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DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain
A Sage Developer writes "During a recent conference, Sage Days 6, Dan Bernstein (who has recently come under attack for his licensing policy) was among the invited speakers. During a panel discussion on the future of open source mathematics software, Bernstein declared that all of his past and future code would be released to the public domain. This includes qmail, primegen, and a number of other projects. Given the headache that incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2 is causing developers, will we see more of this?"
No.
Not in a manner disproportionate to what we've seen in the past anyway. Some people will keep gpl2 as their license, others will go gpl3, bsd, or one of any of the OSI licenses for the most part, because people like attribution, they like retaining (some) control of their work.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
The crypto software and FFT software especially so, but maintenance isn't always as hot. That's hardly DJB's fault - they are public domain and nobody has run with them. On the other hand, it is not acceptable that his software is not being properly distributed, promoted or documented. Nor is it acceptable that he allows his personality quirks to interfere with the primary purpose of getting code into active circulation.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
First of all, not contributing them towards the libc's is sociopathic behaviour (I want only my app to benefit, everyone else go suck bricks sidewise through a thin straw).
This is ludicrous. He wrote them because the ones out there weren't good enough. Others can write their own. There is nothing sociopathic about closed source software, no matter how much you may wish it to be.
(It is probably in the realm of sociopathy, as we're using the term, to go after people who reverse engineer your compiled binaries, but that's entirely different from not giving them your code. If they can extract what they need from what you have chosen given them, good for them. It is always wise to remember that while the GPL and the Free Software movement are in favor of unlimited user rights, a developer choosing to exert his own rights is not wrong.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Right, since there isn't a standard right now...
That's why I called it "trying".
Well, init.d is complete in the sense that brainfuck is Turing-complete.
Which is to say, it's actually awkward for quite a lot of things. For instance: networking.
On Gentoo, the way multiple network interfaces are dealt with is by assigning each of them an init script, all symlinked to the same one. Gentoo init scripts have dependencies, so I can have something depend on some or all of the network interfaces being up.
On Debian, this is dealt with by having one "networking" init script that then ties into its own init-like system for individual interfaces -- ifup/ifdown. I can force certain scripts to run after an interface comes up or goes down.
On Ubuntu desktops, this is dealt with by having a NetworkManager daemon (started by init.d) that handles everything itself, by communicating with a GUI. I'm fairly sure it uses ifup/ifdown in some way, as it seems to respect some of my static scripts.
Gentoo is the closest to the "right way", in that there's a unified way to start/stop something. That is, on Gentoo, I know I can stop a network device by doing /etc/init.d/net.eth1 stop. But Ubuntu's the most user-friendly way, because I can do it from a GUI, and, for instance, easily migrate between wireless networks.
Now, go read about upstart, for a completely different approach. In particular, the ability to receive "events" from, say, udev or HAL, means that the equivalent of "/etc/init.d/net.eth1 start" will be run when I plug a cable into eth1, without removing that functionality, or forcing it into a completely different system (ifup/down).
At least, that's how I think it would work. In practice, while Upstart is used in Ubuntu, it's mostly used just to launch all the old sysv rc scripts, which then launch things like NetworkManager.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why don't you do a modicum of research and find out? The story has been presented far and wide by RMS himself, and is easy enough to find. What you insinuate is that the trouble fixing the printer was somehow RMSes fault, which history shows to be untrue. The printer manufacturer wouldn't acknowledge the problem, and refused to let RMS see the source code so he could "fix" a bug they wouldn't acknowledge. This irrespective of how often said bug bit their customers. RMS spotted a severe social/technical problem and wrote the GPL to solve it (which it does, very successfully). Unscrupulous people have sought out loopholes to subvert the GPL, hence GPL v2, and now, with the advent of MS's "trusted computing initiative" and tivoization, GPL v3 to protect those freedoms in the face of some very powerful entities manipulating very powerful copyright and patent laws with the intent of subverting, even destroying, those same freedoms.
The GPL v2 and v3 are, whatever else one may say, the most successful attempt so far at creating a "constitution" that protects users rights in perpetuity, within the current framework of law designed to do just the opposite. It may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than most options out there.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy