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Everyone I know has at least a few TB of data on burnt CDs and DVDs. It would be nice to be able to consolidate your multimedia stuff into one storage device. I'm running 8 terrabytes of data on 10 1TB hard drives on a ATA over ethernet setup in raid6. So yeah I'm pry not your average consumer but being able to access 1000's of hours of movies, tv and home video without having to pay netflix or watch the ads on hulu is pretty nice.

"Companies" don't invent things. People do.

Companies pay people to invent things. Patents are not meant to provide riches & fame to holy Inventors, they are meant to increase innovation. Please explain how companies will be able to hire R&D departments in your scenario, where the employees will just individually patent and keep all the work they were hired to do.

I'd actually go a step further, and say that patents cannot be bought not sold, period, not at all, no exceptions.

That is really, really stupid. Should we also abolish all forms of money and go back to a barter system?

That would, hopefully, put the kibosh on most of the patent trolls. Y'know, people who don't do any work, but like to profit off of other people's work.

No, people like Matt Katzer seem able to cause trouble just fine without being a corporation or buying patents.

Patents are a ridiculous idea in this modern age, anyway. With global communications a reality, it's nearly a given that any idea out there will be rapidly assimilated, reverse engineered and eventually done better than the inventor. This is a good thing. It benefits everybody.

That's been the case for quite a long time, even before modern global communications.

The patent system as it stands is an obstruction to the overall development of the human species and should be abolished.

Yes. But the way to do that is not to replace it with an even more broken system. As long as patents do exist, they have to be sellable and belong initially to whoever took the risk of doing/funding the research. Otherwise they're mostly useless but still just as dangerous, and would make it rather silly for companies to invest in R&D.

Here you go: http://links.sourceforge.net/ Simple, non-distracting, never crashes, lightning fast...

Still not sure what my hopes are for running Linux on an Intel Mac.

From what I've read Ubuntu runs pretty good on Macs. I have a MacBook Pro I've been researching how to install Ubuntu 9.04 on. To install Ubuntu or any other Linux distro you have to install Bootcamp and or rEFIt first. Here's more info on installing Ubuntu on MacTels.

Falcon

And what, exactly, does one develop for the WinMo on? :)

Depends - there are a few choices there. Linux and CeGCC, for example.

They'll just need a little configuration:

WebVocab (Greasemonkey script): http://webvocab.sourceforge.net/

FoxReplace (Firefox add-on - much less effort): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6510

We don' have software patents over here, but It's a subject that I fallow regularly here on Slashdot. I found this analogy about English prose one of the bests I saw to inform non computer literates about this subject.
Take my example. I'm currently writing an FTP client for learning and contribute purposes. One of the things about FTP is that each server vendor as some kind of slightly different application. So if I want to make a client that has some kind of success I have to test many of the servers(closed sourced and open) out there, so my program can parse every line. I've mostly wrote this software from scratch fallowing the RFC specifications.
At some point I've downloaded the source code of some popular open-source FTP clients(FileZilla, KFtpGrabber), to analize the code and look for different approaches. It was surprising to see that while both this programs and mine are very complex applications, and that my work is completely original, we have very common programming techniques(and code) on several identical subjects(even the variables have the same name sometimes).
What I've realize is that for some problems there are out there have just about one or two best solutions. No one can argue that my creativity is not original. I've only looked at the code of these programs after the engine was almost written, but hypothetically if at any point some FTP client program or idea was patented my program wold violate that for sure(although it would not violate copyright since it's not the same code).

Patenting code is like patenting solutions to problems and it could be justified if there were many different solutions out there but the reality is that many problems have only one or two correct approach.

c'mon mods, give him a point for the attempt.

LAME MP3 Encoder http://lame.sourceforge.net/

[Citation needed].

FOSS. There are more than 200,000 software projects on SourceForge alone. Freshmeat has thousands more. Now I'll admit I bet most of them are abandonware or are little used but software was being programmed before patents were ever issued on software.

Patent rights are significantly stronger than copyright, which is one of the reasons they're time-limited.

Both copyrights and patents were originally issued for 14 years with one 14 year extension possible in the US. It's only because politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, were in the pockets of the MPAA and RIAA that copyright terms were lengthened. The industries now have a friend as the Vice President, Biden.

