Slashdot Mirror

skuzzlebutt asks: "If you are dragging your office (kicking and screaming, no less) into the dynamic and typically, more affordable world of Linux and Open Source to keep those licensing and external help desk call costs down, have you considered your Office Management Software needs yet? I'm talking about things like HR Management, Scheduling, and the like. Snooping around on Freshmeat and SourceForge, the pickin's were pretty slim (I found one package at SF, but it has been posted for a year with no file releases), and Google wasn't much help either. I work as a developer for B of A and am also an MBA candidate; between these two roles, I run into many small business owners who are complaining about licensing costs, limited support options, can't-upgrade-unless-we-get-that-$75M-grant, and so forth. Has anyone had any success/horror stories for particular pre-fab commercial packages (be they open, closed, gratis, paid, etc)?"

Stealth Dave writes: "Remember all the hullabalu back when someone first put Linux on the Dreamcast? At the time you could only get a text console and no source was available. Well, I saw over at DC Emulation that the folks over at m17n.org have screenshots of the Dreamcast running X Windows, X-Mame and PrBoom (a Linux Doom port)! They even have an ftp site with a Dreamcast distribution. What will you do with your $99 Linuxcast?" So now the Dreamcast can run GNU/Linux and BSD, and may get Inferno and Plan 9. Phew -- all for $119 at K-mart.

justrob writes: "Looks like there was a massive security breach at Source Forge. I wonder if this what caused the 'unscheduled maintenance event' that has left the shell servers unavailable for a week. Here is part of an email I recieved:" (Read more below.)

"Dear SourceForge User,

The SourceForge team takes security very seriously. This week, one of our systems was compromised. We have promptly taken the necessary steps to correct this situation.

You have been contacted, because according to our log files, you have used SourceForge during the past week and may have used the system that was compromised. In order to complete the security fix, we are asking all users who used the system to change their password immediately. We've reset your password to a randomly generated string. "

Here's where to go if you think your account might have been compromised.

jimiUK asks: "I've been working for a while on my streaming mp3 server, using Apache:MP3 running on FreeBSD to start with but now running on RedHat Linux. It all runs smoothky, but what I'm trying to do is automate the ripping process so I can just insert cd's and have them ripped and classified automatically. This box is a dedicated server without a keyboard or moniter connected so I'd rather have no user input whatsoever. I've solved all of the initial problems, and now have the box set to login automatically on boot up, but I still can't find the right script. The most useful has been autorip, and I've also tried ripit (although it requires user intervention). My main problem is that if autorip cant find the cd information, it just stalls. My Perl skills are non-existent really so i'm not sure how to alter the script to instruct it to rip away if it doesnt find track info, which I could add in later. Does anyone have any other suggestions for alternative script front ends, or can point me in the right direction on altering autorip to get it over this hurdle." For those of you running MP3 servers, this idea might be a huge timesaver. Has anyone implemented such a system?

CodeNation asks: "I'm a coder in smallish (~50 staff) company with a ~20 strong development team. We, the development team, have been using CVS, and CVSWeb to manage our source base for a couple of years. In the meantime, our corporate documentation has become a complete mess. By 'corporate documentation' I mean content such as Word documents, Powerpoint presenations, and Excel spreadsheets. Anyway, I was recently asked by the one of the bosses to put a document version control system in place for this corporate documentation. All this, and the system has to be usable by the non-technical." Ask Slashdot has touched on a similar topic but it's been about 2 years since that article. Has there been any headway in this area?

"Now, this would be a trivial task if:

• The documents were text-based (i.e. the file formats weren't binary)
• The entire company understood how to use CVS

However, neither of the above are true.

I took a look at CVSWebEdit, but unfortunately it's not quite there yet in terms of stability and usability.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a possible solution? What are you currently using for document control (remember these are Microsoft Office documents). Also note that although the developement team works on Linux boxen, the non-technical staff works in a Windows environment.

Thanks for your help."

Nym writes: "It seems that another component, SQL has been added to the many layers of Freenet. Check out FreeSQL Project, and start porting your SQL apps today." The possible implications of this sort of utility are amazing.

Nym writes: "It seems that another component, SQL has been added to the many layers of Freenet. Check out FreeSQL Project, and start porting your SQL apps today." The possible implications of this sort of utility are amazing.

JediTrainer asks: "The issue recently came up in my organization that our hardware and software asset information needs to be gathered and stored so that we can import this data into an asset tracking database to further be able to deal with the data. Unfortunately because of circumstances it is difficult to send people to all locations to audit each piece by hand. Ideally, we'd like to be able to track specific information about the hardware (serial number if possible, memory, processor type/speed, hard disks etc), and also detect some of the major software packages that might be installed (OS, office suites, photo editors, development tools etc)."

"The company in question is mostly running Windows (9x/NT/2000) machines, but there are a number of Sun and Linux boxes which should be tracked as well, ideally, although we can probably get those by hand since they're the minority in this case.

So far in my search I've found Confound, which seems to do an ok job tracking hardware information on Win9x platforms, but unfortunately crashes on my NT box. Basically, the requirement will be to be able to run the software periodically remotely, either through login scripts or by sending the app via email to each employee. As much data as possible should be gathered about the hardware and software on that station, and then sent to a server where it will be stored and processed. As a company, we'd probably like to re-audit the computers in the organization every few months (at least once a year) to make sure the data's as clean as possible.

Does anyone have any products in mind that might do this? Obviously, cost is a factor (free is ideal, but it doesn't have to be - we could probably budget out a couple thousand dollars). The most ideal would be a solution with source code which I might be able to modify so that we can adjust what it gathered and how it is sent to the server, or at least be flexible in that way. Any product that meets this should reduce (but will not completely eliminate, I know) the need to have people physically do this work."

BillyBob writes: "I Came accross this cool article about Functional programming in Python that demonstrates several intermediate and advanced FP concepts. The author uses Bryn Keller's 'Xoltar Toolkit' which provide valuable assistance. Keller has collected many of the strengths of FP into a nice little module containing pure Python implementations of the techniques. This is definitely worth examining for a Python programmer seeking to continue the exploration of functional paradigms."

descubes writes: "It's been a long time since Java, the last major change in programming languages. Could the next one be designed "the Open Source Way"? For a few years, I have been working on a programming language called LX, which is part of a larger system called Mozart. I need some feedback. Could Slashdot readers comment on which programming language features they would like?"

descubes writes: "It's been a long time since Java, the last major change in programming languages. Could the next one be designed "the Open Source Way"? For a few years, I have been working on a programming language called LX, which is part of a larger system called Mozart. I need some feedback. Could Slashdot readers comment on which programming language features they would like?"

The war on drugs is expensive, and, like most wars, deadly. But it looks like it isn't going to go away any time soon. With that as a given, why not let those who want to wage war on drugs do it in an online gaming environment? The cost of setting up the servers for "Drug Czar" would be lots less than the cost of all those street arrests, border interdictions, and air intercept missions in Peru and Colombia. And, best of all, no one would get hurt.

It could be a wonderful game, with shoot-em-up segments, sim-style strategy, morbid scenes of decayed inner-city neighborhoods, jut-jawed cops and Federal agents, droopy-drawered street drug vendors, and plenty of other colorful characters. Add in politicians, TV preachers, Colombian kingpins, middle-aged parents trying to keep their kids on the straight and narrow plus a bunch of furtive teenage drug experimenters, and you'd have roles in this MUD-variant for everyone who is interested in the drug war -- from either side.

