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Is it just me or does all this sound just a little too familiar? Reminds me of Halloween
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De-commoditize protocols & applications
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
...
Fold extended functionality into commodity protocols / services and create new protocols
Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for networking) into today's commodity services, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.

Hmm...I wonder if Microsoft employees are required to put a EULA and a huge copyright notice at the top of all of their emails to prevent future leaks from being posted on Slashdot. I guess then they would try to throw the DMCA at us for telling people to just use `tail` to view the email contents. ;-)
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http://www.opensource.org/halloween

http://www.opensource.org/halloween

The invention in U.S. Patent 6,foo,bar may be used freely in any software program that complies with the Open Source Definition as published by the Open Source Initiative.

How's that?

I wonder what they're defining an operating system to be? Is it just the kernel, or the complete installation? If it's the former, then there's no problem. If it's the latter, then does this mean Linux/BSD dsitributions incorporating closed course components (e.g., Netscape, Acrobat Reader etc.) will run into problems? Also note that the license explicitly defines the term "Open Source", and it doesn't mean the same as the OSI definition.

They are free to claim it, but as you can see from surveying the comments, most users can see through their nonsense. Any software that isn't free software cannot be Open Source. A simple look at the Open Source Definition will show you that.

-russ

Oh, so words mean what you say they mean? Okay, *I* say that "shit for brains" is a compliment. Now I'm going to compliment you. You have shit for brains.

Oh, maybe words *don't* mean what YOU or I say they mean? They might have an actual definition?

Companies should be applauded for making their source code available, but making source code for a product available and making a product Open Source still need to be treated as different things.

but couldn't the spec be seen a "chapter" of W2K? (the chapter on how to block out OSS competitors, check the Halloween docs where they discussed this course of action)
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No one seems to be mention a few basic common sense observations of this whole thing.

1) The latest "New World Order" (NWO was originally coined 50 plus years ago) is collapsing at a geometric rate, at least in terms of control over information and "intellectual property".

2) The legal system (like the political system) is pathalogically controlled by big business.

3) Control over information when it has already passed into the realm of electrons is rather futile. "Hey Bob, here's a new protocol that will solve this problem." "Frank, let's see if we can tunnel this in that." "Hey Jim, fuck them, we'll reinvent the system from scratch." BUT, this doesn't mean the existing empire won't execute a few heretics before Rome burns.

4) Until, "Soviet-style" tactics are capable of being enforced everywhere simultaneously (which ofcourse, they never will), human beings are going to generally do what they feel is morally and ethically sanctioned. (Pass the pliers, I think I've got a tooth-ache)

5) Most people feel that music is more "art" than "commodity" and therefore sharing art with ones fellow human beings is morally acceptable, even more so when it is easily accomplished, technically speaking. (Rip the Mona Lisa in two and send me a piece when you get a chance) Some people even believe that software is more "art" than "commodity", god forbid!

6) Since when does Meta11ica deserve this much free publicity, they've been crap since I was in highschool (a long time ago). Ratbastard$. Hypocrite$.

7) Given that the powerful corporations that have money and influence will continue to try to put a plug in all the holes in this stuck pig, we better brace ourselves for more and more 1984-style attempts at conforming the behaviour of the average technologically adept human being into a moral and ethical mold set out by organizations like the RI@@ and MP@@.

Their viewpoints as echoed by the emerging legal arguments seem to me to be more like:

"Attention Citizens, anything less than you shoving your hard earned cash down our corporate throats is now punishable by death."

8) Prepare for the Int3l white paper(s) to come true and for attempts at $Corporate$America$-sanctioned IP rights-controlling CPU and hardware to become the standard (adopted through the backdoor ofcourse).

9) I guess the average commercial software houses out there (read N@pster) haven't figured out what the Internet is all about. Single point of failures are exactly that.

And the most important point of all. All those people out there who are up in arms about this MP3/D3CSS/N@pster issue but who are not contributing actively to the Free Software Movement are helping seal their own fates. We all need to fight together to keep software and hardware doing what we want it to do, whether or not $Corporate$America$ feels that it is "right".

Those bastards developing are probably the same corporate bastard$ that are going to restrict your freedoms first, not last.

And you can never be quite sure if those Open$ource friends of yours might be interested in selling out provided the technological solution to our (their) own demise is elegance, efficient and well coded.

Okay, so maybe that was more than a few simple observations. You get what you pay for...