Falcon

OH SNAP:

Media Concentration

Read: media without profit motive threatens the moneyed-interest propaganda monoculture. And are we seriously supposed to believe that the son of Rupert Murdoch doesn't understand that media is international these days?

"As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion," Murdoch said, referring to George Orwell's book, "1984."

What an unbelievable fucking tool.

I wish I would have heard this advice before I named my FOSS project ARSE.

And awesomely i just noticed Mosaic :0, shows my blender ignorance.

Most media devices with music playback abilities do not have the function to play ogg (or flac for that matter).

nope, there are dozens of devices, including portables, that play vorbis, and dozens that play flac. flac is particularly cheap to decode. a partial list:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html Turns network activity into 'audio', but clearly that's illegal too :)

Oh, and it still uses X11.
I figured it would use something like http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ - that seems like a much better resource.

http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/
Too bad it seems relly alpha-quality.

Try the 64bit K-TV with your old card http://www.planetamd64.com/lofiversion/index.php?t7188.html or try the generic BT878 WDM driver http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/supportedcards.html

Open source to the rescue... maybe

Just what the world needed.

Is there something special about this that the 101 others around can't do or is it just a Me-Too product for Redhat?

JBoss MQ goes back to 2002 and was renamed to JBoss Messaging and is now being renamed to HornetQ. Given that it's been around for so long, you should instead ask most of your 101 other ones why they are Me-Too products.

If you can remember your passwords, you're doing something wrong.

Just set up a master password with Firefox and get some auto-login addon like Secure Login or use a program like KeePass or Password Safe.

No, you don't.

You mean like this scary thing?

Yeah, and who the hell is going to use Phoenix? I mean, Firebird. Oh, I guess it started getting popular. I mean, Firefox. Gee, I guess... things change.

But screw FLAC since it has no hardware support. If there's no audience, why would vendors opt to build in support? Oh, but I guess FLAC did get more popular. And more people adopted it despite lack of hardware support. Gee, I guess now... there is FLAC hardware support, and adoption rate speeds up because of it.

This phenomenon is similar to voting. Third party candidates are treated as not viable because they're not popular enough, so they don't get votes. But they can't achieve popularity without votes showing their viability... (This particular system, U.S. plurality voting, is fucked, though, as incremental progress is squashed by it being a non-preferential voting system. You can't cast a vote to demonstrate viability without disenfranchising yourself from the current round of political decision.)

We must support IE! The year of the Linux desktop will never come! People are just greedy and you can't be generous! Theora doesn't have hardware support! Blah blah blah!

My opinion? Folks fail to grasp that many, many systems are dynamics. Arrangements of smoothly continuous mutual influence. Instead they see only chickens or eggs, or the lack there of fully-formed ones. It's a misperception driven by erroneous expectation. I'm getting pretty sick of that.

Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.

I've never used After Effects so I'm not sure what features it has. However, if you want a GUI editor which can handle theora files, then try LiVES. It's rather better (in features & interface) than avidemux or kdenlive, neither of which can handle theora. It's cross-platform OSS for BSD-Linux-Mac-Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiVES http://lives.sourceforge.net/

And you can have all such checks in a compiled language just as well (case in point: D).

Don't forget SBCL.

Here is a recipie to build a set of 2.6.1 packages for debian lenny based on the packaging ari has done for sid (but not uploaded yet hence the download from svn.debian.org).

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/pidgin-2.6.1.tar.bz2
bunzip2 pidgin-2.6.1.tar.bz2
tar -xf pidgin-2.6.1.tar
gzip pidgin-2.6.1.tar
mv pidgin-2.6.1.tar.gz pidgin_2.6.1.orig.tar.gz
cd pidgin-2.6.1
svn export -r 14052 svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/pidgin/trunk/debian
sed -i s/tcl8.6-dev/tcl8.5-dev/ debian/control
sed -i s/tk8.6-dev/tk8.5-dev/ debian/control
sed -i 's/libgstfarsight0.10-dev (>= 0.0.9),//' debian/control
sed -i 's/(>= 0.4.53)//' debian/control
sed -i 's/(>= 1.1.1)//' debian/control
sed -i 's/--enable-vv/--disable-vv/' debian/rules
dpkg-buildpackage

if it complains about missing build-depends install them and run dpkg-buildpackage again

note: I had to disable video/voice because libgstfarsight is not available in lenny.

same place it's always been http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/

2.6.1 is only available as source at the moment?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/pidgin-2.6.1.exe

So that's magic? If you install that do the terrorists win?

http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

psDooM is a process monitor and manager for *nix systems. It could be considered a graphical interface to the 'ps', 'renice', and 'kill' commands. psDooM is based on XDoom, which is based on id Software's 'Doom'.