Some players' roles would be predetermined. The U.S. government's drug policy chief would obviously get the Drug Czar role. George W. Bush would play the President. Congressmen, Senators, and agency heads could also mirror their real-life selves. A few taxpayers might whine about these officials getting paid to play games, but isn't the drug war nothing but a silly game anyway? And if it must be played, shouldn't it be played in a virtual environment where keeping a non-violent drug offender in prison doesn't cost taxpayers $20,000 or more per year, and lives aren't ruined or lost?

You can even argue that this game would be the most effective anti-drug policy the government could possibly have. If, indeed, video games have the potential to turn young people into killers, then hollow-faced, chronically sick game avatar junkies constantly searching for a high "by any means necessary" should steer plenty of kids onto the straight and narrow.

There are other drug-dealing games out there, but they don't have the scope, power, and visual ingenuity it will take to wean government drug warriors (not to mention people on the lucrative "dark side" of the fight) away from the non-virtual version. "Drug Czar" needs to be truly overwhelming, a game so vast that only the government can afford to produce it and make it freely available to players all over the world.

How much would all this cost to design and set up? $10 million? $20 million? Even a billion dollars would be a trifle compared to the cost of the offline version. And if it was an Open Source project (I'm sure SourceForge would be happy to host it, especially if the government kicked in a little pocket change to help with server maintenance), I'll bet volunteers from all over the world would help with development.

But remember, U.S.government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, so this isn't going to happen unless you write your elected representatives to tell them that you understand how much fun they are having with their war on drugs, and that you don't want want to take that pleasure away from them but would like them to stop playing it in real life and move it onto the Internet, where it would be less dangerous and more fun than the current version -- and probably at least as effective.

Faceprint writes: "The developers of gaim have posted another article about the blocking of Jabber and gaim by AOL. It answers a lot of questions that repeatedly get asked on slashdot, and explains the situation rather well. Definitely worth a read."

Here you go - answers to your questions for Guido van Rossum about Python, its future, licensing hassles with the Free Software Foundation, and other neat stuff. Thanks, Guido!

Ruby
by Luke
Thoughts on Ruby?

Guido:
I just looked it up -- I've never used it. Like Parrot, it looks like a mixture of Python and Perl to me. That was fun as an April Fool's joke, but doesn't tickle my language sensibilities the right way.

That said, I'm sure it's cool. I hear it's very popular in Japan. I'm not worried.

Data Structures Library
by GrEp
I love python for making quick hacks, but the one thing that I haven't seen is a comprehensive data structures library. Is their one in development that you would like to comment about or point us to?

Guido:
One of Python's qualities is that you don't need a large data structures library. Rather than providing the equivalent of a 256-part wrench set, with a data type highly tuned for each different use, Python has a few super-tools that can be used efficiently almost everywhere, and without much training in tool selection. Sure, for the trained professional it may be a pain not to have singly- and doubly-linked lists, binary trees, and so on, but for most folks, dicts and lists just about cover it, and even inexperienced programmers rarely make the wrong choice between those two.

Since this is of course a simplification, I expect that we will gradually migrate towards a richer set of data types. For example, there's a proposal for a set type (initially to be added as a module, later as a built-in type) floating. See http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/python-sets and http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0218.html.

[j | c]Python
by seanw
How do you see the relationship between jPython (the java implementation) and standard cPython (the original C language version) evolving? And do you see the advantages of either one (i.e. portability vs. speed) becoming especially pronounced in light of the recent trend toward distributed software (ala the MS .NET initiative)?

Guido:
Note that the new name is Jython, by the way. Check out www.jython.org -- they're already working on a 2.1 compatible release.

We used to work really close -- originally, when JPytnon was developed at CNRI by Jim Hugunin, Jim & I would have long discussions about how to implement the correct language semantics in Java. When Barry Warsaw took over, it was pretty much the same. Now that it's Finn Bock and Samuele Pedroni in Europe, we don't have the convenience of a shared whiteboard any more, but they are on the Python developers mailing list and we both aim to make it possible for Jython to be as close to Python in language semantics as possible. For example, one of my reasons against adding Scheme-style continuations to the language (this has seriously been proposed by the Stackless folks) is that it can't be implemented in a JVM. I find the existence of Jython very useful because it reminds me to think in terms of more abstract language semantics, not just implementation details.

IMO the portability of C Python is better than that of Jython, by the way. True, you have to compile C Python for each architecture, but there are fewer platforms without a C compiler than platforms without a decent JVM.

Jython is mostly useful for people who have already chosen the Java platform (or who have no choice because of company policy or simply what the competition does). In that world, it is the scripting and extension language of choice.

does Python need a CPAN?
by po_boy
One of the reasons I still write some things in PERL is because I know that I can find and install about a zillion modules quickly and easily through the CPAN repository and CPAN module. I'm pretty sure that if Python had something similar, like the Vaults of Parnassus but more evolved that I would abandon PERL almost entirely.

Do you see things in a similar way? If so, why has Python not evolved something similar or better, and what can I do to help it along in this realm?

Guido:
It's coming! Check out the action in the catalog-sig http://python.org/sigs/catalog-sig/. You can help by joining.

One reason why it hasn't happened already is that first we needed to have a good package installation story. With the widespread adoption of distutils, this is taken care of, and I foresee a bright future for the catalog activities.

Favourite Python sketch?
by abischof
Considering that you named the language after the comedy troupe, what's your favourite Monty Python sketch? Personally, my favourite is the lecture on sheep aircraft, but I suppose that's a discussion for another time ;).

Guido:
I'm a bit tired of them actually. I guess I've been overexposed. :-)

Conflict with GPL
by MAXOMENOS
The Free Software foundation mentions the license that comes with Python versions 1.6b1 and later as being incompatible with the GPL. In particular they have this to say about it:

This is a free software license but is incompatible with the GNU GPL. The primary incompatibility is that this Python license is governed by the laws of the "State" of Virginia in the USA, and the GPL does not permit this.

So, my question is a two parter:

1.What was your motivation for saying that Python's license is governed by the laws of Virginia?

2.Is it possible that a future Python license could be GPL-compatible again?

Guido:
Let me answer the second part first. I asked the FSF to make a clear statement about the GPL compatibility of the Python 2.1, and their lawyer gave me a very longwinded hairsplitting answer that said neither yes nor no. You can read for yourself at http://www.python.org/2.1/fsf.html. I find this is very disappointing; I had thought that with the 1.6.1 release we had most of this behind us, but apparently they change their position at each step in the negotiations.

I don't personally care any more whether Python will ever be GPL-compatible -- I'm just trying to do the FSF a favor because they like to use Python. With all the grief they're giving me, I wonder why I should be bothered any more.

As for the second part: most of you should probably skip right to the next question -- this answer is full of legal technicalities. I've spent waaaaaaaaay to much time talking and listening to lawyers in the past year! :-(

Anyway. The Python 1.6 license was written by CNRI, my employer until May 2000, where I did a lot of work on Python. (Before that, of course, I worked at CWI in Amsterdam, whom I have to thank for making my early work on Python possible.) CNRI own the rights to Python versions 1.3 through 1.6, so they have every right to pick the license.

CNRI's lawyers designed the license with two goals in mind:(1) maximal protection of CNRI, (2) open source. (If (2) hadn't been a prerequisite for my employment at CNRI, they would have preferred not to release Python at all. :-)

Almost every feature of the license works towards protecting CNRI against possible lawsuits from disappointed Python users (as if there would be any :-), and the state of Virginia clause is no exception. CNRI's lawyers believe that sections 4 and 5 of the license (the all caps warnings disclaiming all warranties) only provide adequate protection against lawsuits when a specific state is mentioned whose laws and courts honor general disclaimers. There are some states where consumer protection laws make general disclaimers illegal, so without the state of Virginia clause, they fear that CNRI could still be sued in such a state. (Being a consumer myself, I'm generally in favor of such consumer protection laws, but for open source software that is downloadable for free, I agree with CNRI that without a general disclaimer the author of the software is at risk. I'm happy that Maryland, for example, is considering to pass a law that makes a special exception for open source software here.)