PS. It's much more effective if the sheep have internalized the fox's belief system and feel that the external coercion is in fact their own belief system. In the best case, they'll slaughter themselves. In the worst case, they'll probably just bitch about it on Slashdot.

I really doubt Microsoft will Open Source their software. They may disclose their source, but I feel that it is still going to be on a restrictive licesnse. The sad thing is, MS will probably use it as an argument: "We have Open Sourced MS-XYZ." and since monet people dont truely understand the definition of Open Source.

As a professional IT consultant working for one of the top names in the software industry I am working on a detailed report into the "open source" phenomenon (thanks to various people for pointing out that it is not freeware per se) as started by Linus Torvalds with his Linux operating system some six years ago. I browse this forum for insights into the Linux user and developer communities.

Allow me to correct you a bit further. "Open Source" is essentially a marketing program (on practical grounds rather then idealogical) for "free software". Richard Stallman started the free software movement when he started the GNU Project in 1984 with the aim of creating a freely-distributable reimplementation of Unix.

Linus Torvalds significantly popularized free software with Linux (which he started in 1991). Linus provided the last missing piece of the hitherto incomplete GNU system -- the kernel. It's a critical component, but bear in mind that without the prior work of the GNU project, Linux wouldn't be where it is today.

The "Open Source" movement was created in response to Netscape's announcement in January 1998 that they would release the source code to their browser. The relabeling has been very effective, as can be seen in events of the past two years. Netscape's source code release has been viewed by some as less successful, but Mozilla is alive and well, and has made very significant progress since the original source code release. Jury's still out on this one; my personal belief is that Netscape will be making a comeback in the browser marked based on the Mozilla efforts.

Anyway, my question is, is there a fully-featured open source RDBMS out there? Your help is appreciated.

You might want to check out PostgreSQL. It's an object-oriented RDBMS with SQL support as well as transactional integrity. It used to be considered only suitable for academic use, but much work has been done in the last 5 years, and from what I've heard it's one of the most solid free databases out there...

From the Open Source Definition:

3. Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

I don't think that StarOffice satisfies this, which is why it's license is called a community source license, not an open source license. Source available does not equal open source.

I agree that if you work in the closed-source world (like I do) that having your source code leaked is not a good thing. Not because it makes the program available to people for free (a leaked binary would do the same), but because it allows other people to package your program into their closed-source application and claim it as their own. This problem, however, would disappear if everything were open (open as in the source code was available to license holders, not open as in the open source definition). Books by their very nature are open, but does plagiarism run rampant in the book industry? No, because the open nature of books makes plagiarism easy to detect. Oh, look, now I'm ranting at you for no good reason.

"Open-source" means anybody is free to take, hack, and re-distribute (this is a slight/working paraphrase of the open-source definition.
"Proprietary" means the rest of the world can't get their paws on it beyond surface-layer functionality as intended - see parts 3 and 4 in the dictionary definition.

So if, by definition, the rest of the world can get at it, at the lowest and greatest access level possible (source), it can't be proprietary, can it? D'oh.

I think star office is a bloated abomination, I just don't need it in a day-to-day office environment, let alone at home, but that's just me...

"Love envisions Linux tools that will enable service providers to remotely administer Linux systems". Well apart from the split infinitive and ambiguity ("remotely administer" - speaks volumes for his own administrative abilities, thanks ZDnet), has he never heard of ssh? Oops.
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

(As usual, because I have the bad luck of reading Slashdot in my time zone, my comment is hardly going to get read, let alone moderated. Oh well.)

I'm surprised nobody seems to remember Ken Thompson's ACM A. M. Turing Award reception speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. If you haven't read that classic essay, you definitely should.

As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.

The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)

It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)

You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.

The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.

The license in the "open source" grant you only the right to use it for non commercial purpose.

Brian

"Must show logo" is a condition which was applied to Slash up until not so long ago, and is substantially no different from requiring credits to be included in the source

3.2 a) is just the copyright owner's right to produce non-free versions, which exists in the GPL, unless you assign copyright to the FSF.

3.2 b) is effectively a requirement that modifications be made under a less restrictive license than the Jet one, another characteristic of the GPL (this is non-obvious, but follows from the definition of a "Modification"; a Modification is of necessity a modification to their code)

and "when we release new versions, you must update your clients" is specifically excepted as a permissible restriction, under clause 4 of the OSD -- "Integrity of the Author's Source Code".

They're pushing the OSD pretty hard, it must be admitted, but not doing anything so restrictive as to merit being chucked off sourceforge. Look, you got the code, don't you? Stop whining already!

montoya

The government remains many steps behind the fast-moving industry, and is never in tune with the real world. But now they slam Microsoft, and all of a sudden the judicial system knows what's best?

