you understand the choice to call it the "General Public License" instead of the "GNU Public License" as I just intentionally misquoted? See above: it rather strongly implies (via English 'general') that it is in some sense the first, best, broadest or most otherwise applicable license that a developer might choose for releasing software. This serves Stallman's purpose, but it is disingenuous. Mr. Stallman is not Mr. Nice Guy either; he's playing for the win, not for the nice.

Once, some years ago now, a developer named Linus Torvalds chose the GPL for a useful piece of software because he thought the license was "good enough" and was more interested in getting his software out than in Stallman's (or anyone's) ideas on what people should or shouldn't do with software. Have you been paying attention to the recent head-butting and remarks between those two? It is clear even from recent history, let alone the complete record of discourse over the last 20-ish years in each person's case, that Stallman's goal is to convey his definition of "free" software licensing as far as possible, while it is Torvalds' goal to spread useful software as far as possible without getting bogged down in somebody else's abstruse idealism. Remember who said "... if you don't want to lose your freedom, don't follow [Torvalds]"? How recent was that (6 weeks ago!), and why do you suppose it's telling?

Stallman's goal might be the one fact Lyons has gotten right in his years-long journalistic crusade against Open or Free software. Stallman correctly makes a distinction between these two movements, bu

No, no, no! God Wrote in LISP code.

Because applying for the patent in the first place was just fine? You could also support the Amazon boycott if throwing trash-cans isn't your thing.

So again, please explain what you mean by "exploit".

X.509 identities, unlike OpenPGP identities, can only have one introducer. You can be betrayed by a conspiracy of .. one. You think you're talking to your bank, or a certain store, or your webmail server, and the CA says that you are, but if the CA is a liar, you could be talking to anyone. Maybe you talk to whom you think you're talking to. Or maybe it's the government. Maybe it's the CA himself. Maybe it's the Russian Mafia.

This is why I recommend people take a look at GNU TLS. It can use much more appropriate crypto.

I pity the FBI of 2007. In my worldline, they just use TSS to protect classified information.

Forget guys in black suits showing up at your door; that just scares people and makes them want to revolt. Quietly, with the least amount off disturbance possible, information is erased. Those who are really persistent at this kind of thing (create an automated bot to spam now-classified information) are just 100% TSSed. After they can't collect their paycheck, use their bank, pay their taxes, pay their bills, access their music collection for a few days/weeks/months, they give in, they always do.

Trusted Computing, what a brilliant idea.

SEQUENTIAL INNOVATION, PATENTS, AND IMITATION

James Bessen Eric Maskin

Mentions that the vast majority of software companies rank software patents or copyrights as a low priority in controlling the market, they attribute a much greater wait to lead time, and the difficulty a competitor will have catching up. Essentially what happens, is you can't code the whole product, and the new features as quick as the first company can modify the existing product to have those new features so you are excluded from the market.

To quote RMS himself, speaking for the philosophy behind the GPL, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html he does believe all software should be free. His arguement why people would continue to program in his Utopia is that 1)programming is fun, and 2) there are other sources of funds to get paid to program such as universities. Here's what I think about both of those

1) Sure programming is fun. But can you do it full time without getting paid for it? How many people would know it is fun if their was no financial insentive to learn? Think of all the open source projects on say, Sourceforge. Only what maybe 10% of them actually get fully developed. It either a) becomes not fun, or b) the developer losses interest/doesn't have time. How many OSS programs have crappy documentation, or a critical feature that never gets implemented because it is inherently a boring/"unfun" job?

2) Really, RMS? Universities? How big a budget do they have? How many graduating undergrads get full time jobs at the university, what maybe one per year per school? What will everyone else do, get advanced degrees and try to find a faculty position? First off only about 20% of students are considered good enough for grad school, are we going to lower the standard? Who's going to fund the faculty positions? Corporations I suppose because their going to be really gratful for all the free software. Well OSS has been huge for the last 12 years or so (gcc is the first thing to come to mind for truely widespread adoption), how many OSS projects are actually rewarding their developers comparibly to corporate jobs? IMHO we need both OSS and proprietary software, the proprietary stuff pays for the education and living expenses of people, who may choose to donate some time to a OSS project.