Python 1.6.1, the second "contractual obligation release" (1.6 was the first), was released especially to change CNRI's license in a way that resolved all but one of the GPL incompatibilities in the 1.6 license. I'm not going to explain what those incompatibilities were, or how they were resolved. Just look for yourself by following the "accept license" link at http://www.python.org/1.6.1/. The relevant changes are all in section 7 of the license, which now contains several excruciating sentences crafted to disable certain other clauses of the license under certain conditions involving the GPL. Read it and weep.

The remaining incompatibility, according to the FSF, is the "click-to-accept" feature of the license. This is another feature to protect CNRI -- their lawyers believe that this is necessary to make the license a binding agreement between the user and CNRI. The FSF is dead against this, and their current position is that because the GPL does not require such an "acceptance ceremony" (their words), any license that does is incompatible with the GPL. It's like the old story of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object: CNRI's lawyers have carefully read the GPL and claim that CNRI's license is fully compatible with the GPL, so you can take your pick as to which lawyer you believe.

Anyway, I removed the acceptance ceremony from the 2.1 license, in the hope that this would satisfy the FSF. Unfortunately, the FSF's response to the 2.1 license (see above) seems to suggest that they have changed their position once again, and are now requesting other changes in the license. I'm very, very tired of this, so on to the next question!

Structured Design.
by Xerithane
First off, as a disclaimer I have never actually written anything in Python. But, I have read up on virtually all the introduction articles and tutorials so I have a grasp on syntax and structure.

I have been doing C development for 9 years now, and I know a plethora of other languages including shell scripting, perl, PHP (for scripts). Now, each language uses 'normal' grouping for control structures (if, for, etc).

What was the logic behind creating a whitespace-based syntax rule? And why do you feel it is good, please refrain from the readability answer because that is all I get from those people I know who know Python.

I find, because of my background, it is much easier to read code that uses braces ({}) than whitespace because my mind automatically looks for them. After maintaining legacy code that extends a life span of 20 years from it's first line of code, I have some concerns about the longevity of any Python code. So, my second question is, how well do you see Python holding up for 20 years and why do you think it will hold up that long?

Guido:
What's wrong with the legibility answer? I think that's an *excellent* reason! Don't care if your code is legible?

Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented!

When you use braces, there are several different styles of brace placement (e.g. whether the open brace sits on the same line as the "if" or on the next, and if on the next, whether it is indented or not; ditto for the close brace). If you're used to code written in one style, it can be difficult to read code written in another. Most people, when skimming code, look for the indentation anyway. This leads to sometimes easily overlooked bugs like this one:

  if (x  10)
      x = 10;
      y = 0;

Still not convinced? In 1974, Don Knuth predicted that indentation would eventually become a viable means of structuring code, once program units were small enough. (Full quotation: http://www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-1.html)

Still not convinced? You admit that you haven't tried it yet. Almost everybody who tries it gets used to it very quickly and end up loving the indentation feature, even those who hated it at first. There's still hope for you!

So, no, I'm not worried about Python holding out 20 more years.

What is *your* idea of Python and its future?
by Scarblac
There are a lot of "golden Python rules" or whatever you would call them, like "explicit is better than implicit", "there should be only one way to do it", that sort of thing. As far as I know, those are from old posts to the mailing list, often by Tim Peters, and they've become The Law afterwards. In the great tradition of Usenet advocacy, people who suggest things that go against these rules are criticized. But looking at Python, I see a lot more pragmatism, not rigid rules. What do you think of those "golden rules" as they're written down?

What's your idea of the future of Python? Since the PEP process, a lot of new feature ideas have been put forward, and a lot of people feel uncomfortable with quick change to a good language (Python 2.1 is again excellent though, congrats). Do you think or hope Python will be finished one day? If not, isn't the alternative an endless string of added features? "Python 3000" was an idea of a sort of ideal Python that would be worked on, but as I understand Python will now evolve more gradually.

Guido:
You're referring to the "Zen of Python", by Tim Peters: http://www.python.org/doc/Humor.html#zen

It's no coincidence that these rules are posted on the Python Humor page!

Those rules are useful when they work, but several of the rules warn against zealous application (e.g. "practicality beats purity" and and "now is better than never").

While we put "There's only one way to do it" on a T-shirt, mostly to poke fun at Larry Wall's TMTOWTDI, the actual Python Zen rule reads: "There should be one-- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it." That has several nuances!

Regarding the future, I doubt that any piece of software ever stops evolving until it dies. It's like your brain: you never stop learning. Good software has the ability to evolve built in from the start, and evolves in a way that keeps the complexity manageable.

Python started out pretty well equipped for evolution: it was extensible at two levels (C extension modules and Python modules) that didn't require changing the language itself. We've occasionally added features to support evolution better, e.g. package namespaces make it possible to have a much large number of modules in the library, and distutils makes it easier to add third party packages.

I hear the complaints from the community about the rate of change in Python, and I'm going to be careful not to change the language too fast. The next batch of changes may well be aimed at *reducing* complexity. For example, there are PEPs proposing a simplification of Python's numeric system (like eradicating the distinction between 32/64-bit ints and bignums), and I've started to think seriously about removing the distinction between types and classes -- another simplification of the language's semantics.

Strangest use of Python
by Salamander
What use of Python have you found that surprised you the most, that gave you the strongest "I can't believe they did that" reaction?

Guido:
I find few things strange.

For the most obfuscated code I've ever come across, see the Mandelbrot set as a lambda, http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html#4.15.

Digital Creations has written a high-performance fully transactional replicated object database in Python. That's definitely *way* beyond what I thought Python would be good for when I started.

Some people at national physics labs like LANL and LLNL have a version of Python running on parallel supercomputers with many hundreds of processors. That's pretty awesome.

But my *favorite* use of Python is at a teaching language, to teach the principles of programming, without fuss. Think about it -- it's the next generation!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: www.python.org/~guido)

Here you go - answers to your questions for Guido van Rossum about Python, its future, licensing hassles with the Free Software Foundation, and other neat stuff. Thanks, Guido!

Ruby
by Luke
Thoughts on Ruby?

Guido:
I just looked it up -- I've never used it. Like Parrot, it looks like a mixture of Python and Perl to me. That was fun as an April Fool's joke, but doesn't tickle my language sensibilities the right way.

That said, I'm sure it's cool. I hear it's very popular in Japan. I'm not worried.

Data Structures Library
by GrEp
I love python for making quick hacks, but the one thing that I haven't seen is a comprehensive data structures library. Is their one in development that you would like to comment about or point us to?

Guido:
One of Python's qualities is that you don't need a large data structures library. Rather than providing the equivalent of a 256-part wrench set, with a data type highly tuned for each different use, Python has a few super-tools that can be used efficiently almost everywhere, and without much training in tool selection. Sure, for the trained professional it may be a pain not to have singly- and doubly-linked lists, binary trees, and so on, but for most folks, dicts and lists just about cover it, and even inexperienced programmers rarely make the wrong choice between those two.

Since this is of course a simplification, I expect that we will gradually migrate towards a richer set of data types. For example, there's a proposal for a set type (initially to be added as a module, later as a built-in type) floating. See http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/python-sets and http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0218.html.

[j | c]Python
by seanw
How do you see the relationship between jPython (the java implementation) and standard cPython (the original C language version) evolving? And do you see the advantages of either one (i.e. portability vs. speed) becoming especially pronounced in light of the recent trend toward distributed software (ala the MS .NET initiative)?