See Also: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

The "entire" OS isn't written in Assembly (Quake and I think the web browser were not. As a matter of fact, there is a C runtime lib at http://menuetlibc.sourceforge.net/). But certainly the core bits are. The choice for Assembly was to keep the design uncomplicated, not for performance.

One of my class textbooks was this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm/files/nasm%20documentation/2.07/nasm-2.07-xdoc.zip/download

Then again, my CS department had a Linux lab.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm/files/

Tada!

Open Source X86 assembler, with a textbook sized help file. Check the NASM documentation tab.

I can also mention that a lot of assembly is similar, and if you can get a good handle of this one, it's mostly the same. The only difference between architectures is the instructions available and sometimes what they do.

I've tweaked about 6 PSP Fats to run custom firmware using Chickhen as a starting point. No hardware modding needed if you have Sony Firmware 3.5 or lower. http://www.ps3news.com/PlayStation-Portable/psp-chickhen-homebrew-enabler-r2-is-now-available/ This works on *any* PSP1000 or PSP1001 & I think most PSP2001's. It can take a while for the TGA hack to actually "catch" & work. 1st time I did it probably had to try it 60 times or more. Then I use PSX2PSP to convert my PSX games into a format that the PSP can use. http://pspslimhacks.com/psx2psp-v13 An 8GB MemoryStick can hold quite a few compressed PSX games. Then I install BookR to read my ebooks. http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookr/ Hope this is useful to someone.

If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends.

Yes, if only someone would demand software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends. Damn those hypocrites!

Someone created an Opengl driver that fixes some of those issues with FFVII PC. I believe it even works in Wine now.

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8306.0

Then of course there's this http://sourceforge.net/projects/q-gears/develop

you forgot to mention that it also does a lot of things worse

Which you then fail to list?

...but requiring hardware produced in 2010s. switch the aero off and the remains will not even equal the clean nice look of windows 2000

Utter b.s., it runs perfectly well on a two year old laptop.

you probably meant most amateur computer users.

Yeah, you know, those people who buy and use a product and make it profitable and the de facto standard? Yeah them. Also me.

being hdmi is irrelevant. resetting display settings is not that annoying. moreover, most good cards come with utilities that overcome this xp bug and you switch the monitor and resolution on the fly from cards' utility

No, resetting the display settings IS annoying and, furthermore, bullshit. But that's what happens when you are using an ancient OS to run hardware that didn't even exist when it was made.

LOL. on my old 1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn't even install on that

Funny you should mention installing, Win 7 installed in maybe half the time that XP takes for me. I don't know what you're doing at bootup but mine takes about 20-25 seconds in Win 7.

so does media player classic home cinema. even better.

I'm well aware of mpc homecinema, I use it as my primary video player. However, the media centre in Win 7 has a nice media library built into it which is designed to look good and work well on a plasma, and to be used with a remote if you have one.

then you're probably not using windows explorer at all. and right clicking on taskbar items to bring up the applications' system menu, neither. and the start menu shutdown-confirmationless item, also

No, I am not using IE, I didn't realise I had to use it if I wanted to use Windows.

does this (1Gb ram, 16 Gb hdd) look modest to you ?

Yes. Yes it does. It's 2009 for Christ's sake. You can build a system with 4 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hdd for a few hundred bucks.

... at making impression to home users. in enterprise, this is just a second vista. joining a samba/nt4 domain is a pain in the ass or impossible.

Amazingly, most of the people in these enterprises you speak of are the same 'casual users' you dismissed earlier.

As an XP user all I can say is GO TO HELL Microsoft. I am done with your carnival sideshow of needless upgrades and pointless eye candy.

Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.

I'm also a dedicated XP user. You are being unreasonable.