Reading the XKCD forums, apparently prior to the ninja incident someone actually sent RMS a katana (which, in the comic, he whips out to defend himself against them.) He didn't bring it to the debate with him, but someone did take some pictures of him holding it: http://www.gnu.org/people/jag/rms-with-katana/

This is, as far as I can tell, a reasonably accurate interpretation. His exact words are:
The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.

If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.

so, tell me how i can get this free codec for my ipod/car stereo/dvd player/toothbrush? oh, whats that? I cant? I need to buy new hardware? well shit, perhaps this aint so different to the betamax/vhs thing after all

No thanks, I'll be waiting for Hurd to be production-ready.

For performance reasons, it uses a fixed address (instead of going through __objc_msgSend):

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2007-03/msg00251.html

Doesn't this defeat address space randomization?

There are people who don't like to lump everything in the term IP precisely to avoid these confusions: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml

Here you go. It's a decent summary of the situation, albeit not the most in-depth.

You can take a look at the original patent, too, but that would require a second click.

IANAL. I don't know why you are disappointed. The GPL contains the same usage terms that the Ms-PL and Ms-RL licenses seem to have. From the GPL:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.

From the Ms-PL:

Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.

Neither GPL or Ms-PL could offer this grant without being both a usage and distribution license. The Ms-PL/RL licenses don't seem to go beyond this in their terms, so I don't see how you can say it is not Free software.

I remember not even Win95 could copy lots of files... Win98: The same. Win2k: The same. WinXP: The same. 12 years and still the same problem? I really don't remember about Win3.1 or Win286... If ever the Windows code gets open-sourced, lots of programming hackers are going to laugh for years upon seeing the buggy code, I am sure. How come people now have alternative choices and still use a buggy closed-source OS is beyond me. Poor Windows users... (happily posting from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 amd64 etch + some lenny).

This is contrary to any Open Source license I know of. The whole point of Open Source is that you can use the software in any way you want. You have to agree to the license only when you distribute. Microsoft is attempting to subvert OSI, just like it has already subverted ISO.

This is contrary to any Open Source license I know of. The whole point of Open Source is that you can use the software in any way you want. You have to agree to the license only when you distribute. Microsoft is attempting to subvert OSI, just like it has already subverted ISO.

2. This is followed by the singing of the "Microsoft Sucks" song.

You know, I'm all in favor of more organizations for anti-Microsoft geeks, but I've got to warn you that asking us to sing can only end in tragedy.

This scanner thing is already obsolete.

Redacting after the fact with trusted computing is the wave of the future; though it is a bit treacherous.

Nothing stopping even Microsoft from using the GPL, other than the fact that they break out in hives at the mere thought.

Easy to assume, but not true. Microsoft has distributed GPL'ed software in the past, and might still be doing so today for all I know. (The example I know of might have gone by the name "Interix" and it included GNU Fortran (g77) as well as GCC among its suite of Unix-y utilities.)

I think it's safe to say that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has never distributed Microsoft or other proprietary software, however...ideological purity being quite important to that organization.

Ah, a topic of discontent.

You know I can remember thinking about mathematics and the legends behind the basic foundations in analysis, calculas and the like. (i.e. Euler and Newton and Kepler et al.)

I thought WOW I must be stupid, these guys just picked up Mathematics no problemo......

Well....not quite. I mean, make no doubt, Newton, Kepler and Euler all where very adept at Mathematics.

But, they also worked VERY....VERY very VERY hard at it.

Can you imagine the PAIN and SUFFERING, Kepler had to go through in building even the most basic elementals of planetary motion by doing the same calculation sometimes 100 times to prevent error?

Even then, he got the calculations wrong for the orbit of Mars and missed the eccentricity factor that would have been a shoe in while he was testing different shapes of orbits for Mars: namely an ellipse.