Guido:
Note that the new name is Jython, by the way. Check out www.jython.org -- they're already working on a 2.1 compatible release.

We used to work really close -- originally, when JPytnon was developed at CNRI by Jim Hugunin, Jim & I would have long discussions about how to implement the correct language semantics in Java. When Barry Warsaw took over, it was pretty much the same. Now that it's Finn Bock and Samuele Pedroni in Europe, we don't have the convenience of a shared whiteboard any more, but they are on the Python developers mailing list and we both aim to make it possible for Jython to be as close to Python in language semantics as possible. For example, one of my reasons against adding Scheme-style continuations to the language (this has seriously been proposed by the Stackless folks) is that it can't be implemented in a JVM. I find the existence of Jython very useful because it reminds me to think in terms of more abstract language semantics, not just implementation details.

IMO the portability of C Python is better than that of Jython, by the way. True, you have to compile C Python for each architecture, but there are fewer platforms without a C compiler than platforms without a decent JVM.

Jython is mostly useful for people who have already chosen the Java platform (or who have no choice because of company policy or simply what the competition does). In that world, it is the scripting and extension language of choice.

does Python need a CPAN?
by po_boy
One of the reasons I still write some things in PERL is because I know that I can find and install about a zillion modules quickly and easily through the CPAN repository and CPAN module. I'm pretty sure that if Python had something similar, like the Vaults of Parnassus but more evolved that I would abandon PERL almost entirely.

Do you see things in a similar way? If so, why has Python not evolved something similar or better, and what can I do to help it along in this realm?

Guido:
It's coming! Check out the action in the catalog-sig http://python.org/sigs/catalog-sig/. You can help by joining.

One reason why it hasn't happened already is that first we needed to have a good package installation story. With the widespread adoption of distutils, this is taken care of, and I foresee a bright future for the catalog activities.

Favourite Python sketch?
by abischof
Considering that you named the language after the comedy troupe, what's your favourite Monty Python sketch? Personally, my favourite is the lecture on sheep aircraft, but I suppose that's a discussion for another time ;).

Guido:
I'm a bit tired of them actually. I guess I've been overexposed. :-)

Conflict with GPL
by MAXOMENOS
The Free Software foundation mentions the license that comes with Python versions 1.6b1 and later as being incompatible with the GPL. In particular they have this to say about it:

This is a free software license but is incompatible with the GNU GPL. The primary incompatibility is that this Python license is governed by the laws of the "State" of Virginia in the USA, and the GPL does not permit this.

So, my question is a two parter:

1.What was your motivation for saying that Python's license is governed by the laws of Virginia?

2.Is it possible that a future Python license could be GPL-compatible again?

Guido:
Let me answer the second part first. I asked the FSF to make a clear statement about the GPL compatibility of the Python 2.1, and their lawyer gave me a very longwinded hairsplitting answer that said neither yes nor no. You can read for yourself at http://www.python.org/2.1/fsf.html. I find this is very disappointing; I had thought that with the 1.6.1 release we had most of this behind us, but apparently they change their position at each step in the negotiations.

I don't personally care any more whether Python will ever be GPL-compatible -- I'm just trying to do the FSF a favor because they like to use Python. With all the grief they're giving me, I wonder why I should be bothered any more.

As for the second part: most of you should probably skip right to the next question -- this answer is full of legal technicalities. I've spent waaaaaaaaay to much time talking and listening to lawyers in the past year! :-(

Anyway. The Python 1.6 license was written by CNRI, my employer until May 2000, where I did a lot of work on Python. (Before that, of course, I worked at CWI in Amsterdam, whom I have to thank for making my early work on Python possible.) CNRI own the rights to Python versions 1.3 through 1.6, so they have every right to pick the license.

CNRI's lawyers designed the license with two goals in mind:(1) maximal protection of CNRI, (2) open source. (If (2) hadn't been a prerequisite for my employment at CNRI, they would have preferred not to release Python at all. :-)

Almost every feature of the license works towards protecting CNRI against possible lawsuits from disappointed Python users (as if there would be any :-), and the state of Virginia clause is no exception. CNRI's lawyers believe that sections 4 and 5 of the license (the all caps warnings disclaiming all warranties) only provide adequate protection against lawsuits when a specific state is mentioned whose laws and courts honor general disclaimers. There are some states where consumer protection laws make general disclaimers illegal, so without the state of Virginia clause, they fear that CNRI could still be sued in such a state. (Being a consumer myself, I'm generally in favor of such consumer protection laws, but for open source software that is downloadable for free, I agree with CNRI that without a general disclaimer the author of the software is at risk. I'm happy that Maryland, for example, is considering to pass a law that makes a special exception for open source software here.)

Python 1.6.1, the second "contractual obligation release" (1.6 was the first), was released especially to change CNRI's license in a way that resolved all but one of the GPL incompatibilities in the 1.6 license. I'm not going to explain what those incompatibilities were, or how they were resolved. Just look for yourself by following the "accept license" link at http://www.python.org/1.6.1/. The relevant changes are all in section 7 of the license, which now contains several excruciating sentences crafted to disable certain other clauses of the license under certain conditions involving the GPL. Read it and weep.

The remaining incompatibility, according to the FSF, is the "click-to-accept" feature of the license. This is another feature to protect CNRI -- their lawyers believe that this is necessary to make the license a binding agreement between the user and CNRI. The FSF is dead against this, and their current position is that because the GPL does not require such an "acceptance ceremony" (their words), any license that does is incompatible with the GPL. It's like the old story of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object: CNRI's lawyers have carefully read the GPL and claim that CNRI's license is fully compatible with the GPL, so you can take your pick as to which lawyer you believe.

Anyway, I removed the acceptance ceremony from the 2.1 license, in the hope that this would satisfy the FSF. Unfortunately, the FSF's response to the 2.1 license (see above) seems to suggest that they have changed their position once again, and are now requesting other changes in the license. I'm very, very tired of this, so on to the next question!

Structured Design.
by Xerithane
First off, as a disclaimer I have never actually written anything in Python. But, I have read up on virtually all the introduction articles and tutorials so I have a grasp on syntax and structure.

I have been doing C development for 9 years now, and I know a plethora of other languages including shell scripting, perl, PHP (for scripts). Now, each language uses 'normal' grouping for control structures (if, for, etc).

What was the logic behind creating a whitespace-based syntax rule? And why do you feel it is good, please refrain from the readability answer because that is all I get from those people I know who know Python.

I find, because of my background, it is much easier to read code that uses braces ({}) than whitespace because my mind automatically looks for them. After maintaining legacy code that extends a life span of 20 years from it's first line of code, I have some concerns about the longevity of any Python code. So, my second question is, how well do you see Python holding up for 20 years and why do you think it will hold up that long?

Guido:
What's wrong with the legibility answer? I think that's an *excellent* reason! Don't care if your code is legible?

Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented!

When you use braces, there are several different styles of brace placement (e.g. whether the open brace sits on the same line as the "if" or on the next, and if on the next, whether it is indented or not; ditto for the close brace). If you're used to code written in one style, it can be difficult to read code written in another. Most people, when skimming code, look for the indentation anyway. This leads to sometimes easily overlooked bugs like this one:

  if (x  10)
      x = 10;
      y = 0;

Still not convinced? In 1974, Don Knuth predicted that indentation would eventually become a viable means of structuring code, once program units were small enough. (Full quotation: http://www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-1.html)

Still not convinced? You admit that you haven't tried it yet. Almost everybody who tries it gets used to it very quickly and end up loving the indentation feature, even those who hated it at first. There's still hope for you!

So, no, I'm not worried about Python holding out 20 more years.