The courts make rulings for and against industries they don't understand all the time. This is what expert witnesses are for. In fact, it is not the judicial systems place to make a judgement about the technological merits of Microsoft's products. Microsoft is a business, foremost, and it must play by the rules of law as a business. A predatory monopoly is illegal regardless of which industry is being considered. It is the court's job to decide whether Microsoft's business practices have been illegal. That tech is a fast-moving industry is irrelevent. The only thing relevent to the court is whether Microsoft has used its monopoly power illegally.

Put another way, prosecuting criminals is exactly what the courts are for. If any company (not just Microsoft) behaves illegally, should we just leave it to the free market to punish them? I doubt that this would be very effective. All the company would have to do is look good to a majority of the public or offer the public something they want and the company could get away with just about anything.

By the time the remedies take effect, will the browser market (the heart of the whole case) look even remotely the same?

If it weren't for the DOJ case, the answer would most likely be, "No." The fact that Microsoft is being called to task about the browser issue has significantly increased the chance that we may now answer your question in the positive.

No, we shouldn't look the other way, but any sudden disruption to Microsoft is going to cause major, major collateral damage.

What are you saying, exactly? We shouldn't ignore it but we shouldn't do anything about it, either? Allowing the monopoly to continue stifling competition isn't damaging enough to justify the pain of striking them down?

A gradual erosion, courtesy of net appliances, the free software movement, or anything else, was the best hope for change.

And you believe that Microsoft wouldn't strong-arm their way into net appliances the same as they have done in every other market that they decided should be theirs? In fact, they have probably already got that ball rolling.

If Microsoft were left unchecked, don't you suppose they might develop a plan to deny open source entry into the market by subverting open standards with proprietary extensions? Oh yeah, they did that already. Isn't it interesting how innovating and stifling innovation look like the same thing on the surface? But the results are very different!

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Then I think the computing world would be a much better place. However this has to happen voluntarily or it won't work old loyalties will die hard and bitterness will be pervasive. No this is a change MS has to go through on it's own, before they fall down too far. Just remember folks once upon a time IBM was the Big Evil Corporation (tm) that was choking the life out of the computer industry, today we sing their praises as cool and hip for understanding and embracing our beloved Linux better and faster than any other established company. Remember things change, and usually for the better if those involved are left to sort them out on their own.

Didn't this occur because of the extreme degree of regulation that IBM faced from the government in the 80's which included such tactics as having IBM tell competitors what they were working on at any given time? One could say that the reason IBM is so well behaved now is because they do not want the level of involvement by the government ever again.

PS: Moderators R U on crack? Someone suggests that maybe we should let MSFT go on its merry way and maybe it'll split on its own instead of maintaining a stranglehold on the software industry that has created the world's richest individual and ruined/defeated countless competing companies (Netscape, Caldera, Corel, Borland,etc.) using mafiaesque tactics. I suggest rereading the Halloween Documents to clear up your misconceptions of the worlds second most valuable company.

Mozilla is a world famous open source success.

If it crashes into the dust tomorrow (not likely), it will be a failure. Therefore, it isn't a success yet.

Microsoft doesn't have a chance.

Yes they do. By developing proprietary protocols, then claiming that "open source doesn't support this" (which would be true), they can keep a ferocious amount of market share. (See also: commentary in "Halloween Document I")

Backdoors, illegal End-Users-Licence-Agreements, bugs (where's warranty ?), SDK more or less bugged, depending on the price paid, Halloween document, proprietary protocols to stop Internet... (Microsoft or Big Brother ?)
If MS trial is injustice, Al Capone's trial was also injustice!
The REAL problem is NOT MS being monopoly, it's MS *abusing* of its monopoly
For a proof, please tale a look at www.opensource.org/halloween.
In France, Microsoft even scored better. The Windows EULA stated the computer seller was responsible for Windows support. But as French shops doesn't have MCSE technicians, there is NO support. BTW, this EULA is illegal in France!
You worried to pay your Windows $49 ? In France, standard Microsoft price always was 1690 FF (about $256).
The European Union sent a warning in 1994 europa.eu.int/abc/doc/off/bull/f r/9407/p204001.htm (in French, I have to locate the English one)
As you can see, problem is not money, but how you got this money.

----------------

I'm not sure I understand your question.

Public Domain means anybody can do anything with the code. CPHack is not public domain.