It would take Kepler WEEKS to perform these calculations, which now I can do in a fraction of a second on my laptop.

The labor required in those days to do mathematics was intense, and highly error prone.

Newton would lock himself away for DAYS barely eating anything performing every possible experiment, and when not satisfied with just experimentation, he wanted quantitative results from the experiment as well.

Has anyone, I mean anyone here gone for days barely eating anything working non stop on a mathematics problem for 18 hours at a time?

You know the "greats" in Mathematics worked at it with super human resolve and zeal, only if you would care to read about this HISTORY of mathematics you would find it as so.

Expect to put in at LEAST as much effort if you want to really join their ranks.

I would like to point out that with tools like: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ you can bypass the pain and labor of mathematics and get to the core of the matter MUCH faster than Kepler or Newton ever could. So you could literally "cheat" out of the labor these guys had to put in, and put the machine to work doing the calculations to develop methods of computation much quicker to solve problems.

So, although no doubt, these men became literal geniuses, if you look at their lives and what governed their passions with regards to numerical studies, they put in huge amounts of time to the problems they wanted answers to. They earned the right to be called geniuses, it certainly wasn't given to them at birth.

Keep this in mind the next time you are stumped on any sort of mathematics problem. Also keep in mind that like the "greats" you have to be stick with it, and never give up!

-Hack

From TFA:
FENG-HSIUNG HSU earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, ...
Hsu now manages the platforms and devices center of Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing.
...
To experiment with a Go program, readers can download GNU Go at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo. Offered by the Free Software Foundation, in Boston, this free program has performed well in recent computer Go events.

Computing power would be offered by a "Computer Utility" company. They would handle all the technical details. You simply pay your bill and the "technical goodness" comes down the line...

... as you wave goodbye to your freedom.

I have met old professional writers who literally hate the Internet and wish it never existed. They seem particularly worried about amateurs writing stuff. But that's their opinion and you know what they say about opinions. They aren't amateurs, they don't love writing, they just profit from it. I would very much prefer a novel or scientific paper written by amateurs rather than professionals. Why? Because, even if the amateurs's creation contains a few mistakes or omissions here and there, I know that it was nurtured with love, while the professionals's creation is as cold as money (not that money is necessarily bad, but it IS cold). It works with software, it works with encyclopedias, it works with news, it works with hardware, it works with fabbers, it works with science, and certainly it also works with writing. Professional writers can yell as much as they want, but Internet writing is here to stay. They are the old generation and together with all centralised models of production (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft...) will have to either evolve or die, while the Internet enables communities of amateurs, the cooperative generation, to produce high-quality content in an open fashion for the love of it.

...or at least they used to.

A few years back, someone with a hotmail account asked me for web addresses where she could learn more about Free Software, so I sent her links to the usual suspects. When she tried to visit them a couple of months later, she found they didn't work, and wrote back to me complaining about that they were "broken". I was very surprised about the whole thing, because there's not much room for error in http://www.gnu.org/. Besides, the copy in my sent mail archive was correct, so I asked her to please send me the message as she received it.

Of course, I had sent her a plain text mail, but she was reading it as HTML, and hotmail had been kind enough to translate the URL I had typed into a clickable link... only the href attribute of the link did not point directly to the GNU project, for instance, but rather to "http://64.4.18.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=ac40a69cbb8c98b8c7b6ce4475972c10&lat=1037721637&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2egnu%2eorg" which presumably should have bounced the user to the original link's destination. The reason the link didn't work was because that machine seemed to have gone offline for unknown reasons.

Of course, this does not mean that Gmail's idea of doing targetted advertising based on the contents of your e-mail is harmless, but changing the contents of the mail when they deliver it to the user does seem to be at least as bad. The worst part of it is the fact that users actually grant hotmail the right to do it, by blindly accepting the abusive Terms of Service.

Please don't spread ignorance here and please also read GPL license before you make any comment about it.

It is illegal to link to binary of a GPL program by a closed-source non-GPL program.