What is *your* idea of Python and its future?
by Scarblac
There are a lot of "golden Python rules" or whatever you would call them, like "explicit is better than implicit", "there should be only one way to do it", that sort of thing. As far as I know, those are from old posts to the mailing list, often by Tim Peters, and they've become The Law afterwards. In the great tradition of Usenet advocacy, people who suggest things that go against these rules are criticized. But looking at Python, I see a lot more pragmatism, not rigid rules. What do you think of those "golden rules" as they're written down?

What's your idea of the future of Python? Since the PEP process, a lot of new feature ideas have been put forward, and a lot of people feel uncomfortable with quick change to a good language (Python 2.1 is again excellent though, congrats). Do you think or hope Python will be finished one day? If not, isn't the alternative an endless string of added features? "Python 3000" was an idea of a sort of ideal Python that would be worked on, but as I understand Python will now evolve more gradually.

Guido:
You're referring to the "Zen of Python", by Tim Peters: http://www.python.org/doc/Humor.html#zen

It's no coincidence that these rules are posted on the Python Humor page!

Those rules are useful when they work, but several of the rules warn against zealous application (e.g. "practicality beats purity" and and "now is better than never").

While we put "There's only one way to do it" on a T-shirt, mostly to poke fun at Larry Wall's TMTOWTDI, the actual Python Zen rule reads: "There should be one-- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it." That has several nuances!

Regarding the future, I doubt that any piece of software ever stops evolving until it dies. It's like your brain: you never stop learning. Good software has the ability to evolve built in from the start, and evolves in a way that keeps the complexity manageable.

Python started out pretty well equipped for evolution: it was extensible at two levels (C extension modules and Python modules) that didn't require changing the language itself. We've occasionally added features to support evolution better, e.g. package namespaces make it possible to have a much large number of modules in the library, and distutils makes it easier to add third party packages.

I hear the complaints from the community about the rate of change in Python, and I'm going to be careful not to change the language too fast. The next batch of changes may well be aimed at *reducing* complexity. For example, there are PEPs proposing a simplification of Python's numeric system (like eradicating the distinction between 32/64-bit ints and bignums), and I've started to think seriously about removing the distinction between types and classes -- another simplification of the language's semantics.

Strangest use of Python
by Salamander
What use of Python have you found that surprised you the most, that gave you the strongest "I can't believe they did that" reaction?

Guido:
I find few things strange.

For the most obfuscated code I've ever come across, see the Mandelbrot set as a lambda, http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html#4.15.

Digital Creations has written a high-performance fully transactional replicated object database in Python. That's definitely *way* beyond what I thought Python would be good for when I started.

Some people at national physics labs like LANL and LLNL have a version of Python running on parallel supercomputers with many hundreds of processors. That's pretty awesome.

But my *favorite* use of Python is at a teaching language, to teach the principles of programming, without fuss. Think about it -- it's the next generation!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: www.python.org/~guido)

Slashback items tonight on India's satellite launch, a bi-coastal EFF-organized protest (yes, will involve leaving your cubicle, basement, silo, remote farm, etc.), Apple not falling far from the tree, and the death of Indrema. Read on below :)

Show your truuuuueee colors ... h0mee writes: "Howdy! This has already been posted on slashdot, but we still need more volunteers showing up at the protests. This protest is being organized by the EFF against federally mandated censorware in schools and libraries. The protests are occuring on this friday in the SF Bay Area and the NYC areas. I'd like to remind slashdot readers on the completely cynical side that even small groups of protestors showing up will have big impacts, as the FCC will be caught completely off guard by hordes of angry geeks showing up- this protest can make a difference! Please check out the EFF's protest page on this for more info for coordination and ridesharing, or this rant on craigslist for SF bay locals. Show your geek pride, and help us distribute Clue to the FCC!"

Hey, stop looking at me! And no feeling, either! In response to CmdrTaco's recent post about Apple moving yet again to block the makers of Apple-reminscent themes, WillAdams writes:h "The response, and the original letter are up at http://www.macthemes.org.

They'd like a lawyer..."

Sounds fair. Soon lawyers defending Open Source will take over as the heros of the software world. "Didn't there used to be programmers, too, dad?"

Up in the air, Junior Birdman w00ly_mammoth writes: "After an aborted attempt, India has launched a satellite rocket. Signals from it were picked up in Canada. The Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, or GSLV-D1, is capable of giving the nation communication and military capabilities, according to western analysts. The US has been concerned about this development for a while. This could also rattle the aerospace industry, since it marks an entry into the lucrative satellite launch market."

(Invent your own aphorism involving ashes, phoenixes and plant life.) impaler writes: "Games Mania has a story with three people's views on the death of indrema. They interview Mark Collins (author of Linux Game Programming), Clinton Ebadi (me / that lamer that does nothing useful), and Steve Baker (of TuxKart fame). All three offer different opinions on why indrema went down."

Speaking of games, ryants writes: "OpenGL.org is reporting that NVidia's GeForce3 meets or beats the functionality available in DX8 via OpenGL extensions. This bodes well for Linux gaming." Take your grains of salt, head out back, and play some TuxKart;)

cloudscout writes "Macworld UK is reporting that Apple is threatening the Mac Themes Project for creating a theme editor. Apple accuses them of contributing to trademark infringement by enabling people to copy Apple's graphics. They've issued a cease-and-desist order insisting that MTP remove their theme editor from all webservers under their control, "including any hyperlink to other locations where the material may be available". They're even trying to invoke a shaky clause in their OS licenses which prohibit reverse-engineering the operating system since the theme editor utilizes unpublished specs. Apple is famous for its unfriendly attitude toward developers and tech media, but this is just ridiculous. How could they possibly suffer any damage by MTP's efforts? " I'm seriously disappointed to see this. Apple's lawyers are their own worst enemy: they've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this. Its just so dumb I don't know how to respond.

chrisd writes "From the yopy developers list, Young Hoon Kim notes that :"G-Mate will introduce the next generation of Yopy which targets the end user in the 3rd or last quarter of this year. This time, it will have 64MB of RAM and 16MB Flash, and it will use ramfs. Of course it will have X windows installed and all the application will be run on X too. Therefore, if you are planning to develop any application for Yopy, you have to port your application to be used with X windows. Since we will include GTK+ toolkit, it's a good idea to start making application using GTK". I've got the yopy, and I have to say I really like it, the screen is very nice and it's -very- fast. The development version shipped with something called w-windows which was weird, but I quickly installed X from the Yopy X Server Project."

chrisd writes "From the yopy developers list, Young Hoon Kim notes that :"G-Mate will introduce the next generation of Yopy which targets the end user in the 3rd or last quarter of this year. This time, it will have 64MB of RAM and 16MB Flash, and it will use ramfs. Of course it will have X windows installed and all the application will be run on X too. Therefore, if you are planning to develop any application for Yopy, you have to port your application to be used with X windows. Since we will include GTK+ toolkit, it's a good idea to start making application using GTK". I've got the yopy, and I have to say I really like it, the screen is very nice and it's -very- fast. The development version shipped with something called w-windows which was weird, but I quickly installed X from the Yopy X Server Project."

bko writes: "Our software, VOCAL, won a Computer Telephony Magazine award for Product of the Year (it's at the bottom of the page), mostly because they liked the idea of Open Source Voice over IP software. Well, we've finally been able to release all of it (not just part) at our website. CVS access coming soon (we hope). Currently compiles on Red Hat 6.2 and Solaris, diffs accepted for more OSen (I'll do FreeBSD when I get a chance). Since the site is vague about what's in VOCAL, try this Technology Overview (sorry, pdf) for more info. Basically, there's a working VoIP softswitch in there, under a BSD-style license." Open Source Telephony software is a good deal all around, so this is quite nice news. (See also this story about David Sugar's Bayonne Project.)