The GPL allows free modification and redistribution, but prevents redistribution under more restrictive terms, therefore it is not public domain. CPHack might be under the GPL, but yes there appears to be some controversy about that.

The Artistic License also allows free modification and redistribution, and also prevents redistribution under more restrictive terms, but is looser than the GPL as to where the more restrictive terms can't be.

If copyrights were assigned to Mattel, than Mattel has the right to redistribute the software under new and different licenses. Under the circumstances, I don't think they will.

Assuming the software actually was distributed under the GPL, than we all have the right to redistribute it, verbatim or in modified form, under the GPL. I don't know where the mention of the Artistic license is coming from, because the only one who can change the license to Artistic is the copyright holder (i.e. Mattel), and the chances of that are slim.

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> Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued?

Tell me, have you R E A D the findings of fact? Can't you S E E how unbelivable evil they are? Isn't it O B V I O U S that the govenment has to intervene? Do you realize how U N I N F O R M E D your opinions are?

Please read:
Halloween I
Halloween II
Findings of Fact

And theres plenty more material I can point you to. Work on those first. Or try Stephenson's stuff.

Without the Sherman Act, your entire life would be run by GlobalMegaCom. It's a patch to the flaw of capitalism.

Please note that the link to the findings of fact is to the original version, released in November 1999. A version, apperantly with slight corrections, was released a month later "by court order", but it's HTML format has quite a few problems... which comes as no surprise: META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"

> Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued?

Tell me, have you R E A D the findings of fact? Can't you S E E how unbelivable evil they are? Isn't it O B V I O U S that the govenment has to intervene? Do you realize how U N I N F O R M E D your opinions are?

Please read:
Halloween I
Halloween II
Findings of Fact

And theres plenty more material I can point you to. Work on those first. Or try Stephenson's stuff.

Without the Sherman Act, your entire life would be run by GlobalMegaCom. It's a patch to the flaw of capitalism.

Please note that the link to the findings of fact is to the original version, released in November 1999. A version, apperantly with slight corrections, was released a month later "by court order", but it's HTML format has quite a few problems... which comes as no surprise: META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"

They mean "free" as in "libre" (liberty) not as in "sans coute" (without cost) ; this distinction is clear in French but not English. See e.g. http://www.opensource.org/free-notfree.html for an extended discussion.

Here is a Babelfish translation plus my attempts to clean up the French->English mapping. I knew that high school French would come in handy someday....

The national assembly votes the identification a priori authors of Web sites under penalty of prison. [The French Nat'l Ass'y votes for prior identification of website authors, under penalty of imprisonment]

Summary:
The authors of Web sites must give their identity to their shelterer before any public communication under sorrow prison. [Website authors must identify themselves to their ISP/Web host before going public, on penalty of imprisonment.]
In the absence of identification the shelterers are responsible for the contents and liable six months to prison.
[... the hosts ... liable for six months in prison]
The national assembly voted yesterday March 22 [on] a bearing amendment on the responsibility for the shelterers [hosts] of Web sites.
This vote intervenes after the vote of the senat [sic] on January 19 which prevoyait [previewed] the obligation for the shelterers [hosts] to communicate the identity of an author to any third interessé [interested party] under penalty of six months of prison.

All the Web sites for which the identity of the author is not known a priori [beforehand] are legally under the leading [primary] responsibility of the shelterer [host]. To release me [myself] from this responsibility I should [would need to] obtain the identity of each of the 48000 users of altern.org.

Well on the ecommerce [the e-commerce sites] will be content, what could be better than a file customer [customer on file] which the law obliges you to constitute [identify?] by leaving you any latitude to exploit it commercially.

The objective of this law seems to be the installation of a phenomenon of self-censorship on the level of the shelterer [host] who must proceed to ' diligences appropriées' [with 'due diligence'] following a setting of residence of a third [installing a third party home page?]. And on the level of the author who beyond the preliminary declaration under penalty of prison, [the author] does not have any insurance when [faced] with the marketing of his identity.

This law goes against the European legislation, and to that of all the democratic countries.
This vote is not definitif [final], a third and last reading must take place. But it will be a question of rounding the angles [reconciling] between the text of the senate and of the assembly thus one can fear still worse.

Concerning the future of altern.org, as opposed to what I said yesterday before taking note of the exact text, I can continue to exert [work] as long as I accept my new role of watchdog.

Valentine lacambre.

PARTS:

The voted text has [of] the assembly on March 22. (version complete with format pdf).