I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of months. Without having metrics to back up my personal experience, I find that it does everything at least as well as XP, and many things better.

you forgot to mention that it also does a lot of things worse

Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s.

...but requiring hardware produced in 2010s. switch the aero off and the remains will not even equal the clean nice look of windows 2000

It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better, as well as being vastly more customizable. Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users.

you probably meant most amateur computer users.

Overall the UI in Windows 7 looks good and is very responsive.

Various other things work a lot better than they used to - for instance, my laptop has an HDMI port. This was a constant nightmare on XP, and frequently didn't work at all or did weird things like resetting my display settings for the laptop itself whenever it was connected to a TV.

being hdmi is irrelevant. resetting display settings is not that annoying. moreover, most good cards come with utilities that overcome this xp bug and you switch the monitor and resolution on the fly from cards' utility

Windows 7 just figures out what it is plugged into and switches to the most appropriate video-out mode. Similarly, whereas switching screens under XP frequently causes issues with a video that was playing fine on one screen not transferring to another without restarting playback, in Win 7 this seems to happen seamlessly. Audio likewise is a lot simpler and easier to configure.

Unlike Vista, MS seems to have done a good job of working out when additional security is appropriate - e.g. when software wants to actually make changes to installed components or add drivers to the system, a password or fingerprint scan is required, but I am yet to be annoyed at an inappropriate time as I was in Vista.

Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP, which is a huge contrast to Vista (which came with my laptop and ran games like an absolute dog).

It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.

LOL. on my old 1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn't even install on that

The media centre (can't remember what it's called) is actually pretty good for use on a plasma TV.

so does media player classic home cinema. even better.

However, most noticeable is that most of the time I DON'T notice that I'm using Win 7, or any particular OS - stuff just works properly without any real need for fiddling around.

then you're probably not using windows explorer at all. and right clicking on taskbar items to bring up the applications' system menu, neither. and the start menu shutdown-confirmationless item, also

So, from one XP adherent to another, I say: maybe you should give it a go. Vista was a horror from the pits of hell as far as I am concerned. MS may be a big evil lumbering corporate monster, but someone there appears to have taken the problems with Windows by the balls and actu

I've been a 99% Linux user since 2000, including 3 years of law school where I really only used Windows during exams because of Exam4 requirements. However, I'm starting a job at a (small) law firm and my laptop has Win 7 all loaded up and running. My prognosis so far: I can live with 7, especially because it runs Firefox and Cygwin runs Bash and basic UNIX utilities OK as well. I can even use VIM.

    Is it particularly fast? No, but it is not insanely slow. My laptop is recent but not super-high end, 2.2Ghz Core2 with 4GB of RAM is the good part, the Intel graphics are the bad part. Frankly, the Aero effects on Windows 7 work just as well as the compositing effects from KDE 4.3, meaning that they do work, but not blazingly fast like on my desktop with the Nvidia card. As for memory usage... despite claims to the contrary, Linux using a modern, fully featured desktop uses a little bit less RAM, but not significantly less. I'm not even close to filling up my 4GB even with office, firefox, and miscellaneous junk running, so no biggies there.

    I'm not a fan of Windows, I think that Windows 7 is somewhat boring for a "huge" release, but it does get the job done. My new job is concerned with me being able to write office documents and access Exchange + a small windows network, which Win7 makes stupidly simple. Do I miss virtual desktops? Sure. Am I annoyed that Windows still doesn't have very good window management and that I can't get rid of the annoying borders on my windows that the Bespin KDE theme lets me annihilate? You bet. At the same time, Windows does make certain configuration tasks easier (especially graphics & wireless even though I can and do use graphical utilities under Linux).

        I'm not saying that I couldn't do this just as well in Linux, but I am saying that I don't have the time to get my system tweaked to the rest of the office... at least immediately. This is a small law firm with technically proficient lawyers, and being the most junior associate I won't be shocked if I get some IT related tasks from time to time, but my day job is to be able to use nice boring office software, which Windows 7 allows for in a reasonably secure way.