Well, a number of readers noted, and I've been on X-Chat with ElCoronel and technoir regarding themes.org. It's been down for the last day or so due to some technical difficulties (hard drive go buh-bye!), but it should be returning soon -- it was not Apple seizing the hardware, like a couple of submitters had thought.Most of you probably noticed that Themes is back-up - thanks to Patrick Ashmore, Tony Ramos, and Marc Merlin (and anyone else I forgot) for riding the evil-hell bus of late night sysadmining, finding the problem and fixing it.

Well, a number of readers noted, and I've been on X-Chat with ElCoronel and technoir regarding themes.org. It's been down for the last day or so due to some technical difficulties (hard drive go buh-bye!), but it should be returning soon -- it was not Apple seizing the hardware, like a couple of submitters had thought.Most of you probably noticed that Themes is back-up - thanks to Patrick Ashmore, Tony Ramos, and Marc Merlin (and anyone else I forgot) for riding the evil-hell bus of late night sysadmining, finding the problem and fixing it.

One of the things I try to focus on with Ask Slashdot questions are issues involving trademarks and the big guy trying to rob the little guy out of a name, or a domain that they may have had for years. Although this was necessary to stop the domain squatters out to make a quick buck, it seems to have turned into a corporate right to harass everyone. Long before the internet was a household name, people registered domains or created project names that they didn't think would cause problems and now, years later, they are finding out how wrong they were, and how the laws can rob their project's identity. What follows is a question regarding SGI their quest to go after anyone with any name starting with "Open" or containing "GL". How long is it, before corporations begin to carve up the English dictionary and we won't be able to use a single word without following it with "(tm)"?

DooMWiz asks: "I am the author of the Open Image Library (OpenIL), an image library under the LGPL license at openil.org. Several weeks ago, I was shocked by the appearance of an e-mail from a Silicon Graphics, Inc representative. Apparently, they are "concerned" that 'OpenIL' may infringe on their 'OpenGL' trademark. I am not a trademark lawyer, nor do I have any real knowledge of trademarks. Even if I had some kind of justifiable way of proving that 'OpenIL' could not possibly be confused with 'OpenGL', I probably would not pursue it, since a college student with very limited resources against giant SGI would be messy for me. I'm really not *too* upset about being asked to change the name, but during the course of this, I sent several e-mails to the SGI rep, and his replies indicated some disturbing news. He claims that he has already talked to OpenCL about changing their name and that he plans to pursue the ever-popular OpenAL, which isn't just a one man operation like OpenIL. OpenAL may have the resources to fight something like this, since it has nothing to do with SGI's business model but is backed by large companies. Lastly, SGI has a trademark on 'GL', and the rep also claims to plan to pursue projects with 'GL' in their names. Projects like GLScene and DemoGL come to mind and may be in trouble. Anyone with trademark experience have any advice on what course of action to take? Dropping the 'OpenIL' name seems like the easiest way out."

n8willis writes: "There's a project called lzip at SourceForge that lets you compress your files down to 0% of their original size. How's it work? The "L" stands for "lossy.""

Cassivs writes: "The GAIM developers have posted an excellent document on the recent battles with AOL. It seems that upon receiving an OSCAR connection, the server requests an md5sum of some section of the aim.exe file. And recently, AOL has begun changing the section whose md5sum they request. This was always supported in the official clients, but never actually used until now, so they don't break the official clients. Quite a clever solution. Embedding aim.exe into the libfaim source has potential legal problems. Is this the end of the open-source AIM clones being able to use OSCAR?"

Cassivs writes: "The GAIM developers have posted an excellent document on the recent battles with AOL. It seems that upon receiving an OSCAR connection, the server requests an md5sum of some section of the aim.exe file. And recently, AOL has begun changing the section whose md5sum they request. This was always supported in the official clients, but never actually used until now, so they don't break the official clients. Quite a clever solution. Embedding aim.exe into the libfaim source has potential legal problems. Is this the end of the open-source AIM clones being able to use OSCAR?"

jeremie asks: "AOL has been attempting to block access to AIM via Jabber, GAIM, and other open source projects based on libfaim. Both Jabber.org and Jabber.com have issued statements, and are welcoming AOL to work together with the community in creating an open server to server interoperability solution that meets their FCC Conditions." This kind of crap makes me glad that I never completely made the move away from IRC. Of course, this isn't the first time AOL has tried to pull this off, and it seems that the supposed FCC intervention that was supposed to open the AIM protocol has fallen thru. With all of this back and forth on the issue from AOL, do we really need to use their system at all?

wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

We've had word from a number of readers that the Freenet Project has setup an area to accept donations. These folks are doing wonderful work - using a GPL project, non-profit, dedicated to a decentralized free speech network. I highly recommend donating.

We've had word from a number of readers that the Freenet Project has setup an area to accept donations. These folks are doing wonderful work - using a GPL project, non-profit, dedicated to a decentralized free speech network. I highly recommend donating.

Ironstorm asks: "Recently I've started to see Firewire harddrives being sold from companies like Maxtor & Western Digital and now I'm pondering firewire storage solutions for high-availability clusters. Does anyone know if it would be possible to share a harddrive between two cluster nodes on a Firewire bus? Or have a node mount another node's Firewire drive if the other node has failed?"

relya writes "Noticed here that Tripwire Open-source 2.3 now supports FreeBSD 4.2 as opposed to just GNU/Linux."

relya writes "Noticed here that Tripwire Open-source 2.3 now supports FreeBSD 4.2 as opposed to just GNU/Linux."

_Upsilon_ writes "Transmeta announced today that they have released under the GPL their mobile linux as "Midori Linux". It is an x86 compatible version of Linux for internet appliances, residential gateway appliances, wireless web pads, and home audio components." They've got SourceForge project setup for discussion and usage. As well, the download page is ready - the current version is 1.0.0-beta1. And be careful not to drink too much of the distro.

cramhead writes: "Some very cool technology that motherboard manufacturers should consider adopting. Using Linux to boot a system allows flexibility and speed. Thought the world deserved a look at [the LinuxBIOS homepage]" This project sounds similar to the OpenBios project which has mentioned before on Slashdot, but a lot has happened since then, and even since CmdrTaco last posted about LinuxBIOS. The news page indeed reveals that (with certain motherboards), adventurous flashers-of-RAM can have Linux up in three seconds, and they promise improvements even on that. They also note that LinuxBIOS is working with an Alpha DS10 and with an Athlon / SiS730S combination. (This may also remind you of the etherboot project).

The unusually-seen Kurt Gray wrote this; it's funny, to the point and more honest than may make everyone comfortable. Everyone knows banner ads suck; Kurt tells you a little more about why they're still around, explores some things that might make them better, and generally straightens the dope. We're doing this in conjunction with K5, who's also got the story. So, hop back and forth, and we can all get a merry meta-discussion going.

My name is Kurt Gray, I'm the lead programmer for OSDN's ad system which serves ad banners on sites like Slashdot, Freshmeat, SourceForge, Themes, and partnering deal with Kuro5hin, etc. I open sourced our ad delivery code sometime last year and have been maintaining it in-house here as well. My quest now is to create a better ad banner delivery system, not only better for you the audience but also more useful to our sponsors. So I have some ideas about our ad system that we want to pitch to you all sitting out there reading this and your feedback on these ideas would be of great value to us. Note that this is being posted to both K5 and Slashdot because we want to get feedback from everyone we can.

First let me address two issues that have been discussed on Slashdot just recently on Micropayments instead of ads and Ad banners may soon get bigger and how these issues pertain to ad banners on the OSDN sites.