Discusses and text voted with the senate on January 19 2000.

Discusses and text voted at the national assembly on March 22 2000.

press release of the AFA

ACTIONS:

Write with those which control us [write to our government] {great transliteration eh?}.

Write to the Prime Minister.

#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak

>So as long as WINE is GPL (it is, right?)

Uhhhh... no.

It's under what (I guess) is called the WINE License which is a lot closer to the BSD license than the GPL.

And no, there's no provision (as far as I can tell) that stipulates that all files you link into an original work have to be open. Derived works have to be, but not the original, as long as it's linked in, not included in the source code. So linking closed-source VBScript/JScript would be ok. Of course, this is only my interpretation and IANAL (duh).

--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean

True, Microsoft would never think of using market power to influence another company to limit a competitor (like they said they would in los documentos de la Dia de los Muertos, or like the gub'ment said they did in DOJ v Microsoft).
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This, if anything, makes the prospect of buying 3e even more tantalizing, since not only would I be purchasing an incredibly cool product, I'd be rewarding a company for its openness and fair competitive spirit.

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You may like to check out the issue regarding forking (or lack of) in Linux compared to BSD Unix discussed in the infamous Halloween I paper, at http://www.opensource.org/hallo ween/halloween1.html, at the "Code Forking" sub-header.

This should NOT be a suprise to anyone who read the Halloween documents.

There's nothing wrong with copying the best features of commercial software into a free (beer/speech) product. If you've actually bothered to read the story on ibm's site, it only quotes Miguel de Icaza saying that he simply copied Excel's best features, when he wrote gnumeric.

Microsoft itself has commented (in the aforementioned halloween docs) how open source projects tend to copy the best features of commercial products. This is not news.
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*sigh*
Do you even know what Open Source means?
Here's a definition to help you on your way.
Now to comment on your post first of all you just compared a mis-typed character in an HTML page to what is probably the biggest software engineering project ever embarked upon. What kind of comparison can you make with this that doesn't make you sound like an illogical, fanatical, anti-Microsoft, Open Source apologist?
Secondly Cmdr Taco viewing the bad HTML page in his browser, opening a text editor and changing it in the time it took you to reload your page has NOTHING to do with Open Source. After all I've never such bad HTML on any corporate website, does this suddenly mean that corporate software development practices are somehow better than Open Source ones?
Please think before you post next time, posts like this are why lots of people refuse to take Open Source and linux in particular seriously when people like you project yourselves as our advocates

woops, looks like the first five... are bad links to ./

<rant>
I'm really wondering where those four guys (and girls?) left their brain when moderating that one up to score five! Is is so hard just to check a few links before you waste your scarce moderator points? Does that really take so much of your time?
<rant>

- Stephan.

What he probably meant is OSI-approved. ESR is the chairman of the OSI, but they don't always agree with him; he thinks the ASPL should be approved, but it isn't.

What he probably meant is OSI-approved. ESR is the chairman of the OSI, but they don't always agree with him; he thinks the ASPL should be approved, but it isn't.

I understand what you are saying and I agree that Sun doesn't owe us anything. But I believe the sarcasm comes from the fact that (early on) Sun touted their community license as "open source" when, in fact, it is not. The approved "open sources" licenses are here.

-tim

• The GNU General Public License (GPL);

• The GNU Library or `Lesser' Public License (LGPL);

• The BSD license;

• The MIT license (sometimes called called the `X Consortium license');

• The Artistic license;

• The Mozilla Public License (MPL);

• The Qt Public License (QPL).

• The IBM Public License.

• The MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW License).

• The Ricoh Source Code Public License.

• The Python license.

• The zlib/libpng license.

-tim

Please consider revealing your identity. I'd simply love to nominate you for a net.kook award. And do tell if commander Spock has a beard in your reality.

Just to fill you in: in this reality the very definition of "Open Source" is based on the DFSG, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which were written in mid-1997.

The reason I restrain is that my source code might be worth a lot of money someday. If I GPL it then people can get it free. Isn't there a lot of profit lost in open sourcing?

There are companies which did exactly this, opening there former proprietary software. Two very well known examples are Mozilla and Zope. There is a good description how Digital Creations went open source with Zope and what their fears were and why they still did it.

- Stephan.

The reason I restrain is that my source code might be worth a lot of money someday. If I GPL it then people can get it free. Isn't there a lot of profit lost in open sourcing?

There are companies which did exactly this, opening there former proprietary software. Two very well known examples are Mozilla and Zope. There is a good description how Digital Creations went open source with Zope and what their fears were and why they still did it.