        As for the XP part of this... I had an old XP license that I did purchase fair & square (for $10 from my University back in the day). It could have gotten the job done for a while, but Win7 really does have better security and like it or not it is the path forward. One major feature that Win7 has over XP is the find option in the start menu. Since MS keeps screwing with the Control Panel and everything else, I almost never bother to hunt through menus. Instead I just type in what I want to do in the search bar and it does a very good job of finding what I want. In fact, it's likely faster that me clicking menus even if I did know where stuff was. I'm not sure if XP even had this feature but Win7 makes it very easy to use by default and I've saved quite a bit of time with it... so there ya go, one actual reason to upgrade!

Humorously enough, a friend and I stated rolling our own minimal blog software after realizing that a base install of Wordpress is over 6 MB.

It supports comments, multiple posting users, categories, has RSS, will let you theme it (although there is still a bunch of hardcoded HTML generation that we're working to remove for the next major revision) and is less than 300 KB installed.

Sourceforge project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/blobblogsystem/

As of a few months ago, kopete occasionally dropped messages silently (confirmed via other channels). I switched to pidgin and no longer had to restart the program each time a "still there?" question went unanswered.

For webcam support on yahoo, gyachi works nearly flawlessly for me.

I think it's great that this is happening and look forward to the adoption of open textbooks.

However, I looked at the PDFs that they post on their website, and they look awful. The formulas and plots were hard to read and pixelated. They should have used LaTeX for their typesetting and formulas and maybe sage or matplotlib to make the graphs.

BJ

Check out UFO Alien Invasion. It's still in progress, but it seems a fantastic spiritual successor!
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/

GFS is proprietary and for internal use only. The only released a paper describing how it works (don't know if that content is enough to rebuild it). I think GFS (global file system) from Redhat and OpenGFS is something differently. Hadoop is what you want. What would we do without the wiki

The technology in question reminds me of VTD-XML (Virtual Token Descriptor). Make an index that points into the document, "starting offset and length" as described here: VTD in 30 seconds. i4i's "map" is VTD's "index" + "location cache". But no one's talking about it.

To reply again with another tool,

There's a neat blog generator called Thingamablog, which generates a static blog, and therefore has no vulnerabilities itself. Write entries offline, generate the static HTML, then sync that up to the server. Because there is no dynamic content, it works for hosts that only serve static content (like on Freenet, which can only "host" static pages) and minimizes the work done by the server. It's still pretty feature rich, with categories, and good navigation.

The downside lack of comment system, since the whole thing is static. There are workarounds, though. It also stores everything in a little database that could be a lot better.

I use blosxom, which is extremely lightweight. The only way to get lighter is to have a static blog. It's only about 800 lines of Perl in a single script, so anyone who knows a little programming can easily become intimate with it. Many people who use it, including me, slowly modify it over time to fit our needs, molding it like a piece of putty. Its small size, with its worse is better tradeoffs, makes it pretty robust in terms of security, because there isn't any complexity in which to have vulnerabilities emerge.

In the two years I have been using it I'm only aware of one vulnerability, which was a mere cross-site attack where a specific argument in a URL could inject HTML. If you renamed the script from the default (which should be done out of caution anyway) and had on URL rewriting, then you were immune.

The only downsides are no comment system and lack of navigation links, though there are plugins for those features.

RMS goes further than even that. Not only do they consider a program designed to link against a library that doesn't use the GPL infringing, they consider a program that links against a GPL library in addition to other, compatible libraries an infingement.

Interesting link, thanks.

RMS goes further than even that. Not only do they consider a program designed to link against a library that doesn't use the GPL infringing, they consider a program that links against a GPL library in addition to other, compatible libraries an infingement.

Which means that if your program CAN work with a GPL library, the FSF considers it it's property, even if another compatible library exists. This is tantamount to copyrighting ideas, which is what I thought we were trying to prevent in the first place.

I don't understand how this makes FSF software more "free" than Microsoft's code, other than that the FSF doesn't charge you a fee. The essential message for both is "you may only use our software only if you agree with our EULA."

Similar to Microsoft, the FSF goal is to create a base of software so large and pervasive that you can't help but accept the GPL or have your project be marginalized. This is ostensibly done so that software is "free."

And that's fine for them, but what is this really going to accomplish? If the FSF were to succeed, any company that wanted to write proprietary software would not be able to do so and charge for it (reasonably, forking would be rampant) on open-source systems. There are substantial realms of software that will only ever exist with this incentive to produce it, because writing it and then supporting it is hard, unenjoyable work. So the only platform that these packages will exist on is a closed source one like Windows.