Why run ad banners? What about a tip-jar, or subscription fees, or micropayments, or donations, or bill-the-ISPs instead of ad banners?

When you're running a web site, depending on your content, your audience, the size of your staff, your overhead costs, the size and nature of your audience, and many other factors, it might be possible to get by on just subscription fees, or micropayments, or some other revenue model that does not involve selling banner ads. But the size of the audience on OSDN's web sites and the nature of the content within is such that the subscription models break down. For a network of this size and content ad banners are the only realistic way to cover costs and hopefully earn a little profit (someday we hope). Another way of looking at it is to ask yourself why does Yahoo, CNet, and ZDNet still rely on banner ads? Because for a web sites that have a lot of traffic no one has proven that there is a better way to earn more revenue with less overhead. In any large media company, advertising is it. Even with print magazines the subscription fees and cover prices don't come close to covering the costs for a large circulation magazine: the subscription fees and cover price is just a barrier-of-entry to assure the advertisers that the readership paid to read the content and therefore is the right audience to see their ads.

....but ad banners don't work! There's too many ad filters now days!

Yes, a lot of people, even entire ISPs, have ad filters and proxy rules to block out banner ads but even still there are plenty enough ad impressions delivered every day. In fact those who filter ads are doing web publishers and advertisers a favor by making sure that no time, bandwidth, or impressions are wasted on people who definately will not respond to any kind of ad. So please, filter the ads out if you feel that strongly about it, in fact, I'll pitch you some ideas further on in this article in which our ad system could help you filter out the ads which is why I'm posting this.

...but too many people ignore banner ads, and nobody clicks on them! Advertising sucks! Free your head! Prioritize, man!

Yes, many people, including myself, scroll right past banner ads and ignore them completely. But chances are you did glance at many of the ads in a web given page, perhaps you saw a logo or brand name. In that sense the ad delivered just what it intended. It's called "branding": advertising for the sake of increased brand recognition and its most of what large advertisers hope for when advertsing in any medium including the web. Smaller advertisers will obsess over response to each ad, whether that be a click, or even a sale, and thus they become very unhappy when the click-thru is not to their satisfaction. So just because click-thru percentages are low across the board doesn't mean Internet advertising is doomed, but rather advertisers expectations and ad pricing schemes are changing accordingly. The smallest fish in the pond may be doomed but the pond remains.

What can we expect from OSDN web sites as far as ad banners? Bigger fatter ads? More ads per page? Flashing noisy ads that will read my browser cache and report all suspicous keywords to the NSA?

As you might expect, we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business. Right now we are not competitive in many areas: we only accept the most basic ad formats, most OSDN sites only accept one ad size, our average click-thru rate is as low as anywhere else, and our rate card prices are higher than most. We've been able to get away with it so far because our web sites are very well known and our audience has just the kind of demographics advertisers drool over, but lately its become a buyers market, the ad budgets are drying up and the few big advertisers still spending online are having their way with the web publishers left groveling for the business. It's times like these when advertisers can force outrageous new ad formats down the throats of the web publishers, and other web publishers are stepping up their ad offerings to entice advertisers to their space -- it's a free market economy after all.

So what are we doing about it? First we're telling our sales people to go after more main stream advertising accounts: entertainment, auto makers, food and beverage, whatever we think fits our audience. Second, we're looking at which newer ad formats and what we're willing to accept. Third, I have to rewrite our ad delivery system to improve our ad targeting: platform targeting, geotargeting, and topic targeting at the very least. Along these lines I also have some ideas I want to bounce off you there reading this here article...

Let the users control the ad delivery. User preferences. Ad filtering. User feedback. Interactive, or as George W. would say "Interactivfulness"

Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:

Comment forums for each ad banner:

What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum? So if an ad bothers you, offends you, confuses you, entices you, anything about that ad, you can speak and be heard. Let's face it, many ad banners suck because nobody tells the ad agency that the creative needs improvement. On the other hand the ad may be messing with your browser and you just want someone to know about it. Or maybe you wanted whatever was being advertised, you clicked, and you still didn't get the information you were looking for, the ad feedback forum would be the place to get a response on that.

Turning off annoying ads:

Suppose you become absolutely sick and tired of seeing that "Fawking DSL!" ad or that "Punch the monkey" banner, suppose you could click a link right next to the banner "Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security." And you just click that link and bam, you'll never see that ad again. The number of people who turn off a particular ad could be a way of truly knowing how counter productive certain ads are.

Choice of ad topics and categories:

What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see? For example what if you could explicately set your ad preferences so that you're are more about networking, movies, gadgets, and events but you don't want to see ads for alcohol, web design, or luxury items... and these ad preferences would apply to you within whole OSDN network of web sites. Would we use your information to for demographic studies? Yes absolutely, we'd tell advertisers that we have X number of people over here who explicately told us that they'd prefer to see ads about their kind of product. The overall effect we won't waste our effort chasing after advertsiers that have nothing of interest to our community and we won't waste your bandwidth downloading ads you don't want.

What about ad system karma?

I'm thinking there could be a point-based reward system that gives you credit for everything you do that helps our advertising business. As you accumulate karma points in our ad system you could redeem them gain access to an extended set of features in the ad system itself...

To increase your ad system karma you could (Hypothetical examples)

• 1 point for every time you load a paid ad
• 0 points for clicking on an ad (I don't want to encourage excessive ad clicking)
• 50 points for loading bigger ads
• 100 points for loading a pop-up ad
• 500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
• 100 points for loading a Flash ad
• 300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
• 200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
• 500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live

(Just assume for the sake of this disussion that this point system is mostly immune to people running bots to accumulate points. We're still in hypothetical land here.)

Redeem your points to gain access to such features as (Hypothetical examples)

• Turn off all ads
• Upload your own ads
• Get stats on the ads you uploaded
• Specify which sites you want your ads to run on
• Whetever else anyone can think of...

Note that this entire karma point system is just my own personal ideas and not officially sanctioned by anyone else working here. I figured I'd bounce this off you all out there in the audience and see how it plays with you all.

How would ad system karma affect web site user karma?

It wouldn't. The ad system is totally disconnected from any web site user database. Our ad system runs ads on many web sites, so even if we felt compelled to tie it into the user accounts of any web site it would be a lot of work, too much work, and I don't see any reason to even attempt it.

So the ad system would have its own user accounts independant and unrelated to web site accounts. Does that complicate things? No, the ad system user account is low maintenance, transparent, maybe as simple as cookie, nothing too visible, not in your face all the time nagging you to come play. The ad system preferences web page could be one click away, simple web form, nothing too fancy.

Hey I don't like you spying on me! I'm going to wear a metal bowl on my head and warn the others that you're all sneaky opportunist-type people. You are one of them.

That's OK. I have my metal bowl on too. As far as these ad system ideas go, you wouldn't need to have an ad system user account if you want to be anonymous and outside the loop as far as the ad delivery goes that's fine. This user account would be something you'd actively choose to create, and if you don't bother doing so then fine, you're anonymous, unknown, you'll see the normal general rotation of banner ads, and maybe later hopefully you'll find that out food tastes better when you try out some of these features and take advantage of the bonuses.

We're a community, damnit! We're not your ad-clicking sheep! If you can't sell ads then that's your problem! One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!