- Stephan.

There are a lot of good documents that could anser your questions, e. g. the business case which gives you arguments for convincing your boss. There is also a list of licenses, although it doesn't compare them. I think many people here at /. would recommend the GPL.

By doing a Google search for open source licenses, I also found this, but there is probably more out in the net.

Many open source projects work like you describe your wishes, including the Linux kernel itself. Linux is under the GPL.

And for your last question: although I don't use Windoze and other micros~1 products, I would really be happy if there were an increasing number of Win open source projects! I think this way more people would get aware of the open source philosophy and then perhaps would consider doing there own software development as open source. And perhaps we would see less proprietary or shareware (yuck) software.

- Stephan.

There are a lot of good documents that could anser your questions, e. g. the business case which gives you arguments for convincing your boss. There is also a list of licenses, although it doesn't compare them. I think many people here at /. would recommend the GPL.

By doing a Google search for open source licenses, I also found this, but there is probably more out in the net.

Many open source projects work like you describe your wishes, including the Linux kernel itself. Linux is under the GPL.

And for your last question: although I don't use Windoze and other micros~1 products, I would really be happy if there were an increasing number of Win open source projects! I think this way more people would get aware of the open source philosophy and then perhaps would consider doing there own software development as open source. And perhaps we would see less proprietary or shareware (yuck) software.

- Stephan.

There are a lot of good documents that could anser your questions, e. g. the business case which gives you arguments for convincing your boss. There is also a list of licenses, although it doesn't compare them. I think many people here at /. would recommend the GPL.

By doing a Google search for open source licenses, I also found this, but there is probably more out in the net.

Many open source projects work like you describe your wishes, including the Linux kernel itself. Linux is under the GPL.

And for your last question: although I don't use Windoze and other micros~1 products, I would really be happy if there were an increasing number of Win open source projects! I think this way more people would get aware of the open source philosophy and then perhaps would consider doing there own software development as open source. And perhaps we would see less proprietary or shareware (yuck) software.

- Stephan.

There are a lot of good documents that could anser your questions, e. g. the business case which gives you arguments for convincing your boss. There is also a list of licenses, although it doesn't compare them. I think many people here at /. would recommend the GPL.

By doing a Google search for open source licenses, I also found this, but there is probably more out in the net.

Many open source projects work like you describe your wishes, including the Linux kernel itself. Linux is under the GPL.

And for your last question: although I don't use Windoze and other micros~1 products, I would really be happy if there were an increasing number of Win open source projects! I think this way more people would get aware of the open source philosophy and then perhaps would consider doing there own software development as open source. And perhaps we would see less proprietary or shareware (yuck) software.

- Stephan.

Make a website listing, detailing, and comparing all the current open source licenses that are being used.

May I recommend The Halloween Documents by ESR. There you will get an understanding of why M$ does this....

Still a third contribution was the System and Networking Group's work on the Internet Protocol Version 6 or IPv6, a new Internet protocol that promises to greatly expand the number of IP addresses available on the Internet. Microsoft researchers have been working with the Internet standards body known as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to develop the standard and have developed a prototype for Windows 2000 that can be downloaded from the Microsoft Research Web site.

The GPL forbids you from preventing any person, organization, or field of endeavor from using the covered software. This notion is also covered in the Open Source Definition, clauses 5 and 6.

For Novell, wide availability across multiple platforms makes sense. They aren't trying to force the market into their complete line of software. Microsoft on the other hand, wants to present Windows, with all of their apps on top as the one solution. They are doing what mainframe and minicomputer makers did it past decades. They are making it painful to switch oince you are committed to them. That's why Linux specifically, rather than free software generally, scares them. You can run it on the same hardware. It has brought down the cost of switching.

While it is encouraging to see lots of companies recognizing free software for wat it is, a level playing field, it will be amuzing to see the mainstream reactions if MS ever decides to port anything to Linux. I wonder what reasons they will give for doing it. In reality, there are only a couple of motives that are likely. The obvious one will be if they can't fight it any more and they abandon Windows. Another will be if they intend to "embrace and extend". Watch them like hawks if they ever try it.

Then all the remaining viable innovation will go overseas.

As long as the flow of information continues, this can't go on forever.

This is precisely what they are attempting to do: choke the flow of information. If you can accuse anyone of "reverse engineering" if they decrypt a "trade secret", then all MS would have needed to do is rot13 the Halloween documents and noone but the government could legally investigate their activities.

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