What the FSF is doing, in effect, is ensuring there will always be two software stacks that are wholly incompatible: a proprietary one where you have no ability to change anything but is the only one that runs that one proprietary application that you absolutely need; and an open source one where everything's great until you need that one application that nobody wants to write.

This ensures that free software will always be marginalized because keeping Windows around is the only way to ensure that those proprietary software companies continue to write the software nobody else wants to without a financial incentive.

It's almost as if the FSF is acting contrary to their stated goals by not thinking beyond the immediate effects of their actions, or at least ignoring the reality that there is software that people want but that nobody wants to write for no profit.

Anyway, I guess I believe more in karma, and that changing a culture through legal means like RMS is trying to do is much more difficult than changing it through example.

it means that proponents of the GPL will use legal pressure to require you to do this.

Bullshit.

http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL

RMS: If you don't change to using the GPL, then you'll have to stop using readline.

Not "switch to the GPL or else I'll call out the lawyers", but "if no GPL *then* stop using readline". The option to stop using the GPLed code was explicitly mentioned at the beginning. As the clisp author mentions, readline was not essential to his app, he *could* have easily ripped it out if he wanted to; clisp in no way depended on it.

The clisp author didn't even admit RMS was right; he essentially said, "whatever, it's easier this way," and GPL'd clisp.

Oh really?

RMS: I hate to have to play this role with a fellow hacker, but...

BH: I'm sorry too, as I am very indebted to the GNU project.

RMS: If you can get away with this then any company can get away with it.
...
Is that what you want?

BH: No, of course!

RMS: If you do succeed in circumventing the GPL for readline, you would be blazing a path for every commercial company that wants to do it. Would you really like that result? Wouldn't it be best to eliminate this dispute by using the GPL for Common Lisp?

BH: Would be best for me, true.

RMS: Totally aside from readline, the Lisp system would be more useful that way.

BH: This and the following are convincing me:

* Up to 1991 the decision whether using GPL or not, was simply a matter of philosophy or copyright policy. The success of Linux, however, demonstrates how a speed and quality of development was achieved which would have been impossible without access for everyone to the source of everything.

* Finding co-developers for other Lisp packages or testers for other hardware/OS platforms might be easier if I release full source.

So be prepared to seeing CLISP's source before Christmas.

I've snipped out the technical argument over the linking. (Can anyone blame BH for misunderstanding or disagreeing with that? Hell, just look at all the heat in this thread!) Otherwise your description of Bruno's response does not at all match up to what he actually said, methinks. Bruno didn't "give up" in the end, in the end, he *voluntarily* agreed with RMS for several reasons, even if he still didn't agree with, or understand, the FSF's linking argument.

A hint for you, Mr. piojo: If you're going to try your hand at revising history, you'd better make damn sure that the *unrevised* history still isn't out there on the web for all to see...

if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking

That is a nonsensical definition - if a component has a well-defined API and is loaded dynamically, then clearly it is substitutable, even if no substitution exists at any given moment in practice. After all, the end user can always write one.

At the other extreme, in these days of monkey-patching, binary-patching, part-compiled intermediate code, any component of any software is practically swappable at any time. What matters surely is *shipping* a particular software component with your product, and that component being essential and practically irreplaceable to the whole. The shades of gray as to what's "irreplaceable" can only form legal arguments; but a purely technical definition of linking no longer suits the GPLv2.

Also, that was an interesting discussion you brought up

if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking

That is a nonsensical definition - if a component has a well-defined API and is loaded dynamically, then clearly it is substitutable, even if no substitution exists at any given moment in practice. After all, the end user can always write one. Any alternative would effectively mean allowing to copyright APIs, and I'm sure any sane Slashdotter can understand what a mess that can become.

The "if you use an API of a GPL'd library, your code is GPL'd" argument was actually tried by RMS himself in the past in the case of CLISP. While CLISP ended switching to GPL, it wasn't because its author was convinced that he was legally wrong in "circumventing" the GPL, but because he conceded that using GPL would be in the best interests of everyone involved regardless of legal issues.