These web sites have grown way beyond the realm of affordable to operate by volunteers and donors. If OSDN and/or VA collapsed someday then the OSDN web sites would not be simply released back into the wild but rather be liquidated as assets to the highest bidder, and you can bet the new owners would gladly run these sites into the ground for every last penny they can quickly earn from them. So at least you can be glad the original founders of these web sites still work here and they care a lot about how this web site works for you, the community. And if we're not able to turn a profit here despite our best efforts, whoever ends up grabbing our helm here will most likely toss this whole crew overboard, and I can assure you that the new crew will care far less about "community" then we ever did. But that's not your problem anyway because there are plenty of other web sites out there like this one, and if you log off now you may even discover that there is whole world of amazing life outside the Internet, I don't know much about that myself so I can't descibe it to you but I've downloaded pictures of it. So is this as good as it gets for these web sites? No, we can do better here, and last week resolved to be a lot more focused. We're determined not to give Jesse Berst and his ilk any reason to gloat.

So I can't think of what else I was going to pitch here. So please if you have feedback on any of the ideas pitched above then post them here.

Kurt Gray, OSDN, ad system engineer

TimRiker asks: "I run the Open Source project BZFlag and would like to increase awareness of its existence. I see ads for Open Source projects on Slashdot, SourceForge, Freshmeat, etc. Is there an OpenSource banner exchange around that will get my ad shown on other sites in exchange for displaying their ads on my site? I'd prefer not to show adds on my site for any non-free software." This is an interesting thought and it would go about "getting the word out" in an efficient manner. I haven't heard of such a service, but I think it might be a good idea. What about you?

An Anonymous Coward writes "As early as Wednesday, the RIAA has sent letters to the ISPs and operators of OpenNap servers in the U.S. which were listed on Napigator. Here's the story from ZDNET. The RIAA's letter refers to the U.S. Supreme Court decision against Napster. Given that nearly all the OpenNap servers are run by individuals who are never intending to charge for the service, this is an interesting assertion." And HyperbolicParabaloid points out this NYT story (free reg. req.) in which a lawyer says the decision "validates Gnutella" (ok, whatever, but there's also some interesting discussion about how the Sony VCR time- and space-shifting precedent fails to apply to Napster).

Mr. McD writes: "The XonX project over at Source Forge is finally seeing some cool results. This time we finally have X windows running along side Aqua windows. See for yourself here and here. The author states that this release is not in a very usable form just yet. A post explaining how it was was done and how you too can run XonX can be found here. Finally!"

Derek Moeller writes "Remember those late nights playing through Bungie's Marathon series? It looks as if right before Microsoft acquired one of the top gaming companies of the time, Bungie shot off an escape module in the form of the Marathon source, under the full GPL. Now, with the help of Christian Bauer and the SDL libraries, it is running with full OpenGL beauty under Linux! Play Bungie's extensive classic game under our favorite operating system--check out the screenshots here. Mark one up for great 3D gaming on Linux. Download the binary, or grab the source."

Derek Moeller writes "Remember those late nights playing through Bungie's Marathon series? It looks as if right before Microsoft acquired one of the top gaming companies of the time, Bungie shot off an escape module in the form of the Marathon source, under the full GPL. Now, with the help of Christian Bauer and the SDL libraries, it is running with full OpenGL beauty under Linux! Play Bungie's extensive classic game under our favorite operating system--check out the screenshots here. Mark one up for great 3D gaming on Linux. Download the binary, or grab the source."

Shadow_Font asks: "So I've been using XFree since RedHat 4.1 or so (I'm using XFree 3.3.6 on FreeBSD 4.2 nowadays). I've been using Macs since the 128K machine in 1984. The biggest reason I don't use X day in and day out for development is the status of fonts on the platform. They're just horrible! What's being done about this? Does anyone care about this? X fonts have been a sore sight and far worse than what I had on my Mac in 1984, and yet here we are 17 years down the pike. Are there any solutions? Until I can figure out a solution, my main development machine will continue to be a Macintosh with its anti-aliased text which really makes reading code for hours on end easier on the eyes." Give it a few more months folks, and X11 fonts will improve. And if the traditional 75 and 100dpi fonts are too repulsive for you, support for TrueType and Postscript Type 1 fonts has been around for quite a while.

maken writes: "Remember the Free World Dialup project? From their page: "In the Fall of 1995 several of us had been throwing around the idea of "patching" Internet phone to regular telephone lines in order to allow true "patching" of international phone calls over the Internet - not just for people with computers but for anybody with access to a phone... and this is how the Free World Dialup project got started. As commercial VOIP gateways became available, Free World Dialup II in 1997 was the first free network to provide a free phone to phone service to over 15 countries using commercial hardware and software." Well, they're at it again and are looking for members." It costs about a hundred bucks to become part of it (for hardware), as well as broadband access. Rather reminds of me the ambitious Bayonne Project, (about which more later).

During LWCE last week, LinuxWorld Paris was also going on. RMS ^[?] was there, and gave this year's award to Brian Paul. Brian is known for his amazing work on the Mesa 3D Graphics library - and deserves lots of credit. They took a *really* big video shoot of it - you can grab the video and a player from our servers at SourceForge.

During LWCE last week, LinuxWorld Paris was also going on. RMS ^[?] was there, and gave this year's award to Brian Paul. Brian is known for his amazing work on the Mesa 3D Graphics library - and deserves lots of credit. They took a *really* big video shoot of it - you can grab the video and a player from our servers at SourceForge.

During LWCE last week, LinuxWorld Paris was also going on. RMS ^[?] was there, and gave this year's award to Brian Paul. Brian is known for his amazing work on the Mesa 3D Graphics library - and deserves lots of credit. They took a *really* big video shoot of it - you can grab the video and a player from our servers at SourceForge.

Traverser asks: "I'm looking for a solution that allows Windows and Apple users to share a file store. Samba works great for the Windows systems. Netatalk works great for the Apple users. But each solution has its own style of file locking on the server: which means that if the same file were opened under Netatalk and Samba at the same time, there is a chance the file would become corrupt and unusable. Putting Dave on the Macintosh provided further layers of troubles. The WindowsNT AppleTalk driver doesn't seem to like Netatalk. WebDAV seems like a good alternative, except the tools are not mature enough on the Macintosh side to put in a production enviorment. NFS seems like a better solution, except the price per client suggests moving towards a commercial solution. Novell has moved support of the Netware Macintosh client to ProSoft Engineering. The current Novell client is still buggy and there is no visible development for a new client. I hate to say it but I'm back to the Microsoft solution. I really hope I'm missing something..."

stevenl writes "A new project on sourceforge has just been set up for a cross-platform packaging standard. Whilst there isn't much there at the moment, plans are to produce a standard that will allow people to use it even if they have no binary utilities or a compiler to compile one with, and it's expected to be platform independent whilst still being lightweight. What's people's opinions of the cross-platform aspect taking off, or will we see another situation like we have with DPKG - great packaging sysetm, but not widely used due to the inferior (but still good) RPM and proprietary things like installshield?" Frankly, apt-get ^[?] does just about everything that I need - but I'm curious as to what people about something like this actually working - is it a pipe dream? Or possible?

stevenl writes "A new project on sourceforge has just been set up for a cross-platform packaging standard. Whilst there isn't much there at the moment, plans are to produce a standard that will allow people to use it even if they have no binary utilities or a compiler to compile one with, and it's expected to be platform independent whilst still being lightweight. What's people's opinions of the cross-platform aspect taking off, or will we see another situation like we have with DPKG - great packaging sysetm, but not widely used due to the inferior (but still good) RPM and proprietary things like installshield?" Frankly, apt-get ^[?] does just about everything that I need - but I'm curious as to what people about something like this actually working - is it a pipe dream? Or possible?

wmulvihillDxR asks: "In searching for more fun games to play on Linux, I have found that many developing projects need sounds for their games. FreeCiv and FreeCraft are two big projects that are definitely in need of sounds. My question is what can be done to help sounds become easier to integrate into games or programs? Are there 'Sound Archives' around that are free to use for anyone?"