That is, if you develop a driver for Linux, for it to run if it requires to link to Linux libraries (or to any other GPL-based libraries), you have to open source your driver and make it GPL. May be release under other GPL-compatible open source license also be sufficient. If you don't release your driver source, its a vialation of copyright of GPL-licensed software and you expose yourself for litigation. This condition is not limited only for drivers, its for any software requires to link either statically or at run-time with GPL binaries.

GPL license: http://www.gnu.org/

Greg Kroah-Hartman is the head of Linux Driver Project (http://linuxdriverproject.org/), read his comments about it:

1. OLS Day 4: Kroah-Hartman's Keynote Address (http://www.linux.com/feature/55915)

2. Google search: Greg Kroah-Hartman+Closed Source Linux kernel modules are illegal

Alright, I'm just going to say it.

MUSIC SHOULD BE FREE

This is getting ridiculous. That a crime could take place by the mere proliferation of an artist's work is absolutely ridiculous!

Music is a form of art, and I believe that the artists should expect no more from their hobby than personal enjoyment. If they're doing it for any other reason, then they are hacks. Sure they should be able to accept money for what they do; But if they get on the stage or in the recording studio with something other than fun on their minds, they aren't being true to themselves. Having a special talent and an adoring fanbase is all that anybody could ask for.

Obviously some grandmothers and children don't see a moral problem in downloading music from the Internet. Other than it being illegal, do you really have an issue with it? To put it into the context of the article: Do you feel like you owe the artist something when you listen to his song on your friend's CD? Why not? What's the difference? You benefited from his work, but you didn't compensate him.

To me, availability of music is akin to the Right to Read. Mod me down if you like. I'm just saying what everybody has been feeling but have been too reluctant to say.

Artist to consumer: "I want to express myself with music, but only if you're willing to pay."

Again, I'm not suggesting that an artist shouldn't receive compensation. I would just like to see music-related copyright-infringement de-criminalized (or the civil-equivalent).

it's easy to start a piece of shit GPL project - take a look at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ or http://www.sendmail.org/!

Libraries can count on the doctrine of first sale. At the current time, they have nothing to worry about.

Try that with a DVD, CD, or electronic journal. The Library of Congress is timidly thinking about "fair use" rights that will be technologically impossible to enjoy. Of course, the owners of "premium" content will make you chose between participation in your culture and software freedom in order to enforce their insanity. Would you share with your neighbors if it could cost you your house?

Richard Stallman tried to think of all the bad consequences of greed and restriction of knowledge. He predicted many policies that came to be but he remained an optimist because he did not fully explore the personality changes that kind of society can create. His characters remained brave and altruistic, much like people are today. To fully appreciate the corrosive effects of tyranny, you have to look at societies like East Germany, North Korea and the USSR. We know more about them now. The degree of distrust and self interested reporting that existed in East Germany is sickening. Yet, those societies had a small degree of information freedom that came from imperfect control technology and external societies that were free. The society being built by copyright warriors will be worse in many significant ways because technology has made perfect knowledge possible for the oppressors.

Freedom is a matter of principle that must be zealously guarded. The smallest infractions should cause outrage and be defeated. Each right lost makes it that much harder to get back any. A society where your phone can be tapped without a warrant, you can be put in jail without charges or trail, and you can lose your home for sharing a few songs with your friends and neighbors is a long way from free.

Since this was a civil case, the fine should be only enough to promote equity rather than be punitive in nature.

In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.

We have strong protection for copyrights because we believe in the ability for people to write or create books, software, art, movies, music, or other "soft" art for a living. Without copyright, these things would be just hobbies. Even free software depends on strong copyright protection. Without the protection of GPL and copyright protection, GNU and Linux and other GPL software would not have the following and developer involvement and attract billions of dollars from by IBM, Sun and Google as they do today. The proof of this is BSD ("is dying") software, which has much trouble attracting developers, investors and users.

I don't mean to troll, but truly, what's the big problem? Don't distribute stuff that doesn't belong to you unless the person who owns it says it's okay. Find a better hobby and you won't get sued!