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CBC News Interprets GPL - Poorly
frankShook writes "The Canadian news service CBC has up an article entitled 'Linux distributors scorn Microsoft partnership'. Primarily, it looks to describe the ongoing licensing saga between Microsoft and Linux distributors. It also includes a highly unique interpretation of the GPL: 'Open-source software such as Linux, on the other hand, encourages individuals to add to or modify software without fear of legal repercussions, so long as they abide by the conditions of the general public license, which stipulates that the program must remain open and sharable.'"
...but at least it's coverage. They say no publicity is bad publicity.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
I thought the same thing, so I was confused. But then I realized that if you read it, it can be interpreted to mean *any* software. That is, someone reading that part could believe that "Linux software" encourages users to freely distribute/modify proprietary software.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I don't think I have seen the mainstream media do a better job of covering a topic in so few words. The fact that they even covered this topic, and it was on the main CBC page is AMAZING!
Holy shit. Your post embodies everything detestable about overpedantic geekery. The point is that nobody cares about all that shit you just mentioned; and in my opinion, the CBC did a great job focusing on the relevant, interesting aspects of all that shit without fifty thousand words of expository material (the entire contents of the GPL, say).
You're also wrong about the "GNU Public License" bit. It is in fact the General Public License (plus or minus a GNU).
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
"Scientists have finally exceeded the speed of light, causing a light pulse to travel hundreds of times faster than normal. It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it. The experiment is the first-ever evidence of faster-than-light motion."
Scientists have "exceeded" the speed of light in this manner many times. Hell, you could do it yourself by quickly changing the direction of a laser pointer as you point it at the night sky. The pointer "dot" could conceivably arc across some distant object at much faster than the speed of light. Saying that the experiment was the first ever example of this kind of motion is inaccurate, and that was just the first three sentences.
Now, I just finished reading this article and it actually does a passable job of explaining the GPL to everyday newsreaders. It's a bit ambiguous and vague, but anyone who becomes interested with GPL would be quickly set straight after looking it up. The focus was on the relationship between Microsoft and FOSS organizations anyway, not the GPL in particular. The old speed of light article was horrible because 1) most readers wouldn't look up group velocity 2) the speed of light was the focus of the article and they left out important information about their topic.
After re-reading the old article, I'm pretty sure every paragraph has some kind of major physical misconception.
I'm still trying to figure out why BSD people and GPL people have flamewars. They're software licenses, not religions. Is there something I'm missing here?
If I were to write a summary of GPL for the general public, I would write something very similar to that.
The Slashdot summary, however, seems like a flame bait to me.
The fact is I simply can't read the links and/or comments for the majority of stories and the titles+summaries are getting so absurdly inaccurate that I need to consciously filter out information I glean from there since there's such a high probability of it being inaccurate. I love
I stole this Sig